xek
At this point, almost all non-open-source apps have moved (or are moving) to an *aaS model.
In a decade, will the only perpetual licenses for software be FOSS ones?
And, almost as importantly, will those *aaS providers actually contribute back to the non-copyleft ones?
Alexandre Oliva
Ed
@xek @msw with all due respect, from a moral and legal perspective, copyleft licenses like the GPL don’t provide freedom to users. The only person(s) whose freedom is preserved is the copyright holder. This is something that the vast majority of people just do not understand. An instructive example of this is grsec. Copyleft licenses restrict everyone but the copyright holder in a meaningful way. Free licenses like BSD provide no meaningful restrictions.
Matt "msw" Wilson
@xek MIT, BSD, and Apache licensed software is all Free Software. It just isn't under a Free Software license that protects Software Freedom for downstream recipients of the software, or derivatives of the software.
All that said, I am (in my personal time) a #copyleft advocate because I want to advance and protect Software Freedom for all software users.
xek
@msw To be less snarky, the vast majority of FOSS right now is not Free Software. There's a lot of MIT, BSD, LGPL, etc etc, and a lot less GPL code out there.
The only licenses which purport to force people to release code are the GPL. I've long preferred GPLv2, but I rarely release things you could build a whole cloud on, so, meh.
I always thought AGPL/GPLv3 were sorta draconian, but am starting to come around.
Matt "msw" Wilson
@xek (from your original post, I'm not sure what you mean by "non-Free")
Matt "msw" Wilson
@xek the dynamics that make #FOSS a powerful force will continue to provide natural incentives for cloud providers (like Linux distros) to invest in upstream development.
Those dynamics are most powerful when there is an independent, self-governing community (like Linux and PostgreSQL).
When single for-profit firms require CLAs and give no meaningful opportunities for others to participate in governance, the forces are far weaker...
Alexandre Oliva
xek
@msw Ah, you're right. Thanks for pointing that out! I still think that copyleft is the only truly Free Software, and have since the 90s, but apparently I was wrong on the definition people were using then, too.
Will update original post to clarify that I meant non-copyleft.
Alexandre Oliva
Matt "msw" Wilson
@peepstein @xek grsec is a good example of how copyleft doesn't guarantee any sort of meaningful cooperation between downstream derivatives and the originating authors in getting patches merged.
Matt "msw" Wilson
@peepstein @xek yes, this is a very valid ideology that many advocates of BSD-style licenses have adopted (e.g., ⬇️).
The reasons that communities (like those who build FreeBSD) adopt policies that exclude, in various degrees, copyleft licensed software are principled ones—even when the outcome is software that does not respect the freedom of end users (e.g., macOS).
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