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GPL would not (CC licenses is not appropriate to code)
Please ~ MIT or Close Source projects. Don't GPL, GPL is for assholes and the antithesis of free code.
They could try creating a strong brand and using copyright and trademarks.
But the author says the post was just a needed rant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39414296
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Except neither GPL, nor AGPL, would do anything about the case described. And that's even with AGPL violating freedom 0 through its tangled text.
Did you even read the case described? From the article: "Many of them have made minor or major modifications to the tools, and next to none provide the source to those modifications" "I wanted to promote community contributions, not to have them monetized by other people who don't even provide the source to their modifications " If you did, I don't think you understood it any better than the AGPL (or freedom zero). A…
And it's trivial to be compliant with AGPL in this case without any effective change to the behaviour or problems caused. Yes, there would be source code link somewhere, but it can take 0.01% of the SEO spam and be still compliant.
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It's useful when words mean things. That goes double when the words are used for marketing. Like, yeah in theory it's odd for the OSI to define "Open Source", but in practice it turns out the only people who seem to object to this are people who really want the social capital from calling their stuff open source while actually screwing over the users.
I think there are plenty of arguments for non-OSI approved licences and I don't think "screwing over their users" is even remotely close to why people choose them.
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I think there are plenty of arguments for non-OSI approved licences and I don't think "screwing over their users" is even remotely close to why people choose them.
It's perfectly acceptable to use whatever license you want, but then don't call it "open source."
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To be honest I prefer copyleft or viral over reciprocal. Reciprocal licensing is traditionally an arrangement where a given license is interchangeable with another license. For example, drivers licenses are often reciprocal between states. I've worked for firms which has reciprocal licensing agreements with some of their manufacturers. Copyleft is neither.
The big place that permissive licenses are promoted is in the giant tech companies. This is not a coincidence; it benefits them. That does not mean it benefits us. With smaller companies we see a lot of *GPL with additional commercial licensing options ... which (assuming the main product is not a library with a non-LGPL license) often is actually still easy to comply with (especially if you only use somebody's prebu…
I'm also not sure what your on about with regards to big companies vs small companies. Do you mean companies which produce open source software? Or companies consuming it?
Generally, most software companies open source exactly nothing. Many companies open source software which they have found useful but is not designed to be used for a profit center. In my experience, only companies trying to directly license software adopt GPL or AGPL. Almost all companies which produce software under GPL or AGPL dual license with a commercial paid option that comes with no strings attached. Personally I find this disingenuous.
The reason giant tech companies promote permissive licenses is because they don't care about those things -- they're already giant and have secured whatever edge they need -- and because they can be a useful recruiting tool. Plus sometimes you need to ship SDKs and integrations and permissive is the only real way to go generally.
Anyways I've licensed and contributed to permissive licenses software. I could not care less what happens to it. That's the point. I understood the consequences of my actions as I made them.
Software that I want to make money with? I don't open source that at all, at least not until I've abandoned it.
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“Free” means something. If you want to stop people distributing your software through a site that has ads, then it’s not “free.” “Open source” means something too. The control people have is in using shared definitions. Language is malleable, so if enough people use a word incorrectly it changes the definition. But those people get to be called wrong for years until enough people misuse it to make it right.
You have one definition, of "free" but its not the only reasonable one. Is MIT not free because it requires attribution? Is no code free because it cannot be used in ways that break the law? Just because there are some restrictions does not make it completely unfree, and its fair for people to want to use what is the most natural word to refer to thing that are free enough for them. "OSI-approved" works if you want t…
I don’t think there’s a true, single definition, but I think maybe the closest to that would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
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The text file isn't to stop the bad actor, it's to let you send DMCA requests to their host/search engines.
But he's not doing that. He's changing his text file.
> It's pretty easy to figure out someone's hosting service and put in a DMCA request. I've had to do it in the past for some stolen data that was posted online, and it's fast and effective. I'd of course try to contact them first as well, but when that failed I'd have quick recourse.
The same question was posed in the comments on his article.