Happy Halloween!
Notices by HD Moore (hdm@infosec.exchange)
-
Embed this notice
HD Moore (hdm@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Nov-2023 21:08:37 JST HD Moore -
Embed this notice
HD Moore (hdm@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 13-Nov-2022 14:46:16 JST HD Moore @msw re: negativity, its not hyperbole; good luck building a business that goes within arms-length of GPL code without spending far too much money on IP lawyers. Huge amounts of permissively licensed open source is funded by companies allergic to viral licensing. There are exceptions (Linux), but in general, it is BSD/MIT/Apache2 or it is effectively closed source.
The fake open source of "community" licenses recently were a reminder of how folks want their cake (protection from competitors) while being able to eat it too (actually using it and working with other contributors). There should be no protection from competitors if you want community contributions, and that's how things are shaping up, with a few exceptions.
-
Embed this notice
HD Moore (hdm@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 13-Nov-2022 14:44:19 JST HD Moore This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I would love to see ActivityPub implementations not tied to a GPL/AGPL license. After poking at WriteFreely, the only thing stopping me from PRing a half-dozen improvements is the weird license choice.
AGPL/GPL is terrible if you want to write stuff that you can reuse for other projects (commercial or personal). Viral licenses tie the hands of the original authors as much as those of contributors. Folks tend to figure this out only when it is really difficult to fix (ie. getting (C) reassignment or CLAs in place for all past contributors).
You can work around it by putting code into freely licensed subpackages instead, but it forces weird design decisions. I get that some folks are concerned about being SaaSed, but the AGPL choice still has a cost.
Anywho, MIT/BSD licenses are your friend now, and a friend to your future self who needs to reuse that code for something else in a decade.
-
Embed this notice
HD Moore (hdm@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 13-Nov-2022 14:44:17 JST HD Moore @docwho76 That's the rub. WriteFreely is built on permissively licensed dependencies, but because the application itself is AGPL, any derivative is also AGPL. It would be a little different if most of the application was built on AGPL dependencies. Certainly I can go write something on my own, but the AGPL license limits how much I can contribute. I am all for author license choice, but folks should be aware that AGPL/GPL is not a positive thing for most folks in software land.