41–50 of 198 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia was licensed under GFDL 1.2 or later, so relicensed by convincing the FSF to release an updated version of the GFDL (version 1.3) that adds a very narrowly worded clause allowing relicensing that pretty much only applied to Wikipedia.
Which does point to the hidden danger of the FSF licenses when “any later version” exists.
Racket had to do this to go from lGPL to Mit, it was a long process. But they did it to make the language more accessible to developers. Developers are scared away by lGPL. Not all contributions were relicensed (resulting in code being rewritten), and we lost some code in the standard library (the csv parser). Now Racket is trying to make it more friendly to people by created a new language (called Rhombus for now) t…
> Developers are scared away by lGPL. I see GPL as a sign of quality and am attracted by projects using it. It's a promise nobody will ever take that thing away from me once I've started using it. I'm a developer, by the way. :-) Edit: Not to mention that some people even using GCC, Linux and Java.
Personal opinion is that BSD > GPL. Free as in properly free. I always donate to BSD license folks. When corporations use BSD software, they usually get engaged in the BSD community - under the stilts of management, suited lawyers and spreadsheet bean counters, it's just us programmer folk... you know. We like tinkering things and BSD software tends to have a different philosophy. Very welcoming to people who want to propel the world forward. Truly liberating, try BSD software.
I opened the spreadsheet, and now I can't remove it from my list of Google Sheets (unlike most shared spreadsheets). Am I missing some obscure way to remove it, despite the Remove option being grayed out? (It does respect the "Owned by me" filter so this isn't the end of the world.)
> The right-click menu option with the trash can symbol can’t be clicked, but dragging the file over to the trash can works just fine.
why not gpl it D:
Because the entities who spend the most effort on LLVM to support its construction and maintenance have no interest in the GPL. Even if the LLVM board of directors did vote to move in this direction (which would make little sense since most of them are employed by one of the sponsors), the sponsors would end up forking the entire project and the old LLVM would no longer have much relevance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Developers are scared away by lGPL. I see GPL as a sign of quality and am attracted by projects using it. It's a promise nobody will ever take that thing away from me once I've started using it. I'm a developer, by the way. :-) Edit: Not to mention that some people even using GCC, Linux and Java.
> I see GPL as a sign of quality Personal opinion is that BSD > GPL. Free as in properly free. I always donate to BSD license folks. When corporations use BSD software, they usually get engaged in the BSD community - under the stilts of management, suited lawyers and spreadsheet bean counters, it's just us programmer folk... you know. We like tinkering things and BSD software tends to have a different philosophy. Ver…
This might be the largest contributor relicensing project of any IP category: 2800 people and companies. 94% progress is impressive.
Not to be crass, but surely some of these people are just.. dead? It's an old project, and a lot of contributors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, in most jurisdictions where copyright is non-transferable, the original holder also permanently retains a right to cancel any such licensing agreement, at any time without cause. They cannot grant a license in perpetuity, and any language in the license to that effect has no legal weight whatsoever.
As far as I can find online, this is an edge case that's unlikely to ever be relevant. Dutch law allows the voiding of licenses after "unreasonably long" terms. One suspects that it would be hard to show that a term is unreasonably long when you're talking about a contribution to open source software. In Poland, there's a limit of five years, on the author's wish, with one year's notice. Fair enough, a Polish contrib…
> Fair enough, a Polish contributor might possibly demand that their code be taken out of a projects with a year's notice. It seems unlikely that many Polish devs will exercise this right, since, if their contributions are significant, it would probably result in blacklisting, and if not significant, it would probably not be worth it. But I suppose it could happen. If it happened often, Polish devs would likely stop being welcome to contribute to open source projects.
This is the same for Australian developers.
This is also where the primary risk is, and it cannot be mitigated by _any_ copyright license. At any point in time the authour can revoke the license, which is an unlikely event, but because of how licensing works, they can revoke the license for _one individual or corporation_, as well.
For example, it is conceivable that someone who has contributed to a large project, say... Linux, has an issue with one particular corporation who have been found to acting unethically, say... Google. They can revoke the right to use their contributions to the Linux kernel by Google. They don't have to supply a reason for it.
This is thus far untested in court, but that is what the current copyright framework allows for.
The developer may risk blackballing themselves, but they may also not care at all. They may do so by making it about idealism, in which case what they are capable of has little to do with their own personal future.