Licensing rant / debate thread

[astyle]

I'm not talking about GPL violations because I consider those like thefts. I'm more curious about BSD licensed software and tools, for which companies have no obligations at all and thus all they give back is only due to their willingness to do it (regardless of their motivations).

Try reading the "Donor List" that the FreeBSD foundation publishes.

Ok, this isn't going the way I thought it would. Too political for my taste, sorry to have bothered you.

Well, if you dig deep enough into how licenses even work, and the reasoning for different licensing terms to exist, you do eventually get to politics and opinion camps. The point of my thread was really to talk about why software licensing even matters. Reason being - Yeah, there's this whole unpleasant, political morass of rules and limitations on what people can and cannot do with their own devices that run software. Yeah, it's kind of important to know how things work so that you avoid stepping on other people's toes.

But - there does seem to be a lack of understanding when software licensing matters, and when it really doesn't, and to what extent. This thread is kind of an attempt to crystallize the distinction between such situations.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

… the usual names are Netflix, NetApp, Juniper, Sony, Apple at one time and so on. …

When I counted things for another organisation in April:

"two thousand, four hundred and eighty-six sponsored commits".

More broadly (two sponsors, three trees):

git -C /usr/doc log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Netgate|Rubicon'

git -C /usr/ports log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Netgate|Rubicon'

git -C /usr/src log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Netgate|Rubicon'

src tree, Klara or Netflix:

git -C /usr/src log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Klara|Netflix'

And so on.

 

[sidetone]

As an alternative to Open Source, there's also Fair Source.

• https://fair.io/
• https://github.com/fairsource/fair.io

It includes the non-compete licenses of FSL and BUSL (also known as BSL). Non-compete licenses are where code converts to true opensource after a set period of time, in order for the author to not give an advantage to competitors over their own work, but for them to share it to open source eventually. FSL may be a more practical license than BSL, but BSL was an example template for FSL.

Learned about the term Fair Source from https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/s...-avoid-the-pitfalls-of-open-source-licensing/.

Edits: There's also Fair Core License (FCL), which is derived from FSL, that has added protections for specific needs.

Also, I think that Fair in Fair Source means, fair to companies which are the original authors. That's good though, because companies have a business model, and are there to stay in business, then through standardized non-compete licenses, they eventually give back to opensource. It's also good that companies get together to promote these license models.

Fair Source has a requirement that, code have delayed opensource publication, which is a part of noncompete licenses. Fair Source used to have another meaning, which was a more complex and restrictive for use type of license. The stewards of that willingly transferred the domain and other IP to the current Fair Source project, which started in 2024. That previous license project has been defunct since 2016.

I wish I could see the same support for CDDL1.1, that companies get behind it, as upholding a standard of a type of Open Source. CDDL1.1 isn't included as an accepted Open Source Initiative standard, even though it's a good license for businesses. CDDL 1.1 also doesn't seem to be a Fair Source type of license, even though it protected business IP. I like that CDDL protects code from being absorbed into viral licenses, protects business IP of shared code, and it allows companies to share it. There's no reason, that CDDL 1.1 can't be an extended family of Fair Source, or that there be a Fair source license that transfers the license to CDDL 1.1 after a set amount of time.

 

[Ferocious1881]

Neither Photoshop nor Gimp would arbitrarily shut down just because you're using the software for legally (or even ethically) questionable projects...

It should not be the inverse?

I think it unlikely you could successfully do that. You might if you showed a very high level of negligence, but how many precedents (and across how many jurisdictions?) are there of people suing successfully for consequential damages from software bugs. Most licences will contain clauses that shield developers from liability.

In any reasonable jurisdiction, renouncing from reasonable liability should requires scary warnings. Otherwise contract shall be null.

The EU's Cyber Resilience Act will make such clauses entirely invalid for some classes of software.

Which is an awfully malicious idea, it extends and ratify the goverment as the ruler of your personal choices and what you you value and not value, in any case, one can just block the European Market, and put one's headquarters in Argentina.
Also, this law only will be bad for the customers of Europe, that will get only higher prices for nothing in return.

Licenses can be seen as a tangible guarantee of quality.

Nonsense, that goes into reputation and the rent/sell contract, if there is not contract, in any reasonable jurisdiction, it means not guarantees from the software vendor, as it is distributed as is, not guarantees. Thought the software license may be seen as part of the contract in proprietary products, when is a software with an openly available source code, as I thereby declare open source means, I find it as no holding itself as a valid contract.

For private end users, license terms do have the effect of taking options off the table (Like not wanting to pay for Photoshop or AutoCAD, leaving you with GIMP and Blender). For those who are NOT private end users (think employers and distributors), it's more complicated, and that's where it pays to know what the license terms are, what is negotiable, what's not, the risks, the differences in available options, and other related details.

* you think corporations are evil, and only will give back if there is a legal lever which requires it? Use GPL.

If you not want nobody to use your software for profit, do not share it.

We, Berkeley, have a complete and well fitting OS that runs perfectly fine. Linix, OTOH, have just a kernel and a bunch of assorted stuff. Nevertheless Linux got extremely popular. If there were no Linux, would our OS be similarly popular? No, because shops would just cannibalize it and sell it under their own name. With Linux they cannot do that, they must provide it as Linux. And as a consequence, everybody today knows Linux.

