• Allero@lemmy.today
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    6 months ago

    Basically, it allows you to steal all the code and use it in your closed-source programs, giving a green light for corporations to use open-source code without giving anything back.

    GPL doesn’t allow that, forcing you to open-source anything that was produced using other GPL-licensed code. That’s, for example, why so much of Linux software is open-source - it commonly relies on various dependencies that are GPL-licensed, so there is no other legal option other than sharing the code as well.

    • communism@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      It’s not “stealing”. It’s explicitly allowed. Using IP according to its licence is the opposite of stealing.

        • communism@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          That is definitionally not plagiarising. It follows IP law, which is the opposite of plagiarism.

            • communism@lemmy.ml
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              6 months ago

              No, actually, plagiarism is a legalistic term. If IP law did not exist, neither would plagiarism.

              And if you give someone permission to use your IP, and they go ahead and use that permission, it is not plagiarism neither legally nor by any colloquial understanding of the term. That is what happens when someone uses BSD or MIT code in their proprietary software. It is explicitly allowed, by design, by intention.

              without attribution

              BSD/MIT also don’t allow you to not attribute the author of the BSD/MIT code, so that doesn’t even make sense. You are perhaps thinking of code released public domain, in which case, again, the author specifically chose that over BSD/MIT, and the main practical difference is not needing to give attribution, so that must be what the original author wanted.

                • communism@lemmy.ml
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                  6 months ago

                  I don’t have a legalistic view of the world; I am saying plagiarism is a legalistic concept. For context, I support the abolition of law and of intellectual property. Plagiarism is a particular kind of violation of intellectual property law, and without IP, it makes no sense. You still fail to define a plagiarism outside of the law, and you also fail to define a plagiarism that does not violate MIT/BSD. MIT/BSD both require attribution. You cannot claim MIT/BSD code written by someone else as your own without breaking copyright law.

      • graphene@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Unrelated to this exact discussion, but like, the law does not dictate morality nor the other way around. If I believe that using someone’s hard work to make a profit without paying them or contributing some work of your own is morally wrong, I can reasonably say it’s ‘stealing’. Even if the person who did the work fully understands that the license under which the work was released makes it not actually stealing.

        I am judging someone as a thief, not legally but morally.

        • communism@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          I never stated what was or wasn’t moral; I stated what was legal, and stealing is a legalistic term. How can you enforce property ownership, intellectual or material, without law, and legal rights to property?

          For the record, I want the abolition of property and of law. I do not believe stealing to be wrong. “Stealing” can only be a legal category if you believe it to be morally neutral.

          That definition also makes no sense. If I gift you a laptop I worked hard to afford and you use it, no sane person would call that stealing, even to those to whom stealing is a moral category. That is the same thing as someone using MIT code according to the licence. The original coder gifted the code to the public and said “I explicitly want you to use this however you like, under the sole condition that you credit me.” Just like if I gifted you a laptop I’d be saying “I want you to use this laptop however you like.”