281–290 of 339 posts
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Well, go and check: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html Then see how many of those are OSI approved licences (thus open source).
Free implies open source. Open source does not imply free.
(that doesn't mean the difference isn't important though)
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> no they are not Yes they are, according to people who use both terms. All “free software” licenses are also “open source” licenses and vice versa.
Free Software is Open Source, but Open Source is not necessarily Free Software.
In practice, pretty much every Open Source license is also Free Software license and vice versa (there are some very nitpicky exceptions, but I guarantee they're not where you'd expect them to be).
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Yeah... had it not been for CentOS, I would've never touched anything in the RHEL-side of things after I discovered Ubuntu in the 10/12 era. Because CentOS existed, I made sure most of my open source work would run just as well on all RHEL derivatives as it does on Debian. If Rocky didn't exist, I would quickly drop all my RHEL support because operating thousands of test machines and containers based on UBI and havin…
I'd have to check if it is still the case but RHEL has provided free developer licenses for RHEL for years (decades?). EDIT: checked and it still exist and allow usage of up to 16 physical or virtual nodes for development " to develop software (including open source software), perform prototyping or quality assurance testing and/or for demonstration purposes.
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Right, my bad. Permissive licenses are "free" in the sense that they allow to distribute free software (e.g. I can distribute a binary together with its sources even if they are MIT-licensed, and that would be free), but they also allow to distribute non-free software (e.g. I can take MIT code and distribute a proprietary binary). Copyleft licenses enforce the freedom downstream. I guess my original point is that I d…
Yes, that sounds right to me. “Free Software” and “open source” are synonyms, with the FSF preferring to use one term over the other, despite recognizing they’re synonyms, because they are ideologues who are obsessed with language use. Permissive and copyleft are two different types of free software/open source licenses, with the FSF preferring copyleft. To answer your underlying question: I like permissive licenses…
My opinion differs here. First, the free philosophy is nice for me as a user: for instance say I buy a Marshall "smart" speaker, for which the software kind of sucks and is essentially not maintained (but still it connects to the internet...). I don't see how it would hurt Marshall to enable an open source ROM. After all, they sell the hardware, right? And a big part of the software running on that speaker is open source; they did not pay anything for it, and more often than not, they "forget" attribution for permissive code.
But companies try to minimize their costs, and contributing a bugfix back upstream is seen as a cost (conveniently ignoring that they did not pay for the software in the first place). With a copyleft license, of course the company can keep ignoring the license (like they do for attribution in permissive licenses), but at least it gives the developer an argument for contributing back upstream.
And it doesn't have to be GPL. LGPL and MPL are easy to handle.
> I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
If the software has value, I am convinced that they can deal with copyleft (see Linux). And if the majority of open source software was copyleft, then companies would be used to it. Copyleft is really not that bad, it is just perceived as a source of cost by companies.
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I was wrong indeed, thanks for the precision :-). So: Permissive licenses are free in the sense that they allow making free software (but they also allow making non-free software). GPLv3 enforces the complete derived work to be free. LGPLv3 says that the particular library should stay free. GPLv2, LGPLv2 and MPLv2 say that the source code (either of the whole derived work or just the library) should stay free, but ti…
That's spot on. That was what I meant initially: in HN there's a strong opinion against copyleft, not necessarily free software.
To me, writing software in my free time and open sourcing it under a permissive license is shooting myself in the foot. I did the work for free, it may as well benefit me as a user. At minimum it should be MPLv2.
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It also annoys me to great extents when Red Hat removes support for SAS raid cards that are perfectly usable. Oracle fixes that.
Removed it midstream or between releases ?
Here are the meeting notes from the RockyLinux people on this subject: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/resf-rocky-linux-git-c.o-chan...
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Red Hat's model is to only ship what they know they can support. For the rest there's EPEL which is community managed. Canonical's model is to ship the kitchen sink and wing it in case a customer wants support on something that is in a sorry state. Different customers, different requirements.
RHELs model is to support such ancient versions of software that they don't have to support many pieces of software, because the features most people would rely on aren't in 3, 5 or 10 year old software. If it wasn't effectively required (until recently) for most US government use, I would imagine they would have a substantially smaller customer base.
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Also in terms of security, Oracle's "forks" are decades behind. They managed to make RedHat unsecure with their own dogshit changes. There are so many CVEs for Oracle specifically that are just bad default usernames and passwords, where they still dispute the CVE reports because it is "intended behaviour". So ridiculous...
RHEL also introduced some.... interesting changes few times, like re-enabling ciphers removed from upstreams because their clients needed them for something. I remember our amazement on how we failed audit on having a cipher enabled in OpenSSH version that had that cipher removed in upstream...
Losely related: I've audited so many BSD instances that were using MD4/NTHASH in their passwd and shadow files because they wanted to keep compatibility with their Windows infrastructure... it's stunning to see what is still possible in terms of misconfigurations. Things that should have been removed a long time ago.
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Many startups can only dream of being as long and influential as IBM was .
Champion in patents per year in tech, Red-Hat, 2nd major Java implementation, one of the few vendors in quantum computing. That alone looks quite alright for a dying company.
IBM is still in business because they can build on massive reserves from the time where they literally created the market for commercial computing. That was indeed influential. Now they slowly burn those reserves and have a crackhead sales team that knows how to sell mainframes and subsequently suck those customers dry.
The new generation of graduates has no idea what IBM does, let alone what a mainframe is. New talent for maintaining Cobol codebases is so rare to come by, that they pay the Linux foundation to offer free courses on Cobol.
IBM's success is a relict of the past. It will die when the last guy that knows how to maintain Cobol dies. Good riddance.