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Developments like this one and the faker.js and colors.js fiasco from last week have made me rethink my position about licensing. Now it seems to me that relea

Developments like this one and the faker.js and colors.js fiasco from last week have made me rethink my position about licensing. Now it seems to me that releasing code you wrote for free under a permissive open-source license is somewhere between ill-advised and unethical. On one hand it will not benefit you in any way, on the other, it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expenses necessary to develop it. In the end, you've contributed to closed source and on top of that you got nothing in return... And that is the best case, as we saw with log4j, you can be held responsible in the court of public opinion in case the project you developed and maintain for free (with no warranty or liability as per license) causes an issue...

jcelerier 5y ago
as usual when it's about free software licenses, https://www.reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright https://www.reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright > In the end, you've contributed to closed source yes, that's exactly what using the GPL is supposed to prevent
charcircuit 5y ago
What's wrong with lowering the time it takes to develop closed source software? Closed source software solves people's problems. By making it easier to make, more of people's problems can be solved. There can be less time spent where multiple people remake the same exact thing over and over again.
- glogla 5y ago
  Maybe. Or maybe you are just helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Whether proprietary software is a force for good or just another mechanism of exploitation is a matter of opinion, and the GP might not share yours.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    As a child starting from $0 I built up almost all of the money I have now doing contract work by making closed source software using open source software. Being able to quickly make things without even having to spend any money is great for someone with no money. It didn't make me poorer as someone with $0, it made me much richer. I know my software was a positive to the lives of many people even if it is closed source.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      If you are making money using open source software, it's always nice to support the creators of the software you use.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Are you giving back to the people who enabled you to do so?
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        Honestly, no. They released their software for free, so that's what I will pay.
prmoustache 5y ago
I don't see where it is not ethical. At any point you can decide to pursue or stop maintaining the code and anyone can decide to fork and take over. It is just naive to think you will always find fun in working on it or pretend you might make a living out of it unless you have a strong business plan.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  > I don't see where it is not ethical. And that's the problem. Many people like the idea of 'helping' other people for free, even if these users never 'give something back' (because they can't program, don't have the time to translate something, ...). But helping other people (companies) make money for free that already have not only enough but way more than you, and you even do the less rewarding work like fixing bugs is not what moste people thought of when making OSS.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    To explain it a different way, I think, is that releasing code under a permissive license where the end user is a large corp, doesn't make the world a better place, it just reduces the labor needed to achieve an end. OSS saves on headcount.
  - mring33621 5y ago
    At my company, a huge bank, where we use a ton of open source code, we were explicitly told that working on (contributing to) open source was a terminal offense.
    - Tostino 5y ago
      Name and shame them.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        I don't think it's fair to expect this user to do that. (However, if somebody else knows of a bank like that…)
keewee7 5y ago
>code you wrote for free >for free How much open source code is actually written by hobbyists working for free? Most of the Linux code is written by paid engineers employed by big tech companies.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  > How much open source code is actually written by hobbyists working for free? Initially, almost all of it. > Most of the Linux code is written by paid engineers employed by big tech companies. Nowadays. It didn't start this way.
- drran 5y ago
  Yes, it's because of GPL restrictions: if you use my code, then I can use your (to some extent), so proprietary developers are forced to cooperate, which everyone job easier. Linux is used by whole planet, but it's not a burden for Linus Torvalds. Same for KHTML -> WebKit/WebCore -> Blink (LGPL), which is used even by such GPL haters as Apple and M$.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Same for Postgres and multitude of other liberally-licensed software.
pabs3 5y ago
It takes a lot of effort and money to enforce copyleft open source licenses, a lot of companies just violate them regardless. Some companies even violate permissive licenses, for eg my router violates the microhttpd BSD license. The latest GPL lawsuit I saw was only possible due to a large grant from amateur radio hobbyists. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/press/qanda.html https://sfconservancy.org/press/qanda.html
- hda2 5y ago
  Damages. Offer two licenses. One GPL and the other commercial. Make the commercial license as costly as possible, even Oracle grade by charging per core. Include language stating that the licensing agreement falls back to the commercial license if the GPL is violated and the violation is not remedied according to the provisions set in the GPL. Any licensing fees collected get poured back into the open source project. If another company is stupid enough to ignore these terms, I'm sure you can find someone willing to sue on your behalf for a fraction of the damages owed to you.
