I like to compare it with WordPress, what with wordpress.com and wordpress MU, etc. Rails and AGPL vs PHP and GPLv2. Admittedly Diaspora are two steps up on the language and license stakes but I don't think that's a real road-block. That's probably just small stakes. If it's popular enough, site providers will fall over themselves to enable 'installation' of Diaspora. People (theme designers mostly) complain about GPL in WordPress too, but lots of web designers are making custom WordPress sites and making money off it too.
How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#22I like to compare it with WordPress, what with wordpress.com and wordpress MU, etc. Rails and AGPL vs PHP and GPLv2. Admittedly Diaspora are two steps up on the language and license stakes but I don't think that's a real road-block. That's probably just small stakes. If it's popular enough, site providers will fall over themselves to enable 'installation' of Diaspora. People (theme designers mostly) complain about GP…
Rails is MIT-licensed: http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/railties/MIT-LICEN...
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#23Heh. The reasons given also explain why the GNU project has failed to release any influential software like GCC, the various GNU shell utilities, GNU Emacs, GDB and other such insignificant projects.
None of the projects listed above are AGPL-licensed. AGPL is egregious in its viral nature.
Depends on how you apply it. MongoDB uses an AGPL core, with Apache drivers. The end result? Your deployed modifications to MongoDB must be made available, but your application itself can stay closed. It's kind of like the LGPL, but for network services.
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#24I like to compare it with WordPress, what with wordpress.com and wordpress MU, etc. Rails and AGPL vs PHP and GPLv2. Admittedly Diaspora are two steps up on the language and license stakes but I don't think that's a real road-block. That's probably just small stakes. If it's popular enough, site providers will fall over themselves to enable 'installation' of Diaspora. People (theme designers mostly) complain about GP…
Rails is MIT-licensed: http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/railties/MIT-LICEN...
Diasport is AGPL http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/COPYRIGHT
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#25Reason #2 ("they make you sign the contributor agreement") is basically a declaration that the author doesn't understand US copyright law. If you are serious about keeping your code free, up to and including the ability to enforce its license in court, there are legal reasons to do this.
At least, so says the FSF (and so do the IP lawyers I've talked to about it):
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#26I ran a non-profit called ossline for a while (www.ossline.org) which helped open source projects with contributor license agreements, so I am familiar with the issues.
I don't understand this "no way in hell I am signing a contract just to contribute to an open source project" sentiment. It is trivially easy to do (see Node.js's CLA which is an entirely electronic form,) and it gives the users all sorts of additional protections that traditional open source licenses can't otherwise provide, such as patent royalty protections.
The downside of these CLA agreements is that it allows the controllers of the project to re-release code under a less stringent license, and in some cases a commercial license. I can see someone becoming upset that code they worked on in a GPL project was later released as BSD, but that doesn't seem to be an issue with the OP.
All in all, the only reasonable take away here can be summarized in a sentence: "Diaspora may have a more limited uptake by corporations who are hesitant to open source proprietary additions to the software."
Certainly nothing to write a rant over.
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#27Heh. The reasons given also explain why the GNU project has failed to release any influential software like GCC, the various GNU shell utilities, GNU Emacs, GDB and other such insignificant projects.
No denying the influence of GNU, but have you noticed that commercially tolerant licenses are becoming more popular and businesses are some of the biggest producers of new major open source projects?
What are some examples of such licenses?
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#28Heh. The reasons given also explain why the GNU project has failed to release any influential software like GCC, the various GNU shell utilities, GNU Emacs, GDB and other such insignificant projects.
None of the projects listed above are AGPL-licensed. AGPL is egregious in its viral nature.
It's always seemed to me that with truly free software, you absolutely could compile into a binary and distribute it without the source code. I'm all for abolition of most if not all intellectual property protection, but the copyleft stuff always seemed to me just "we don't like certain restrictions on software, but we're perfectly fine with these restrictions on software."
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#29Do we really need to reach out to the license to declare this project DOA? This is a hacker community, right?
For me the technical "architecture" did it.
A rails-app, of all things, to serve as some sort of "superpeer" for what cries to be a P2P system? Really?
And their answer to their stated goal of "privacy aware, personally controlled" is to store the data not in one opaque box (facebook) but to distribute it over many opaque boxes, under the control of random people, without some sort of end-to-end encryption involved?
Really?
Sorry, but not only does real P2P technology exist, there are even free and mature implementations out there for most of the primitives that a distributed facebook would require. Why not plug together what's needed and invent what's missing?
We have mature DHT impls like Kademlia (edonkey), Chord, freenet. Look at the concept of Web-of-Trust and RSA/PGP for identity management in a distributed system. Look at jabber for messaging and presence.
Something is seriously, fundamentally wrong when your answer to "distributed system" comes out as "Rails".
Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
No denying the influence of GNU, but have you noticed that commercially tolerant licenses are becoming more popular and businesses are some of the biggest producers of new major open source projects?
What are some examples of such licenses?
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