221–230 of 476 posts
Never sign contributions agreement: it will be used against you when the license inevitably get changed.
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Thanks! It seems a little short of the claim in their FAQ though, but it's something: > The purpose of the Corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity [...] including the creation and maintenance of "open source" software distributed by the Corporation to the public at no charge
I don't think that falls short. The reason for the "any lawful act" language is to allow the ASF to do things like run a conference, accept donations, sell t-shirts and other activities. If the statement was only "develop open-source software" there are all kinds of important activities that support open source development that would be impossible. The fact is, however, that certificates can be changed by the people…
Their FAQ says "all software free no exception" and this document says something weaker.
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Neither of those licenses require copyright ownership transfer. It's what makes Linux completely bullet proof against license changes. You'd have to track down every copyright holder (everyone that contributed, even if it's just a 1 line change) to get their permission for re-licensing their contribution. Which in the case of Linux is literally tens of thousands of individuals and companies, if not more.
Most GNU projects require a copyright assignment. For example, GNU coreutils: "note that non trivial changes require copyright assignment to the FSF as detailed in the “Copyright Assignment” section of the Coreutils HACKING notes." (from: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils ). As far as I know, this is case for most GNU projects. Linux only requires a confirmation that you wrote the patch; previous poste…
> Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less)
Does that mean the cluster will stop working when it can no longer report?
What are the remaining use cases for CockroachDB where there isn't a better/open-source alternative?
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Old(?) school open source with GPL licenses doesn't seem to suffer from this, on a first glance. Maybe Stallman was right. Would love to hear from someone more knowledgeable on this. I'm not trying to troll.
GPL is actually a great license for this scenario. The software advances to a particular level of development, inertia, market penetration - then the company that owns the software dual licenses with GPLv3 - which no company can risk to have on their premise, distribute, or use/touch, etc... - ergo you then have to pay for a commercial license to avoid the GPLv3 taint.
I can see it has some disadvantages for companies incorporating GPL software in their products, but none for companies merely using GPL 3 software.
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Yep! I actually far prefer closed source software, made by non-VC funded companies, where there business is to create good software that actually adds value for the license I'm paying for. Something like Sublime Text or JetBrains. Sure can have people spend years of their life working on something, but release it as open source because VCs are paying for it, and that leads to more mindshare, but it leaves a bad taste…
I'm imagining that those closed source softwares wouldn't be possible without open source libraries and tools...
Many c/C++ libraries are not open source - even more .Net ones
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tbf I think both GNU and Linux require copyright assignment, and I don't think that either of those are likely to swap licenses any time soon
FYI, you're right about GNU (by and large), but mistaken about Linux.
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Neither of those licenses require copyright ownership transfer. It's what makes Linux completely bullet proof against license changes. You'd have to track down every copyright holder (everyone that contributed, even if it's just a 1 line change) to get their permission for re-licensing their contribution. Which in the case of Linux is literally tens of thousands of individuals and companies, if not more.
Most GNU projects require a copyright assignment. For example, GNU coreutils: "note that non trivial changes require copyright assignment to the FSF as detailed in the “Copyright Assignment” section of the Coreutils HACKING notes." (from: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils ). As far as I know, this is case for most GNU projects. Linux only requires a confirmation that you wrote the patch; previous poste…
At this point the GNU foundation mostly just runs relatively small, older projects and that definitely does not include the linux kernel. That one has its own foundation called the Linux foundation. The Linux foundation runs many hundreds of projects and they operate mostly without contributor licenses as far as I know. And in so far they do those agreements are not about transferring ownership of the copyright but asserting ownership to ensure that the contributions people make are actually legal.
Big corporations moving code bases under their control seems to be a regular thing and that includes some pretty high profile projects recently. And of course there are many more projects on Github that use one of the GPL licenses. The vast majority of which don't have any contributor license.
So, I don't think I'm that wrong here at all that this is not that common. The previous poster seems to confuse the license with the GNU foundation which is a tiny subset of the overall GPL licensed software ecosystem.