Way to run with the anti-GPL FUD, LWN.
The GPL has more than run its course and it’s time to move on. Many people recognise that, and that’s what we’re seeing.
Making the GPL more scary
41–50 of 151 posts
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#42I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but here's an opinion supporting the MongoDB license. Two things: 1. MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like ------------------------------------------------------ The creator of a product: 1. Has a rational interest in maximizing their returns 2. Owns all the rights to their products (barring existing IP restrictions) And if they choose to open source their co…
> This License Means More Open Source Code
You're going to get flak for this because you're factually incorrect. The SSPL is not an open source license. It might as well contain a clause that says "Thou shall not compete with MongoDB." As far as I can tell it was submitted to the OSI in bad faith.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap. Also why all new open source OSes done companies are all based on BSD/MIT licenses like Zephyr, RTOS, Fuchsia, ... When we get back to PD, Shareware world, don't start complaining companies don't contribute back.
That's kind of the point though. BSD is truly free, and that means there are a lot of proprietary products which benefit massively from it and create worthwhile products with clear monetization strategies and thrive. Sure, they might not contribute back, but the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch.…
I think most of the commenters on my post misunderstood me very much. I think people should be free to license under GPL, AGPL, SSPL, VXMPL, or whatever the heck they want. I like BSD personally, and it meets my requirements, but someone who has a different need can do what they want. I think GPL has worked well for Linux, and I'm glad they did it the way they did; I think it is less free than BSD, but in a good way for their project and purposes. I think having both a GPL licensed OS and a BSD licensed OS is great. We have diversity of licenses for different purposes and different ideologies, and it enriches the market in a lot of ways. I think forcing everyone to use the same copyleft licenses for everything based on a radical ideology is a dangerous and useless endeavour; and that sort of ideology is completely _not_ free in every sense of the word. Do what you want, set your rules for your project as you wish, we are all better for it.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, that feels more like a hidden contract. Giving away for free a software only to require the user to do the same. That's why I prefer BSD-style licenses - when they write "free", they mean "free".
And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap. Also why all new open source OSes done companies are all based on BSD/MIT licenses like Zephyr, RTOS, Fuchsia, ... When we get back to PD, Shareware world, don't start complaining companies don't contribute back.
Not true - if you compare various cases of GPL vs BSD, the theory of GPL helping the project just doesn’t hold. See MySQL vs Postgres, or GCC vs LLVM, or various MTAs.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#45I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but here's an opinion supporting the MongoDB license. Two things: 1. MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like ------------------------------------------------------ The creator of a product: 1. Has a rational interest in maximizing their returns 2. Owns all the rights to their products (barring existing IP restrictions) And if they choose to open source their co…
> 1. MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like
Well, no, obviously not. They have to stay within legal bounds. But of course they can have any obscure license that is legal if they want.
The thing they get flak for is trying to deceive the public.
> 2. This License Means More Open Source Code
This license is only open source in a very obscure interpretation of the word. It's basically doing a lot of legal gymnastics to say "we don't want Google+Amazon to sell services based on our database, but we still want to call it Open Source". These two goals are fundamentally incompatible.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's kind of the point though. BSD is truly free, and that means there are a lot of proprietary products which benefit massively from it and create worthwhile products with clear monetization strategies and thrive. Sure, they might not contribute back, but the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch.…
Apple isn't the best example. They generally do publish the modified source code to FOSS projects they do, and sometimes they don't add their own license clause, so the changes can get merged back.
It is a good example, because that’s exactly how the BSD license works - it doesn’t force you to give your changes back, but there are other incentives to do so, such as not having to maintain your diffs forever.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#47I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but here's an opinion supporting the MongoDB license. Two things: 1. MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like ------------------------------------------------------ The creator of a product: 1. Has a rational interest in maximizing their returns 2. Owns all the rights to their products (barring existing IP restrictions) And if they choose to open source their co…
Open Source needs a definition and that definition has been governed by OSI: https://opensource.org/osd just like how Free Software has been governed by FSF: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Yes, we need an organization that governs over such a definition and over compliance, because otherwise the term becomes meaningless, due to being sexy for marketing purposes. Back in the day companies like Microsoft actually tried to hijack it via restrictive "shared source" licenses. And those cute little projects on GitHub without a license? Those are a legal minefield ;-)
Developers are not lawyers, we don't read the fine print. That's why we have to rely on certain freedoms when hearing the term Open Source. And one of those freedoms has been the freedom to run the program without restrictions. And another freedom has been the freedom to distribute the program along with other programs, without imposing restrictions on those other programs.
