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

goauthentik.io

31–40 of 46 posts

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

#31

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'…

That is a very good point, I'll fix that in a bit

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

#32

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…

The whole thing about how GPL propagates to unrelated works that happen to use a GPL licensed software is a misunderstanding. One that the FSF foundation is happy to propagate, but not one that would hold in court.

The concept of derived work in copyright law has nothing to do with how the binaries are linked together nor is an entire work derived from a GPL library just because they happen to call it at one point. Lawyers look at this very differently.

See https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366

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

#33
post #29

I looked at OP's account. No comments at all, and every submission leads to his own website. Many of them marked as [dead]. I thought this was strictly against HN guidelines?

"Guidelines" are never "strict." Guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." OP has made 5 submissions in 7 months. All for blog posts tangential to their product, not even direct product offerings, not even directly pitching their product. (I read the posts and still don't know what they actually s…

Actually OP has made 12. Only 4 of them escaped death. This is clearly a case of using HN only for self-promotion. I wouldn't suggest we should stop them as it doesn't cross into abusive IMHO, but it does seem against the guidelines. It may not be reason to take action but doesn't seem like a nothingburger either.

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

#34

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…

The link "Changed to GPL v3" was actually "change to Enterprise Edition license. So that's a bizarre comment to make in the blog post.

https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/commit/4671d4afb4d3...

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

#35

I looked at OP's account. No comments at all, and every submission leads to his own website. Many of them marked as [dead]. I thought this was strictly against HN guidelines?

Probably 80% of my submissions are “Show HN” links to my work. It’s me saying “hey look at this cool/silly thing I just made!”. I don’t necessarily ask for feedback when I do that, although I do appreciate it.

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

#36
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's FUD. Microsoft in particular and proprietary software companies in general have long been scaremongering about the alleged dangers of using GPL code as a marketing tactic, and some people believe them.

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

#37
post #26

>The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add... That's the entire point of copyleft licenses. Businesses want to benefit from the community without giving back.

Copyleft doesn't seem to cause businesses to give more back, but does seem to prevent them from benefiting from the community, which is a shame.

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

#38
post #26

>The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add... That's the entire point of copyleft licenses. Businesses want to benefit from the community without giving back.

Copyleft doesn't seem to cause businesses to give more back, but does seem to prevent them from benefiting from the community, which is a shame.

It doesn't prevent them from benefiting from the community. They're deciding they don't want to be beholden to a license that requires them to contribute back, and they're blaming the license itself for their selfishness.

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

#39
post #26

>The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add... That's the entire point of copyleft licenses. Businesses want to benefit from the community without giving back.

Copyleft doesn't seem to cause businesses to give more back, but does seem to prevent them from benefiting from the community, which is a shame.

How many drivers are available as FOSS in the Linux kernel? Now how many drivers for the same hardware are available as FOSS for Windows?

Do you think so many of those Linux drivers would have their code available if the kernel weren't copyleft licensed?

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

#40
> Initially, authentik used the MIT license. When Elastic called out AWS for trademark abuse (offering Elasticsearch as an AWS service without collaborating with Elastic), I changed it to GPLv3 because I didn’t like what AWS did in principle, and didn’t want it to happen to authentik.

GPLv3 doesn't protect SaaS users anyway! That's the whole point of AGPL. lol

IOW, GPLv3 doesn't prevent Amazon or Google or Microsoft from offering a hosted version of your project without sharing source code changes with customers.

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