Worth noting that the "escape hatch" clauses in the EUPL that allow converting it into other licenses mean it's only ever as strong as the weakest license it names for such an operation, AKA EPL/MPL/LGPL.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
You are describing the compatibility clause as if it's settled that the EUPL simply allows you to convert to a compatible license. The compatibility clause is an unfortunate ambiguity, but it's not the intention of the license authors to lose strong copyleft and SaaS loophole protections this way. See for example here [1] [2] [3].
* BigTech can take your EUPL library and write a small wrapper in MPL
* such a wrapper can therefore be used in any project, even a closed one that is a network service.
* however all of that still qualifies as distributing EUPL, and the EUPL core would still need to be made available under EUPL (whether modified or not).
Saying that since I have an MPL wrapper then all the code is MPL is not allowed.
So you can't just copy all the code and change the license to MPL.
This is basically AGPL without virality and anti-tivo, correct?
On the face of it, no it doesn't say that. It just says the combined work can be MPL. Then someone can take that MPL work, and distribute it without source code because the MPL allows that. It explicitly says any conflict between the EUPL and the MPL shall be resolved in favor of the MPL.
A “conflict” is intended to mean the case that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.
> But as none of the compatible licenses come into conflict with the EUPL *by prohibiting the essential points* of publication of the source code and coverage of remote distribution (closing the SaaS loophole), these obligations, that are the core of the "reciprocal" condition, persist for the derivatives concerned.
aka: the compatible licenses do not put additional restrictions, so no, it is not MPL.
also, from the license:
> this Distribution or Communication can be done under the
terms of this Compatible Licence..
So you are allowed distribution, not relicensing.
To simplify It seems to me that:
* GPL will automatically make something GPL.
* EUPL will automatically make something selectively dual-licensing. parts EUPL, parts whatever.
Also do note that EUPL is the first license to explicitly state that any issues fall under EU(Belgium) law, so EU has the last say on its license.
I read a few dozen comments to see if I could get an answer to this in the thread, but it does appear to be a case where we're highlighting one of the risks of picking up a new license: folks don't agree on how to interpret it.
I'm very curious why the author didn't simply use AGPL, but I haven't done a deep dive on the text of the EUPL, so maybe that's the next step.
EDIT: Went to go research this. First thing I learned is the license has been around since 2007. It was updated in 2017. So maybe scratch my comment about it being a new license!
This article would do better if it simply enumerated the problems with the LGPL and addressed how this new license which I've never heard of addresses those problems. This hinting and alluding might make great SEO, but that's fit for neither the audience of people producing software, nor for HN.
I do appreciate the link to the article and came via HN. I don’t think you can speak for either the audience of people producing software nor for HN.
Another article comparing LGPL and this license sounds good and I am interested in that as well. This article though is a good nudge to start thinking about licensing.
The article seems pretty clear that the LGPL is too weak compared to the EUPL for this author, and one of the main concerns is the "SaaS loophole" which I assume would be addressed by the AGPL but also seems addressed by the EUPL.
But the EUPL itself says that derivative works may be distributed under the LGPL instead, as long as those works are derived from both a EUPL and LGPL parent. This seems kinda trivial to abuse and the author should have noticed this clause if that was their main concern.
The EUPL obligations still apply, unless they specifically conflict with the other license. There is some dispute on how exactly that is to be interpreted, but hopefully it will be clarified in version 1.3: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di...
A “conflict” here is intended to mean that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.
I don't understand how that's supposed to work - then you can't distribute under the compatible license; only under a weird hybrid of that license and non-conflicting EUPL terms. Seems to defeat the purpose of the compatibility clause?
Yes, I agree, it’s unclear how the EUPL requirements would propagate for a composite work that gets relicensed under the compatible license, without changing the latter.
What are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing?
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
I think it definitely hurts adoption. No hobbyist or experimenter wants to delve into legalities head first by first having to understand the licensing terms of software, whereas permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are easily-understood and familiar.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
Will hobbyists and experimenters that has no interest in understanding licenses go out of their way to locate specific licensed code, or are they more likely to just ask the AI/agent to cobble together stuff without care of any licenses?
"The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business."
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)
Excuse me but as both a hobbyist and commercial software developer I say that the gpl (any version) is quite simple enough. There is no need to go all the way to bsd/mit just to get safety and clarity and freedom from encumberance.
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
right but the GPL explicitly allows commercial use, which isn't what the original comment was about ("use in production requires a fee"); i agree with the previous comment that such a license is hard to assess for a hobbyist, but the GPL is not such a license (hence yes it's simple enough)
Even though it's technically allowed, a lot of companies are afraid of it. Not GPL2 - that's used a lot, because tivoization lets them ignore the spirit of it. But they fear GPL3 and AGPL.
You can also just do a crayon license. "All rights reserved, noncommercial use allowed." Nobody's stopping you. If and when Debian wants to ship your package, ask them for proper legal advice about changing it, they have lawyers.
Companies that make physical products are afraid of GPLv3 because of the anti-tivoization clause. Cloud companies aren't, but they're afraid of the AGPLv3, because of the anti-cloud-tivoization clause.
In practice AGPL might achieve that. It does allow commercial use, but a lot of big businesses, especially big tech, will not use it. On the other hand it is a clear, OSI approved, FOSS license.
Well, the language is clear enough. What's not clear are the implications of the language. And, honestly, the sensible default for a lot of companies is just not to go there. And big companies tend not to operate on hopes and prayers to avoid distracting and expensive lawsuits. Without going into details I have enough familiarity with the space to know that a lot of open source-friendly companies either avoid AGPL entirely or discourage its use.
Yes. The clean way is to use the strongest copyleft license you can find, probably AGPL. Even if corporations are technically allowed to use it, they don't want to risk touching it with a three-meter pole. Then you offer to sell them a different license. Hobbyists and OSS folks usually have no issue with AGPL.
Do you have data on that last bit, or just a guess? As a hobbyist and OSS developer I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else.
This means you have only solved the problem for large companies, and specifically those who have money and who have a functioning procurement system that's developer-driven. Which is a very narrow use case.
Sure, but for anything except large companies it has a bootstrapping problem. I'm absolutely not going to use AGPL software in a test one-person trying to sell a service kind of deal. So if it takes off, I'm already on a non-AGPL stack, so why reach out at that point to get a commercial license for software I don't even use?
And hell, even without money involved, I'm not going to make a hobby project with AGPL software either. Not only may I have small parts of the project I've not opensourced, but AGPL is untested in how far the virality goes. Are my backup cronjobs in scope? I certainly don't want to be the test case for this. Even if I win against an AGPL troll, I'll still lose.
I like the AGPL but don’t often use it. (I did recently license two coding harnesses I wrote as AGPL.)
A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do. In the USA the collusion between government and big tech is starting to smell a little bit like fascism. Sorry, I have only complaints, not any good answers.
>A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do.
Is the concern that anybody will be earning money on your software (just that), or that you won't get any money, or that they will earn money and don't give back the code?
If the company earns money and opens the code, is that OK for you?
Just for you and for everyone information, Richard Stallman himself told people not only to sell their own software, but the software written by others as well!
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
AGPL, just as all other GPL, does not prohibit selling the software. If you goal is to make your software unsellable, please use your own licensing terms (there's nothing wrong with that!!!)
> Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
Yes, it's called language. Contracts are nothing but text, so why don't you just write down what you think should be the rules around using your software by other people?
I get the urge of a lot of developers to pick an existing third party license from the shelf, but just as you can write your own code - and are not required to use ready-made libraries/frameworks - you can write your own open source license for your software.
If you are trying to monetize your software, the biggest factor is whether or not your customer trusts you.
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
>MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
You've chosen the license which allows "stealing", why did you do that if you don't like that? Nobody forced you to do that, I hope.
How can I trust the person who published their code with the strict legal terms, but becomes sad when other people use their code exactly as the author said it could be used?
Every once in a while I read discussions about licenses, and puzzled every time why the author of the software chooses free license when the freedom of copying and distribution is seem to them as pirating. If the license is not suitable for you, why choose it?!
Licenses are about legal possibilities. You're looking for social/moral terms instead if I understood you correctly (something like CoC).
After many years of thinking about this, I have arrived in the exact same place. I think the SQLite team learned this in the early days, and have done very well for themselves, giving away all of their source code for the product itself, free of charge, and then having folks pay for consulting and enhancements, which they remain particularly strong at because of their closed, comprehensive regression test suite.
How does MIT build any more trust than a copyleft licence like AGPL? At the very least AGPL stops people "stealing" your work without contributing back their changes?
AGPL does not do anything to force people to contribute their changes back. They have to make the changes available, however that's very different from actually contributing back. It is not hard to make a low quality contribution that the upstream would for very good reason refuse even though it 'works'.
The poster child for this is chromium which is GPL because it has clear and obvious roots in the old KHTML code of 20 some years ago. In theory you can contribute to Google movement and I suppose some people do but realistically Google controls it completely and they will do whatever they want. even though the source is available it is effectively not a contribution back.
By "contribute back" I was referring more generally to the commons.
The chrome example actually proves my point, the KDE project, or anyone for that matter, can take the changes Google made to their code. If KHTML was MIT it's likely that wouldn't be the case
Practically though, there is no difference. The KDE project has lost control over the web browser, even though they started it. It's an all or nothing. They can take all of chrome or they can take nothing. There is no in between. If KDE and Google disagree on the direction of the web browser, Google wins. There is no control. There's no advantage to open source, other than it's free. It may as well be a closed source project for all the good it does.
You can't be stealing what is given away for free.
Developers that choose copileft license want to see al changes shared under the same license.
Developers that choose permissive want their code to be of use to as many developers as possible for whatever they want to use it for.
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
Once you decide on a non-free license, in the FSF sense, in the DFSG sense, and in the open source sense, does the details of the license matter much? You want as many people to pay as possible, and you do not wish for others to compete with you providing this software.
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
It doesn’t have to be binary. A license like this allows for 99% of the personal and commercial use that a project will ever see, while giving the author leverage over large corporations - which is the main gripe people have. It is not ideal for libraries or things that would be redistributed, but then you have other options.
