They're silly, folks. Intellectual property is a spook.
Under communism all software will be free to share, use, and modify without restriction.
This post inspired by the current Ruby mimemagic gem license drama.
In case you're not following:
- mimemagic is a Ruby library (gem) used for detecting the MIME types of files, either by their extension or by their content
- it's widely used and included in Rails
- it was MIT licensed
- it was using an xml file from freedesktop dot org, which is a GPL project
- the GPL license means that every project that uses that software must also be GPL licensed - open-source, freely usable/modifiable/etc
- someone from freedesktop pointed this out to the mimemagic maintainer
- the maintainer republished the gem as GPL and yanked all the MIT licensed gems, breaking builds everywhere, and making rails currently uninstallable
I have a big headache because of ideology.
Yeah your perspectiveon this is basically that of the corporation, because in doing your job you do enact their will, so what makes your job easiest is what the corporation dictating your work wants. It is a pain for corporations by design, and part of your job is managing this difficulty, in which they place all blame upon you, its easy to end up hating the license instead of the corporation that demands you avoid it.