AGPL has been in my opinion restrictive enough that I don't think it is Open Source to begin with — smarter people than myself disagree, but this new SSPL is a farce because it extends those restrictions far beyond derived works. So I hope SSPL doesn't get approved by either OSI or FSF.
The GitHub repository lists 350 contributors.
Many of those are third-party I'm sure. So how many of them are happy with MongoDB's bait and switch? For that matter, how many people that advocated for MongoDB over the years would have done so in the knowledge that MongoDB is not Open Source?
> MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like
Sure, but that's not an argument. We also have the right to complain about it, to campaign against it and to stop using it.
The truth is the company behind MongoDB tries to eat their cake and have it too. Well, that's not how things work. Either you're developing Open Source and are thus happy with other companies profiting from your work, or you stop developing Open Source, but when you do, don't be hypocritical about it.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#48I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but here's an opinion supporting the MongoDB license. Two things: 1. MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like ------------------------------------------------------ The creator of a product: 1. Has a rational interest in maximizing their returns 2. Owns all the rights to their products (barring existing IP restrictions) And if they choose to open source their co…
Companies don't open source their products, especially their core business products, because they are awesome and want to contribute to the community (at least the majority of for-profit ones).
They do it because:
* The users demand it (you can be sure that MongoDB wouldn't be even remotely as popular if it started life closed-source)
* Because it generates free marketing and helps build a community
* Because it allows paying developers less or attract stronger talent
* Because it allows leveraging the community's talents to make the code better (I.E. getting outside contributors)
When you change the license, you break the unspoken contract between your users and contributors and the company, which is just a form of bait and switch.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#49The AGPL is a great license for free software development. It is also great to be coupled with a proprietary license, something that does no often make sense with other licenses.
I have found AGPLv3 useful, everything I do is under AGPLv3, if people want to use it under other terms, they can pay me for a branch under a mutually acceptable license. I will not maintain the alternatively licensed branch unless paid, and these branches after a few months are generally missing significant features. Its a fine revenue stream for me, and in the context of what I am building and the companies that ar…
MongoDB was AGPL, but according to MongoDB, Inc. that didn't stop cloud providers to sell it as service, without also publishing their management tools and everything else used to provision MongoDB under a license AGPL accepts. Hence MongoDB, Inc. came up with their license additions.
IANAL, but depending on who you ask, AGPL is deemed unenforcable or even misusing copyright legislation. In any case, AGPL hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, been tested before a (US or EU) court. If it had, I'd expect an excessive discussion as to which scope AGPL can have, and a fundamental legal discussion of whether copyright laws can even limit use of third-party software.
Anyway, AGPL doesn't directly address commercial licensing; it rather extends GPL's "distribution" to the case of "provisioning over a network", with the understanding that a commercial license also offered from the publishers doesn't require you to publish your source code to your end users. As it stands, AGPL might not be a good tool to express/enforce "free for personal use". It also depends on whether you actually want to win contributors, or merely have a licensing badge for your project. The AGPL itself basically implies that you want contributions (code) from your commercial users, rather than money.
Re: Making the GPL more scary
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have found AGPLv3 useful, everything I do is under AGPLv3, if people want to use it under other terms, they can pay me for a branch under a mutually acceptable license. I will not maintain the alternatively licensed branch unless paid, and these branches after a few months are generally missing significant features. Its a fine revenue stream for me, and in the context of what I am building and the companies that ar…
I'll accept a pull request with no CLA so long as the code is of decent quality. If you accept contributions without a CLA, you are not the sole owner of the copyrights anymore and you cannot offer a proprietary paid branch, unless all contributors give you permission to relicense their AGPL code as proprietary.
Yep, and I'm perfectly fine with this. If someone wants a non-copyleft branch, they can pay me to rewrite the features I didn't author, otherwise I will exclude the added code from said pull request.
Its a definite edge case, but if I can get active contributors, I am not about to ask them to sign a CLA.