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A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

element.io

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Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#241

Post by lucasyvas »

AGPL is the way. Every time I see BSL I just laugh - the AGPL is enough to scare away people that don't want to contribute back. And the enforced contribution means the original author can incorporate changes they put no effort into back into their own product.

IMO the only options for a cloud hosted service are:

1. Closed source

2. AGPL

Anything else is a half measure that disproportionately puts users or the business at risk.

If they want a CLA, fine. It still enables a fork later.

GPL and its derivatives are the only licenses that will stand the test of time for open source products for sale.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#242

Post by COGlory »

I have never seen as much negativity for an open source project on Hacker News as I have seen in every single Matrix thread. It is unbelievable. The only thing that might come even close is FlatPak. It's been going on for years and years. If anyone doesn't believe me, just click Arathorn's post history and start browsing. I've never understood what Matrix did to deserve this. It's a fantastic project - I've been using it every day since ~2017. It has its problems but it's head and above every other project like it and provides real value. Better still, the Matrix folks seem to really be thinking things through and making, even if not the best (subjective), a well thought out and well explained decision every time they make a decision.

I have seen every. single. possible. attack. thrown at Matrix OVER AND OVER again. Every single one. So many quite obviously not in good faith. Matrix is owned by the Jews. Matrix is owned by the CIA. Matrix is owned by Germany. Matrix violates privacy laws. Matrix tricks you into thinking your messages are deleted when they aren't. Matrix (this one's hilarious), BROKE SIGNALS ENCRYPTION (lol). Matrix is scraping all the rooms to sell to Google (lol). XMPP was perfectly fine and we didn't need Matrix. Matrix collects too much metadata. Matrix federates by default. Matrix is too slow (ok fair). Matrix is going to sell out.

This has been going on for the 5+ years I've been using Matrix. People have been sounding the alarm for a half decade about how awful and evil Matrix is. Yet it keeps plugging along, solving truly hard problems, getting better and better, and being released openly (I have no idea why, if I were on the Matrix team I'd have ragequit by now). It is absurd the level of criticism that is thrown at a project that has asked no one for anything, and has truly made the world a better place.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#243

Post by ensignavenger »

cvwright wrote: post #231
ensignavenger wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. There are a lot of things that folks look for when buying hosting or a support contract. For example, trust and confidence. I trust the primary maintainer of a open source project to be able to support me better than some one else maintaining a proprietary fork. In fact, the fork being proprietary means I am not going to use it when there is an open source alternative. However, I also distrust a proj…

Unfortunately most of their big customers seem to be governments, who are often bound by law to do things like select the lowest bidder. And where criteria like “trust and confidence” are too often cover for corruption and favoritism.

Governments are a whole other ballgame, your right. They often have very particular requirements that not every company is going to be able or willing to meet, though. I don't know enough about their particular business to say without a more complete analysis, but even with governments, just having a cheaper product is not always enough to get your bid accepted.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#244

Post by gkbrk »

taway1237 wrote: post #187
gtirloni wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL is not the issue. The CLA is. It allows the project to change licenses at will, without going back to all contributors and asking for approval.

Ah yes, CLAs are not a real open source, which is why they're required by uhh FSF. I mean I dislike CLAs personally, but I understand why they can be healthy for a project growth.

Do you truly see no difference between assigning rights to your own code to a non-profit foundation dedicated to Free Software and assigning rights to your own code to a for-profit company?

Especially when the for-profit company openly announces this assignment of rights is for the purpose of selling code you wrote to others without giving back to the authors.

The FSF doesn't have a track record of asking for CLAs, and then selling your code to others under different licenses and pocketing the profits.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#245

Post by gkbrk »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #114
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #96

So AGPL+CLA: > The benefit of switching to AGPLv3 is that it obliges downstream developers to contribute back to the core project - either by releasing their modifications as open source for the benefit of the whole Matrix ecosystem, or by contacting Element for an alternative license. Future code contributors to Synapse will need to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) This makes it clear that they intent to s…

What are your thoughts on Stallman explicitly saying that selling exceptions is fine [1]? [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

Here's the opening paragraph from your link.