Some things in life are binary. You either allow people to build new products and businesses on your work or you don't. Would you allow me to extend the product with new features? "It depends" is a form of "no". It is not a position to sustainably work from.
If you frame the licensing space as for either personal or commercial use, perhaps your point of view makes sense, but this is not a useful framing for most people, and it is specifically not something the open source community cares about.
If you wish to keep leverage over others then you do not wish to have them compete with you on the same product. That is a valid position to have, but it is squarely on the non-free part of the licensing spectrum. You don't want to play within the open source community and they don't want to play with you. All anyone owe others is to make that clear.
This is why open source is rapidly becoming obsolete ;) There have been source-available/fair source/whatever-you-name-it approaches before.
They were attacked by OSI zealots every time because it's not real open source. Which is true, but the unsaid - or well, only sometimes mentioned - other half is that these open source enthusiasts would you rather have a bog standard all-rights-reserved commercial licence than a relatively open licence without the four freedoms!
I can't claim to read other people's thoughts, but my hunch is that this happens because it's too "close" to an open source licence so they view it as competition, while they view commercial software as either a straightforward enemy or they don't care about it whatsoever.
The history aside, this approach just makes the open source community more and more irrelevant each day, especially with the advent of "vibecode your own dependencies up". The 4 freedoms come from a place where they were about users, but gigantic corporations have shoehorned themselves into being users, and instead of the community defending against it, they think the freedom to exploit the maintainers' work while contributing nothing back is more important than keeping the commons free and shared. :P
The freedom to host open-source software is more important than contributing back to the original project: it's where the actual value of open source comes from. Would you host your website behind Apache or Nginx if you couldn't just switch providers and keep the same web server? Would you ever pick up Postgres or MySQL if you couldn't actually pay a company to host that for you, knowing that if they screwed up, you could switch to a provider that did it better?
From a pure engineering reliability perspective, coupling your technology choice to your vendor gives that vendor too much leverage (as we've seen with, for example, VMware).
This isn't about defending the big companies at all. It's about defending the right of hosting providers to compete on hosting a variety of software. In the alternative world of entirely commercial licenses, or entirely BUSL-styled licenses, you would be shackled to the specific vendors that happened to create the technology that you wanted to leverage. This is a scenario where the customer invariably loses.
Let's not get everything mixed up here - I singled out BUSL exactly because it does not prevent competing services, especially at small scale. In fact it would encourage small business and individual usage vs big cloud providers. It also has a conversion clause, so worst case scenario you have a slightly outdated MIT-licensed release to pick up from.
The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.
That said, indeed it might not be an ideal choice for that kind of cloud-hosted software if you want to maximize adoption.
> The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.
To support sibling comment: no it doesn't?
But your point about the revenue cut off in the BUSL is worthwhile (assuming we're talking about a licensor that is leveraging the additional use grant). I just disagree that it's a remedy because it basically punishes a business for being successful, by changing the rules upon which it was built. I'd be very curious to hear of anybody who has licensed software under the BUSL and has ended up getting a license from companies that meet those revenue thresholds.
It's worth noting that the BUSL, by default, with no additional use grant, prohibits the use of the software in production. So I actually think you have the two licenses reversed. The BUSL prohibits production use and competing services by default unless an additional use grant is specified and then it is only allowed under the revenue threshold specified in the additional use grant.
The AGPL has no prohibition whatsoever on the deployment of competing services.
It is expected that you use the license with an Additional Use Grant. For example, Hashicorp says:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.
Or, for a revenue threshold:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided that your use is solely for an application or system developed or operated by an entity (including its affiliates) with total annual gross revenues of less than $10,000,000 USD.
That is the whole point - you can define your own limits for commercial usage, while keeping the rest of the license text unchanged.
The AGPL's "viral" property inhibits competition without prohibiting it - companies are just scared of accidentally becoming liable to publish private software sources. As far as I know, that's the reason it is banned at Google, Apple and other major companies [1].
That didn't stop AWS though, which is why we now have SSPL and the BSL.
At its core it's a question of control. If I use this library or app, will I be safe? Will I be able to repair it, use it in the future, pay someone to fix it? Will it still be developed in a few years?
FOSS is a great answer to the first few questions, but it fails at the last one. As a user, yes, I would prefer a cloud-protection license, if it means that software will still be developed in a few years time. It's not like I want to use this software to compete with the author, I'm happy not to be allowed to do that.
Well, there's no guarantee that there will be sufficient market in a few years for that software development to continue unless you fork it and do so (or pay to have done) yourself.
Yes, you would be allowed to extend the product. There is no 'it depends', the license is quite short and clear. You have to acquire a commercial license once you go over the revenue threshold, that is all.
I find this much simpler to understand than AGPL/LGPL or the linked EUPL.
You might also be interested in the O'Saasy license (https://osaasy.dev/) which is in the similar vein, but simpler.
HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.
I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.
I'm sorry - what I meant to say is that it is listed in the SPDX (https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html) as a recognized license. The revenue gate means it will never be considered an open-source license by the OSI.
I was a bit surprised to read that there was an OSI-approved license with usage restrictions and wondered if I had missed the memo. But you seem to be correct and it's not OSI-approved and therefore is not generally considered to be an open source license.
Good points, the second is very "dual-licensing" in nature. BUSL is certainly the more "mature" option and there's a higher likelihood people came across it in the wild.
The heat around this particular issue has cooled down a bit and I'm not sure anyone is especially happy with the state of affairs. But questions around AI have sucked a lot of the oxygen from the room for now.
This framing ignores the fact that many people pick up technologies because they want to be able to switch the vendor that is hosting it for them. If I'm hosting a LAMP stack from some shared hosting provider, it's easy for me to just move to a different hosting provider because all the software is open source and anybody can host it. This falls apart when companies choose the BUSL, which is why it's not considered OSI open source.
You're basically describing open core. It's hard to get the balance right. Give too much away for free and people won't buy your full product. Give too little away and they can't really properly evaluate it.
Isn't that what Epic, MiniMax, Z.ai, and others are doing, where a license is free for personal use / low revenue projects, but cost a (steep) fee for commercial use? They don't use dual licenses, but rather a tiered license.
if the EUPL actually closes the SaaS loophole (first time i'm hearing about it though) in a legally grounded way i can see it being used by people outside the EU who say the AGPL is unenforceable/is actually nonfree/is too hard to actually comply with
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
The post seems like a poorly disguised political rant “I don’t like the US, I don’t like the rich” with the license change being an excuse to post it to a technical forum.
Also there’s only one trillionaire and that varies by the stock that day. And it’s not because he abused open source, he’s just the greatest huckster of all time.
Huh. My story is that 15 to 20 years ago, as a young programmer, I read some of Stallman's writings and I was convinced that copyleft was the only way to keep free software free.
Copyleft vs permissive seems like a "paradox of intolerance". There's no paradox. You cut down intolerance where you see it.
But then I'm a big skeptic and I'm always willing to believe that everyone else could be wrong. Which is not a great heuristic, except when you're actually right.
If one licences open source under a strong copyleft licence (say AGPL3) presumably one can open up later and issue under weaker licences (say MIT) if one chooses?
Presumably you can also sell access to it with a full commercial licence if one chooses?
"Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
Did anyone ever claimed, open source was a way to get super rich in money?
It was always about access to source, to study, to tinker, to improve upon. We now have huge ressources of open source software to learn from - indeed a win I say.
And it is not clear at all to me, that the alternative timeline would have been any better, if FOSS and a strong copyleft would have won as developers choice and standard - I rather would expect it to be way more niche - and trillionaires would be as rich as ever.
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
In all honesty, a license matters little to nothing if there is no enforcement behind it. And enforcement needs pockets deep enough to drive a legal process.
A normal person like me? No way, I can't afford the money nor time.
I know GPL have some backing of SFC and FSF, but all others like EUPL, MIT, APL and so forth?
Its a nice thought but copyright is dead in the age of AI. I wish it werent but it is. We're in a period where copyright is only enforced selectively and it will pass.
> We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I have to disagree. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. You take some, you give back. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business. And not having access to it would absolutely not have stopped corporate behemoths from getting where they are, but would have killed many small businesses and startups.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use, unless you are a large company. The code becomes MIT-licensed automatically after a set window to remove maintainability concerns.
The complaint here is, that those business are not necessarily "bringing people into the community", unless you are talking about passive users, who do not contribute. The businesses simply use the stuff built at no cost to rake in big money, while the person, who did the actual work does not see a cent. This is different with copyleft licenses like AGPL. Only that many businesses are so afraid of contributing anything at all, that they often don't want to use AGPL or even GPL licensed software.
The causality is wrong here. You chose to work for free with no reward, and _then_ companies found your work and used it. Presumably you started out working for free because it was intrinsically rewarding (otherwise: stop doing work you hate for free?).
Why? MIT license or public domain helps the most people, because anyone can use it. It being usable by corporations is purely additive, it can't subtract from the number of people you'd help with a copyleft license.
Did you read my comment or you just reply for the sake of it?
I release the code so that people and companies that feel like contributing to the community can use it. Companies that want to take without giving back however are mildly inconvenienced by copyleft.
Distributing (however defined by a given license) unmodified software that is presumably widely available to customers may be a requirement but is also a profoundly uninteresting legal requirement.
I don't think we're disagreeing about anything. I wasn't giving a legal opinion but lawyers, especially at large firms, are a lot more conservative about some matters than I might be for a personal project. If you have deep pockets and provide any path to those pockets, someone could sue you.
I used to work for a very open source-friendly company and, while AGPL wasn't broadly verbotten and I can't quote any publicly available documents, its use was not encouraged in general. (And outside of Linux which was what it was, permissive licenses became much more common for new projects.)
> I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I want to help other people, then giving them the means to do what they want with no real restrictions is "the opposite" of that?
> Companies that want to take without giving back
So this is not about helping anyone else, but about mandating a behavior, even if that behavior is "pay it forward".
