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

Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 117 posts

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#41

Post by roblabla »

I just learned about faircode[0] and I've got to say, I like the idea. I like that right on the frontpage, it shows that I have the choice to keep using the current license, and have it work like a Patreon, or use their own Faircode License (which seems what this story is about). It makes them look honest.

I like that they are honest about the cost of using the faircode service, right on the frontpage (5% on top of a 2.9% + 30c transaction fee).

I like that they thought about having tools integrated in the ecosystem to allow businesses to easily now what license the deps they're using are on, and how to easily pay for them.

I haven't looked too deep into it, but if it could handle a dual license model as well, then it'd be beyond awesome. I don't want to force companies (even >$1M companies) to pay if they contribute back any improvements they make.

[0]: https://faircode.io/

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#42

Post by bobby_the_whale »

mindcrime wrote: post #39
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 j…

Fine, so you have an opinion about which the author of Ungit doesn't need to care. I am sure a monkey in the zoo also has an opinion. Remind me, why did you write down anything again?

The moment you start talking about what's "right", you are just showing a lack of maturity.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#44

Post by bobby_the_whale »

andybak wrote: post #33
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?

What kind of idiot are you?

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#45

Post by gpderetta »

INTPenis wrote: post #40
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.

This doesn't meet neither the free software nor Open Source license requirements. It might be open source in some colloquial sense, but that's not how the term is usually understood in the trade.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#47

Post by bobby_the_whale »

rectang wrote: post #11

This is not an "open source business model", as claimed by the Ungit maintainer, because the new license is not open source under the long standard definition maintained by OSI. Good commentary from Grant Bakker in the discussion: https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/issues/974#issuecommen...

Just because something is old, it doesn't make it true.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#48

Post by bonzini »

vortico wrote: post #16

This is a perfectly moral choice, assuming he has not taken significant contributions from others (or they have allowed this relicense, or granted copyright ownership of their contribution to him). Later in the Issue discussion, they attempt to put a name to the type of license. I propose "Freeware with source". Thoughts?

They have already allowed the relicense by releasing their contributions under a permissive license such as MIT.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#49

Post by Klathmon »

0xfaded wrote: post #26
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 would like a companion contributors agreement to the GPL that provides the correct legalese to assign copyright back to the project owner. I decided to go the GPL route, but am not currently accepting contributions. I've managed to successfully license the code under a companion license, which is doable since I'm the only copyright holder. My thoughts are that there should be a contrib fork for major contributions…

I personally feel that assigning copyright on commit is a stopgap.

What if you die? What if you abandon the project? How can a fork of your project work with that if they want to change the license down the road? Copyright basically lasts forever now, so any choice about "assignment" will last forever.

Personally I really feel we need a solution that allows the current "maintainers" to have control over it. I don't really know what that would legally look like, but I've been hit by issues from open source copyright too many times to consider it a "solved problem".

Perhaps a new license "framework" that allows each contributor to say how they want to allow their contributions to be used in the future? I honestly don't know, but the current solutions are holding us back in some ways.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#50

Post by vortico »

bonzini wrote: post #48
vortico wrote: post #16

This is a perfectly moral choice, assuming he has not taken significant contributions from others (or they have allowed this relicense, or granted copyright ownership of their contribution to him). Later in the Issue discussion, they attempt to put a name to the type of license. I propose "Freeware with source". Thoughts?

They have already allowed the relicense by releasing their contributions under a permissive license such as MIT.

Oh yes, of course. Ignore my parenthetical statement then.
Post reply on HN