⚠️ 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?
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.
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."
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/
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
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
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.
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.
In the Q&A, someone asks Hinton about the ethical dilemmas of #LLM training on copywritten data, to which he responds that he's only done research on the existential risk of AI and others understand the ethical arguments surrounding #labor issues better than him, so he has no comment.
Next someone asks his opinion on #FOSS LLMs to which he responds:
"If these things are going to be dangerous it might actually be better for just a few big companies — I don't work for #Google anymore so I'm not saying this on their behalf — but it might work out for a few big companies, preferably in several countries, to develop this stuff along with ways of keeping it under control. As soon as you #OpenSource anything, people will start doing all sorts of crazy things with it; it will be a really quick way to learn how far things can go wrong"
Um, wasn't this figured out back in 2007? It's called #AGPL, the AI-safe #gnu license that demands that anyone who interacts with the programs built from modified source code have readily-available access to that very source code.
Call me crazy, but I'm much more compfortable with software that everyone can audit than trusting a few corporations who are wreaking havoc on the planet as we speak.
Maybe useful for new-comers: you can read #twitter accounts without logging-in or waiting for the heavyweight website to load. #nitter
«Nitter is a #free and #opensource alternative Twitter #frontend focused on #privacy and #performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter (...) In the future a simple account system will be added that lets you follow Twitter users, allowing you to have a clean chronological timeline without needing a Twitter account.» #AGPL#freesoftware