How is it “the best”? It’s inapplicable in any jurisdiction which guarantees authors cannot give away their moral rights. So literally any other license which requires attribution is better than CC-0 in that case, for instance.
CC BY-NC-ND is what I'm also increasingly using (for non-code), though not always, and disheartenedly. (And as commented, the non-code context is different.)
I discussed NC in my other comment. But, yes, ND is arguably counter the whole remix culture that was supposedly part of the impetus for Creative Commons in the first place. I do kind of see the logic behind prohibiting, say, a remix of a video or photo in a way that misrepresents the subject. But I also don't particularly like it.
True enough; philosophically, I am still in the BY camp (a.k.a. BSD/MIT/etc.), and I do not particularly care about the NC part, but ND is increasingly important for non-code. But if they could do even the BY properly, it would be a step to the right direction (and, to some extent, I think they're doing that).
ND is important for those who do "authoritative writing" (for a lack of a better term); i.e., when you write with your real name, you do not want nonsense and disinformation associated with your name.
Yes, I think of it more in the context of photo and video integrity, but you can certainly imagine an unscrupulous individual rewriting something and changing the meaning. Of course, I doubt a license would stop that person.
Not really. You're supposed to attribute the original creator. And if I did make major changes/additions I'd find some way to flag that. But you don't have a Github-style change log.
I have been releasing books under Creative Commons for 20+ years. Share alike, no modifications, no commercial reuse. I sell my books via Leanpub (my books https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson) and they can all be read free online (recommended to see if you like them), and if purchased the price can be reset to free, zero cost.
I like CC because I like my books to be read and I still make money. When people choose to pay I use that as a signal for which topics to put future effort into.
My wife has been my editor for ever, so this is a family business.
EDIT: over 20 years ago, I was what I think was Larry Lessig’s second ‘Featured Commoner’ and that was fun because they interviewed me and posted the interview in the CC web site.
I recognize your nickname because I have always enjoyed your comments on Lisp on here, so I checked out the site and disappointingly because of topic and appearance, look like AI slop to me.
As there's no publication date listed, and I'm particularly intolerant to slop, can you recommend a book of yours published before Autumn 2022?
My older books have real photographs on them (e.g., https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp) and newer ones have AI generated covers and some have AI generated figures. Look for books with photos I have taken of nature - those are the old books (exception is Java AI book that is 90% very old material, but has a new AI generated cover).
In the last year I have started vibe coding a lot, but I still take personal ownership of my latest code examples because I set requirements and provide a design, and ask AI coding harnesses to let me run and test the code so I tweak it. Anyway, it still feels like mostly my code and I prefer the new AI + Mark code over what I used to produce.
This has been a strange ride! I learned to program in 1965 and have always loved coding, but it is a weird new world we live in, my friend.
I use no commercial reuse (NC) yet years ago a polite young man from China emailed me letting me know that he was translating my stuff to resell under his name for money. To be honest, I didn’t mind and it made a good story to tell friends and family.
I had something similar happen with a book I wrote through a publisher. I went radio silence on him. Would have required contacting my publisher and I didn't need the hassle.
That's one of the reasons that defining NC broke down in the latest round of CC license revisions. Sure, even in the US, define NC as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. But that doesn't mean some mom-and-pop charity you agree with. It can easily mean a non-profit with goals you totally disagree with. And how about 501(c)(6)s like the NFL? And that's just US tax law.
The problem is that not even Creative Commons was able to come up with a real definition for non-commercial when they last (I think) revised the license. Essentially it means trivial uses (a photo in a grade school assignment) or its contentious in a way that reasonable people can disagree about. What constitutes acceptable usage of a properly attributed photo? Personally, I just properly attribute and stopped worry about whether most presentations constituted commercial use or not.
As both a consumer and producer, NC makes it kind of a pointless untouchable dead end even if I never intend to make a business out of something.
A lot of unintended things could be argued as commecial and who wants to risk it? If I do something purely as ahobby, and along the way make a youtube video about it, and that video pays money, I suddenly become techically in violation of non-commercial. Or I use it in a class where I was paid to teach. Or any number of ordinary possible uses that along the way do involve an exchange of money.
Let alone the freedom to change my mind in 5 years and decide I do want to sell something I made that initially I didn't.
I don't know what I might want to do tomorrow, so best to just not invest any of my time or effort into anything that might bite me later.
ND is 100x worse. Why even bother publishing a design at all then? Just sell your commercial propeietary product, and any users who want the plans you can just sell them more service for support and customization instead.
So I only apply BY-SA to be as similar to classic GPL as possible, and it's no problem at all if there is a business that can't accept the SA terms. It doesn't prevent selling a product, it just prevents being a dick and a thief (well on paper anyway, of course they go ahead and steal anyway but that's a different problem).
If I ever had something where I didn't want anyone else to be able to sell it, I just wouldn't publish it at all in the first place.
I wouldn't use an NC photo on a big company stage or in a marketing campaign. But I sort of convinced myself I wasn't being directly paid for most of the presentations that I did and do, so it was OK enough. And I don't materially rework most photos or text.
For FOSS I personally prefer Apache 2.0 license, as 10 years from now I have no idea what people will need for their projects.
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
Which could make the business untenable. I'm not GP commenter, but I do want to be useful to these too.
And as others have said the deceptive term of "plugging the SaaS loophole" ignores that it means most software cannot be combined with it. Most. By far most.
Sure, some people will say "well fuck that software". And that's a stance. But it ain't freedom.
One problem is that people (mostly--we'll ignore the various edge cases) know what traditional *nix-style distribution looks like. No one knows what network interactions resolve to if someone with deep pockets and/or a grudge wants to file a lawsuit. So better to just run away.
Use an AGPL license if you like but--and I'm not even a lawyer--but I'll probably just walk away. Your software is probably not that interesting to compensate for any risk.
Yup. As I said in another comment "I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else".
Indeed, keeping track of every shader/asset/texture under CC BY-SA 4.0 was a nonstarter.
For media, 3D files, game FX, and icons it is only CC0 Public Domain projects we recommend to folks having fun. Keeping track of every Copyright and Copyleft trolls content demands is just too much work for small hobbies. =3
We also financially support people clearing barriers for future artists and creatives (clean Blender resources.)
One of the problems we found was people reselling other peoples pirated works, or plug-ins for features already in Blender for free. Cons will always con regardless of community intentions. Make something fun and beautiful instead =3
There can be issues with public domain in Europe (moral rights you can't disclaim yada-yada in some non-common law countries). And, as I distantly recall, there were some issues with CC0 related to patents. MIT-0 would probably be my choice absent deep legal research into the topic (though I have discussed public domain as related to software with IP lawyers as related to a book I wrote).
Trademarks are still a possible liability, which is why film sets use gaffers tape or stickers to cover equipment logos and branding. The photo can be CC0, but the coca-cola logo is still owned by a company.
Patent claim sections are the only legal part at the end of the document, and may only cover functional or process facets of an innovation. Software patents are also only valid in certain jurisdictions.
Generally speaking, if something has been time-stamped in the public domain you can challenge a patent for $2k. Since a global patent is around $240k to $600k each, most people would not want to take that bet with archive.org active.
The Patent first-to-file changes under the US system may have altered the 17 organizations disclosure limit rules, but as far back as I can recall any patented technology older than 19 years is almost certainly public domain. =3
Yes, especially in an actual commercial context (e.g. an ad on a billboard) companies are or should be very careful. I've had panicked last minute emails from organizations where some CC photo of mine was being slated to be used. I've said yes of course as they were usually some form of worthwhile charitable organization.
I did even get a check once from a magazine but it was Canadian so that was very cute. (Sorry to any Canadians in the audience.)
But there are a lot of, often unclear, rules related to publicity and model rights that are by no means clear across geographies. Even leaving aside Eiffel Tower light displays, I'm sure a lot of the photos I've taken in Europe and put up on Flickr or Facebook could be an issue if someone really wanted to pursue it. Organizations do often have disclaimers as part of event registrations as well but they're pretty pro-forma and a lawyer could probably argue that there was no meeting of the minds in any contract.
I am mostly just an anti-contaminating license proponent. Porting to multiple platforms gets complicated if you include a 3rd party commercial library with a project that on linking demands it also become publicly accessible.
For example, if someone wants to do something creative... they shouldn't have to cite 400 different peoples licenses. That isn't sustainable or fun.
I will stick with Apache 2.0, but understand different folks have other use-cases =3
That is why the FSF invented just one GPL, and said everyone should use this one or later. Then when they invented another one, it was automatically compatible. This way, the license is compatible, and you don't have to give up any freedoms.
GPL and LGPL works for a lot of people, but becomes a persistent issue when porting to other OS. They both still become a contaminating license if you have to static link something, embed 3rd party blobs, or even use icons for a consistent user interface experience.
Having a less restrictive FOSS compatible license that doesn't obligate people to modify the general purpose libraries for their edge case has proven important.
GPL only truly makes sense if targeting an OS supporting shared-object library paradigms. This is part of the reason why 95% of commercial Applications are running in an emulated/wrapper on the nix platforms.
The year of the Linux Desktop is still a ways off, and the foundational library structures are under constant upgrade or permutation. Snap/Flatpak/AppImage and Docker/RancherVM were all designed to try and mitigate the compatibility chaos of perpetual nix Beta release cultures.
It has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages similar to the Butterfly Effect bugs when something with the same name slightly changes behavior. =3
This, for some reason, has become a controversial idea — as evidenced by your comment being downvoted.
I don’t understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects of open-source software entirely. If your main goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead.
If people have a rational self-interest in helping build great works, than the projects simply manifest out of necessity. There is zero benefit in assuming everything is a zero-sum game.
With billions of people online someone is always having the best or worst day of their lives. I rather people be honest about what they think, and trust respectful disagreement is welcome. Have a great day =3
Yes, that's what I mean. I have used open source software before, and deployed it and so on, but no one has ever offered me to work 1 day a week or something like that during my job hours on an open source project, contributing something. Maybe at a future job.
