No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it.
I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.
Imagine if the AGPL had become the default license for open source projects, as it was intended to when the service provider loophole in the GPL became apparent. The software industry would be unrecognizable.
Instead, millions of developers now gift corporations their work by releasing everything under MIT or Apache, and those corporations take from that treasure trove what they want and give back what they want, which is very often nothing.
You are absolutely allowed to use GPL software in commercial products, why are you deliberately lying or misleading?
GitHub could only exist because it was built on top of git, which is also GPL licensed. This is not the only example but should be the immediate one since nearly a vast majority of devs touch git on a daily basis.
Maybe stop listening to your legal team and actually think for a moment. GPL doesn't prevent commercialization, what it does is make sure everyone contributes to the same project equally. Shocker, corporations do not want to contribute to the common good they want to rat fuck it into submission for profit.
I believe Open Source software sold developers the dream of "to be hired for what they have developed" and cash-in the effort they have spent as a future, stable employment.
Many die on the hill of "developing something required for free with permissive licenses for recognition which will help with their future endeavors", which is the same with other creative lines of work. As a result they are milked of their knowledge and forced to bear the burden of leading the project and handling the community while companies just use what's developed while quietly but strongly nudging the project's direction for their benefit.
If the developer gets rogue, the thing is forked and sometimes closed down with no downside to the company, but the community and the developer(s) are hung to dry, conveniently signaling other developers about what they might face if they disobey their overlords with iron fists in velvet gloves as a secondary effect.
I think you can get recognition just as well with share-alike licenses. Plus you leave the opportunity open to ask for money for a different license grant.
I believe strongly so, however companies doesn't like this, hence the current state we're in. Also it's part of the "advertising" done by the companies.
Last but not the least, many people are very ill-informed about GPL and how it works. I experience this when we discuss this with peers.
This is why I only use copyleft (or non-commercial/share-alike) licenses on what I build/produce/put out.
If you share your code with me under a copy left license, I will share my contributions under the same copy left license... you will not then be free to ask for money for things built on top of or with my contributions. You may be okay with that, but it is a decision you have to make.
A common misunderstanding with the GPL and other copy left licences is that they care about money and monetary transactions.
They mostly do not.
They only demand that you offer the source code to anyone that asks for it if you also distribute any kind of executable (you may even charge to cover the costs of the distribution).
The AGPL expands this to SaaS's too to close that loophole.
Sorry, I am aware of this, I worded my comment incorrectly. What I meant to say is that one will be unable to ask for money for a ~different license~ to my contributions, becuase my contributions will be under the copyleft license, and I will not sign any agreements that give the project maintainers rights to license my contributions under a proprietary (Non open source) license. Yes, anyone is still free to ask for money for copy left code. But it is still copy left, and as such, the license goes with it.
lying about the license to linus probably wasn't a smart move for AGPLv3 adoption.
In my experience the virality clause is the main reason those projects don't get used therefor sponsored.
The Drupal Association and its mismanagement of the community? I don't know how dead Drupal is, but I used to actively use and promote it and I have long since moved on, due in part to the Drupal Associations shenanigans.
I glanced at D.O the other day and was depressed to find they're reporting 400k active installs. I remember when that was 16M and growing. We're talking a loss of 97.5% of active sites. I'm betting the few that remain are mostly small government and nonprofit websites that haven't managed to put together the budget for a migration away from the platform. So yeah pretty dead. And yeah I blame the Drupal Association by way of Aquia and Microsoft. I left the project with a clear conscience after explaining in detail to an entire roomful of core developers that objectifying the codebase a la Laravel would kill the project stone dead within 5 years. Predictably they offered the typical "community developers are bad and don't want to learn" sneer as their primary defense of the decision. RIP.
Having coded back end projects in PHP, Perl, Python, and Node idk wtf folks who make comments like this are on about. Node took all of the worst aspects of JavaScript and spread them to back end development. Someone should have ended up on trial in the Hague for that particular crime against humanity and PHP is what you're grumbling about? Seriously?
I’ll grant you that there are good arguments in favor of your position. PHP, and then later JavaScript have both filled the world with more fragility and chaos than was necessary.
> We realize that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" a market - in the software industry, that means to control tightly a particular conduit such that all others must pay for its use. This is typically done by "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of the World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web will remain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus, "ownership" of the protocols must be prevented.
They wouldn't. But the GPP seemed to be implying that we should be grateful to commercial entities for the existence of those useful open projects, when in fact if the commercial entities had their preferred way the projects would not be (as) open.
Idk I swapped to a Linux-only PC last April and have been steadily shifting over to open source software for basically everything in my life. I haven’t done everything, I doubt I ever will hit 100%, but well over half the stuff I use on a daily basis I have real control over now and can audit.
Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer, I’m just kind of a tourist in that world, so if I can do it it’s clearly very achievable for many people.
No reason to throw up your hands in defeat. We don’t need everyone to shift over everything. We just need to make sure there’s always space and demand for open source software to keep it alive.
One of the reasons why a source-based system like Gentoo is particularly nice is that you can compile your binaries with debug flags, so if you hit bad behavior you can inspect, write a patch, compile into your running system, and then push the same patch upstream.
I barely have to do it, but imho, this is how software should work and what running a computer should feel like.
It's worth noting that even more staid distributions like Debian provide you with the means to do this. It's arguably bit more complicated, but saves you a lot of time and hassle on the happy path.
I use OpenBSD and it’s actually the same thing with the additional niceties of binary packages. A bug or an issue with any program (including the kernel and drivers)? Patch and rebuild.
I'm doing exactly the same but you really don't have as much control as you may wish. I mean look at Freedesktop which is basically Redhat staff. The biggest Kernel contributor in SLOC a while back was MSFT.
Gnome and Systemd is a fine example of how fucked up this can get.
I’m on bazzite which isn’t perfect but it’s lightyears ahead of windows.
You can always find bad examples. The good news is there’s still lots of good ones out there right now. No point in being defeatist about it, just do what you can
I depend on the community tbh. Poor phrasing, it implies I personally audit it. But ultimately if I want to I can and I know plenty of folks scour repos/compile code themselves, so if something is wrong it’ll likely come out. It’s open source, they can’t hide it from people who are looking. Also I’m not entirely ignorant - I can sometimes see when something is up, I am comfortable using a CLI, I know my way around a computer better than most.
Wouldn’t you say that’s way better than the status quo with windows/macOS?
> Wouldn’t you say that’s way better than the status quo with windows/macOS?
I would say it’s irrelevant to the conversation. I wasn’t throwing shade or criticising your approach, I was making an honest question to understand your argument better. I have no interest in flame wars.
I’m not engaging in a flame war, you just seem to have a very terse way of writing that kind of caught me off guard. That initial question felt a bit leading and there’s a bit of a hostile tone coming through. Seems it’s unintentional though so not a big deal.
> you just seem to have a very terse way of writing that kind of caught me off guard.
Fair.
> That initial question felt a bit leading
How would you have phrased it? I’m genuinely asking.
> and there’s a bit of a hostile tone coming through.
It’s been my experience that in online writing with strangers it’s best to assume good faith and not assume tone. Read things imagining the other person is smiling and in a good mood (exceptions for obvious trolls). Not that I can do that every time, mind you, we all have flaws, but it avoids a ton of needless misunderstandings and doesn’t escalate.
> Seems it’s unintentional though so not a big deal.
I understand we need to give people the benefit of the doubt, but take this previous comment for example. It comes off as pretty patronizing, I have to really squint to remove that feeling. I understand I have a responsibility to try and focus on the best possible interpretation of somebody’s comment, but it also behooves you to maybe take a second look at the way you’re writing and maybe consider ways to encourage a more generous interpretation. I can only work with what is given to me at the end of the day. Discussions are a two way street, and sometimes people are just rude/combative, especially online.
Anyway it’s all good. I hope you have a nice weekend.
Oh, sure sure, I am in agreement with you. In no way do I believe this to be the exclusive responsibility of the receiving side. I’m usually competent at detecting this and don’t see why you’d interpret the previous comment as being patronising, but I concede I may be having an off day.
Thank you again for replying. A nice weekend to you too!
Note that the LF of today is basically just like any other global corporation with its own political agenda. You can just follow the money, and see that it is controlled by corporations. They neutered Torvalds, are very woke, and generally a nightmare to work with.
I always advice aspiring open source enthusiasts to stay far, far away from the Linux Foundation. It has become a barrier to software freedom these days, rather than an enabler.
Acknowledging the result of defeatism should push us toward a different mindset, not more defeatism. Over the long run, humanity has a pretty good record, carried by the people who refuse to give up.
> Acknowledging the result of defeatism should push us toward a different mindset, not more defeatism.
Defeatism says otherwise!
> Over the long run, humanity has a pretty good record, carried by the people who refuse to give up.
Unfortunately when the struggle is against other people, especially the incumbent powers-that-be (in this case the capitalist overlords), those that refuse to give up have to fight long and hard to get enough other properly in the fight, and victory requires something drastic like at very least mass protests perhaps up to civil war level.
You were never at an airport. You fell asleep in your bed and woke up on the plane. Fighting the people taking you somewhere you don't want to go is definitely more work than falling out of the plane. It just has a specific advantage.
Not every airport is a huge commercial building with hundreds of people (also, you wouldn’t visit one of those to parachute jump). Some are akin to cozy shacks without a lot of traffic where you’re in and out in no time.
I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.