Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I changed my license

bergie.iki.fi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 193 posts

Re: I changed my license

#151

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #146
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder. I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical. >It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that beca…

Quelle horreur! Ok buddy whatever you say. These arguments are so ridiculously invalid I'll trade you a Clockwork Orange for a "not even wrong" suggested google. Talk about "passionate about the subject" indeed.

If one proposed an absurd analogy, than we should expect an absurd response. Have a wonderful day =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Re: I changed my license

#152

Post by ang_cire »

"Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.

And so it is time to stop messing about with permissive licenses. If corporations don’t want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own."

Funny, my reaction was to just make all my stuff Unlicense instead of MIT.

Re: I changed my license

#153

Post by TheChaplain »

In all honesty, a license matters little to nothing if there is no enforcement behind it. And enforcement needs pockets deep enough to drive a legal process.

A normal person like me? No way, I can't afford the money nor time.

I know GPL have some backing of SFC and FSF, but all others like EUPL, MIT, APL and so forth?

Re: I changed my license

#154

Post by layer8 »

brainwad wrote: post #129
layer8 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EUPL obligations still apply, unless they specifically conflict with the other license. There is some dispute on how exactly that is to be interpreted, but hopefully it will be clarified in version 1.3: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di... A “conflict” here is intended to mean that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the…

I don't understand how that's supposed to work - then you can't distribute under the compatible license; only under a weird hybrid of that license and non-conflicting EUPL terms. Seems to defeat the purpose of the compatibility clause?

Yes, I agree, it’s unclear how the EUPL requirements would propagate for a composite work that gets relicensed under the compatible license, without changing the latter.

Re: I changed my license

#155

Post by rpdillon »

apt-get wrote: post #32

Worth noting that the "escape hatch" clauses in the EUPL that allow converting it into other licenses mean it's only ever as strong as the weakest license it names for such an operation, AKA EPL/MPL/LGPL. Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or w…

I read a few dozen comments to see if I could get an answer to this in the thread, but it does appear to be a case where we're highlighting one of the risks of picking up a new license: folks don't agree on how to interpret it.

I'm very curious why the author didn't simply use AGPL, but I haven't done a deep dive on the text of the EUPL, so maybe that's the next step.

EDIT: Went to go research this. First thing I learned is the license has been around since 2007. It was updated in 2017. So maybe scratch my comment about it being a new license!

Re: I changed my license

#156

Post by rpdillon »

ricardobeat wrote: post #35
mnahkies wrote: post #12

What are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing? Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee? If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if th…

No success yet, but I recently found BUSL - used by Terraform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).

This framing ignores the fact that many people pick up technologies because they want to be able to switch the vendor that is hosting it for them. If I'm hosting a LAMP stack from some shared hosting provider, it's easy for me to just move to a different hosting provider because all the software is open source and anybody can host it. This falls apart when companies choose the BUSL, which is why it's not considered OSI open source.

Re: I changed my license

#157

Post by rpdillon »

Pannoniae wrote: post #149
xorcist wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things in life are binary. You either allow people to build new products and businesses on your work or you don't. Would you allow me to extend the product with new features? "It depends" is a form of "no". It is not a position to sustainably work from. If you frame the licensing space as for either personal or commercial use, perhaps your point of view makes sense, but this is not a useful framing for most peop…

This is why open source is rapidly becoming obsolete ;) There have been source-available/fair source/whatever-you-name-it approaches before. They were attacked by OSI zealots every time because it's not real open source. Which is true, but the unsaid - or well, only sometimes mentioned - other half is that these open source enthusiasts would you rather have a bog standard all-rights-reserved commercial licence than a…

The freedom to host open-source software is more important than contributing back to the original project: it's where the actual value of open source comes from. Would you host your website behind Apache or Nginx if you couldn't just switch providers and keep the same web server? Would you ever pick up Postgres or MySQL if you couldn't actually pay a company to host that for you, knowing that if they screwed up, you could switch to a provider that did it better?

From a pure engineering reliability perspective, coupling your technology choice to your vendor gives that vendor too much leverage (as we've seen with, for example, VMware).

This isn't about defending the big companies at all. It's about defending the right of hosting providers to compete on hosting a variety of software. In the alternative world of entirely commercial licenses, or entirely BUSL-styled licenses, you would be shackled to the specific vendors that happened to create the technology that you wanted to leverage. This is a scenario where the customer invariably loses.

Re: I changed my license

#158

Post by rpdillon »

bob1029 wrote: post #80
mnahkies wrote: post #12

What are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing? Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee? If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if th…

If you are trying to monetize your software, the biggest factor is whether or not your customer trusts you. MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else. So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worr…

After many years of thinking about this, I have arrived in the exact same place. I think the SQLite team learned this in the early days, and have done very well for themselves, giving away all of their source code for the product itself, free of charge, and then having folks pay for consulting and enhancements, which they remain particularly strong at because of their closed, comprehensive regression test suite.

Re: I changed my license

#159

Post by bornfreddy »

rpdillon wrote: post #157
Pannoniae wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why open source is rapidly becoming obsolete ;) There have been source-available/fair source/whatever-you-name-it approaches before. They were attacked by OSI zealots every time because it's not real open source. Which is true, but the unsaid - or well, only sometimes mentioned - other half is that these open source enthusiasts would you rather have a bog standard all-rights-reserved commercial licence than a…

The freedom to host open-source software is more important than contributing back to the original project: it's where the actual value of open source comes from. Would you host your website behind Apache or Nginx if you couldn't just switch providers and keep the same web server? Would you ever pick up Postgres or MySQL if you couldn't actually pay a company to host that for you, knowing that if they screwed up, you…

At its core it's a question of control. If I use this library or app, will I be safe? Will I be able to repair it, use it in the future, pay someone to fix it? Will it still be developed in a few years?

FOSS is a great answer to the first few questions, but it fails at the last one. As a user, yes, I would prefer a cloud-protection license, if it means that software will still be developed in a few years time. It's not like I want to use this software to compete with the author, I'm happy not to be allowed to do that.

Re: I changed my license

#160

Post by qwerpy »

alturp wrote: post #33

> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires." Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (whi…

The post seems like a poorly disguised political rant “I don’t like the US, I don’t like the rich” with the license change being an excuse to post it to a technical forum.
Post reply on HN