> it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work
It's an idea as old as any:
The freedom to restrict the freedom of others, is it really a freedom?
It is a tiresome debate. People can argue about it until the sun sets without reaching an agreement. Better to be clear about which kind of freedom you mean, and respect the choice of others.
Plenty of businesses have been started around free software without necessarily restricting the freedoms of others. It is often argued that this constitutes a better approximation of a truly free market than the entry barriers intellectual property law can put up.
Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
Why does it have to be forced? Why can't murder just be legal and if you want to murder that's fine and if you don't, that's fine too...
It was not forced charity from the original author. They were free to choose any license. The original author is the only one in the position to choose to be charitable or not. No one else's opinion on charity matters.
Rather being thoughtful and principled enough to choose a copyleft license is the truest charity of all and the most valuable for all other consumers forever after.
It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
If I get something from you and the only terms are not money but simply attribute and share-alike, that is not some burden.
That's like saying the only terms are you can have this for free and you can use it for any purpose you want, but just promise not to punch me in the face. "What? Outrageous! It's totally unreasonable to make it a condition enforced by law that I can't punch you in the face and still take your stuff."
>Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical.
>It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
Adding what is effectively an end user copyright DRM submarine under the flag of FOSS is tantamount to sabotage.
I do not see the distinction between copyright and copyleft trolls. They both demand end users give up freedoms to meet a selfish ideal.
If someone wants to control how people use their stuff, than just stop calling it a FOSS work. Some seem very passionate about the subject, but I don't think anyone has ever been murdered over shitty code. =3
"Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
And so it is time to stop messing about with permissive licenses. If corporations don’t want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own."
Funny, my reaction was to just make all my stuff Unlicense instead of MIT.
The EUPL sound like a good idea - preserving some of the ideas of the FSF (copyleft) but in a way that governments and companies can actually use to develop their own software.
Personally I'm still in the BSD camp, but my current ranking is BSD/MIT > EUPL > (L)GPL now.
When open source was becoming a huge thing for everyone to participate in - say 20ish years ago, I always saw a dichotomy that people seemed to gloss over.
You're either writing software for fun and you are happy to give it away. In which case anyone's use of it is to do as they please including make money is just bragging right for you.
Or you write software for a living in which case giving it away for free is dumb. You want to charge maximally for your money making output.
Do these types of things really matter anymore? If you have tokens, given the source is available pretty easy to reimplement with plausible deniability.
Then again, it's not like even before the plagiarising slop machines you couldn't just get around licenses if you were dedicated enough to evil and was comfortable lying about the provenance of the code you're using.
Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.
If you think an LLM can just implement e.g. an alternative to the Linux kernel from scratch (or any other GPL licensed software), you might be falling for the marketing.
Have you seen LLMs build large, stable, pieces of software, that work well, with your own eyes? I have not. I have seen LLMs build small, well-understood things, and I've seen LLMs do super well with extremely well specified problems, but all the rest seems to be marketing (i.e. I couldn't observe or reproduce it).
Edit: I'm not talking about throwaway slop that just needs to run long enough to get funding.
A lot of open source that we used to use as dependencies is trivial. Sometimes you only need 10% of the library.
No one is talking about kernel.
Also, changing license does not prevent you from forking the source code before the change. There are no new libraries with kernel level effort that use uncommon license.
I think there's been a mistake in the thinking that restricting the licensing on open source projects will make the companies that use them as a service would make them contribute.
They don't, the companies just replace the software in question.
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
I hate that some people like to put us all in the same bag. Please don't include me. I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I publish it as such because it's a present to the world at large that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT.
You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please.
Agreed; I mentioned Elon because the post made the reference quite explicit by saying "trillionaires", probably given the context Bezos or Gates would've been better examples though.
Agreed. I don't care if some big tech company uses my work to become even richer, or even if they use my code in some closed software. It doesn't harm me or others, as third parties cannot take away the work I gave to the commons. They may not give to the commons in the way I did, but nobody is any worse off than if the company developed their own software from scratch. So why should I care?
I don't like the phrasing of the EUPL because it says you have rights full stop and then in a later section it says there are actually conditions. For that reason I would not immediately be sure the conditions are even enforceable, other than "this was surely made by lawyers and therefore also surely valid".
Aside from that, it is nice to see Communication counted alongside Distribution; this should have been done from the start IMO.
> I don't like the phrasing of the EUPL because it says you have rights full stop and then in a later section it says there are actually conditions. For that reason I would not immediately be sure the conditions are even enforceable.
Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
> Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
2. Scope of the rights granted by the Licence
The Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive,
sublicensable licence to do the following, for the duration of copyright vested
in the Original Work:
- use the Work in any circumstance and for all usage,
- reproduce the Work,
- modify the Work, and make Derivative Works based upon the Work,
- communicate to the public, including the right to make available or display
the Work or copies thereof to the public and perform publicly, as the case may
be, the Work,
- distribute the Work or copies thereof,
- lend and rent the Work or copies thereof,
- sublicense rights in the Work or copies thereof.
Those rights can be exercised on any media, supports and formats, whether now
known or later invented, as far as the applicable law permits so.
In the countries where moral rights apply, the Licensor waives his right to
exercise his moral right to the extent allowed by law in order to make effective
the licence of the economic rights here above listed.
The Licensor grants to the Licensee royalty-free, non-exclusive usage rights to
any patents held by the Licensor, to the extent necessary to make use of the
rights granted on the Work under this Licence.
This is a lot more rights than just to use and there is absolutely nothing about conditions in this entire section.
There's not even a hint of conditions until three sections later, in section 5 where it starts modifying section 2, which feels messy to me.
>All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
This is not true. Open source is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good thing that open source unlocks.
Also theres not multiple trillionaires in the world, and the one trillionaire we have did that largely by innovating and creating new stuff rather than just leveraging existing OSS for profit...
The current argument AI owners use is that it falls under fair use as "transformative use", so the licence is entirely irrelevant. If that wasn't the case anything trained on GPL code would have to be released under the GPL.
I'm now sure what if any argument they are using in Europe. Most countries here have a "fair dealing" exemption which is similar to USA "fair use", but it doesn't include "transformative use". The closest would be "pastiche", but that wouldn't really cover it.
A license is a waiver of your rights that are enshrined in law and enforced by the government. It can't take away rights that other people are allowed, unless you get them to agree voluntarily in exchange for something they feel is of equal or greater value.
For example you can say someone can only copy this CD if they pay you $10. Ordinarily you're allowed to sue them for copying it, but you're allowed to promise not to sue them, under any condition whatsoever, such as them paying you $10.
But you can't say someone can only resell this CD if they pay you $10. You already don't have the right to sue them for reselling it, so they have no reason to listen to you.
That is a lost cause, because the AI companies are above the law now. Copyright doesn't apply to them, felonies committed by them (via their agents) are not prosecuted, and if the AI bubble were to burst, they would be bailed out because by now, all American pensions and the ETFs of the rest of the world depend on them staying fantastical capital black holes.
But what we still can do is stop programming for free for Big Tech, and this license at least gets us closer toward that goal.
Worth noting that the "escape hatch" clauses in the EUPL that allow converting it into other licenses mean it's only ever as strong as the weakest license it names for such an operation, AKA EPL/MPL/LGPL.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
You are describing the compatibility clause as if it's settled that the EUPL simply allows you to convert to a compatible license. The compatibility clause is an unfortunate ambiguity, but it's not the intention of the license authors to lose strong copyleft and SaaS loophole protections this way. See for example here [1] [2] [3].
[1] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di...
[2] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/ho...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45422512
The way I read all of that is that:
* BigTech can take your EUPL library and write a small wrapper in MPL
* such a wrapper can therefore be used in any project, even a closed one that is a network service.
* however all of that still qualifies as distributing EUPL, and the EUPL core would still need to be made available under EUPL (whether modified or not).
Saying that since I have an MPL wrapper then all the code is MPL is not allowed.
So you can't just copy all the code and change the license to MPL.
This is basically AGPL without virality and anti-tivo, correct?
On the face of it, no it doesn't say that. It just says the combined work can be MPL. Then someone can take that MPL work, and distribute it without source code because the MPL allows that. It explicitly says any conflict between the EUPL and the MPL shall be resolved in favor of the MPL.
This isn’t the intent, and will hopefully be fixed/clarified in version 1.3: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di...
A “conflict” is intended to mean the case that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.
> But as none of the compatible licenses come into conflict with the EUPL *by prohibiting the essential points* of publication of the source code and coverage of remote distribution (closing the SaaS loophole), these obligations, that are the core of the "reciprocal" condition, persist for the derivatives concerned.
aka: the compatible licenses do not put additional restrictions, so no, it is not MPL.
also, from the license:
> this Distribution or Communication can be done under the terms of this Compatible Licence..
So you are allowed distribution, not relicensing.
To simplify It seems to me that:
* GPL will automatically make something GPL.
* EUPL will automatically make something selectively dual-licensing. parts EUPL, parts whatever.
Also do note that EUPL is the first license to explicitly state that any issues fall under EU(Belgium) law, so EU has the last say on its license.
I read a few dozen comments to see if I could get an answer to this in the thread, but it does appear to be a case where we're highlighting one of the risks of picking up a new license: folks don't agree on how to interpret it.
I'm very curious why the author didn't simply use AGPL, but I haven't done a deep dive on the text of the EUPL, so maybe that's the next step.
EDIT: Went to go research this. First thing I learned is the license has been around since 2007. It was updated in 2017. So maybe scratch my comment about it being a new license!
This article would do better if it simply enumerated the problems with the LGPL and addressed how this new license which I've never heard of addresses those problems. This hinting and alluding might make great SEO, but that's fit for neither the audience of people producing software, nor for HN.
Here's the license text if someone wants to do the work: https://spdx.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2.html#licenseText
This is the actual license text, in English: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/file...
Other languages can be found here: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eu...
I do appreciate the link to the article and came via HN. I don’t think you can speak for either the audience of people producing software nor for HN.
Another article comparing LGPL and this license sounds good and I am interested in that as well. This article though is a good nudge to start thinking about licensing.