  - guitarbill 5y ago
    Is there an easy way of providing commercial licences? Has anybody had experiences with this? I've seen Super Source (https://supso.org/ https://supso.org/), which I think used to be called Supported Source (https://supportedsource.org https://supportedsource.org). It seems to make providing commercial licenses easy. But their website is pretty bare. Do people usually just roll their own with Square or Stripe? I've found it hard to get search results on this at all.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      If somebody is going to be paying you more than $1000, they'll contact you about it. You don't need to automate the license payments; you just need to check your email.
    - semi-extrinsic 5y ago
oblio 5y ago
It's not unethical, it's more like being a "fellow traveler" or in clearer terms, a useful idiot. People with money (corporations) were always the ones to benefit most from permissive open source, they're best placed for it. Permissive open source only really makes sense as charity[1], or for libraries you as a developer want to be able to use at future companies[2] or as a component for a corporation's grand strategy. [1] "Here, have this, I built it and I want to share it so that it doesn't go to waste sitting on my storage." [2] Only the case if you accept outside contributions with no copyright assignment, since otherwise you have the power to relicense your own code.
- LaGrange 5y ago
  > It's not unethical, it's more like being a "fellow traveler" or in clearer terms, a useful idiot. I mean, the line between a useful idiot and a scab is so thin it barely exists. > Permissive open source only really makes sense as charity[1], or for libraries you as a developer want to be able to use at future companies[2] or as a component for a corporation's grand strategy. Edit: nah, I think "as charity" it's bad (takes away from others, corporations don't need your charity), case 2 is at best misguided (just charge them, don't do this for free, please), and only 3 makes sense, as in "language bindings for our product are permissive."
Devasta 5y ago
No one except the most credulous buffoons really believed the "MIT is more free" nonsense about the GPL, it is, was, and always will be a push to move away from "Free as in Freedom" to "Free as in Free Tech Support". Large Corps won't use your code if its AGPL? Thats a feature, code away without worrying about breaking anything!
- tobywf 5y ago
  Having a license where "network use is distribution" seems to be a must these days. I also recently found the European Union Public License (EUPL, e.g. [0]), which seems similar to the AGPL. Might be interesting to Europeans. The translations being available in multiple languages is really nice. It being a less often used license could also be a feature. [0] https://choosealicense.com/licenses/eupl-1.2/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/eupl-1.2/
  - anticensor 5y ago
    EUPL is severable, unlike GPL family. GPL is explicitly non-severable.
  - namibj 5y ago
    Unfortunately it's compatibility clause means it's only as strong as GPL...
- aseipp 5y ago
  It's so funny that if you say that actually the GPL is good because random corporations can't freely utilize it with zero consequence and make money off your labor, you'll get a bunch of bedbugs come out of nowhere saying uhhhhhhhhmmmm, actually you're the one hurting "free" software, somehow, for being so difficult, so cruel, because how dare you prevent others from writing even more computer programs, can't you understand N+1 programs in the world is better than N? And that you are the one who stopped it, you selfish selfish person? And that someone else could have even made money off that? You've practically robbed them pre-emptively with intent. And you wouldn't want to scare away the 9-figure corporation by being mean... would you? Sorry but I don't consider letting Lucy set up the football and giving it a solid go to be kind and equitable. It's called "being a mark."
SloopJon 5y ago
> it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expenses necessary to develop it Without necessarily taking a position on the ethics, I would point to macOS and its derivatives as a clear example of this. Apple invested significant resources into a successor to System 7 called Copland, abandoning it in 1996. While the purchase of NeXT in 1997 hugely influenced the design of OS X, look at all of the free and open source projects that accelerated its development: Mach, Clang/LLVM (and GCC before it), KHTML, KJS, CUPS, much of the BSD and GNU userland, and the list goes on. macOS, and by extension iOS, would not be where it is today without its open source core. Put a little spit and polish on it (no small thing, of course), add a kernel extension named Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext, and voila: new O/S.
- favorited 5y ago
  The flip side (of this specific example) is that several of those projects were either started or nearly exclusively funded by Apple. - Mach's primary architect, Avie Tevanian, was hired by NeXT to productize it, and he continued that work at Apple with XNU and the OS X strategy to replace the classic MacOS - Apple hired Chris Lattner after he finished his PhD (where LLVM was started) and then created Clang and open-sourced it, as well as other LLVM tools like libcxx - Apple hired Michael Sweet (creator and maintainer of CUPS) and paid him to maintain it for several years As you say, Apple's software wouldn't be where it is today without open source. But major open source projects either wouldn't exist at all (e.g., Clang) or would have needed someone else to pay for their maintenance (e.g., CUPS) without Apple.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
There are 10s of thousands of open source projects out there going smoothly, please don't make any drastic decisions based on anecdotal evidence.

