@davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus in conclusion, AGPL everything.
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@davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus
in conclusion, AGPL everything. or, as I think of it, the "I believe I just did, Bob" license.
I never understand how people reach this conclusion. AGPL is a complex legal document. The only people who can use things licensed under it are people who think no one will sue them and people with large legal teams.
We have decades of experience showing that adding more complex licenses just makes corporations do their own in-house thing instead of contributing, and then they release it as a permissively licensed version and suck the oxygen out of the copyleft version's ecosystem.
The most successful users of the AGPL are companies who use it as a moat, preventing competitors from deploying something in the same space.
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@davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus
in conclusion, AGPL everything. or, as I think of it, the "I believe I just did, Bob" license.
I never understand how people reach this conclusion. AGPL is a complex legal document. The only people who can use things licensed under it are people who think no one will sue them and people with large legal teams.
We have decades of experience showing that adding more complex licenses just makes corporations do their own in-house thing instead of contributing, and then they release it as a permissively licensed version and suck the oxygen out of the copyleft version's ecosystem.
The most successful users of the AGPL are companies who use it as a moat, preventing competitors from deploying something in the same space.
@david_chisnall @davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus there's no better alternative, so use it or engage on groups for better alternative. just throwing hands up and using mit/bsd is not a fix, as much as using plain text is not a fix for a complex encryption library just because it have some caveats. -
@david_chisnall @davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus there's no better alternative, so use it or engage on groups for better alternative. just throwing hands up and using mit/bsd is not a fix, as much as using plain text is not a fix for a complex encryption library just because it have some caveats.
@gcb @davidgerard @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade
just throwing hands up and using mit/bsd is not a fix
Not a fix for what? After two or so decades of using MIT / BSD licenses and having good interactions with contributors ranging from the world's largest company down to students, and having released several things that have been deployed on over a hundred million devices, I am not seeing problems that need a 'fix'.
I release things under permissive licenses, and other people increase the amount of Free Software in the world.
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@davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus
in conclusion, AGPL everything. or, as I think of it, the "I believe I just did, Bob" license.
I never understand how people reach this conclusion. AGPL is a complex legal document. The only people who can use things licensed under it are people who think no one will sue them and people with large legal teams.
We have decades of experience showing that adding more complex licenses just makes corporations do their own in-house thing instead of contributing, and then they release it as a permissively licensed version and suck the oxygen out of the copyleft version's ecosystem.
The most successful users of the AGPL are companies who use it as a moat, preventing competitors from deploying something in the same space.
@david_chisnall @davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus in all my years, do you want to know how companies actually treat GPL/AGPL licensed stuff?
They really, truly do not give a shit because they know. They know they can't and won't be sued no matter the size. Lip service and two middle fingers.
"Oh, no, don't look at the license it doesn't matter it's fine. Fork and fix it. But if you give them labor *we* paid for, you're fired. On the spot."
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@gcb @davidgerard @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade
just throwing hands up and using mit/bsd is not a fix
Not a fix for what? After two or so decades of using MIT / BSD licenses and having good interactions with contributors ranging from the world's largest company down to students, and having released several things that have been deployed on over a hundred million devices, I am not seeing problems that need a 'fix'.
I release things under permissive licenses, and other people increase the amount of Free Software in the world.
@david_chisnall @davidgerard @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade good for you, but not everyone's goal is to be an indirect consultant for hire. -
@david_chisnall @davidgerard @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade good for you, but not everyone's goal is to be an indirect consultant for hire.
@gcb @davidgerard @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.
If your goal is to increase the amount of Free Software in the world, restrictive licenses have been shown, repeatedly, to not help, and often actively hinder.
If your goal is to write software that no one apart from uses, just don't publish it, problem solved.
If your goal is to get software that you can use, with less effort than writing it all yourself, by having other people contribute, then permissive licenses help more than restrictive ones.
If your goal is to make people use Free Software systems, the biggest thing that you can do to help is make Free Software systems actively desirable by users. That means making exercising the FSF's Four Freedoms things that users are empowered to do and actively benefit from doing. That means focusing on building end-user programmable environments. That means making it trivial to modify software and distribute the improvements for people with little or no programming background. Complex licenses actively harm this effort because they mean that you have to be a lawyer to understand what you can and cannot do with the result.
If you believe that social problems are best solved with complex legal structures, by all means keep using [A]GPL and similar licenses.
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@gcb @davidgerard @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.
If your goal is to increase the amount of Free Software in the world, restrictive licenses have been shown, repeatedly, to not help, and often actively hinder.
If your goal is to write software that no one apart from uses, just don't publish it, problem solved.
If your goal is to get software that you can use, with less effort than writing it all yourself, by having other people contribute, then permissive licenses help more than restrictive ones.
