alt Hacker NewsI Changed My License
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> "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.
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.
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.)
Perfect, I've been looking for a license I can get behind for new projects. I just made a few tweaks https://aeupl.org/
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?
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.
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
> 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.
Do these types of things really matter anymore? If you have tokens, given the source is available pretty easy to reimplement with plausible deniability.
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.
> 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?
> "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.
>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.
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You write js - scum of the languages and you date put a license? It is license of shit.
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.
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!)