The article seems pretty clear that the LGPL is too weak compared to the EUPL for this author, and one of the main concerns is the "SaaS loophole" which I assume would be addressed by the AGPL but also seems addressed by the EUPL.
But the EUPL itself says that derivative works may be distributed under the LGPL instead, as long as those works are derived from both a EUPL and LGPL parent. This seems kinda trivial to abuse and the author should have noticed this clause if that was their main concern.
The EUPL obligations still apply, unless they specifically conflict with the other license. There is some dispute on how exactly that is to be interpreted, but hopefully it will be clarified in version 1.3: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di...
A “conflict” here is intended to mean that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.
I don't understand how that's supposed to work - then you can't distribute under the compatible license; only under a weird hybrid of that license and non-conflicting EUPL terms. Seems to defeat the purpose of the compatibility clause?
Yes, I agree, it’s unclear how the EUPL requirements would propagate for a composite work that gets relicensed under the compatible license, without changing the latter.
Huh, that's a pretty massive loophole. Pretty much makes the whole license irrelevant.
What are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing?
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
I think it definitely hurts adoption. No hobbyist or experimenter wants to delve into legalities head first by first having to understand the licensing terms of software, whereas permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are easily-understood and familiar.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
Will hobbyists and experimenters that has no interest in understanding licenses go out of their way to locate specific licensed code, or are they more likely to just ask the AI/agent to cobble together stuff without care of any licenses?
"The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business."
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)
Excuse me but as both a hobbyist and commercial software developer I say that the gpl (any version) is quite simple enough. There is no need to go all the way to bsd/mit just to get safety and clarity and freedom from encumberance.
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
right but the GPL explicitly allows commercial use, which isn't what the original comment was about ("use in production requires a fee"); i agree with the previous comment that such a license is hard to assess for a hobbyist, but the GPL is not such a license (hence yes it's simple enough)
Even though it's technically allowed, a lot of companies are afraid of it. Not GPL2 - that's used a lot, because tivoization lets them ignore the spirit of it. But they fear GPL3 and AGPL.
You can also just do a crayon license. "All rights reserved, noncommercial use allowed." Nobody's stopping you. If and when Debian wants to ship your package, ask them for proper legal advice about changing it, they have lawyers.
I'm not sure there's a lot of fear of GPLv3 out there. Linus just didn't want to adopt it for Linux.
AGPL is a different matter because companies are unsure of the boundaries between their own proprietary code and any AGPL code they're using.
Companies that make physical products are afraid of GPLv3 because of the anti-tivoization clause. Cloud companies aren't, but they're afraid of the AGPLv3, because of the anti-cloud-tivoization clause.
In practice AGPL might achieve that. It does allow commercial use, but a lot of big businesses, especially big tech, will not use it. On the other hand it is a clear, OSI approved, FOSS license.
Well, the language is clear enough. What's not clear are the implications of the language. And, honestly, the sensible default for a lot of companies is just not to go there. And big companies tend not to operate on hopes and prayers to avoid distracting and expensive lawsuits. Without going into details I have enough familiarity with the space to know that a lot of open source-friendly companies either avoid AGPL entirely or discourage its use.
Yes. The clean way is to use the strongest copyleft license you can find, probably AGPL. Even if corporations are technically allowed to use it, they don't want to risk touching it with a three-meter pole. Then you offer to sell them a different license. Hobbyists and OSS folks usually have no issue with AGPL.
Do you have data on that last bit, or just a guess? As a hobbyist and OSS developer I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else.
If you don't want to give people downstream of you my source code, I'm happy to sell you a commercial license.
This means you have only solved the problem for large companies, and specifically those who have money and who have a functioning procurement system that's developer-driven. Which is a very narrow use case.
Also relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596403
But that's the whole point of dual AGPL + commercial licensing.
Sure, but for anything except large companies it has a bootstrapping problem. I'm absolutely not going to use AGPL software in a test one-person trying to sell a service kind of deal. So if it takes off, I'm already on a non-AGPL stack, so why reach out at that point to get a commercial license for software I don't even use?
And hell, even without money involved, I'm not going to make a hobby project with AGPL software either. Not only may I have small parts of the project I've not opensourced, but AGPL is untested in how far the virality goes. Are my backup cronjobs in scope? I certainly don't want to be the test case for this. Even if I win against an AGPL troll, I'll still lose.
The usual way I've seen it work is using the AGPL.
AGPL doesn't bar use in commercial production, but the requirements usually scare off any corporate from using it in production.
I like the AGPL but don’t often use it. (I did recently license two coding harnesses I wrote as AGPL.)
A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do. In the USA the collusion between government and big tech is starting to smell a little bit like fascism. Sorry, I have only complaints, not any good answers.
>A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do.
Is the concern that anybody will be earning money on your software (just that), or that you won't get any money, or that they will earn money and don't give back the code?
If the company earns money and opens the code, is that OK for you?
Just for you and for everyone information, Richard Stallman himself told people not only to sell their own software, but the software written by others as well!
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
AGPL, just as all other GPL, does not prohibit selling the software. If you goal is to make your software unsellable, please use your own licensing terms (there's nothing wrong with that!!!)
> Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
Yes, it's called language. Contracts are nothing but text, so why don't you just write down what you think should be the rules around using your software by other people?
I get the urge of a lot of developers to pick an existing third party license from the shelf, but just as you can write your own code - and are not required to use ready-made libraries/frameworks - you can write your own open source license for your software.
If you are trying to monetize your software, the biggest factor is whether or not your customer trusts you.
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
>MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
You've chosen the license which allows "stealing", why did you do that if you don't like that? Nobody forced you to do that, I hope.
How can I trust the person who published their code with the strict legal terms, but becomes sad when other people use their code exactly as the author said it could be used?
Every once in a while I read discussions about licenses, and puzzled every time why the author of the software chooses free license when the freedom of copying and distribution is seem to them as pirating. If the license is not suitable for you, why choose it?!
Licenses are about legal possibilities. You're looking for social/moral terms instead if I understood you correctly (something like CoC).
After many years of thinking about this, I have arrived in the exact same place. I think the SQLite team learned this in the early days, and have done very well for themselves, giving away all of their source code for the product itself, free of charge, and then having folks pay for consulting and enhancements, which they remain particularly strong at because of their closed, comprehensive regression test suite.
How does MIT build any more trust than a copyleft licence like AGPL? At the very least AGPL stops people "stealing" your work without contributing back their changes?
AGPL does not do anything to force people to contribute their changes back. They have to make the changes available, however that's very different from actually contributing back. It is not hard to make a low quality contribution that the upstream would for very good reason refuse even though it 'works'.
The poster child for this is chromium which is GPL because it has clear and obvious roots in the old KHTML code of 20 some years ago. In theory you can contribute to Google movement and I suppose some people do but realistically Google controls it completely and they will do whatever they want. even though the source is available it is effectively not a contribution back.
By "contribute back" I was referring more generally to the commons.
The chrome example actually proves my point, the KDE project, or anyone for that matter, can take the changes Google made to their code. If KHTML was MIT it's likely that wouldn't be the case
Practically though, there is no difference. The KDE project has lost control over the web browser, even though they started it. It's an all or nothing. They can take all of chrome or they can take nothing. There is no in between. If KDE and Google disagree on the direction of the web browser, Google wins. There is no control. There's no advantage to open source, other than it's free. It may as well be a closed source project for all the good it does.
You can't be stealing what is given away for free. Developers that choose copileft license want to see al changes shared under the same license. Developers that choose permissive want their code to be of use to as many developers as possible for whatever they want to use it for.
Almost no business relationships builds trust based on source code. It's based on whether you deliver what the other side wants.
No success yet, but I recently found BUSL - used by Terraform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
Once you decide on a non-free license, in the FSF sense, in the DFSG sense, and in the open source sense, does the details of the license matter much? You want as many people to pay as possible, and you do not wish for others to compete with you providing this software.
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
It doesn’t have to be binary. A license like this allows for 99% of the personal and commercial use that a project will ever see, while giving the author leverage over large corporations - which is the main gripe people have. It is not ideal for libraries or things that would be redistributed, but then you have other options.
Some things in life are binary. You either allow people to build new products and businesses on your work or you don't. Would you allow me to extend the product with new features? "It depends" is a form of "no". It is not a position to sustainably work from.
If you frame the licensing space as for either personal or commercial use, perhaps your point of view makes sense, but this is not a useful framing for most people, and it is specifically not something the open source community cares about.
If you wish to keep leverage over others then you do not wish to have them compete with you on the same product. That is a valid position to have, but it is squarely on the non-free part of the licensing spectrum. You don't want to play within the open source community and they don't want to play with you. All anyone owe others is to make that clear.
This is why open source is rapidly becoming obsolete ;) There have been source-available/fair source/whatever-you-name-it approaches before.
They were attacked by OSI zealots every time because it's not real open source. Which is true, but the unsaid - or well, only sometimes mentioned - other half is that these open source enthusiasts would you rather have a bog standard all-rights-reserved commercial licence than a relatively open licence without the four freedoms!
I can't claim to read other people's thoughts, but my hunch is that this happens because it's too "close" to an open source licence so they view it as competition, while they view commercial software as either a straightforward enemy or they don't care about it whatsoever.
The history aside, this approach just makes the open source community more and more irrelevant each day, especially with the advent of "vibecode your own dependencies up". The 4 freedoms come from a place where they were about users, but gigantic corporations have shoehorned themselves into being users, and instead of the community defending against it, they think the freedom to exploit the maintainers' work while contributing nothing back is more important than keeping the commons free and shared. :P
Only siths think in absolutes.
The freedom to host open-source software is more important than contributing back to the original project: it's where the actual value of open source comes from. Would you host your website behind Apache or Nginx if you couldn't just switch providers and keep the same web server? Would you ever pick up Postgres or MySQL if you couldn't actually pay a company to host that for you, knowing that if they screwed up, you could switch to a provider that did it better?
