131–140 of 151 posts
Title is misleading. The article is about a new license, MongoDB's Server Side Public License, that is scarier (to freeloaders) than the GPL.
People who use free software are not “freeloaders” and there’s no need to use such a derogatory term here.
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People who use free software are not “freeloaders” and there’s no need to use such a derogatory term here.
Could you explain how the term does not apply? Its meaning seems to be: "to impose upon another's generosity or hospitality without sharing in the cost or responsibility involved".
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Could you explain how the term does not apply? Its meaning seems to be: "to impose upon another's generosity or hospitality without sharing in the cost or responsibility involved".
Free software users are voluntarily given use of the software with only specified conditional responsibilities; them using the software and not taking on additional responsibilities is not an imposition of any kind, and not freeloading.
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Individuals interpretations of this are unlikely to matter much until such a clause is tested in court. The interpretation that the license is as broad as Mr Kuhn claims may be true, but it may not be. Personally I think that both Mongo and Redis doing this is great as it shows the danger posed when a company can just relicense a project at will, which IMHO is the greater issue here. If Mongo felt the need they could…
"Redis doing this" -> Redis is BSD licensed, but Redis Labs modules that were never part of Redis itself changed license. Note btw that when something is BSD can be relicensed by everybody, both the original copyright owners or anyone else.
Relicensing is not something that the BSD license permits. The license family is permissive, but a user doesn't have the right to strip out the copyright notice and call it a day.
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Free software users are voluntarily given use of the software with only specified conditional responsibilities; them using the software and not taking on additional responsibilities is not an imposition of any kind, and not freeloading.
Isn't that the same as when someone offers me a couch to surf and a kitchen to use? Sure, it's unconditional and I'm not violating any agreement, but if I use their stuff and don't give anything back, am I not a freeloader?
I think "free-rider" is probably a better choice of term.
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Keeping track of and excluding commits authored by others seems a lot of work. I am curious if you use any kind of tooling or process to make it easier.
A bigger issue might be trying to filter anything that might be derivative of contributed work not covered by CLA.
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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.
> And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap BSDs will (perhaps) never be as big as Linux because Linux had first mover advantage in the FOSS operating system world, and hasn't (yet) fumbled it badly enough to be displaced. OTOH, Postgres and SQLite do quite well (with plenty of contributions from big downstream users and sellers), despite being permissi…
A suit that was settled in about 2 years, and Linux also had its own set of suits.
Most companies that use BSD seldom give anything back thanks to the license.
MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support.
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Only if you assume the only choices were 1. using GCC or 2. writing from scratch. Thing is, this assumption obviously doesn't match reality. Absurd assumptions -> absurd conclusions. And no, BSD has nothing to do with shareware. Shareware was never about sharing sources; meanwhile, BSD-licensed projects are fine with respect to sharing - just take a look at Postgres, LLVM, FreeBSD, X11, or Python. GPL is an attempt t…
I have plenty of crufty shareware CDs and most likely unreadable floppies with source code on those .zip and .arj files. FreeBSD vs what Linux has achieved, LLVM still lacking many of the hardware targets supported by GCC don't seem to be doing that great in company contributions. The others I don't know well enough to comment on. Lets check again in about 10 years to see how far they managed to develop themselves. M…
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I have plenty of crufty shareware CDs and most likely unreadable floppies with source code on those .zip and .arj files. FreeBSD vs what Linux has achieved, LLVM still lacking many of the hardware targets supported by GCC don't seem to be doing that great in company contributions. The others I don't know well enough to comment on. Lets check again in about 10 years to see how far they managed to develop themselves. M…
There are many GPL-licensed operating systems. You could as well compare FreeBSD with Hurd and make the opposite conclusion.
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> And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap BSDs will (perhaps) never be as big as Linux because Linux had first mover advantage in the FOSS operating system world, and hasn't (yet) fumbled it badly enough to be displaced. OTOH, Postgres and SQLite do quite well (with plenty of contributions from big downstream users and sellers), despite being permissi…
BSD was the first mover, getting contributions until the suit happened. A suit that was settled in about 2 years, and Linux also had its own set of suits. Most companies that use BSD seldom give anything back thanks to the license. MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support.
Which almost no one does, at least not as the sole decision factor. Even while being recognized as better on that dimension, Postgres was far behind MySQL for a number of reasons and caught up because of much stronger contribution from downstream users.