51–60 of 121 posts
As exciting as Meteor is (VERY!), their approach to licensing kills it for me. The products I am working on cannot be licensed under GPL for a large number of reasons, and their "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" policy puts too much risk into my business plan. At the early stage of product development, I don't necessarily know the finer points of how my revenue model will work. If there's a fixed fee for a co…
Personally, I'd prefer they just kept it closed source and charged money for it rather than making it "open source, but not really since you can't use it to build anything unless you give out all your code or can lawyer your way past this obnoxious, ambiguously worded license". I don't care about being able to look at somebody else's source code. I just want something that I can use. Meteor looked really cool until I…
You can use Meteor. I quote from FAQ: If the GPL doesn't work for your project, get in touch (contact@meteor.com) and we will write you a commercial license to your specifications.
Personally, I'd prefer they just kept it closed source and charged money for it rather than making it "open source, but not really since you can't use it to build anything unless you give out all your code or can lawyer your way past this obnoxious, ambiguously worded license". I don't care about being able to look at somebody else's source code. I just want something that I can use. Meteor looked really cool until I…
It took years to convince the wider commercial technical community to so much as expose portions of their source code, regardless of license. It's invaluable for bug identification, security auditing, and general programmer education. I'm glad they're sharing it under any license, and I hope your attitude does not become more widespread.
As exciting as Meteor is (VERY!), their approach to licensing kills it for me. The products I am working on cannot be licensed under GPL for a large number of reasons, and their "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" policy puts too much risk into my business plan. At the early stage of product development, I don't necessarily know the finer points of how my revenue model will work. If there's a fixed fee for a co…
Also, have you talked to them? Like, actually written an email? Maybe it's not so bad.
If you haven't even figured out your revenue stream you probably are prematurely optimizing choice of license. Besides, you could still make use of it for prototyping and figuring out better your product requirements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one thing that has been bugging me since the first time I've heard of GPL. If I use a library or framework that's licensed under GPL, without modifying said library/framework in any way, do I still have to (as TFA puts it) "extend the copyleft nature" of GPL to my code? It would be great if someone could finally lay this question to rest.
Yes generally you do. But you are only obligated to make source available to parties to whom you distribute the binaries you've built. Typically a web app that generates and serves html, would not be 'distributing' the derivative work, so there would be no source obligation (GPLv2; AGPL etc changes this). If its a web app that includes client-side js that in turn relies on a particular server-side API, things are per…
Could you clarify? GPLv2 doesn't require source in this case and AGPL does? Or both GPLv2 and AGPL (along with versions) do?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use Meteor. I quote from FAQ: If the GPL doesn't work for your project, get in touch (contact@meteor.com) and we will write you a commercial license to your specifications.
Just give me a price. I don't want to discuss pricing.
As exciting as Meteor is (VERY!), their approach to licensing kills it for me. The products I am working on cannot be licensed under GPL for a large number of reasons, and their "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" policy puts too much risk into my business plan. At the early stage of product development, I don't necessarily know the finer points of how my revenue model will work. If there's a fixed fee for a co…
It's a commercial product that also happens to be available under a free license you can't use. How does the second part impact the first?
Edit: it seems the implicit context in your post is that you would use this if it were free under a permissive license, but not if it costs money or is GPL. That's not an uncommon position, but it's not something that rises to a multi-paragraph complaint on HN. You're complaining about the "GPL" instead of complaining that "the authors want to charge money", and that seems inequitable and unfair. If they were just another tool vendor, you wouldn't have posted: basically you're punishing them for releasing free software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one thing that has been bugging me since the first time I've heard of GPL. If I use a library or framework that's licensed under GPL, without modifying said library/framework in any way, do I still have to (as TFA puts it) "extend the copyleft nature" of GPL to my code? It would be great if someone could finally lay this question to rest.
Yes, you do. From memory there's one get-out: if there are non-GPL products which would be drop-in replacements for the user , the GPL isn't contagious.
1. Someone wrote a program. It needed to use an arbitrary precision math library, and it needed to use a freely distributable but closed source library.
2. This program was distributed in source form. In the source code there were #ifdefs to allow it to be built to use either of the two most common arbitrary precision math libraries. One of these was under a BSD license and one was under GPL.
3. Many systems did not have either math library preinstalled, so someone who wanted to build this program on those would have to go download whichever math library they decided to use.
4. Stallman claimed that distributing the program induced people to download the math libraries, and since one of the libraries was GPL, the program was inducing distribution of GPL code, and so itself must be placed under GPL.
5. The author of the program wrote a new math library that was just a wrapper for the BSD library, but that provided the same interface as the GPL library. Now people who chose to build the program with the build option to use the GPL library could successfully build by using this new non-GPL library. Since the source code no longer contained a build option that necessarily induced those electing it to go and download GPL code, Stallman was satisfied.
As exciting as Meteor is (VERY!), their approach to licensing kills it for me. The products I am working on cannot be licensed under GPL for a large number of reasons, and their "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" policy puts too much risk into my business plan. At the early stage of product development, I don't necessarily know the finer points of how my revenue model will work. If there's a fixed fee for a co…
It's under the GPL, not the AGPL. Provided that you're using it as a web platform, why would this end up being a big deal? The client has your source anyways, right, in the form of client-side JS? Also, have you talked to them? Like, actually written an email? Maybe it's not so bad. If you haven't even figured out your revenue stream you probably are prematurely optimizing choice of license. Besides, you could still…
As exciting as Meteor is (VERY!), their approach to licensing kills it for me. The products I am working on cannot be licensed under GPL for a large number of reasons, and their "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" policy puts too much risk into my business plan. At the early stage of product development, I don't necessarily know the finer points of how my revenue model will work. If there's a fixed fee for a co…
It's under the GPL, not the AGPL. Provided that you're using it as a web platform, why would this end up being a big deal? The client has your source anyways, right, in the form of client-side JS? Also, have you talked to them? Like, actually written an email? Maybe it's not so bad. If you haven't even figured out your revenue stream you probably are prematurely optimizing choice of license. Besides, you could still…