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- Hacker News
- 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?
by TheChaplain - 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.
by Daegalus - "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.
by lukan - 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?
by jimnotgym - This works as long as you're the only copyright holder. If other developers contribute, weakening the license requires their approval.by emersion
- 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.
by BlackRabbit1 - "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.
- > "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.
by alturp - 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.by codemog
- 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.by qwerpy
- 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.by kzrdude
- 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
- 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.
by mnahkies - 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).
by ricardobeat - 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.
by bob1029 - > 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.
by rambambram - 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.
by RobotToaster - 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.by pocksuppet
- 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.by graemep
- 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.
by mihaelm - 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.by dotancohen
- 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.by LoganDark
- 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.
by moontear - Here's the license text if someone wants to do the work: https://spdx.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2.html#licenseTextby KronisLV
- 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!)
by apt-get - 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!
by rpdillon - 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...