Open enough to be scraped and remixed by CoPilot, apparently
How ‘open’ should your open source be?
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#32> First, let’s take a look at how we got here. > Open source eats the world (and needs some Tums) > Early software was written by researchers and academics, and open by default—it couldn’t even be copyrighted until 1974. We didn’t even have the now-common phrase “open source” until Christine Peterson coined it in 1998. That same year, the OSI formed and established the aforementioned open source definition, which rem…
Free Software as explicitly anti-corporate is not something Microsoft likes to remind itself of.
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#33Bot accepting contributions is fine. It’s still Open Source Definition so anyone can fork it and accept contributions.
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#34It's tricky. Like there's real benefits to allowing contributions sometime. I was profiling some code and discovered that OpenNLP uses StringBuffer where it should use StringBuilder in a few places, and for those not fresh with Java, the two work the same except StringBuffer is a thread safe construction that is very slow and largely considered a deprecated vestige of Java 1.0, and it was used in a way where it didn'…
A lot of projects like this can / should be forked. It depends on how much credit you want, if someone then looks at your fork and incorporates the change into mainline themselves.
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#35> First, let’s take a look at how we got here. > Open source eats the world (and needs some Tums) > Early software was written by researchers and academics, and open by default—it couldn’t even be copyrighted until 1974. We didn’t even have the now-common phrase “open source” until Christine Peterson coined it in 1998. That same year, the OSI formed and established the aforementioned open source definition, which rem…
Free Software as explicitly anti-corporate is not something Microsoft likes to remind itself of.
Free/Libre Software is not anti-corporate, it is pro-user's freedom to use, modify, sell and improve such software
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#36Ctrl-F free - Phrase not found
What a coincidence.
I'm not a card carrying FSF member but that seems like a deliberate omission from the admittedly brief history. However also fairly off-topic as criticisms go.
A maintainer willing to reject contributions is a good sign to me - BDFL with a vision prevents mission creep and associated ills. The right to fork alleviates most of the negatives.
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free Software as explicitly anti-corporate is not something Microsoft likes to remind itself of.
Free/Libre Software is not anti-corporate, it is pro-user's freedom to use, modify, sell and improve such software
It's anti-corporate-abuse-of-users, which in Microsoft's case is exactly the same.
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#38Always remember to s/GitHub/Microsoft/g
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#39I have to say, for the project mentioned, Litestream, which is licensed under Apache-2.0 license thus allows close-source redistribution, "Open-Source, not Open-Contribution" might not be the best combination for it. Because one can simply take the source code, make their own fork and never bother trying to back-contribute now that contribution is extremely hard if still possible at all. It's just not strategically s…
It works for sqlite (public domain though, not apache-2.0) https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
The reasoning is specific and pretty interesting IMO. Contributions are accepted as long as they stay public domain.
“In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from people who have not submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain.”
I’d guess this compares to the GPL in interesting ways too (i.e., unlike GPL public domain code can be used/copied/distributed without license, even in proprietary settings and for profit, but attribution, credit & copyright must be waived first).
Re: How ‘open’ should your open source be?
#40> Johnson closed the project to contributions in January 2021, explaining in a section of the README titled "Open-Source, not Open-Contribution" that dealing with even small code contributions was too time-consuming. > "As the author of BoltDB, I found that accepting and maintaining third-party patches contributed to my burn out and eventual archival of the project," he wrote. "Even small contributions typically requ…
Hashicorp and Terraform are pretty notorious about rejecting/ignoring all community PRs. I once saw Hashicorp say that someone was allowed to come up with a proposal for a proposal for improvement, and that might get read but a real change would not even be considered.