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I'm Archiving Picocrypt

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Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIT is a donation of your labour to corporations. No, MIT is a donation of your labor to the public. That includes corporations, yes, but it is not only corporations.

I always found this stance puzzling. If the point of open source is to give your code to the public, why do people get upset when corporations do exactly what you told them they could do? If you didn't want to give it to everyone , you shouldn't have chosen that license. And if you choose a non-commercial license, people get upset that it's "not technically open source because the OSI says so" as if they are somehow…

> why do people get upset when corporations do exactly what you told them they could do?

A lot of people have been taught `corporations == bad`, part of the anti-capitalism efforts taught to our youth for a couple generations.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#132
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a good opportunity to remember that MIT is not a strong enough open source license, and if you want to prevent corporations making money off your work, make it AGPL or even SSPL, plus a statement that AI training creates a derivative work (the latter may or may not have any legal effect). MIT is a donation of your labour to corporations. With a stronger license, at least they're more likely to contribute…

When are we getting a GPLv4 that's AGPL + no LLM training? This is overdue.

Be the change you wish to see.

Or just literally call your program's license "AGPL + no LLM training" and that may suffice.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The money didn't go towards the author. Perhaps many would have refused to donate if they knew that the project would be archived in a year. Collecting for audit and then archiving the project is, in a way, a violation of expectations.

Did they perform the audit? That is what is important. The more and more you start modifying code after the audit, the more and more useless the audit becomes.

> That is what is important

Depends on your perspective... If I'd known the project was going to stop soon after I donated, I probably wouldn't donate, even if the purpose of the money was strictly for an audit.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get it either, because that has always been the case, thus most of his post is borderline non sense. Yes, making software development cheaper has been the main priority of the industry for a long time. The new development is that there's now a magic "do what I want" button that obviously won't quite do what you want but it's so cheap (for corporations, not humanity...) that you might as well pretend it does…

I've been a web application developer for nearly 30 years now. I care about the craft and discipline immensely. Then you pull up something like the Jack-In-The-Box menu site and fully realize that managers/executives don't give a damn if the stuff works well... 48MB of built JS?!? My daughter expressed how badly the site was working on her phone, and I got curious. What's funny, is some will say, "use the app" instea…

To be fair, the app may be developed by a completely different team.

If your argument is still that you don't want to trust a company that can't make both functional, well... maybe you shouldn't be going to Jack-In-The-Box in the first place.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#135
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found this stance puzzling. If the point of open source is to give your code to the public, why do people get upset when corporations do exactly what you told them they could do? If you didn't want to give it to everyone , you shouldn't have chosen that license. And if you choose a non-commercial license, people get upset that it's "not technically open source because the OSI says so" as if they are somehow…

> why do people get upset when corporations do exactly what you told them they could do? A lot of people have been taught `corporations == bad`, part of the anti-capitalism efforts taught to our youth for a couple generations.

Yes I understand... but they already knew that the license explicitly allows this, and they already knew companies regularly take advantage of FOSS without giving back, so I'm not sure why they were expecting to get lucky or something.

To me this is just like getting upset when someone forks your open source project. Which ironically I've seen happen a LOT. Sometimes the original developer/team even quits when that happens.

It's like... they don't actually want it to be open source, they want to be the ONLY source.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#136
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do people get upset when corporations do exactly what you told them they could do? A lot of people have been taught `corporations == bad`, part of the anti-capitalism efforts taught to our youth for a couple generations.

Yes I understand... but they already knew that the license explicitly allows this, and they already knew companies regularly take advantage of FOSS without giving back, so I'm not sure why they were expecting to get lucky or something. To me this is just like getting upset when someone forks your open source project. Which ironically I've seen happen a LOT. Sometimes the original developer/team even quits when that h…

Because they don't think about it deeply - that's why reminders are necessary. They think they're only donating to people with similar attitudes to themselves. xGPL licenses (SSPL included) are the license family most similar to that...

... but MIT is what corporations told them they want. There has been a low-level but persistent campaign against xGPL in the past several years and the complaints always trace back to "the corporation I work for doesn't like xGPL." No individual free software developer has a problem with xGPL (SSPL not included).

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#137
post #99

The (current) last commend by hakavlad (same as hakavlad on HN perhaps?): @HACKERALERT Your decision may be somewhat irresponsible towards those who donated to the audit. That audit was one year ago. The money didn't go towards the author. The source continues to be available. The author doesn't own you zilch.

>The money didn't go towards the author. Perhaps many would have refused to donate if they knew that the project would be archived in a year. Collecting for audit and then archiving the project is, in a way, a violation of expectations.

Would they have refused to donate if they knew the author would be hit by a bus in a year? Or hired by someone who refused to allow them to continue working on it?

I don't think the author had explicit plans to do this a year ago.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a web application developer for nearly 30 years now. I care about the craft and discipline immensely. Then you pull up something like the Jack-In-The-Box menu site and fully realize that managers/executives don't give a damn if the stuff works well... 48MB of built JS?!? My daughter expressed how badly the site was working on her phone, and I got curious. What's funny, is some will say, "use the app" instea…

To be fair, the app may be developed by a completely different team. If your argument is still that you don't want to trust a company that can't make both functional, well... maybe you shouldn't be going to Jack-In-The-Box in the first place.

My point is that I'm not going to give app-level access to my phone to a company that doesn't care enough to have a functional website. That said, I'm unlikely to install an app for anything on my device.

I don't actually install that many apps, and generally not retail apps anyway.

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#139
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a good opportunity to remember that MIT is not a strong enough open source license, and if you want to prevent corporations making money off your work, make it AGPL or even SSPL, plus a statement that AI training creates a derivative work (the latter may or may not have any legal effect). MIT is a donation of your labour to corporations. With a stronger license, at least they're more likely to contribute…

Alternatively MIT does exactly what it says it does. It's up to you as an author whether you like those terms or if you'd prefer GPL, AGPL, or SSPL. If you want a permissive license MIT is perfectly reasonable. If you want more restrictions or stronger copy-left then don't pick MIT.

The point is that people who think they want permissive licenses usually don't, and eventually regret choosing them when a corporation treats their work as donated labour (because it is), assuming their software is important enough to be picked up by them (if not then license choice doesn't matter anyway).

Re: I'm Archiving Picocrypt

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I understand... but they already knew that the license explicitly allows this, and they already knew companies regularly take advantage of FOSS without giving back, so I'm not sure why they were expecting to get lucky or something. To me this is just like getting upset when someone forks your open source project. Which ironically I've seen happen a LOT. Sometimes the original developer/team even quits when that h…

Because they don't think about it deeply - that's why reminders are necessary. They think they're only donating to people with similar attitudes to themselves. xGPL licenses (SSPL included) are the license family most similar to that... ... but MIT is what corporations told them they want. There has been a low-level but persistent campaign against xGPL in the past several years and the complaints always trace back to…

> No individual free software developer has a problem with xGPL

I do... I consider it the opposite of freedom. I think it places severe restrictions on your project that make it hard/impossible for some people (like companies) to use, especially if your project contains lots of code from other people that make it really hard/impossible to try to re-license if one day you decide you like/need money (assuming you have no CLA, I don't like those either).

But I also realize there's different kinds of freedom... freedom TO vs freedom FROM.

Some want the freedom TO do whatever they want... and others want freedom FROM the crazy people doing whatever they want.

I wish there was a happy medium but centrism doesn't seem to be very popular these days.

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