141–150 of 198 posts
>m8r-9yw8a5@mailinator.com "/dev/humancontroller" That one should be fun. An anonymous mail account service.
Not that I suspect LLVM to take that kind of risk, but it is an interesting consequence of anonymous contribution.
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Something that keeps being forgotten, those legal issues were settled in 1994, after USL also getting a counter lawsuit for their own use of BSD code, while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.
>while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO. The dust was settled then, Google and all were on linux. Compared to BSD era. Not to mention the legal threats were not in the same order of magnitude.
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Commenting on BSDs losing out to Linux seems like a weird dig in this context, considering that a large contributing factor to that was legal threats from AT&T.
Something that keeps being forgotten, those legal issues were settled in 1994, after USL also getting a counter lawsuit for their own use of BSD code, while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.
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> Developers are scared away by lGPL. For me it's very much the opposite, I refuse to contribute code to anything licensed under the MIT/BSD/etc family of languages. It makes me sad to see so much confusion, incorrect information, naiveté and paranoia going around regarding the GPL that it's scaring people off. I think that most of these people would feel differently if they understood better. I think the systematic…
I don't think people who shy away from GPL are in favor of the free software movement. People who advocate for MIT like licenses like 'open source', but they usually explicitly reject the ideas from free software. Some of these concerns are simply commercial, and some are philosophical. I think people might have been convinced to dislike GPL. But I don't think that was misinformation or confusion. It might be fear-mo…
I have no idea what you're talking about. You can use gpl code without being the owner of said code.
You're thinking in very selfish terms. The gpl is bot about safeguarding rights for the developer, but instead it safeguards rights for the user. When code is licensed as gpl, it's a promise to the user that they'll always be able to get, use, and modify the code for the software. That comes at the cost of developers not being allowed to make the code private.
I think that safeguarding user rights is a virtuous method of improving the world.
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I don't think people who shy away from GPL are in favor of the free software movement. People who advocate for MIT like licenses like 'open source', but they usually explicitly reject the ideas from free software. Some of these concerns are simply commercial, and some are philosophical. I think people might have been convinced to dislike GPL. But I don't think that was misinformation or confusion. It might be fear-mo…
If those people are coherent I assume they are also contributing and running one of the BSDs as their main UNIX.
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I have yet to see BSD / MIT meaningfully improving my personal life, quite unlike the GPL which pretty much made my career possible thanks to the wealth of GPL software under Linux
Have you ever used software linked against OpenSSL? It’s licensed under APL, which is very similar to the BSD family of license - it allows use in closed source projects. Or OpenSSH - it’s developed by the OpenBSD folks and licensed under a BSD style license. Or Firefox - licensed under MPL, very similar to APL. The rust compiler is dual-licensed under MIT/APL. Both ruby and python are dual-licensed with at least one…
The whole GPU driver subsystem for example.
Is Rafael de Espindola on that list? He seems to have left on not that great terms and I can imagine him not being interested in supporting a license change. He was a prolific contributor.
I guess I should be, but I don't see myself there. I haven't agreed to changing the license from the beginning: https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-August/116370... I have contributed to LLVM while working for INdT in Brazil, Google in Ireland and Canada, Mozilla and Sony Interactive Entertainment (both in Canada). I probably also got a few patches in between jobs. Maybe they have tracked every patch to ev…
Do you ever regret your decision? I think I understand your perspective, but does it ever seem a bit impractical to move away over the CoC? It seems like Renato had similar misgivings but resolved to stay, for example. I can understand not wanting to agree to the CoC but what about continuing to contribute without agreeing? Also, the association with "outreachy" seems to have little impact on most developers work. Why let it bother you any more than the evils of companies who use llvm in their products supporting censorship or other things you might oppose?
FWIW, going with Apache 2.0 is/was a mistake. There is a clause in the license which implies that almost everybody who uses GitHub/GitLab/etc. to work on an Apache 2.0 project in the common workflows is in breech of the license. Specifically, the license says that every file with modifications has to include a corresponding notice that the file was changed. Nobody does this in practice. Unfortunately the license is s…
>Specifically, the license says that every file with modifications has to include a corresponding notice that the file was changed. Nobody does this in practice. Can't you achieve this easily with a git hook or something like that?
People are in violation of the licence not because it's bothersome to produce the notice, but because they are unaware of the clause.
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> Developers are scared away by lGPL. For me it's very much the opposite, I refuse to contribute code to anything licensed under the MIT/BSD/etc family of languages. It makes me sad to see so much confusion, incorrect information, naiveté and paranoia going around regarding the GPL that it's scaring people off. I think that most of these people would feel differently if they understood better. I think the systematic…
The number of people who refuse to commit to MIT/BSD/etc. code is almost not existing, the number of people who refuse or cannot commit to GPL is plentiful. > It makes me sad to see so much confusion, incorrect information, naiveté and paranoia going around regarding the GPL I agree, there are still too many people who think the GPL is _just_ another license. It's not and many figured this out the hard way after they…
Let’s not kid ourself: the main reason companies don’t like the GPL is because they don’t want to share the code they actually use in their products. Making that impossible is an intended consequence of the license not some unforeseen flaw. If you are fine with companies profiteering from your work then choosing the MIT or BSD license definitely make sense.
The whole discussion really is about commercial interest in the end.
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> This is the same for Australian developers. I don't see any sign of this being the case in my searching. This document ( https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=628b5bca-b7d5... ) suggests that Australia does recognize perpetual licenses ("Does the law in your jurisdiction recognise the validity of ‘perpetual’ software licences? ... Yes."). Would you provide a citation? > For example, it is conceivable that…
> As noted above, I'm skeptical that this right exists in Australia. The right to control the integrity of one's work is a Moral Right, and moral rights fall outside of copyrights in Australia. A very basic introduction is here [0]. Granting the use of a work in perpetuity is permitted, but revoking that perpetuity is also permitted and cannot be limited. > But if it does, the worst that would happen is that a person…
The other person already responded to your understanding of moral rights. I would also question this assumption. A copyleft license that excludes certain participants who are otherwise complying with this license because of animus on the part of one contributor is not really a copyleft license in spirit. It would be an untenable precedent to set that any contributor can effectively ban anyone they like from using Linux. I strongly doubt the Linux community would keep code like this even if they were technically allowed to.
> Richard Stallman ...
Would never countenance a situation like the one you're contemplating. He cares most about software freedom and what you're describing is basically the opposite.