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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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 - > "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 - 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
- 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 - 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
by Joel_Mckay - 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
- 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