Mold linker creator considers changing the license
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#2I've donated to FOSS projects before. I have never and will never donate to any proprietary software projects.
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#3It‘s incredibly sad that companies worth literal trillions of dollars don‘t have a couple thousand dollars to spare for open source developers who create insanely valuable software for their employees. I remember that brew‘s (the defacto standard macos package management tool) maintainer had similar projects in the past.
Bad tools grind operations to a halt and feel incredibly dissatisfying to work with. Mold is insanely fast and pushing further in a problem space (linking) that can‘t be avoided and has in the past been dominated by slow tooling. Corporations save real dollars when their developer uses free software by open source maintainers, but due to their greed and their top heavy management which lacks insight on what speeds up development they give nothing back.
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One solution I would propose is that industry giants form a general OSS funding collective, which selects interesting / helpful oss projects and grants funding to their developers.
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#4Does no one else have copyrights preventing a license change? That's one thing I like about contributing to projects (at least those without license assignment), is once you do that the main author(s) can't re-license the project at all without your consent. They could re-write all your code instead, but it at least makes it harder.
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#5Does no one else have copyrights preventing a license change? That's one thing I like about contributing to projects (at least those without license assignment), is once you do that the main author(s) can't re-license the project at all without your consent. They could re-write all your code instead, but it at least makes it harder.
That's not entirely true, the "threshold of originality" is relevant. Contributing typofixes or even things like minor non-functional refactorings (i.e. renaming methods or variables) isn't going to qualify as an original contribution. A common mistake is thinking stuff like relicensing is some kind of binary 1-or-0 thing. It's not. It's a legal concern, not a technical one and is therefore subject to many messy human interpretations of ownership, law, et cetera.
In any case it does not matter here because contributing to mold requires your changes to be available under both AGPLv3 and MIT, and so any derivative proprietary works can be considered derivatives of the MIT licensed version. It therefore isn't "changing the existing license", it's "making a proprietary derivative, which the existing license allows."
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#6All seems like reasonable points, it's highly project-dependant but since switching to mold I've seen solid overall speedups. If I was to put a saved time value on that for me alone it would be huge. At $1200/month in donations for full time work, the value large companies get out of it is huge.
The actual meat of the title buried down in the tweets:
> Given this situation, I'm seriously considering changing the mold/macOS license (not mold/Unix license) from AGPL to a commercial, source-available one. Something like individuals would be able to use it for free but companies have to pay.
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#7Paid software support and seems to be the way to go, but I don't think this really works for this project.
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#8Paid software support and seems to be the way to go, but I don't think this really works for this project.
How do GNU and LLVM maintain linkers while staying financially solvent without going proprietary? Why won't the same strategy work in this case?
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#9> Part of a reason is because most companies don't have an internal process to start supporting an open-source project. If they need to buy a license, that's fine, that's part of a usual business. But giving money away to "free" software? There's no precedent and hard to justify.
The author already sells licenses, so I am not sure that is the case.
Re: Mold linker creator considers changing the license
#10Paid software support and seems to be the way to go, but I don't think this really works for this project.
How do GNU and LLVM maintain linkers while staying financially solvent without going proprietary? Why won't the same strategy work in this case?
Companies pay employees to work on them.
If you know of a company who could support Rui, then please let him know.