jcelerier 5y ago

as usual when it's about free software licenses, https://www.reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright https://www.reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright > In the end, you've contributed to closed source yes, that's exactly what using the GPL is supposed to prevent

charcircuit 5y ago

What's wrong with lowering the time it takes to develop closed source software? Closed source software solves people's problems. By making it easier to make, more of people's problems can be solved. There can be less time spent where multiple people remake the same exact thing over and over again.

glogla 5y ago
Maybe. Or maybe you are just helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Whether proprietary software is a force for good or just another mechanism of exploitation is a matter of opinion, and the GP might not share yours.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  As a child starting from $0 I built up almost all of the money I have now doing contract work by making closed source software using open source software. Being able to quickly make things without even having to spend any money is great for someone with no money. It didn't make me poorer as someone with $0, it made me much richer. I know my software was a positive to the lives of many people even if it is closed source.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    If you are making money using open source software, it's always nice to support the creators of the software you use.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Are you giving back to the people who enabled you to do so?
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      Honestly, no. They released their software for free, so that's what I will pay.

prmoustache 5y ago

I don't see where it is not ethical. At any point you can decide to pursue or stop maintaining the code and anyone can decide to fork and take over. It is just naive to think you will always find fun in working on it or pretend you might make a living out of it unless you have a strong business plan.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> I don't see where it is not ethical. And that's the problem. Many people like the idea of 'helping' other people for free, even if these users never 'give something back' (because they can't program, don't have the time to translate something, ...). But helping other people (companies) make money for free that already have not only enough but way more than you, and you even do the less rewarding work like fixing bugs is not what moste people thought of when making OSS.
- sitkack 5y ago
  To explain it a different way, I think, is that releasing code under a permissive license where the end user is a large corp, doesn't make the world a better place, it just reduces the labor needed to achieve an end. OSS saves on headcount.
- mring33621 5y ago
  At my company, a huge bank, where we use a ton of open source code, we were explicitly told that working on (contributing to) open source was a terminal offense.
  - Tostino 5y ago
    Name and shame them.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      I don't think it's fair to expect this user to do that. (However, if somebody else knows of a bank like that…)

keewee7 5y ago

>code you wrote for free >for free How much open source code is actually written by hobbyists working for free? Most of the Linux code is written by paid engineers employed by big tech companies.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> How much open source code is actually written by hobbyists working for free? Initially, almost all of it. > Most of the Linux code is written by paid engineers employed by big tech companies. Nowadays. It didn't start this way.
drran 5y ago
Yes, it's because of GPL restrictions: if you use my code, then I can use your (to some extent), so proprietary developers are forced to cooperate, which everyone job easier. Linux is used by whole planet, but it's not a burden for Linus Torvalds. Same for KHTML -> WebKit/WebCore -> Blink (LGPL), which is used even by such GPL haters as Apple and M$.
- trasz 5y ago
  Same for Postgres and multitude of other liberally-licensed software.

