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Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

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Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#31

Post by naturalgradient »

manigandham wrote: post #22
deepakkarki wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered, in such cases where you have an open core and plan to monetize on extra features and plugins; what do you do if the community just goes ahead and adds those extra features? Or someone forks the project and adds the features?

That's called business competition. Stay in business by delivering greater value. It's likely the maintainer is in the best position to start a company about the product to deliver more features faster and at higher quality along with more inherent trust.

As someone being in a similar situation, it's a really difficult business model. Unlike many other business models with a natural moat (i.e. by virtue of having all the data, being deeply integrated into organisational processes, etc), commercialising open source is a struggle because simply justifying making money already requires constant improvement.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#32

Post by Tempest1981 »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #10

Has the LYC license been tested in court ? I know GPL has. I agree with the maintainer that they should be compensated for their time. An open core model works but depending on a project who has the time to set that up? Patreon or Kickstarter has the same issue.

He proposes no enforcement. Although I could imagine public shaming of those who are out of compliance. And who knows if others using LYC would want enforcement.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#33

Post by andybak »

bobby_the_whale wrote: post #30

Those GitHub responses are for the most part so incredibly retarded. People without legal expertise offering their opinion. Yeah, like any sane person should care about that. The "You can't say it is open-source" bullshit is just the first in a long line of idiots lining up to comment on it. Who are these people who so desperately want to share with the Internet that they cannot say anything which is remotely correct…

Gosh. I'm not sure. What kind of idiot would boldly post their poorly thought through comments on a public forum?

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#34

Post by jlg23 »

Licenses like these are a logistical nightmare. If someone deploys software under that license, paying that person for the job is the smallest item on the bill: Now I have to connect my legal department with my techies and with the finance folks. Let's schedule meetings every 3 months to review for which software we have to pay now!

Just the logistical overhead alone justifies a fork for any of the targeted users^wcustomers.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#35

Post by bhuga »

rgbrenner wrote: post #28
waisbrot wrote: post #14

Reinventing GPL with less care. I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT, and now commercial companies can use it for free. A dual GPL-commercial license is the correct way to handle this. A more useful contribution to the license landscape would be to define a commercial sibling-license to the GPL that described how license payments would be disbursed.

I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT You can't relicense someone elses code. You dont have the right to do that. If you fork this code, only your changes would be under MIT. So you would have a mixed-license project, and users would need to comply with both licenses. If you don't want to use this license, you have to fork it from before the license change... giving up the changes that were made after the new…

You're right, but both the MIT and the non-commercial portion of this new license explicitly grant the right to sublicense. It's not obvious to me that a free use case can't sublicense its use to a huge organization.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#36

Post by rgbrenner »

bhuga wrote: post #35
rgbrenner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT You can't relicense someone elses code. You dont have the right to do that. If you fork this code, only your changes would be under MIT. So you would have a mixed-license project, and users would need to comply with both licenses. If you don't want to use this license, you have to fork it from before the license change... giving up the changes that were made after the new…

You're right, but both the MIT and the non-commercial portion of this new license explicitly grant the right to sublicense. It's not obvious to me that a free use case can't sublicense its use to a huge organization.

sublicense != relicense. You can't remove restrictions. All of the terms of the license would remain. That organization would still need to pay the fee.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#37

Post by hannob »

Of course people can license their stuff in whatever weird way they want and I don't have to like it.

But I don't like it when people lie to me. The title is "Trying a new open source model" - the content is "Trying not to be open source any more". If you don't want to do open source then you can of course do that. But if you don't want to do open source any more and still say you're doing open source then you're lying.

(And before anyone answers: No, there's no "other open source" or "a different kind of open source". Open Source is a clearly defined term and such restricted licenses aren't.)

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#38

Post by erikb »

arekkas wrote: post #19
hackbinary wrote: post #13

While I can understand where he is coming from, his stuff is itself largely built on the free licensed software of others. In the end, this seems to me like pulling up the ladder after himself, and ultimately quite selfish.

How is making a living from your work selfish?

Please read a comment before you respond. The whole comment only exists to say that it seems like the author of ungit is not making a living on his own work alone, but also on the work of all the OTHER contributors, who contributed assuming this would be a free and open community project.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#39

Post by mindcrime »

bobby_the_whale wrote: post #30

Those GitHub responses are for the most part so incredibly retarded. People without legal expertise offering their opinion. Yeah, like any sane person should care about that. The "You can't say it is open-source" bullshit is just the first in a long line of idiots lining up to comment on it. Who are these people who so desperately want to share with the Internet that they cannot say anything which is remotely correct…

The "You can't say it is open-source" bullshit is just the first in a long line of idiots lining up to comment on it.

Just because OSI don't have a USPTO registered trademark on "open source" doesn't mean that the OSD isn't the de-facto definition of what "open source" means. One may (may) legally be able to call their project with a crappy homegrown license "open source" but they shouldn't do so.

It isn't always just about what's legal, it's about what's right, and about community consensus. And the truth is, Ungit is not open source after this change.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#40

Post by INTPenis »

hannob wrote: post #37

Of course people can license their stuff in whatever weird way they want and I don't have to like it. But I don't like it when people lie to me. The title is "Trying a new open source model" - the content is "Trying not to be open source any more". If you don't want to do open source then you can of course do that. But if you don't want to do open source any more and still say you're doing open source then you're lyi…

You're confusing open source software with free software.

I'm on your side in principle but the distinction is important in this case.

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