That is very generous. I hope that this is a win-win situation for the ecosystem and their business.
I'm curious about what the new business model is going to be.
Meteor is now MIT licensed
91–100 of 127 posts
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
>* Use Meteor.publish() and Meteor.subscribe() to control what clients can see (remove the 'autopublish' package first). Actually you may not need to do this for a blog. Scoping isn't enough. >* Use Meteor.methods() and Meteor.call() to define secure server functions and call them from the client. Then lock down your app by disabling the "training wheel" methods that let any client do any write." So, I can't make a p…
You're absolutely right. But all frameworks have to go through these humps. Hell, I remember just 2 years ago having MongoDB in production it would regularly crash. We got rid of it in production, but I'd reconsider using it now.
Which features, are making you consider MongoDB? I'm asking because I wrote a (really short and small) MongoDB-ish abstraction layer over SQLite the other day (https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/goatfish), and it seems to me that it's trivial to emulate the MongoDB queries and various other features over SQL without all the hassle of it eating your data or requiring 100 GB of RAM for a few indices.
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a user perspective, GPL offers in theory more freedom, since new products built on codebase X will also be free. It is debatable if this is true in practice. If less software gets built as a result of the license restriction, the GPL takes away freedom. Even closed source software adds some freedom - the freedom of choice. From a developer perspective, there is no question which one is more free. We often do not…
I license code under the GPL. If I write something and release it open source, I'm doing you a favour by letting you use it for free. If you make changes and distribute them, the least you can do is return the favour and give them back. If you're not happy with that arrangement, you're free to not use my code. I wouldn't be happy if I spent a lot of time writing some open source software and then a company came along…
If you're not happy with that arrangement, you're free to not use my code
Exactly. This conversation exists because guelo was complaining about people choosing to not use the GPL code. They don't like the arrangement. geon articulates why.
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
"GPL takes away freedom" is a very developer-centric point of view. From user point of view GPL gives freedoms that MIT/BSD don't give. Where freedoms of developers and users conflict, GPL sides with users. In other words, GPL only takes away your freedom to take freedom away from others. If you don't intend to restrict others' freedoms, GPL shouldn't get in your way.
The GPL actually trades off freedom over time. Specifically, it trades away actual freedom right now for the person who currently has a copy of the code, in an attempt to secure potential freedom later for people who do not yet but might someday have copies of the code or of code derived from it. As such, the GPL is always, in the "now", a license which grants less freedom than, say, the BSD or MIT licenses. Most obj…
Specifically, it trades away actual freedom right now for the person who currently has a copy of the code...
How so? As far as I know, if I have GPL code, I can do whatever I want with it. Could you tell me any action I might want to take that the GPL prevents?
The only "freedom" the GPL removes is the freedom to restrict the actions of others. To me, that seems like a rather odd sort of freedom.
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a user perspective, GPL offers in theory more freedom, since new products built on codebase X will also be free. It is debatable if this is true in practice. If less software gets built as a result of the license restriction, the GPL takes away freedom. Even closed source software adds some freedom - the freedom of choice. From a developer perspective, there is no question which one is more free. We often do not…
I license code under the GPL. If I write something and release it open source, I'm doing you a favour by letting you use it for free. If you make changes and distribute them, the least you can do is return the favour and give them back. If you're not happy with that arrangement, you're free to not use my code. I wouldn't be happy if I spent a lot of time writing some open source software and then a company came along…
> If you make changes and distribute them, the least you can do is return the favour and give them back
I agree. But if your code is a minor library like a json parser, a dijkstras algorithm solver, or a custom button? Should all of my company's product's code neccesarily be GPL as well? What if we already use non-free code from somewhere else? Even if we are happy to fix and contribute back all buggs we find, and any feature we add, we can't. Because you won't let us use the code without GPL.
Now you will tell me that is what the LGPL is for.
...until I want to release my product on the Appstore. The user can't replace the dynamically loaded library, so the LGPL doesn't apply. Then I need to make sure there is an exception for this specific use case.
Headache.
You might argue that without the GPl, i have no incentive to contribute back the bugfix I did. Let's for the sake of this argument pretend that I'm a heartless sociopath, driven only by greed.
By contributing back buggfixes, I make sure future versions of your code (with other peoples buggfixes) include my fix, and is compatible and field tested with it. There is no downside to me, since my competitors either haven't run into the bug or can fix it themselves.
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
He says 'non free' there, not non-GPL'ed. The FSF considers lots of licenses other than the GPL to be 'free software'.
The FSF has little choice but to consider a lot of licenses "free", but is also quite clear in the opinion that strong-copyleft licenses are always superior, and that people who do not use strong-copyleft licenses aren't really as good as people who do use them.
That's still pretty far off from "prefer you wouldn't even write the code".
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
"GPL takes away freedom" is a very developer-centric point of view. From user point of view GPL gives freedoms that MIT/BSD don't give. Where freedoms of developers and users conflict, GPL sides with users. In other words, GPL only takes away your freedom to take freedom away from others. If you don't intend to restrict others' freedoms, GPL shouldn't get in your way.
The GPL actually trades off freedom over time. Specifically, it trades away actual freedom right now for the person who currently has a copy of the code, in an attempt to secure potential freedom later for people who do not yet but might someday have copies of the code or of code derived from it. As such, the GPL is always, in the "now", a license which grants less freedom than, say, the BSD or MIT licenses. Most obj…
I agree with your first paragraph, but come to different conclusions.
The way I see it GPL values freedom over short-term gains.
You can put BSD software in the AppStore, which is nice short term, but long-term that's helping platform that is a golden cage.
Wouldn't it be nice if Android was GPL v3? Instead of giving operators freedom to lock down handsets and add uninstallable crapware, give users freedom to customize and upgrade their phones. Of course, GPL-Android could have hard time gaining traction in the market because of GPL being unappealing to crapware-installing operators, but if it did succeed, that would be significant long-term win for users' freedom.
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones. If anything, too much work goes into open source development tools--certainly much more than in any other category! Just look at how much is accomplished--and how is easily--by various start-ups using open source technology. There are great web servers, web frameworks, libraries, programming languages, text…
I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi-client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced. Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduce…
Conflating FOSS to socialism is patently absurd (FOSS is very monetizable and comes in many different forms that you can incorporate into many different business models) and an attempt to co-opt a very negative "red baiting" sentiment in others.
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#99I feel it is sad that so few HN hackers seem to appreciate the vision of the GPL. GPL needs more indispensable software like this for it to thrive and protect us all from a future of completely locked down computers.
Most websites are commercial, and they operate in competitive spaces. They will not consider using GPL code if it means their own site code becomes GPL-licensed.
GPL works when the people using it must contribute whatever small patches or modifications they have made, not when they have to turn over multi-million-dollar codebases worth much more (commercially) than the GPL tool in question.
Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed
#100I feel it is sad that so few HN hackers seem to appreciate the vision of the GPL. GPL needs more indispensable software like this for it to thrive and protect us all from a future of completely locked down computers.
This would be true if it were an area where Open software didn't already dominate. As others, including the developers of Metor, have stated, this software being GPLed was detrimental to the overall user base because there were many people who were not willing to use and contribute to software with a restrictive copyright. The existing culture of web development is already centered around permissive licenses, trying to introduce a new product with more onerous usage conditions now will just lead to it languishing because its usage of the GPL is a weakness.