List of formerly open-source or free software(en.wikipedia.org) |
List of formerly open-source or free software(en.wikipedia.org) |
After doing some quick reading on the SSPL, I actually don't hate it though. It seems to be completely open for those who use it themselves, but prevents the cloud providers from capitalizing on hosting your software as a product. Not truly open, but I think this is probably an okay middle ground if you want open source software from a business that's developing and selling products around that software.
This turns out to not be that difficult. Postgres can be a great KVS.
OpenRedis anyone?
But what's the point?
It's not open source, so why bother?
Whether you agree with BSD or GPL, OpenSource means you aren't locked to a vendor. The SSPL means that essentially for Redis, you are
Note: I'm joking, there was also Chromium BSU.
And that's only open source and freely redistributable games - on the commercial side there was also iD, Loki Games, LGP as well as a couple of indies even before Steam for Linux.
My understanding is that you can relicense code for which you own the copywright, but if you have any other contributors, those contributions are still under GPL. So, you'd have to either get their permission to relicense or revert all their changes and subsequent derivatives.
2. Some projects have a CLA, so all contributions have the relevant rights transferred before the patches are accepted.
3. Some projects are “open source, not open contribution”, though this wasn't common until recently, effectively making them match point 1.
4. Some relicensing is done without consideration for other contributors, in the hope that no one with skin in the game will notice (or take action if they do), so it won't bite.
5. Sometimes getting the relevant permission after-the-fact, if a CLA was not in place, isn't difficult.
You hit the bull eye.
These all projects as I could see, have relatively low number of important contributors and narrow circuit, and they are mostly relatively young projects, without large number of inherited old code, so when need to throw out some code, they just need to make internal deal and rewrite all "external" code.
Once, they have all code owned by limited group, could make deal within this group, to re-license whole project with other license.
And yes, you are right, this is near impossible for big projects, because need too much resources to rewrite "external" code.
And in many cases, for big business this mean, for them is easier to just make their own new project from scratch, than to use GPL-licensed code.
I used to host such scripts on my 233mhz pentium 2 that my parents allowed me to have in my bedroom.
Exploit ridden PHPNuke anyone?
Edit: for example, Google: “don’t be evil” lasted as long as Google was run by people who cared about the technology more than profits. It used to be a search engine run by such types. Now it’s an ad engine and competition-extinguisher run by completely different types of people.
In the cloud provider scenario it's clearly the right license, so that it remains opensource
The GPL was meant to be viral, and require contributions if you change it. GPL@ didnt understand that would be a thing.
GPL3 also had the Affero, to deal with parasite companies, like what you seem to represent. If you want to use and follow the license? Cool. Elsewise GTFO.
But you have to trust. Because lifespan of human is limited (just about 40 years at most), so you cannot consider to make long term foundation based on any human. And unfortunately none human-free technology at the moment could even get close to human or human based bureaucracy as management force.
And near only known example of private organization in big tech is Dell (Ford Motor company was build as organization by Ford himself, so it was bureaucracy even when Henry Ford was at head). All others are owned at least by some family (like Walmart), and most others are just open Joint-Stock Companies, good if have large share in one human hands (or one family, like Porsche), but in many cases owned by other JSC or by government (or large municipality, like was Volkswagen) and by widely distributed list of tiny shareholders.
I'm agree, organizations are harder to understand from common sense view, but from mathematics view they are more predictable than humans.
And I'm agree, it is possible to intentionally make so much HR chaos that organization will change constantly looking unpredictable way. But in real life, even very non-experienced manager, very fast see how to make organization predictable.
For about your example, Google is very predictable for its owners and its management, even when we don't like what it become.
Viral nature of GPL is really big headache, because make big troubles to use external libs as they could be closed source, so it will be impossible to client to compile binaries himself.
Imagine, if I'll use GPL for control of nuclear reactor and have to open control schemes to comply with GPL (in real life, these things keep secret to make more hard for bad people make something wrong with such dangerous object).
This solved for very few software packages, for example, GCC, Libc, have exclusion in license, directly allowed to make closed sourced derivatives and to link external library without give access to its code (only need api definition, for example as C header).
At the same time, GPL does not limit usage of open source software by hosting companies, who don't make any contributions.
That's why some infrastructure companies switched from GPL to different licensing schemes.
The GPL doesn't care about control schemes though, so your nuclear reactor example seems strange.
The GNU family of licenses don't care about contributions, only about user software freedom. In the case of hosting companies, the AGPL was created to preserve user freedom for network oriented software, it isn't perfect but is reasonably good.
It is incorrect to say these companies are switching to different licensing schemes because of lack of contributions from hosting companies, the correct reason is that the hosting companies make a lot of money and the software companies want that money for themselves.
The AGPL is to protect the software you made so it can't be bundled as a service and enhancements locked away because "they aren't giving away the software".
Enhancements to PostGIS would have to be published if it was AGPL. Not literally everything that's on the network.
If someone wants to take community software but not submit fixes then I would agree that they should avoid AGPL.
Unless I miss the point of your comment.
Unless you're a lawyer and confident in your ability to represent me in court, then this is in fact the point of my comment.
I have zero faith in your statement.
I don't think GPL way is best to achieve this goal.
I see much wider goal of modern engineering, to REuse as much work as possible, because even with modern advances with AI, we still have very limited number of engineers, so users could not got quality products and services when reuse is limited by license, so GPL effectively limiting users freedom.
Must admit, other licenses also have issues, but for user freedom I think best MIT/BSD licenses and most similar to them (Apache, etc).
So, if you will invent something really better, I will respect.