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| ▲ | ricardobeat 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. This implies some kind of fairness/moral contract in a license like MIT. There is none. It’s the closest thing to donating code to the public domain, and entirely voluntary. There are plenty of standard licenses with similar clauses restricting commercial use, no need to create a custom one. But indeed, the truth is that a restrictive license will massively reduce the project’s audience. And that is a perfectly fine choice to make. |
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| ▲ | sarchertech 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > This implies some kind of fairness/moral contract in a license like MIT. The license tells you what you are legally allowed to do. It doesn’t supersede basic concepts of fairness. The average person would say that if you directly make millions of someone else’s work, the fair thing to do is to pay that person back in some way. Calling someone a leech is just saying that they aren’t following the the accusers model of fairness. That’s all. There’s no legal definition. We say things like “my company screwed me over when they fired me right before my RSUs vested” despite that being perfectly legal. | | |
| ▲ | ricardobeat 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > someone else’s work It is not “their” work anymore (IP rights discussions aside) once they published with an unrestricted license. That’s the point. You do it expecting nothing in return, and do it willingly. Expecting “fairness” is a misunderstanding of the whole spirit of it. | | |
| ▲ | brookst 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Semantic games with “their work”. An artist who sells a painting can still call it their work, even if someone else owns it. And I suppose the collector who bought it could also call it their work, though that phrasing isn’t usually used. It comes about because “work” is overloaded to mean both the activity of creating and the product/result of that activity. | | | |
| ▲ | sarchertech 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >expecting nothing in return Let’s ignore that no one contributes to open source expecting nothing in return. I can help someone out expecting nothing in return. Then if my situation changes and I need help, but they look at me and say “sorry your help was a gift so I’m not going to return the favor even though I can”. That person is a dick. The problem is you are taking the act of applying a permissive license as some kind of ceremony that severs open source software from all normal human ideas of fairness. You may view it that way. Most people don’t. It’s perfectly reasonable to put something out in the world for other people to enjoy and use. And yet still think that if someone makes a billion dollars of it and doesn’t return anything they are displaying bad manners. | | |
| ▲ | Chris2048 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > I can help someone out expecting nothing in return. Then if my situation changes It sounds like you did expect something in return, conditional on your circumstances. Maybe it's good-will or something, but some kind of social insurance in any case. | | |
| ▲ | sarchertech 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This is partly getting into questions about whether “pure” altruism is even possible, e.g., is an anonymous donation truly selfless if you do it because it makes you feel good. But in the example above it’s entirely possible that you helped someone out with no expectation of being paid back. Let’s say you’re rich and the person you helped is a chronic drug addict. You have no expectation of every needing help and no expectation that the person you helped will ever be in a position to help you. Let’s say I give a homeless person a dollar. He turns around and uses that dollar to buy a lottery ticket and wins 100 million dollars. Years later, I’m homeless and the former homeless guy walks past me and gives me a lecture about how I should have put conditions on my donation. In that situation there was no reasonable expectation for anything except as you said maybe good will.
But of course open source developers also expect good will. |
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| ▲ | nemomarx 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sidestep this debate with one trick - use the GPLv3. No company large enough to have a legal team will be able to use it, you're still squarely within the various definitions, and the FSF basically has to approve. As a bonus maybe you can get some proprietary software open sourced too. |
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| ▲ | fleebee 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Is there a real reason not to use AGPL? The fact that it makes Google very uncomfortable[1] is a great selling point to me. [1]: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl... | | |
| ▲ | nemomarx 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | For the purposes of me being facetious, it's less infectious than v3. but yeah it would have the same impact on large corps I think | | |
| ▲ | em-bee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | it's less infectious than v3 putting aside the argument about how infectious the GPL is in general, the the current AGPL is based on the GPL v3. it adds additional requirements. so how can it be less infectious than the GPL v3? |
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| ▲ | SAI_Peregrinus 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | AGPL is arguably an EULA, not just a copyright license. |
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| ▲ | JTbane 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Companies are happy to use GPLv3 as long as they can put it behind a proprietary SaaS. |
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| ▲ | marcosdumay 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > telling you that this isn’t open source Are you talking about promoting some software as open source when it's in fact not? Because yes, there's something wrong with that, you shouldn't do it, and people will rightfully react loudly if you try. People don't complain about proprietary software honestly communicated as that. |
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| ▲ | sarchertech 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This is exactly the kind of thing, I’m talking about. Open source has mostly been captured by large corporations because purists refuse to recognize the gradient between proprietary and completely free. If I license my software as MIT but with an exception that you can’t use it for commercial purposes if you make more than $100 million a year in revenue, that’s a lot closer to open source than proprietary. We should be normalizing licenses that place restrictions on large corporations. I think the world would be a much better place if we just changed the definition of open source to include such licenses. We don’t even really need to change the definition because normal everyday use of the term would already include them. | | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Open source is open source. There exists no gradient there. If your software isn't open source, don't claim it is. You are free to try to normalize your licensing preferences. Even better if you have a nice name for them that don't try to mislead people into thinking they are something they clearly aren't. > I think the world would be a much better place if we just changed the definition of open source to include such licenses. You are free to think that. I'm quite certain it's not correct, but nothing stops you. Anyway, you can make a positive change on the world you actually live on by being honest and clear about what your license does, and communicating why you think it's a good thing. Again, it's a huge plus if you get some nice name that can actually mean the thing your license is. > normal everyday use of the term would already include them Normal and everyday use of "open source" does absolutely not include the licenses you are talking about. |
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| ▲ | watwut 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The most likely and common result of releasing an open source project is that everyone ignores you. If they notice, you may get a question about license once in a while which you can ignore. |
