5 ms·

Author of Duplicacy here. To personal users, it is free software.

hannob 9y ago
The term "free software" has a very specific meaning [1] and there is no such thing as "free software, but only for personal users". [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
yorwba 9y ago
The unambiguous term would be "gratis" or "free of charge". Your software is not "free software" in the "libre" or "free to modify and share" sense.
comice 9y ago
It doesn't meet the free software foundation's definition of free software, which I believe was the original point. It lacks the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE...
- _wxn8 9y ago
  The FSF's definition of "Free Software" doesn't necessarily match the English language's definition of "free software". Since we're speaking English, I think it's reasonable to assume the latter meaning, like most reasonable people who haven't encountered the FSF would. I really wish people would capitalize things like this. "This is not Free Software" would make the sentence unambiguous. You can't just go around redefining the English language willy nilly and expect people to play along. Languages do evolve naturally but this isn't natural. This is an organization trying to influence the language to advance an agenda (though I believe it to be a worthy agenda, it's still an agenda).
  - comice 9y ago
    "It's a shame Duplicacy is not free software." If the commenter meant no cost it's more reasonable they'd have said "It's a shame Duplicacy is not free". Or "It's a shame Duplicacy costs money". Capitalising would have made it clearer yes, but I think given the language and the context (hacker news) I was justified. But the author, @acrosync, was also justified in assuming it meant no cost.
    - acrosync 9y ago
      Free or not free aside, my question is, does it matter to personal users between this free-for-personal-use license and any of those more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD, or GPL?
      - hedora 9y ago
        I hate switching backup software, and with your current license, you become a single point of failure--will you be supporting this thing in 10 years when I need to back my FireflyBSD 128-bit RiscV machine up to the walmart cloud (or whatever random os/hardware/cloud is common in a decade)? If this were BSL licensed, the community could fork it if that became an issue: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2016/08/applying-business-source-licensing-bsl.html http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2016/08/applying-business-sou... I'm curious to see whether any BSL software manages to build a third party dev community (inclusion in debian non-free, third party patches and bug reports, etc) While I have your attention: It'd be great to measure how many bytes the solutions read and write, as well as I/O counts. There are tools for this in Linux, and probably MacOS. Alternatively, network bandwidth would be a good proxy for these measurements.
      - comice 9y ago
        It matters to me as a personal user because my use of duplicacy might change at some point and suddenly I'd lose rights to use it (unless I pay). I'd lose rights to any development contributions I might have made unless I pay. And as a personal user, I can't use any code from Duplicacy in any other project. I can't even, say, create a package for it and get it included in Debian. And aside from some of these practical issues, I'm a personal user who supports software freedom so I don't want to use something encumbered in this way. And as a commercial user, any development contributions I make are no longer my own and I have to pay to make use of them. But the worst part of it is, your license isn't very well defined. As it stands, you may at any point stop accepting license payments from a commercial user and they'd lose the right to use it entirely - they'd lose access to their backups (unless they used the software without a license). You of course have the right to choose any license you like! I just wouldn't use duplicacy myself under the terms of that license.

The term "free software" has a very specific meaning [1] and there is no such thing as "free software, but only for personal users". [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

yorwba 9y ago

The unambiguous term would be "gratis" or "free of charge". Your software is not "free software" in the "libre" or "free to modify and share" sense.

comice 9y ago

It doesn't meet the free software foundation's definition of free software, which I believe was the original point. It lacks the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/LICENSE...

_wxn8 9y ago
The FSF's definition of "Free Software" doesn't necessarily match the English language's definition of "free software". Since we're speaking English, I think it's reasonable to assume the latter meaning, like most reasonable people who haven't encountered the FSF would. I really wish people would capitalize things like this. "This is not Free Software" would make the sentence unambiguous. You can't just go around redefining the English language willy nilly and expect people to play along. Languages do evolve naturally but this isn't natural. This is an organization trying to influence the language to advance an agenda (though I believe it to be a worthy agenda, it's still an agenda).
- comice 9y ago
  "It's a shame Duplicacy is not free software." If the commenter meant no cost it's more reasonable they'd have said "It's a shame Duplicacy is not free". Or "It's a shame Duplicacy costs money". Capitalising would have made it clearer yes, but I think given the language and the context (hacker news) I was justified. But the author, @acrosync, was also justified in assuming it meant no cost.
  - acrosync 9y ago
    Free or not free aside, my question is, does it matter to personal users between this free-for-personal-use license and any of those more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD, or GPL?
    - hedora 9y ago
      I hate switching backup software, and with your current license, you become a single point of failure--will you be supporting this thing in 10 years when I need to back my FireflyBSD 128-bit RiscV machine up to the walmart cloud (or whatever random os/hardware/cloud is common in a decade)? If this were BSL licensed, the community could fork it if that became an issue: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2016/08/applying-business-source-licensing-bsl.html http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2016/08/applying-business-sou... I'm curious to see whether any BSL software manages to build a third party dev community (inclusion in debian non-free, third party patches and bug reports, etc) While I have your attention: It'd be great to measure how many bytes the solutions read and write, as well as I/O counts. There are tools for this in Linux, and probably MacOS. Alternatively, network bandwidth would be a good proxy for these measurements.
    - comice 9y ago
      It matters to me as a personal user because my use of duplicacy might change at some point and suddenly I'd lose rights to use it (unless I pay). I'd lose rights to any development contributions I might have made unless I pay. And as a personal user, I can't use any code from Duplicacy in any other project. I can't even, say, create a package for it and get it included in Debian. And aside from some of these practical issues, I'm a personal user who supports software freedom so I don't want to use something encumbered in this way. And as a commercial user, any development contributions I make are no longer my own and I have to pay to make use of them. But the worst part of it is, your license isn't very well defined. As it stands, you may at any point stop accepting license payments from a commercial user and they'd lose the right to use it entirely - they'd lose access to their backups (unless they used the software without a license). You of course have the right to choose any license you like! I just wouldn't use duplicacy myself under the terms of that license.