A pretty interesting take, and an interesting discussion about what it means to be open source. Is there room for a trusted space between open source and closed corporate software?
A pretty interesting take, and an interesting discussion about what it means to be open source. Is there room for a trusted space between open source and closed corporate software?
Thank you - I would love to read any resources that you have
Well, that’s wonderful to hear!
If you’re wondering what sort of issue being careless with licenses can cause, see the (in)famous case of Tivoization. GPL 3 was written partly to solve issues like this.
Note how issue here is still subjective. Linux stays on GPL 2 and the people in charge are largely uninterested in planning a path forwards, or outright refuse to even consider it.
For a more recent example of how community/contributors and owner/company interest misalignment can make a huge mess, see the consequences of HashiCorp changing the Terraform license from MPL to BUSL. Relevant facts I’d like to note:
Or, for a slightly funny case:
A while back I saw a project on GitHub licensed as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The developer was considering writing a guide for contributors, even though I’m pretty sure you can’t fork and modify it to open a PR (popular way to offer contributions), because that’d break the ND clause (sharing derivatives). Were people supposed to e-mail patches straight to the developer? Who knows! There are people who are into that, such as some Linux Kernel folks.
And finally, here’s what I thought was a very interesting take on what “free” means when talking about software licenses, touching upon obligations, rights and copyleft.
I’m trying to avoid opining too much, even though I can’t help it and, really, it’s inevitable. I hope these serve as entry points for further research, and that they help you form your own perspective on all this. And if you do happen to end up agreeing with me in the end… well, I obviously won’t complain :^)
Thanks, I appreciate it. I’ll check it out.