From a pure engineering reliability perspective, coupling your technology choice to your vendor gives that vendor too much leverage (as we've seen with, for example, VMware).
This isn't about defending the big companies at all. It's about defending the right of hosting providers to compete on hosting a variety of software. In the alternative world of entirely commercial licenses, or entirely BUSL-styled licenses, you would be shackled to the specific vendors that happened to create the technology that you wanted to leverage. This is a scenario where the customer invariably loses.
> or entirely BUSL-styled licenses
Let's not get everything mixed up here - I singled out BUSL exactly because it does not prevent competing services, especially at small scale. In fact it would encourage small business and individual usage vs big cloud providers. It also has a conversion clause, so worst case scenario you have a slightly outdated MIT-licensed release to pick up from.
The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.
That said, indeed it might not be an ideal choice for that kind of cloud-hosted software if you want to maximize adoption.
> The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.
To support sibling comment: no it doesn't?
But your point about the revenue cut off in the BUSL is worthwhile (assuming we're talking about a licensor that is leveraging the additional use grant). I just disagree that it's a remedy because it basically punishes a business for being successful, by changing the rules upon which it was built. I'd be very curious to hear of anybody who has licensed software under the BUSL and has ended up getting a license from companies that meet those revenue thresholds.
It's worth noting that the BUSL, by default, with no additional use grant, prohibits the use of the software in production. So I actually think you have the two licenses reversed. The BUSL prohibits production use and competing services by default unless an additional use grant is specified and then it is only allowed under the revenue threshold specified in the additional use grant.
The AGPL has no prohibition whatsoever on the deployment of competing services.
It is expected that you use the license with an Additional Use Grant. For example, Hashicorp says:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.
Or, for a revenue threshold:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided that your use is solely for an application or system developed or operated by an entity (including its affiliates) with total annual gross revenues of less than $10,000,000 USD.
That is the whole point - you can define your own limits for commercial usage, while keeping the rest of the license text unchanged.
The AGPL's "viral" property inhibits competition without prohibiting it - companies are just scared of accidentally becoming liable to publish private software sources. As far as I know, that's the reason it is banned at Google, Apple and other major companies [1].
That didn't stop AWS though, which is why we now have SSPL and the BSL.
[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
The AGPL doesn't prevent competing services.
At its core it's a question of control. If I use this library or app, will I be safe? Will I be able to repair it, use it in the future, pay someone to fix it? Will it still be developed in a few years?
FOSS is a great answer to the first few questions, but it fails at the last one. As a user, yes, I would prefer a cloud-protection license, if it means that software will still be developed in a few years time. It's not like I want to use this software to compete with the author, I'm happy not to be allowed to do that.
Well, there's no guarantee that there will be sufficient market in a few years for that software development to continue unless you fork it and do so (or pay to have done) yourself.
Yes, you would be allowed to extend the product. There is no 'it depends', the license is quite short and clear. You have to acquire a commercial license once you go over the revenue threshold, that is all.
I find this much simpler to understand than AGPL/LGPL or the linked EUPL.
You might also be interested in the O'Saasy license (https://osaasy.dev/) which is in the similar vein, but simpler.
HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.
I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.
Looks nice. Two main differences:
- BUSL is OSI-approved and listed in SPDX, so corporate lawyers won't be scared away by it: https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html
- With BUSL the restriction is revenue-based. You can still create competing products, but would have to pay a licensing fee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License:
I'm sorry - what I meant to say is that it is listed in the SPDX (https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html) as a recognized license. The revenue gate means it will never be considered an open-source license by the OSI.
> BUSL is OSI-approved
Of course it isn‘t.
I was a bit surprised to read that there was an OSI-approved license with usage restrictions and wondered if I had missed the memo. But you seem to be correct and it's not OSI-approved and therefore is not generally considered to be an open source license.
Good points, the second is very "dual-licensing" in nature. BUSL is certainly the more "mature" option and there's a higher likelihood people came across it in the wild.
The heat around this particular issue has cooled down a bit and I'm not sure anyone is especially happy with the state of affairs. But questions around AI have sucked a lot of the oxygen from the room for now.
This framing ignores the fact that many people pick up technologies because they want to be able to switch the vendor that is hosting it for them. If I'm hosting a LAMP stack from some shared hosting provider, it's easy for me to just move to a different hosting provider because all the software is open source and anybody can host it. This falls apart when companies choose the BUSL, which is why it's not considered OSI open source.
You're basically describing open core. It's hard to get the balance right. Give too much away for free and people won't buy your full product. Give too little away and they can't really properly evaluate it.
Isn't that what Epic, MiniMax, Z.ai, and others are doing, where a license is free for personal use / low revenue projects, but cost a (steep) fee for commercial use? They don't use dual licenses, but rather a tiered license.
maybe?
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International
Using EUPL is mostly a way to signal that you want to use a license grounded in EU law, not in US law. That's at least the way I've looked at it.
if the EUPL actually closes the SaaS loophole (first time i'm hearing about it though) in a legally grounded way i can see it being used by people outside the EU who say the AGPL is unenforceable/is actually nonfree/is too hard to actually comply with
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
The post seems like a poorly disguised political rant “I don’t like the US, I don’t like the rich” with the license change being an excuse to post it to a technical forum.
Also there’s only one trillionaire and that varies by the stock that day. And it’s not because he abused open source, he’s just the greatest huckster of all time.
"favored by the NPM package ecosystem"
Huh. My story is that 15 to 20 years ago, as a young programmer, I read some of Stallman's writings and I was convinced that copyleft was the only way to keep free software free.
Copyleft vs permissive seems like a "paradox of intolerance". There's no paradox. You cut down intolerance where you see it.
But then I'm a big skeptic and I'm always willing to believe that everyone else could be wrong. Which is not a great heuristic, except when you're actually right.
For hardware/electronics I also recommend looking at the CERN OHL licenses.
They cover a very specific niche GPL/AGPL/etc. do not cover properly.
If one licences open source under a strong copyleft licence (say AGPL3) presumably one can open up later and issue under weaker licences (say MIT) if one chooses?
Presumably you can also sell access to it with a full commercial licence if one chooses?
This works as long as you're the only copyright holder. If other developers contribute, weakening the license requires their approval.
It's also possible if contributors agree to waive rights to their contributions, thus having multiple contributors and a single rights holder.
"Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
Did anyone ever claimed, open source was a way to get super rich in money?
It was always about access to source, to study, to tinker, to improve upon. We now have huge ressources of open source software to learn from - indeed a win I say.
And it is not clear at all to me, that the alternative timeline would have been any better, if FOSS and a strong copyleft would have won as developers choice and standard - I rather would expect it to be way more niche - and trillionaires would be as rich as ever.
https://github.com/daegalus/daegalus/blob/main/licensing-phi...
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
In all honesty, a license matters little to nothing if there is no enforcement behind it. And enforcement needs pockets deep enough to drive a legal process.
A normal person like me? No way, I can't afford the money nor time.
I know GPL have some backing of SFC and FSF, but all others like EUPL, MIT, APL and so forth?
Its a nice thought but copyright is dead in the age of AI. I wish it werent but it is. We're in a period where copyright is only enforced selectively and it will pass.
> We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I have to disagree. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. You take some, you give back. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business. And not having access to it would absolutely not have stopped corporate behemoths from getting where they are, but would have killed many small businesses and startups.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use, unless you are a large company. The code becomes MIT-licensed automatically after a set window to remove maintainability concerns.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License
The complaint here is, that those business are not necessarily "bringing people into the community", unless you are talking about passive users, who do not contribute. The businesses simply use the stuff built at no cost to rake in big money, while the person, who did the actual work does not see a cent. This is different with copyleft licenses like AGPL. Only that many businesses are so afraid of contributing anything at all, that they often don't want to use AGPL or even GPL licensed software.
But why should I work for free so that companies can fire my fellow human beings?
The causality is wrong here. You chose to work for free with no reward, and _then_ companies found your work and used it. Presumably you started out working for free because it was intrinsically rewarding (otherwise: stop doing work you hate for free?).
I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.
Why? MIT license or public domain helps the most people, because anyone can use it. It being usable by corporations is purely additive, it can't subtract from the number of people you'd help with a copyleft license.
Putting people out of jobs doesn't necessarily help them?
Huh? You release code so that people will have to rewrite it?
I really don't understand what your goal would be in releasing code at all, then.
Did you read my comment or you just reply for the sake of it?
I release the code so that people and companies that feel like contributing to the community can use it. Companies that want to take without giving back however are mildly inconvenienced by copyleft.
How? If they don't make (and distribute) changes.
Because they cannot distribute the software itself or use it for online services with AGPL
Distributing (however defined by a given license) unmodified software that is presumably widely available to customers may be a requirement but is also a profoundly uninteresting legal requirement.
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
I don't think we're disagreeing about anything. I wasn't giving a legal opinion but lawyers, especially at large firms, are a lot more conservative about some matters than I might be for a personal project. If you have deep pockets and provide any path to those pockets, someone could sue you.
I used to work for a very open source-friendly company and, while AGPL wasn't broadly verbotten and I can't quote any publicly available documents, its use was not encouraged in general. (And outside of Linux which was what it was, permissive licenses became much more common for new projects.)
Could you please take my question at face value?
> I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I want to help other people, then giving them the means to do what they want with no real restrictions is "the opposite" of that?
> Companies that want to take without giving back
So this is not about helping anyone else, but about mandating a behavior, even if that behavior is "pay it forward".
Best license:
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
How is it “the best”? It’s inapplicable in any jurisdiction which guarantees authors cannot give away their moral rights. So literally any other license which requires attribution is better than CC-0 in that case, for instance.
Perfect, I've been looking for a license I can get behind for new projects. I just made a few tweaks https://aeupl.org/
CC BY-NC-ND is what I'm also increasingly using (for non-code), though not always, and disheartenedly. (And as commented, the non-code context is different.)
ND is usually a bit sad, as it makes the thing a dead-end.
The magic of the web has always been that things would continuously morph through being reinterpreted and all, and that just doesn't happen with ND.