> Selling exceptions means that the copyright holder of the code releases it to the general public under a valid free software license, then separately offers users the option of paying for permission to use the same code under different terms, for instance terms allowing its inclusion in proprietary applications.

Crucially, Element is not trying to sell an exception as the copyright holder. They want you to sign a CLA, because they want to sell AGPL exceptions code you wrote, and they are not a copyright holder of your code.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#246

Post by matheusmoreira »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #96

So AGPL+CLA: > The benefit of switching to AGPLv3 is that it obliges downstream developers to contribute back to the core project - either by releasing their modifications as open source for the benefit of the whole Matrix ecosystem, or by contacting Element for an alternative license. Future code contributors to Synapse will need to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) This makes it clear that they intent to s…

Agreed. The difficulty of changing the license is proportional to how many copyright holders there are. To change Linux's license, everyone who ever contributed to it probably needs to agree in writing. In comparison, it is trivial for a single copyright holder to change the license, even the GPL. Anyone contributing should know the risk exists.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#247

Post by matheusmoreira »

taway1237 wrote: post #187
gtirloni wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL is not the issue. The CLA is. It allows the project to change licenses at will, without going back to all contributors and asking for approval.

Ah yes, CLAs are not a real open source, which is why they're required by uhh FSF. I mean I dislike CLAs personally, but I understand why they can be healthy for a project growth.

If the Free Software Foundation which was started and is headed by Stallman himself betrays the free software movement, then nothing in this world can be trusted anymore.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#248

Post by bruce511 »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #196
callahad wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost went there myself in my response, but I don't think that's the strongest argument since any of your users could request the source and then hand it over to the parent corporation, albeit only under the terms of the AGPL.

Yeah but then you have non CLA-ed code in the original codebase which in the context of an AGPL+CLA project, now it's just AGPL and their upstream has to be maintained separate from their proprietary offering. So in that sense, it's no different than if the maintainers was just a collection of open source contributors rather than a corporation. They can integrate your changes as long as they comply with the license b…

You are completely correct, but I think it's worth clarifying one part.

>> they can't meaningfully profit off of them

To be clear that can absolutely profit off the code, as long as they do do under the same license. ("Meaningful" being in the eye of the beholder.)

Implying that you can't "meaningfully profit" from an AGPL license is not technically true (although, of course, finding examples that do is tricky.)

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#250

Post by bruce511 »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #96

So AGPL+CLA: > The benefit of switching to AGPLv3 is that it obliges downstream developers to contribute back to the core project - either by releasing their modifications as open source for the benefit of the whole Matrix ecosystem, or by contacting Element for an alternative license. Future code contributors to Synapse will need to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) This makes it clear that they intent to s…

>> As usual, remember to never sign a CLA.

I see this a lot. And I think I understand where you are coming from. But I guess I see things another way.

My thinking is something like this. I'm using project x (for free). I fix something or whatever. I contribute it back because that's the social contract. It's my minor contribution, my paltry acknowledgement of the value you add to me.

Do as you please with it. It's not a stick for me to wave later on. It's not a ticket for me into your boardroom. Here it is, it's my gift to you.

I fully expect you to create a commercial product down the road. I acknowledge that you probably like eating as much as I do. I've no problem with that. I'm probably not the market for you, I'll likely never actually pay you, so here's my offering.

If and when you make a commercial offering I'll have lots of options. You'll have lots of options. Worst case I'll make a fork, or move onto something else. You owe me nothing, I have received more than I gave. I wish you well.

So sure, here's my CLA. I do this for you, not for me.

-- I'm not saying that my attitude is more, or less, right than yours. If you don't want to sign a CLA, then don't. That's fine. I present merely an alternative viewpoint.

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