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I changed my license

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Re: I changed my license

#181

Post by pocksuppet »

rlkamn wrote: post #123
Tomte wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Licenses are contracts, just like an EULA. And if you expand the acronym EULA you will actually find that it is… a license agreement.

Yes, and the point is that in order to obtain and keep the license, you have to fulfill additional clauses that you agreed to by accepting the EULA . If EULA is the same as a license, why would MSFT not just use a license? The intellectual contortions of the AI boosters here are stunning.

"an end-user license agreement is the same as a license agreement, so why do they use an end-user license agreement instead of a license agreement?"

I don't understand this question.

Re: I changed my license

#182

Post by pocksuppet »

ghaff wrote: post #127
pocksuppet wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though it's technically allowed, a lot of companies are afraid of it. Not GPL2 - that's used a lot, because tivoization lets them ignore the spirit of it. But they fear GPL3 and AGPL. You can also just do a crayon license. "All rights reserved, noncommercial use allowed." Nobody's stopping you. If and when Debian wants to ship your package, ask them for proper legal advice about changing it, they have lawyers.

I'm not sure there's a lot of fear of GPLv3 out there. Linus just didn't want to adopt it for Linux. AGPL is a different matter because companies are unsure of the boundaries between their own proprietary code and any AGPL code they're using.

Companies that make physical products are afraid of GPLv3 because of the anti-tivoization clause. Cloud companies aren't, but they're afraid of the AGPLv3, because of the anti-cloud-tivoization clause.

Re: I changed my license

#183

Post by pocksuppet »

knorker wrote: post #120
pocksuppet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The clean way is to use the strongest copyleft license you can find, probably AGPL. Even if corporations are technically allowed to use it, they don't want to risk touching it with a three-meter pole. Then you offer to sell them a different license. Hobbyists and OSS folks usually have no issue with AGPL.

Do you have data on that last bit, or just a guess? As a hobbyist and OSS developer I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else.

If you don't want to give people downstream of you my source code, I'm happy to sell you a commercial license.

Re: I changed my license

#184

Post by roundabout-host »

ghaff wrote: post #139
roundabout-host wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't CC BY require to say what you changed?

Not really. You're supposed to attribute the original creator. And if I did make major changes/additions I'd find some way to flag that. But you don't have a Github-style change log.

Not really, but you can't just distribute a changed version as if it were original. That's just as illegal as if it were ND.

Re: I changed my license

#185

Post by bergie »

franciscop wrote: post #58
logifail wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I wish we could spend less (collective) time here on HN talking about/worrying about Elon Musk. We're (allegedly) here for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". What SpaceX and/or Tesla are doing could certainly satisfy that, worrying about Musk himself certainly isn't.

Agreed; I mentioned Elon because the post made the reference quite explicit by saying "trillionaires", probably given the context Bezos or Gates would've been better examples though.

Fair point, but "making billionaires multi-billionaires" didn't have quite the same ring to it :-D

(I'm the author of that blog post)

Re: I changed my license

#186

Post by LtWorf »

ghaff wrote: post #177
LtWorf wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they cannot distribute the software itself or use it for online services with AGPL

Distributing (however defined by a given license) unmodified software that is presumably widely available to customers may be a requirement but is also a profoundly uninteresting legal requirement.

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

Re: I changed my license

#187

Post by Diti »

Cider9986 wrote: post #140

Best license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en

How is it “the best”? It’s inapplicable in any jurisdiction which guarantees authors cannot give away their moral rights. So literally any other license which requires attribution is better than CC-0 in that case, for instance.

Re: I changed my license

#188

Post by knorker »

LtWorf wrote: post #134
knorker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? You release code so that people will have to rewrite it? I really don't understand what your goal would be in releasing code at all, then.

Did you read my comment or you just reply for the sake of it? I release the code so that people and companies that feel like contributing to the community can use it. Companies that want to take without giving back however are mildly inconvenienced by copyleft.

Could you please take my question at face value?

> I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I want to help other people, then giving them the means to do what they want with no real restrictions is "the opposite" of that?

> Companies that want to take without giving back

So this is not about helping anyone else, but about mandating a behavior, even if that behavior is "pay it forward".

Re: I changed my license

#189

Post by knorker »

ghaff wrote: post #166
knorker wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which could make the business untenable. I'm not GP commenter, but I do want to be useful to these too. And as others have said the deceptive term of "plugging the SaaS loophole" ignores that it means most software cannot be combined with it. Most. By far most. Sure, some people will say "well fuck that software". And that's a stance. But it ain't freedom.

One problem is that people (mostly--we'll ignore the various edge cases) know what traditional *nix-style distribution looks like. No one knows what network interactions resolve to if someone with deep pockets and/or a grudge wants to file a lawsuit. So better to just run away. Use an AGPL license if you like but--and I'm not even a lawyer--but I'll probably just walk away. Your software is probably not that interest…

Yup. As I said in another comment "I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else".

Re: I changed my license

#190

Post by knorker »

nine_k wrote: post #147
knorker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have data on that last bit, or just a guess? As a hobbyist and OSS developer I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else.

But that's the whole point of dual AGPL + commercial licensing.

Sure, but for anything except large companies it has a bootstrapping problem. I'm absolutely not going to use AGPL software in a test one-person trying to sell a service kind of deal. So if it takes off, I'm already on a non-AGPL stack, so why reach out at that point to get a commercial license for software I don't even use?

And hell, even without money involved, I'm not going to make a hobby project with AGPL software either. Not only may I have small parts of the project I've not opensourced, but AGPL is untested in how far the virality goes. Are my backup cronjobs in scope? I certainly don't want to be the test case for this. Even if I win against an AGPL troll, I'll still lose.

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