361–370 of 509 posts
I am literally incapable of sympathising with this situation. Seriously, what did you expect to happen?
As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is. I'd like to see some recognition from this crowd of the "free-ride competition" problem as this author puts it. What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-availa…
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GPL also gets incredibly ambiguous when it's applied to anything that isn't software written in a language like C for a personal computer. (What does "linking" even mean with respect to a Javascript library, for instance?)
Just think about the goals of the GPL (software freedom for users), and its easy to see what you should do. Make it practical for a user to obtain and modify the source form (non-minified, non-transpiled, non-concatenated TypeScript/JavaScript/etc) of the library, build the version ran by the web browser, and replace the original with their modified version. Source maps can make part of that easier too. Progressive e…
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MIT was always the easy default that every project used, you just select it from the GitHub dropdown and you are done when setting up a new project. I think you can't really blame people for using it. Especially when your project is new it's also not often clear that this project will become something more serious later where you have to worry about such things as people cloning your project.
How would GPL change the outcome? A lot of people say that it can prevent these situations but from working for large enterprises, a lot of the offerings that are created literally don’t even change the code. Thus they have nothing to contribute and have no obligation to release any source code. GPL also does not prevent the corporation from building software in front of whatever GPL service it is. Kind of like the L…
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>The original stance of the open source crowd..... >The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses... Interesting how the world have changed. The so called GPL preference, or GPL > GPLv3 > AGPL among Open source crowd is a recent thing. Arguably in the last 15 to 20 years. Both BSD and MIT dates back before GPL. And you will see far more people prefer BSD and MIT in the 90s and 00s. I ha…
> And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not. Working for big companies used to cool, but now they are just all EvilCorps.
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It's not completely wrong ... how rude. Shareware isn't even open source, generally, and it certainly isn't gratis--you have to pay for it, or at least should, and there are often restrictions or time limits if you don't. Again, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not free beer. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html > “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughl…
That definition, and Richard Stallman himself, completely agree with me. A BSD license also guarantees "that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software". Here is Stallman spelling it out explicitly: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.en.html > The two major categories of free software license are copyleft and non-copyleft. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL insist tha…
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You shouldn't look a gift horse in its mouth. Anything being open-source does not entitle you to be able to easily run it yourself. You are given the source as-is with no warranty. It is up to you to be competent enough to do anything with it and not the responsibility of the authors of the code. If this doesn't suit you (as in, if this is a project you can't run, let alone maintain yourself), then you should conside…
Well I disagree. My take: they wanted their cake and to eat it too. They wanted to be able to say they were free/open source, but really didn't want anyone to be able to utilize the code in any meaningful way. The hobbyist will be turned off because it doesn't look like there is any way to even try it out themselves on their own VPS or hardware. That seems intentional. And now, they change their license so that anyon…
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Phones contain Linux, TVs contain Linux, cars contain Linux, clouds contain Linux. It is used everywhere.
Companies that follow the law will release their changes to the Linux kernel when they distribute their products to users. Just using Linux is not enough to say anything built with it is a combined product in the eyes of the GPL, the license is pretty specific about what it considers a derivative work. For example, you can ship closed source apps and OS on top of Linux so long as you respect the license.
Those are pretty rare when it comes to the GPL, a lot of hardware companies do not comply with it fully, in some way. Vizio is being made an example of at the moment:
Naive. Guy picks a license that allow anyone to do anything they want with his code. Later realizes that was not appropriate when he's trying make money. Changes to an obscure license that on the surface seems to fix the problem. Your options are: MIT / BSD, GPL, LGPL, AGPL. All others are unnecessary and create needless incompatibility.
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What specifically is your problem with the AGPL? I read both of your links and while there are a lot of incisive statements ("But the truth is, the AGPL isn't used to increase user freedom — it's used to restrict it, primarily through its legal ambiguities") you never spell out why you believe them.
It is objectively true. AGPL does not meet the definition of free software, because it restricts the use of the software when modified. The FSF pretends this isn't true by pretending that some uses are actually redistribution. However, this is too clever by half. Redistribution has a well-settled meaning, and allowing interaction over a network—unless it involves downloading the software itself—does not meet that def…