Hard disagree, and by the way there is not canibalization.

I would write an essay about how much I despise viral licenses, and consider the GPL as a demonic licensing model, but will reserve to call out a case of extraordinary nonsense.

Imagine Immogen lives in a city with a frequently traversed park in the center of the city, which has even foreign travelers, and one day Immogen for some arbitrary reason or emotion decide to put a table with fruits in the park to everyone every day and put a sign saying, "you can take what they want."

And everyday Immogen repeats the practice, every day for years, years in which foreigners with thousands of gold ingots, local entrepreneurs, starving children, no extraordinary people and beyond the imagination, had taken and used the fruits to their benefit, allowed orphans to become successful and all more.

But a day Immogen feels stole of how much money had all those successful orphans earn, of how much they had archived, and the few cents that the rich had save in fruit, and how nothing she got, thus decides to complain and harass anyone that had even taken of her table and had not given her a quote, in all those years of giving it for free.

The morality of Immogen is the same that the proponents of things like Open Zero, as well the morality of the bunch of proponents of the so called open source movement, the claims of maintainers that complain about "not remuneration", proponents of the ideology of the FSF tend to at least share in a personal level.

 

[sidetone]

I've given it more thought. If going for practical terms, and not on widespread compatibility with overly viral licenses which overextend into libraries such as GPL, then Apache 2.0 is perfect for libraries. A copy left file or directory based version of Apache 2.0 would be good too. MPL2.0 is close to that, except it allows the license to be upgraded according to Mozilla's discretion. Still a very good license. Then, CDDL1.1 is great for endpoint software products, which use those libraries.

CDDL1.1 and Apache 2.0 are beneficial due to their additional protection of patent use. Permissive licenses are good too, for major software organizations which are big enough which can protect and maintain them. So, Apache 2.0 and CDDL1.1 would be good for the ports tree, and for smaller groups of authors

Then, GPL allows use with a Classpath exception, which when this is added, other code is allowed to use GPL code as libraries without extending the viralness into that code. GPL doesn't need to extend into libraries, which are dynamically linked, period. GPL2 is already incompatible with LGPL 3 versions due to this.

Also, in the FreeBSD ports tree, many Apache licensed programs are often missing components, or rely on GPL configurations and GPL build tools. Apache licensed programs are still free to be made in a BSD way, or at least a non Linuxism way as well.

If an organization or for-profit wants to offer a product, then CDDL1.1 is more straightforward for users for open source than GPL.

Looking the "Complete Guide for Open Source Licenses" PDF from MEND, it appears that even the Microsoft Public License is better than the GPL. It says, it is incompatible with it, due to that it doesn't want code being given up in a "blackhole" to owners of GPL code. That the MS-PL license is less restrictive in forfeiting code than GPL is a major irony, considering Microsoft's history and Bill Gates unfavorable interactions towards Linus.

Back to, about why CDDL 1.1 isn't an accepted license at the OSI. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2024-July/005502.html says, that it may have not been submitted, and if it were, it would be so for legacy purposes. That very few programs used this license, and most code was under CDDL 1.0. Even so, I believe it would be good for the CDDL 1.1 license to be submitted or replaced with a similar license anyway. Even if limited programs use it, it would still be great as being Stewarded by the license creator. It's a good license, and it didn't get the popularity it deserved, as it was overshadowed by GPL's rhetoric.

Edit: The clause specific to California Law added in CDDL 1.1 also makes it, not a universal license. That may be applicable to where Oracle is located. Still, it should be submitted to OSI. Then, we need a license like it on the basis of that acceptance.

Also, that there isn't a popular universal license version of CDDL 1.1, means the opensource ecosystem is severely lacking. MPL 2.0 is great for open source, however, it serves a different philosophy of being upgradable to a new version. GPL dictated what opensource should be, when they should just make a universal dynamic linking exception to work with other libraries without absorbing them. This level of viralness is what's wrong with GPL.

 

[hasbeen]

I had a dream about "Open Internet and FOSS". Tho, that was just a dream.
Then, I thought what would Internet look like today without monetization of the Internet and almost everything on Internet, and who would be concerned the most about Open Source Software licensing schemes. That aside, here is interesting take on Linux:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqtN0lgzabE

 

[6502]

I had a dream about "Open Internet and FOSS". Tho, that was just a dream.

You have to read Karl Marx and his dreams.

 

[astyle]

I had a dream about "Open Internet and FOSS". Tho, that was just a dream.
Then, I thought what would Internet look like today without monetization of the Internet and almost everything on Internet, and who would be concerned the most about Open Source Software licensing schemes. That aside, here is interesting take on Linux:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqtN0lgzabE

This is off-topic, unless you can connect this to the topic of this thread, in a manner that other participants can understand.

If you want to make a connection between A: license terms and B: global politics, please expand and explain how they are connected. Otherwise, spreading of unsubstantiated FUD like this is generally discouraged on these Forums. Even Youtube is officially making an effort to tell people to avoid off-the-cuff remarks and think before you post...