I can of course see the valid reasons why one would pick that license, but it's still.. kinda sad that it's culturally dead.
I discussed NC in my other comment. But, yes, ND is arguably counter the whole remix culture that was supposedly part of the impetus for Creative Commons in the first place. I do kind of see the logic behind prohibiting, say, a remix of a video or photo in a way that misrepresents the subject. But I also don't particularly like it.
True enough; philosophically, I am still in the BY camp (a.k.a. BSD/MIT/etc.), and I do not particularly care about the NC part, but ND is increasingly important for non-code. But if they could do even the BY properly, it would be a step to the right direction (and, to some extent, I think they're doing that).
Huh. Can you elaborate why you view ND as increasingly important, whereas NC bothers you less?
Because for me, it would be the exact other way round.
ND is important for those who do "authoritative writing" (for a lack of a better term); i.e., when you write with your real name, you do not want nonsense and disinformation associated with your name.
Ah, yeah, in the meanwhile I've also googled your nick and saw that you're in academics.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Yes, I think of it more in the context of photo and video integrity, but you can certainly imagine an unscrupulous individual rewriting something and changing the meaning. Of course, I doubt a license would stop that person.
Doesn't CC BY require to say what you changed?
If a person would ignore one part of a license, they may also ignore other parts.
... Then why would they care that it's ND?
Not really. You're supposed to attribute the original creator. And if I did make major changes/additions I'd find some way to flag that. But you don't have a Github-style change log.
Not really, but you can't just distribute a changed version as if it were original. That's just as illegal as if it were ND.
I have been releasing books under Creative Commons for 20+ years. Share alike, no modifications, no commercial reuse. I sell my books via Leanpub (my books https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson) and they can all be read free online (recommended to see if you like them), and if purchased the price can be reset to free, zero cost.
I like CC because I like my books to be read and I still make money. When people choose to pay I use that as a signal for which topics to put future effort into.
My wife has been my editor for ever, so this is a family business.
EDIT: over 20 years ago, I was what I think was Larry Lessig’s second ‘Featured Commoner’ and that was fun because they interviewed me and posted the interview in the CC web site.
I recognize your nickname because I have always enjoyed your comments on Lisp on here, so I checked out the site and disappointingly because of topic and appearance, look like AI slop to me.
As there's no publication date listed, and I'm particularly intolerant to slop, can you recommend a book of yours published before Autumn 2022?
My older books have real photographs on them (e.g., https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp) and newer ones have AI generated covers and some have AI generated figures. Look for books with photos I have taken of nature - those are the old books (exception is Java AI book that is 90% very old material, but has a new AI generated cover).
In the last year I have started vibe coding a lot, but I still take personal ownership of my latest code examples because I set requirements and provide a design, and ask AI coding harnesses to let me run and test the code so I tweak it. Anyway, it still feels like mostly my code and I prefer the new AI + Mark code over what I used to produce.
This has been a strange ride! I learned to program in 1965 and have always loved coding, but it is a weird new world we live in, my friend.
NC is a huge pain as it can be difficult to define commercial use, and it's often defined differently in different countries.
https://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
https://www.techdirt.com/2014/03/27/german-court-says-creati...
And NC doesn’t always work.
I use no commercial reuse (NC) yet years ago a polite young man from China emailed me letting me know that he was translating my stuff to resell under his name for money. To be honest, I didn’t mind and it made a good story to tell friends and family.
I had something similar happen with a book I wrote through a publisher. I went radio silence on him. Would have required contacting my publisher and I didn't need the hassle.
That's one of the reasons that defining NC broke down in the latest round of CC license revisions. Sure, even in the US, define NC as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. But that doesn't mean some mom-and-pop charity you agree with. It can easily mean a non-profit with goals you totally disagree with. And how about 501(c)(6)s like the NFL? And that's just US tax law.
The problem is that not even Creative Commons was able to come up with a real definition for non-commercial when they last (I think) revised the license. Essentially it means trivial uses (a photo in a grade school assignment) or its contentious in a way that reasonable people can disagree about. What constitutes acceptable usage of a properly attributed photo? Personally, I just properly attribute and stopped worry about whether most presentations constituted commercial use or not.
BY-SA
As both a consumer and producer, NC makes it kind of a pointless untouchable dead end even if I never intend to make a business out of something.
A lot of unintended things could be argued as commecial and who wants to risk it? If I do something purely as ahobby, and along the way make a youtube video about it, and that video pays money, I suddenly become techically in violation of non-commercial. Or I use it in a class where I was paid to teach. Or any number of ordinary possible uses that along the way do involve an exchange of money.
Let alone the freedom to change my mind in 5 years and decide I do want to sell something I made that initially I didn't.
I don't know what I might want to do tomorrow, so best to just not invest any of my time or effort into anything that might bite me later.
ND is 100x worse. Why even bother publishing a design at all then? Just sell your commercial propeietary product, and any users who want the plans you can just sell them more service for support and customization instead.
So I only apply BY-SA to be as similar to classic GPL as possible, and it's no problem at all if there is a business that can't accept the SA terms. It doesn't prevent selling a product, it just prevents being a dick and a thief (well on paper anyway, of course they go ahead and steal anyway but that's a different problem).
If I ever had something where I didn't want anyone else to be able to sell it, I just wouldn't publish it at all in the first place.
I wouldn't use an NC photo on a big company stage or in a marketing campaign. But I sort of convinced myself I wasn't being directly paid for most of the presentations that I did and do, so it was OK enough. And I don't materially rework most photos or text.
For FOSS I personally prefer Apache 2.0 license, as 10 years from now I have no idea what people will need for their projects.
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
>Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work
Copyleft doesn't say that they can't, it says they have to make their changes available
Which could make the business untenable. I'm not GP commenter, but I do want to be useful to these too.
And as others have said the deceptive term of "plugging the SaaS loophole" ignores that it means most software cannot be combined with it. Most. By far most.
Sure, some people will say "well fuck that software". And that's a stance. But it ain't freedom.
One problem is that people (mostly--we'll ignore the various edge cases) know what traditional *nix-style distribution looks like. No one knows what network interactions resolve to if someone with deep pockets and/or a grudge wants to file a lawsuit. So better to just run away.
Use an AGPL license if you like but--and I'm not even a lawyer--but I'll probably just walk away. Your software is probably not that interesting to compensate for any risk.
Yup. As I said in another comment "I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else".
Indeed, keeping track of every shader/asset/texture under CC BY-SA 4.0 was a nonstarter.
For media, 3D files, game FX, and icons it is only CC0 Public Domain projects we recommend to folks having fun. Keeping track of every Copyright and Copyleft trolls content demands is just too much work for small hobbies. =3
We also financially support people clearing barriers for future artists and creatives (clean Blender resources.)
https://polyhaven.com/
And procedural textures with bake export (actually made Blender usable for mere mortals):
https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary
One of the problems we found was people reselling other peoples pirated works, or plug-ins for features already in Blender for free. Cons will always con regardless of community intentions. Make something fun and beautiful instead =3
There can be issues with public domain in Europe (moral rights you can't disclaim yada-yada in some non-common law countries). And, as I distantly recall, there were some issues with CC0 related to patents. MIT-0 would probably be my choice absent deep legal research into the topic (though I have discussed public domain as related to software with IP lawyers as related to a book I wrote).
Trademarks are still a possible liability, which is why film sets use gaffers tape or stickers to cover equipment logos and branding. The photo can be CC0, but the coca-cola logo is still owned by a company.
Patent claim sections are the only legal part at the end of the document, and may only cover functional or process facets of an innovation. Software patents are also only valid in certain jurisdictions.
Generally speaking, if something has been time-stamped in the public domain you can challenge a patent for $2k. Since a global patent is around $240k to $600k each, most people would not want to take that bet with archive.org active.
The Patent first-to-file changes under the US system may have altered the 17 organizations disclosure limit rules, but as far back as I can recall any patented technology older than 19 years is almost certainly public domain. =3
Yes, especially in an actual commercial context (e.g. an ad on a billboard) companies are or should be very careful. I've had panicked last minute emails from organizations where some CC photo of mine was being slated to be used. I've said yes of course as they were usually some form of worthwhile charitable organization.
I did even get a check once from a magazine but it was Canadian so that was very cute. (Sorry to any Canadians in the audience.)
But there are a lot of, often unclear, rules related to publicity and model rights that are by no means clear across geographies. Even leaving aside Eiffel Tower light displays, I'm sure a lot of the photos I've taken in Europe and put up on Flickr or Facebook could be an issue if someone really wanted to pursue it. Organizations do often have disclaimers as part of event registrations as well but they're pretty pro-forma and a lawyer could probably argue that there was no meeting of the minds in any contract.
I am mostly just an anti-contaminating license proponent. Porting to multiple platforms gets complicated if you include a 3rd party commercial library with a project that on linking demands it also become publicly accessible.
For example, if someone wants to do something creative... they shouldn't have to cite 400 different peoples licenses. That isn't sustainable or fun.
I will stick with Apache 2.0, but understand different folks have other use-cases =3
That is why the FSF invented just one GPL, and said everyone should use this one or later. Then when they invented another one, it was automatically compatible. This way, the license is compatible, and you don't have to give up any freedoms.
GPL and LGPL works for a lot of people, but becomes a persistent issue when porting to other OS. They both still become a contaminating license if you have to static link something, embed 3rd party blobs, or even use icons for a consistent user interface experience.
Having a less restrictive FOSS compatible license that doesn't obligate people to modify the general purpose libraries for their edge case has proven important.
GPL only truly makes sense if targeting an OS supporting shared-object library paradigms. This is part of the reason why 95% of commercial Applications are running in an emulated/wrapper on the nix platforms.
The year of the Linux Desktop is still a ways off, and the foundational library structures are under constant upgrade or permutation. Snap/Flatpak/AppImage and Docker/RancherVM were all designed to try and mitigate the compatibility chaos of perpetual nix Beta release cultures.
It has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages similar to the Butterfly Effect bugs when something with the same name slightly changes behavior. =3
The GPL excludes system libraries from contamination issues.
