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My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

goauthentik.io

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#11
post #5

I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL: https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php to non commercial: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a co…

People are upset that they can't profit off your labor without a license? Those don't sound like open source purists to me. They sound like straight up thieves lol.

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#13
post #5

I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL: https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php to non commercial: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a co…

A lot of discussion around has been people disingenuously calling their software open source when it isn't.

I have a less of a problem with people openly restricting their software to non-commercial usage only.

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#14
post #5

I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL: https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php to non commercial: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a co…

People are upset that they can't profit off your labor without a license? Those don't sound like open source purists to me. They sound like straight up thieves lol.

> People are upset that they can't profit off your labor without a license?

No, open source licenses are, in fact, licenses.

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#15
post #5

I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL: https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php to non commercial: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a co…

> people always howl that "its no longer open source"

That's a legit complaint, particularly if someone contributed to it, gave feedback, was part of the user community, depended on it etc and would have chosen differently it they knew it wasn't open source. You changed the terms from "everyone can profit from this" to "only I can profit from this" which is a pretty big change. It's your right, but it shouldn't be surprising people don't like it.

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#16
Is GPL vs. MIT even relevant in this case? GPL only requires providing sources with the distributed binary, but for server-side code you don't distribute the binary so don't have to publish sources. The whole point behind the AGPL is to close this loophole.

Further I don't think the change to GPL even fixed the author's original concern of something like AWS taking it and standing up a service on it. The GPL wouldn't prevent that because again, no binary distribution.

I don't doubt that the author was told this by Sid at OCV, but it seems like a misunderstanding on both their parts of what the licenses actually require and don't require.

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#18
post #7

Tl;dr: "I would like to justify my decision to dump the GPL for money."

I am not sure I understand what they (the business behing "authentik") hope to gain from having their Open/Libre variant available under MIT instead of under GPLv3, when they do have a fully proprietary ("you may look at the source" or not, meh) alternative that they are trying to sell INSTEAD of the free variant? Is it because they hope that MIT-licensed software is more readily adopted by businesses, and they hope to get their foot in more doors for their proprietary "premium" version that way? Or is there something else/in addition to that that I cannot see?

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#19
post #6

Right off the bat there's a pretty serious error: > There’s been a lot of discussion about licensing in the news, with Red Hat and now Hashicorp notably adjusting their licensing models to be more “business friendly,” and Codecov (proudly, and mistakenly) pronouncing they are now “open source.” Red Hat has not adjusted any of their "licensing models." They've simply stopped publishing the RHEL sources publicly. They'…

Not arguing. But in practice there’s some number of large orgs hostile to GPL (which strikes me as bass-ackwards, but there you have it).

Indeed, I don't understand it, especially when it's a back-end service they're running, not even something they are modifying and reselling. The GPL is completely safe for that.

Re: My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

#20
post #5

I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL: https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php to non commercial: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a co…

Even if we ignore the open source purists, restricting commercial usage still violates the popular libre software guidelines like FSD and DFSG:

* https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#fs-definition - FSD

* https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines - DFSG

It violates freedom 0 of FSD!

The problem with that is that a lot of non-profit organizations that do use libre software cannot use your software because it violates one of the fundamental requirements of libre software guidelines: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor / The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). So such software become automatically disqualified for non-profits that want to run themselves on libre software.

I know it is your software and you are totally entitled to release it under any license you want and make money off it. Nothing wrong with it. But I'm hoping you can see why this is a problem for those who want to use libre software who are also entitled to ignore your software and keep looking for something that is actually libre.

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