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How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

jarinheit.posterous.com

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Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#2
1. It is absurd to expect to be able to make money from the work they are doing. That said, they may need to make accommodations to allow commercial plugins / complementary services.

2. The "you give your contribution to us" clause is standard in any open source project. How, for example, will they be able to update the project license if they don't own the copyright?

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#3
post #2

1. It is absurd to expect to be able to make money from the work they are doing. That said, they may need to make accommodations to allow commercial plugins / complementary services. 2. The "you give your contribution to us" clause is standard in any open source project. How, for example, will they be able to update the project license if they don't own the copyright?

1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't?

2. That's not the problem. The problem is making developers sign a contract just to contribute to the project.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#5
post #4

I can't stand anti free software zealots like this guy.

I'm not anti-Free Software. I'm all for it. I make my living off of it, and I contribute regularly to open source projects. I'm anti-Overly-Restrictive-and-Innovation-Stifling-Licenses. You'll note that I recommended that the BSD license would be way more appropriate for this project.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#7
post #5
post #4

I can't stand anti free software zealots like this guy.

I'm not anti-Free Software. I'm all for it. I make my living off of it, and I contribute regularly to open source projects. I'm anti-Overly-Restrictive-and-Innovation-Stifling-Licenses. You'll note that I recommended that the BSD license would be way more appropriate for this project.

Snarky translation: I'm all for embrace and extend of other peoples, just like late 90's Microsoft. Look at how well that worked for everyone.

BSD licenses are great and all, but often lead to a situation where the original developers get used with little to no compensation in return in terms of code improvement or financial benefit. A great example of how annoying this can be to the original developers - look at the bottom paragraph of http://openssh.org/

My take on the whole thing - they should have published a spec, with hard and fast guidelines for interaction and preferably a protocol verification test suite, rather than code. Then release an implementation with a license that is GPL or proprietary or whatever - just make it so that 3rd parties can write interoperable code if they want.

To put this succinctly, we need the "HTTP" of social media, not the "Apache" of social media.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#8
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not anti-Free Software. I'm all for it. I make my living off of it, and I contribute regularly to open source projects. I'm anti-Overly-Restrictive-and-Innovation-Stifling-Licenses. You'll note that I recommended that the BSD license would be way more appropriate for this project.

Snarky translation: I'm all for embrace and extend of other peoples, just like late 90's Microsoft. Look at how well that worked for everyone. BSD licenses are great and all, but often lead to a situation where the original developers get used with little to no compensation in return in terms of code improvement or financial benefit. A great example of how annoying this can be to the original developers - look at the…

That's a good point, and I totally agree that would be a good solution. It needs more than just one working implementation out there, or it will just turn into Google Wave part 2. The good thing is the Diaspora protocol is much simpler than the Wave protocol, so hopefully it won't take very long before good alternative implementations start showing up.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#9
Maybe if the author started with the premise that Diaspora is more about offering an open source, secure and decentralized alternative to Facebook rather than zomg facebook killer h8 gpl mindset they might understand the situation better?

Diaspora is about choice, not market share.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#10
post #3
post #2

1. It is absurd to expect to be able to make money from the work they are doing. That said, they may need to make accommodations to allow commercial plugins / complementary services. 2. The "you give your contribution to us" clause is standard in any open source project. How, for example, will they be able to update the project license if they don't own the copyright?

1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't? 2. That's not the problem. The problem is making developers sign a contract just to contribute to the project.

1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't?

When you can demonstrate to me how the existence of GPL-licensed web servers prevents the creation and sale of proprietary web servers, and additionally demonstrate to me that people will not pay other people to host stuff for them, I will accept that you "aren't allowed to" make money off of this.

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