@nicemicro there’s something more: on corporate-owned servers (⇒ "software as a service") the #GPL (v2 or later) does not guarantee effective copyleft.
To have copyleft with server-side software you need to use the #AGPL (v3 or later).
⚠️ CSG is failing to honor its GPL obligations, say critics - The Register
「 Cloud Software Group – the post-merger offspring of Citrix and Tibco – has decided to withdraw the community edition of its JasperReports Server. Now all you can get is the commercial edition, with a 30-day free trial 」
#Redis just confirms that "permissive" #OpenSource licenses should be understood as "permission to exploit".
A #CLA is a red flag (unless perhaps to a NGO/charity).
Look for projects that chose strong Free, Libre, Open Source protections - such as the #GPL / #AGPL / #EUGPL and a Developer-Certificate-of-Origin (#DCO) rather than setting yourself up.
... do we want to take a bet on how long it takes for #redis to get forked and their business to fold anyway, having caused the damage?
From my PoV, it's certainly a license that's preferable to that of BSD or MIT. There's a solid reasoning behind this HERE.
After all, even Tanenbaum himself was surprised to discover that MINIX is the most ubiquitous of all operating systems:
> "I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS."
The SSPL being akin to that of the AGPL avoids that sort of dreadful situation, ensuring protections for the end users that not even the GPL affords them where #SaaS is concerned ;)
MongoDB's SSPL (Server Side Public License) sounds like an extremely strong copyleft form of free software license. It sounds like MongoDB took the AGPL and made it much stronger.
Respected "open source" groups have rejected MongoDB's copyleft open source free software license, such as the OSI, RedHat, and Debian.
The criticism of the SSPL do not seem to recognize that it is a copyleft free software license. Is the OSI really a protector of copyleft free software? The politics of these organizations seem to leaning anarcho-capitalist "libertarian".
I don't believe the SSPL will harm any specific field of endeavor. Databases are used in all fields of endeavor. They are usually one of many provided cloud computing services. Cloud computing services are used in most every field of endeavor these days. Even my toothbrush has a cloud database.
By rejecting the SSPL, the OSI, RedHat, Debian have appeared to have ignored the copyleft freedoms that the SSPL guarantees.
(neo)’liberal’ licenses like MIT and BSD that enable corporations to partake of the free labour of others
implying that the #GPL / #AGPL doesn't let corps partake in the free labor of others too> and enclose the commons
Your "open commons" is worthless if it's effectively still proprietary. Case in point: #Mastodon's #ActivityPub extensions that pretty much everybody else have to support (Mastodon is AGPL, and it's not realistic to implement ActivityPub strictly to the spec and expect it to be compatible with Mastodon). Or GNUisms (implemented by #GNU software which are GPL) that #BSD userlands are forced to support. Or #Matrix where there's basically only one server implementation that is usable (#Synapse whichis AGPL). I could go on and on.
If you see the AGPL licenses on my free and open source work and you think “damn you, I can’t use this to enrich myself or my corporation without sharing back what I’ve built on top of what you’ve freely shared and thus contribute to cultivating a healthy commons where others might enjoy the same benefits from my work that I want to obtain from yours” (a) you really have long-winded thoughts and (b) well, you already see the flaw in your reasoning.
(Remember this whenever anyone complains about ‘the viral nature of GPL’ or sings praises for (neo)’liberal’ licenses like MIT and BSD that enable corporations to partake of the free labour of others and enclose the commons.)
What are the odds of getting away with taking a no longer maintained #AGPL licensed project, modernizing the parts that need modernization adding features and allowing people to use it for free (since it's just clientside, so all it means for me is a few requests to static files), without being willing to hand out the changes? Or am I better off just not allowing others to use it, so no one can demand the code legally?
They support DDG-like !bangs and have a feature called Optics to customize search results, e.g. "Limit your searches to blogs, indieweb, educational content etc."
for free and open source software, it's usually maintained by a relatively small group of people with small funding or no money involved at all. so hypothetically, when a for-profit company offend a #foss project's #GPL license without releasing their codes. are there ways to fight the offending company without wasting money on lawyers?
@penryu@boracle another similar thing idk if it makes sense or not..
for example, if a git service provider uses my source codes to train their AI models, i want to extend AGPL's reach onto this service provider to release their model's binary blob as well as the code base that perform the training.
might be difficult to enforce because how difficult it is to detect. #agpl
Diese Initiative von #BrucePerens, Mitbegründer der Open-Source-Bewegung, hat durchaus explosives Potential.
Haben die üblichen #FOSS-Lizenzen ausgedient? Wurde FOSS von Konzernen anders verwendet als von der FOSS-Idee her ursprünglich gedacht? Wie würde eine korrigierte Lizenz aussehen? 🤔
Rallly https://rallly.co/ is open source, self-hostable "pick a date or time to meet" software.
I've created a note page for it with some more details, like their suggested social obligation to pay the equivalent of one year managed hosting if you host it yourself. https://bmannconsulting.com/notes/rallly/
From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
I would suggest that what you really learned was to ALWAYS "License" your contributions to any crowd-sourced project under CC-BY-SA, the #FSF#GPL or #AGPL, or some other #Creative_Commons or strong #Copyleft license.
Again: "License" your contributions - do not "ASSIGN" your copyright to any project. It's a common technique used by tricksters to steal your intellectual property for their own diabolical, ulterior motives like you just described
A while back, Eugen Rochko shared with us: "I was disappointed with Twitter, and have a love for free software." Read the full article, published in 2017: https://u.fsf.org/429#Mastodon#Fediverse#AGPL
During this fundraiser, we've welcomed many new associate members that have told us, of their reason for joining, that they were inspired by a post on Mastodon. That's great! We look forward to having you on board. #Mastodon#AGPL
MongoDB dropped the #AGPL in late-2018 in favor of the "Server Side Public License" (SSPL), a modified version which requires those who offer the licensed software as a service accessible to third-parties, to make the entire source code of all software used to facilitate the service (including without limitation all "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available") available under the same license
While we are pleased when people use GNU licenses to distribute and license software, we condemn the use of unauthorized, confusing derivatives of the licenses. In this article, we explain how users are protected against restrictive terms introduced by people using GNU licenses' terms in drafting their own, new licenses: https://u.fsf.org/41g#GPL#AGPL#Copyleft#GNU
The #Matrix project is re-licensing its servers (synapse, dendrite, ..) from #Apache to #AGPL, following the spate of similar measures by many other projects. Good that they didn't choose a non-FOSS license.
But they're also changing the sign-off from #DCO to #CLA. That is very disappointing.
PS: If you are starting a FOSS project, consider adopting a #copyleft license. It should be abundantly clear by now that the push for permissive licenses is an attempt to extract free labour.
Pour que la tragédie des communs liés à Matrix n'en soit plus une, les serveurs d'implémentation de référence de Matrix passent sous license AGPLv3 🎉🎉
Ainsi, les modifications du code source des serveurs devront être publiées sous la même license auprès de leurs utilisateur·ices, donc du monde entier.