LGPL does not allow static linking without disclosure.
It is why the wxWidgets has a license that allows creating monolithic commercial blob dependent binaries for Windows, Linux Gtk/X11, and MacOS.
https://wxwidgets.org/about/licence/
People should not static link GPL/LGPL code to closed source blobs, and expect copyright/copyleft trolls to leave their project violating licenses. =3
This, for some reason, has become a controversial idea — as evidenced by your comment being downvoted.
I don’t understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects of open-source software entirely. If your main goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead.
If people have a rational self-interest in helping build great works, than the projects simply manifest out of necessity. There is zero benefit in assuming everything is a zero-sum game.
With billions of people online someone is always having the best or worst day of their lives. I rather people be honest about what they think, and trust respectful disagreement is welcome. Have a great day =3
I think people getting time sponsored working on FOSS is quite rare. Would like to do that myself, but instead I just develop in my free time.
You mean you have never written or used FOSS applications at work?
I find that very surprising, but I have seen some shops practice clean room coding policies. =3
Yes, that's what I mean. I have used open source software before, and deployed it and so on, but no one has ever offered me to work 1 day a week or something like that during my job hours on an open source project, contributing something. Maybe at a future job.
> it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work
It's an idea as old as any:
The freedom to restrict the freedom of others, is it really a freedom?
It is a tiresome debate. People can argue about it until the sun sets without reaching an agreement. Better to be clear about which kind of freedom you mean, and respect the choice of others.
Plenty of businesses have been started around free software without necessarily restricting the freedoms of others. It is often argued that this constitutes a better approximation of a truly free market than the entry barriers intellectual property law can put up.
Philosophically, I see it as forced charity is no longer a true charity paradox.
Or, a copyright troll is functionally indifferent from a copyleft troll.
It is important to keep the path clear for kids to build their own success stories. =3
Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
Why does it have to be forced? Why can't murder just be legal and if you want to murder that's fine and if you don't, that's fine too...
It was not forced charity from the original author. They were free to choose any license. The original author is the only one in the position to choose to be charitable or not. No one else's opinion on charity matters.
Rather being thoughtful and principled enough to choose a copyleft license is the truest charity of all and the most valuable for all other consumers forever after.
It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
If I get something from you and the only terms are not money but simply attribute and share-alike, that is not some burden.
That's like saying the only terms are you can have this for free and you can use it for any purpose you want, but just promise not to punch me in the face. "What? Outrageous! It's totally unreasonable to make it a condition enforced by law that I can't punch you in the face and still take your stuff."
>Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical.
>It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
Adding what is effectively an end user copyright DRM submarine under the flag of FOSS is tantamount to sabotage.
I do not see the distinction between copyright and copyleft trolls. They both demand end users give up freedoms to meet a selfish ideal.
If someone wants to control how people use their stuff, than just stop calling it a FOSS work. Some seem very passionate about the subject, but I don't think anyone has ever been murdered over shitty code. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
Quelle horreur!
Ok buddy whatever you say.
These arguments are so ridiculously invalid I'll trade you a Clockwork Orange for a "not even wrong" suggested google.
Talk about "passionate about the subject" indeed.
If one proposed an absurd analogy, than we should expect an absurd response. Have a wonderful day =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
The more one complains about their right to steal being infringed, the less anyone should care what their opinion is.
You think it's just awful? Ok.
"Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
And so it is time to stop messing about with permissive licenses. If corporations don’t want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own."
Funny, my reaction was to just make all my stuff Unlicense instead of MIT.
The EUPL sound like a good idea - preserving some of the ideas of the FSF (copyleft) but in a way that governments and companies can actually use to develop their own software.
Personally I'm still in the BSD camp, but my current ranking is BSD/MIT > EUPL > (L)GPL now.
When open source was becoming a huge thing for everyone to participate in - say 20ish years ago, I always saw a dichotomy that people seemed to gloss over.
You're either writing software for fun and you are happy to give it away. In which case anyone's use of it is to do as they please including make money is just bragging right for you.
Or you write software for a living in which case giving it away for free is dumb. You want to charge maximally for your money making output.
Do these types of things really matter anymore? If you have tokens, given the source is available pretty easy to reimplement with plausible deniability.
https://malus.sh/ (I think it was intended to be satire/critique)
It's a quixotic crusade, in perfect European style.
Yes, how quixotic of them. They really should have foreseen this when they published the license … checks notes … close to twenty years ago.
Then again, it's not like even before the plagiarising slop machines you couldn't just get around licenses if you were dedicated enough to evil and was comfortable lying about the provenance of the code you're using.
Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.
As much as I dislike isomorphic plagiarism, your point is very valid...
It is a viable argument, and people shouldn't bury such insights given the estimated $9Tn worth of opensource work that was appropriated. =3
If you think an LLM can just implement e.g. an alternative to the Linux kernel from scratch (or any other GPL licensed software), you might be falling for the marketing.
Have you seen LLMs build large, stable, pieces of software, that work well, with your own eyes? I have not. I have seen LLMs build small, well-understood things, and I've seen LLMs do super well with extremely well specified problems, but all the rest seems to be marketing (i.e. I couldn't observe or reproduce it).
Edit: I'm not talking about throwaway slop that just needs to run long enough to get funding.
A lot of open source that we used to use as dependencies is trivial. Sometimes you only need 10% of the library. No one is talking about kernel.
Also, changing license does not prevent you from forking the source code before the change. There are no new libraries with kernel level effort that use uncommon license.
Bun was rewritten for software used by millions.
Mechanical translation.
It was done with LLMs.
I think there's been a mistake in the thinking that restricting the licensing on open source projects will make the companies that use them as a service would make them contribute.
They don't, the companies just replace the software in question.
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
I hate that some people like to put us all in the same bag. Please don't include me. I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I publish it as such because it's a present to the world at large that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT.
You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please.
> I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code.
I wish we could spend less (collective) time here on HN talking about/worrying about Elon Musk.
We're (allegedly) here for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
What SpaceX and/or Tesla are doing could certainly satisfy that, worrying about Musk himself certainly isn't.
Agreed; I mentioned Elon because the post made the reference quite explicit by saying "trillionaires", probably given the context Bezos or Gates would've been better examples though.
Fair point, but "making billionaires multi-billionaires" didn't have quite the same ring to it :-D
(I'm the author of that blog post)
Agreed. I don't care if some big tech company uses my work to become even richer, or even if they use my code in some closed software. It doesn't harm me or others, as third parties cannot take away the work I gave to the commons. They may not give to the commons in the way I did, but nobody is any worse off than if the company developed their own software from scratch. So why should I care?
https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/do...
I don't like the phrasing of the EUPL because it says you have rights full stop and then in a later section it says there are actually conditions. For that reason I would not immediately be sure the conditions are even enforceable, other than "this was surely made by lawyers and therefore also surely valid".
Aside from that, it is nice to see Communication counted alongside Distribution; this should have been done from the start IMO.
> I don't like the phrasing of the EUPL because it says you have rights full stop and then in a later section it says there are actually conditions. For that reason I would not immediately be sure the conditions are even enforceable.
Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
> Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
This is a lot more rights than just to use and there is absolutely nothing about conditions in this entire section.There's not even a hint of conditions until three sections later, in section 5 where it starts modifying section 2, which feels messy to me.
>All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
This is not true. Open source is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good thing that open source unlocks.
Rather feels like post LLMs being everywhere, salary levels for developers are dropping left and right. Where did we gain value?
Also theres not multiple trillionaires in the world, and the one trillionaire we have did that largely by innovating and creating new stuff rather than just leveraging existing OSS for profit...
> Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along.
No. YOU changed your mind, to become less free and more authoritarian.
> gained little for users
What? The world runs on Linux.
> or developers.
Were you even there before "everything" was open source and/or free software?
> our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
Yeah that was always allowed.
The problem with freedom is that people get to make their own choices, eh?
The license still allows AI training theft. What is needed is an OSS EULA that forbids IP theft, since the governments are corrupt and still allow it.
The EULA needs a clause that 10% of the market cap of a company will be paid to the IP holder upon violating it.
The current argument AI owners use is that it falls under fair use as "transformative use", so the licence is entirely irrelevant. If that wasn't the case anything trained on GPL code would have to be released under the GPL.
I'm now sure what if any argument they are using in Europe. Most countries here have a "fair dealing" exemption which is similar to USA "fair use", but it doesn't include "transformative use". The closest would be "pastiche", but that wouldn't really cover it.
EULA != license, which is the entire point.
Licenses are contracts, just like an EULA.
And if you expand the acronym EULA you will actually find that it is… a license agreement.
Yes, and the point is that in order to obtain and keep the license, you have to fulfill additional clauses that you agreed to by accepting the EULA.
If EULA is the same as a license, why would MSFT not just use a license? The intellectual contortions of the AI boosters here are stunning.
"an end-user license agreement is the same as a license agreement, so why do they use an end-user license agreement instead of a license agreement?"
I don't understand this question.
No one but, you, an AI moron, has asked this question. Get your AI girlfriend to explain it to you.
And the AI swine reacted by downvoting the top comment again now that arguments for an EULA are made. Fucking fascists.
A license is a waiver of your rights that are enshrined in law and enforced by the government. It can't take away rights that other people are allowed, unless you get them to agree voluntarily in exchange for something they feel is of equal or greater value.
For example you can say someone can only copy this CD if they pay you $10. Ordinarily you're allowed to sue them for copying it, but you're allowed to promise not to sue them, under any condition whatsoever, such as them paying you $10.
But you can't say someone can only resell this CD if they pay you $10. You already don't have the right to sue them for reselling it, so they have no reason to listen to you.
That is a lost cause, because the AI companies are above the law now. Copyright doesn't apply to them, felonies committed by them (via their agents) are not prosecuted, and if the AI bubble were to burst, they would be bailed out because by now, all American pensions and the ETFs of the rest of the world depend on them staying fantastical capital black holes.
But what we still can do is stop programming for free for Big Tech, and this license at least gets us closer toward that goal.