If your goal is to make people use Free Software systems, the biggest thing that you can do to help is make Free Software systems actively desirable by users. That means making exercising the FSF's Four Freedoms things that users are empowered to do and actively benefit from doing. That means focusing on building end-user programmable environments. That means making it trivial to modify software and distribute the improvements for people with little or no programming background. Complex licenses actively harm this effort because they mean that you have to be a lawyer to understand what you can and cannot do with the result.
If you believe that social problems are best solved with complex legal structures, by all means keep using [A]GPL and similar licenses.
@david_chisnall @gcb @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade
> complex legal structures,
you keep hammering on this, is your core argument *really* "the license is long"? I posit that if it is complex, that's because it's written for a complex world.
> If you believe that social problems are best solved with complex legal structures
That looks very like a short description of a functioning society with rule of law, where the laws match its complexity. There are people who advocate just throwing all of that out, and the kindest thing I can say is that they're being extremely simplistic.
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@david_chisnall @gcb @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade
> complex legal structures,
you keep hammering on this, is your core argument *really* "the license is long"? I posit that if it is complex, that's because it's written for a complex world.
> If you believe that social problems are best solved with complex legal structures
That looks very like a short description of a functioning society with rule of law, where the laws match its complexity. There are people who advocate just throwing all of that out, and the kindest thing I can say is that they're being extremely simplistic.
@davidgerard@circumstances.run @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I honestly don't get the debate here. Users, hobbyists, people who are learning to code, etc etc don't usually have to worry too much about software licenses. As soon as someone wants to make money with the software, they do--but that's how business works. The fact that the license is long or complex is irrelevant. That's what compliance officers and attorneys are for. My experience has been that upon encountering a new software license, a compliance officer will read it over and then boil it down into a short bullet list of things you have to do to safely use it in your business. This task could be done by third parties for smaller companies who cannot afford to hire their own, could be done pro bono, or could be crowdsourced. Generally once it's done, it's done; you don't have to re-interpret the license every time you encounter it. In short there are many ways to handle long and/or complex licenses that are not onerous.
This is how most regulatory frameworks work. They, in general, are good for society, unless you're a libertarian or some variant thereof I guess. Eschewing any kind of regulation, even informal systems, in the hope that corporations will firehose the world with "free" software is a strange take that I don't think can be defended.
It's also strange to demand that one can pick up a piece of software--something many people may have toiled over for many years--and start using it for whatever purposes one wants without any restrictions. That is an anti-social stance, in my view.
Personally I think the conflation of "free software"--which represents a political agenda--with Tim O'Reilly style "open source software" --which represents a corporate agenda--was a mistake. I think it muddies almost every discussion about software.
@gcb@pleroma.envs.net @zeyus@corteximplant.com @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange @dougwade@mastodon.xyz
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@david_chisnall @davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus in all my years, do you want to know how companies actually treat GPL/AGPL licensed stuff?
They really, truly do not give a shit because they know. They know they can't and won't be sued no matter the size. Lip service and two middle fingers.
"Oh, no, don't look at the license it doesn't matter it's fine. Fork and fix it. But if you give them labor *we* paid for, you're fired. On the spot."
@rootwyrm @david_chisnall @davidgerard @0xabad1dea @dougwade @zeyus yeah, and the gew cases of litigation in terms of enforcement backfired hard as well...
That being said in #Germany said #GPL licenses get enforced by courts - as #Fritz! (nee #AVM) found out the hard way.
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@abucci @davidgerard @gcb @zeyus @0xabad1dea @dougwade
Users, hobbyists, people who are learning to code, etc etc don't usually have to worry too much about software licenses
Usually, being the operative word. I compile a GPL'd program for a friend and give them a copy of the binary? Ooops, I've violated the license. Now, I'm probably fine, because I doubt anyone would take me to court over this. But I've also read one legal opinion recently that argued that the fact that GPL'd projects permit this kind of casual license violation means that they can't claim any actual damages (and may not qualify for statutory damages) when a company violates the license in the same way.
That particular clause in GPLv2 caused a hobbyist Linux distro to shut down around 10 years ago. They built binary packages from a load of GPLv2 things. GPLv2 says that you must ship either the source code (they didn't want to force users to download source code that they didn't need) or a written offer good for three years to provide the source code on demand. They couldn't afford the storage cost of all of the source code for three years. GPLv3 allowed you to just pass on such an offer if you had received one, but a lot of distros carry a few patches, which eliminates this option. For big corporate-funded distros, this is fine, for community-developed ones it's more of a burden.
And that's the problem with complex legal documents. You are probably fine, but you need to understand the nuances of when you aren't.
The many, many hours of my life that I've been forced to spend discussing the GPL and its derivatives with lawyers tell me that this is not easy.
