Nice story and judging by it congrats on overcoming your "low-key" austrailian manner handicap ;)
An Unbelievable Demo
51–60 of 478 posts
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#52As much as I think RMS himself is an utter embarrassment of a human being, stories like this are why I also believe the GPL is one of the most important contributions to computing, ever. MIT/BSD-style licenses are practically begging large billion-dollar corporations to rip off your work wholesale and use it to generate profits while contributing only the occasional patch or two. I used to see this phenomenon on HN,…
Where does this expectation come from that a rich organization or person using open source software should be paying for it? That’s against the entire spirit of the open source license in the first place.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#53As much as I think RMS himself is an utter embarrassment of a human being, stories like this are why I also believe the GPL is one of the most important contributions to computing, ever. MIT/BSD-style licenses are practically begging large billion-dollar corporations to rip off your work wholesale and use it to generate profits while contributing only the occasional patch or two. I used to see this phenomenon on HN,…
I think the GPL and FSF etc lost momentum with their GPLv3 push. I know that was the case for me. I really liked GPL (v2). Then GPLv3 came out and I was like huh? After that I became much more open to the lighter versions of things MIT / BSD. GPLv3 is not really workable in terms of preserving developer freedom to do what they want with code (as long as they share their code back). Obviously the powers that be disagr…
You can still use gplv2 if you like. The auto-update clause is optional afaik, and lots of projects are gpl2-only.
I suppose you're right though in as much as it splits mindshare.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The criticism is of forks that are done in order to re-brand and re-sell a project, and then never contribute anything back to the original, and likely, never pull improvements from the originally forked project (which can include critical bug fixes) after that.
Serious question, how does that hurt the original project? This has never been a concern in the projects I’ve worked on. Getting mad every time some developer writes code that didn’t go to your project is a good way to be mad all of the time.
Just a couple of example scenarios:
- Someone sells you BPF observability that's buggy and dissapointing, and you avoid BPF in the future. So in that case it's hurt the BPF community.
- Funding goes to a project that gives nothing back, instead of funding a project that does. Again, it hurts the community as funding isn't infinite.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#55> a heavy American accent
Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#56How is information in this blog related to Wikipedia article on DTrace [1] where one can read "DTrace is ... originally created by Sun Microsystems" and "Original author(s): Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Mike Shapiro (Sun Microsystems)"?
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#57As much as I think RMS himself is an utter embarrassment of a human being, stories like this are why I also believe the GPL is one of the most important contributions to computing, ever. MIT/BSD-style licenses are practically begging large billion-dollar corporations to rip off your work wholesale and use it to generate profits while contributing only the occasional patch or two. I used to see this phenomenon on HN,…
I think the GPL and FSF etc lost momentum with their GPLv3 push. I know that was the case for me. I really liked GPL (v2). Then GPLv3 came out and I was like huh? After that I became much more open to the lighter versions of things MIT / BSD. GPLv3 is not really workable in terms of preserving developer freedom to do what they want with code (as long as they share their code back). Obviously the powers that be disagr…
I remember RMS saying that the license was based on these freedoms he enumerated, but after releasing software under GPL v2 he found out he had to explicitly add the freedom to actually RUN the software.
Remember that the idea of the GPL is the authors preserve and propagate the rights for the USERS.
He also once said "proprietary software subjugates people", which I thought was sort of over-the-top to say, but over time I think software in this era of dark patterns and privacy has unfortunately become very obvious.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was there actually no follow-up? Change of header?
I never got a chance to see it again. I ended up spending more energy with another Sun project that wanted to switch the CDDL license to the GPL, only because they wanted to avoid going through the legal approval procedure to ship mixed-licensed products. Maybe I'll share that story one day: it was another eye-opening experience.
Thanks! Also, you never heard back from the Dtrace expert? (silly question, ok)
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The criticism is of forks that are done in order to re-brand and re-sell a project, and then never contribute anything back to the original, and likely, never pull improvements from the originally forked project (which can include critical bug fixes) after that.
Serious question, how does that hurt the original project? This has never been a concern in the projects I’ve worked on. Getting mad every time some developer writes code that didn’t go to your project is a good way to be mad all of the time.
Obviously it hurts if your project gets bad rep from an old unmaintained fork. If "everyone knows $your_project is broken, don't use it" it will spill back on you.
Somewhat like when powershell on windows had aliases for wget and curl that was just shell aliases for a simple downloader, making some scripts work without those two installed, but also confusing anyone that wanted to do anything outside of "get one single file from url".
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you find it cringe? In NZ I think it's even more true than Australia. It's a tiny, isolated country with a small population that isn't the hub of anything really. Aussie and NZ compared to the US are completely different worlds in my eyes. (I'm a Kiwi btw)
See, at least you realize you are a tiny country with a small population and the ego adapted to that. I am French and we are a country with a great past - but not looking ahead. We still assume that we radiate across the world and that our voice counts. It does not, and this has to be clear. There are countries that can influence events, but this is not ours. A typical example is how angry we were after the recent pi…
But there are consequences; Belarus is now cut off from air travel except with Russia. Flights are avoiding their airspace. They are a pariah.