171–180 of 198 posts
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There is also 6. Have a CLA (contributor license agreement) that lets the project the right to change the licence. (Different from 4. because there is no copyright transfer).
CLAs are shaky, it might not be valid in some countries that e.g. do not allow reassigning copyright.
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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.
"Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
The SCO lawsuit that happened a decade after this is pretty much irrelevant.
This sounds unsustainable. Will a death of a core contributor mean that the project is stuck on a license forever?
Last line of the article: "If copyright does apply and the code is still in the code base, we can remove the contribution. Depending on whether current contributors and users still value the effect of that contribution, it may need to be reimplemented."
Will it sometimes be easier to just fork? Would fork-relicensing be a good thing for the community?
Or should there be a different approach to ownership that does not allow for relicensing?
As a contributor to some projects that relicensed, I felt pressured to accept a change that was packaged up together with some major downsides.
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I don't think you've quite understood the risk, here. > 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…
> 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…
Whether or not this works is dependent per-country; many countries have judicial systems which do honor the intent of a law, while others (most common law incl. USA) read strictly by the letter of the law, which is why legal loopholes exist.
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CLAs are shaky, it might not be valid in some countries that e.g. do not allow reassigning copyright.
That's why CLA is not copyright assignment.
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> besides people who wanted to write non-free software? Would there be any negative consequences besides the negative consequences? No, I guess not. Lots of people want to write non-free software, for instance for their jobs or businesses or hobbies.
But users can do even less with non-free software than they can with copyleft software, so calling the latter "tyranny" while simultaneously being okay with the former makes no sense at all.
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Saying that corporations prefer something they can profit from without giving back vs something they can not is circular reasoning to me. Conversely if you look on the other side you'll see developers bitten by permissive software licences (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, ...).
"without giving back" is a bit of an exaggeration. You could have a giant 20M line proprietary codebase, and if you incorporate a 20-line function from a GPL source, GPL says you need to relicense the whole thing. I prefer the MPLv2, it lets commercial users actually use the code, but they still have to contribute back any changes they make.
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Yeah, agree it is hotly debated and not worth discussing further. I've recently been bitten by GPL and it's fresh on my mind how insidious it can be. That said, I work in commercial environment where BSD-licensed software is highly regarded.
Saying that corporations prefer something they can profit from without giving back vs something they can not is circular reasoning to me. Conversely if you look on the other side you'll see developers bitten by permissive software licences (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, ...).
I am sick of this constant myopic view that all corporations are evil and people working there have no regard for open source development.
The truth is probably closer to being opposite than the anti-corporate crusader zeitgeist of HN. The point of the original comment was to express that behind all the corporations, there are just real people like you and me.