pabs3 5y ago

It takes a lot of effort and money to enforce copyleft open source licenses, a lot of companies just violate them regardless. Some companies even violate permissive licenses, for eg my router violates the microhttpd BSD license. The latest GPL lawsuit I saw was only possible due to a large grant from amateur radio hobbyists. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/press/qanda.html https://sfconservancy.org/press/qanda.html

hda2 5y ago
Damages. Offer two licenses. One GPL and the other commercial. Make the commercial license as costly as possible, even Oracle grade by charging per core. Include language stating that the licensing agreement falls back to the commercial license if the GPL is violated and the violation is not remedied according to the provisions set in the GPL. Any licensing fees collected get poured back into the open source project. If another company is stupid enough to ignore these terms, I'm sure you can find someone willing to sue on your behalf for a fraction of the damages owed to you.
- guitarbill 5y ago
  Is there an easy way of providing commercial licences? Has anybody had experiences with this? I've seen Super Source (https://supso.org/ https://supso.org/), which I think used to be called Supported Source (https://supportedsource.org https://supportedsource.org). It seems to make providing commercial licenses easy. But their website is pretty bare. Do people usually just roll their own with Square or Stripe? I've found it hard to get search results on this at all.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    If somebody is going to be paying you more than $1000, they'll contact you about it. You don't need to automate the license payments; you just need to check your email.
  - semi-extrinsic 5y ago

oblio 5y ago

It's not unethical, it's more like being a "fellow traveler" or in clearer terms, a useful idiot. People with money (corporations) were always the ones to benefit most from permissive open source, they're best placed for it. Permissive open source only really makes sense as charity[1], or for libraries you as a developer want to be able to use at future companies[2] or as a component for a corporation's grand strategy. [1] "Here, have this, I built it and I want to share it so that it doesn't go to waste sitting on my storage." [2] Only the case if you accept outside contributions with no copyright assignment, since otherwise you have the power to relicense your own code.

LaGrange 5y ago
> It's not unethical, it's more like being a "fellow traveler" or in clearer terms, a useful idiot. I mean, the line between a useful idiot and a scab is so thin it barely exists. > Permissive open source only really makes sense as charity[1], or for libraries you as a developer want to be able to use at future companies[2] or as a component for a corporation's grand strategy. Edit: nah, I think "as charity" it's bad (takes away from others, corporations don't need your charity), case 2 is at best misguided (just charge them, don't do this for free, please), and only 3 makes sense, as in "language bindings for our product are permissive."

Devasta 5y ago

No one except the most credulous buffoons really believed the "MIT is more free" nonsense about the GPL, it is, was, and always will be a push to move away from "Free as in Freedom" to "Free as in Free Tech Support". Large Corps won't use your code if its AGPL? Thats a feature, code away without worrying about breaking anything!

tobywf 5y ago
Having a license where "network use is distribution" seems to be a must these days. I also recently found the European Union Public License (EUPL, e.g. [0]), which seems similar to the AGPL. Might be interesting to Europeans. The translations being available in multiple languages is really nice. It being a less often used license could also be a feature. [0] https://choosealicense.com/licenses/eupl-1.2/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/eupl-1.2/
- anticensor 5y ago
  EUPL is severable, unlike GPL family. GPL is explicitly non-severable.
- namibj 5y ago
  Unfortunately it's compatibility clause means it's only as strong as GPL...
aseipp 5y ago
It's so funny that if you say that actually the GPL is good because random corporations can't freely utilize it with zero consequence and make money off your labor, you'll get a bunch of bedbugs come out of nowhere saying uhhhhhhhhmmmm, actually you're the one hurting "free" software, somehow, for being so difficult, so cruel, because how dare you prevent others from writing even more computer programs, can't you understand N+1 programs in the world is better than N? And that you are the one who stopped it, you selfish selfish person? And that someone else could have even made money off that? You've practically robbed them pre-emptively with intent. And you wouldn't want to scare away the 9-figure corporation by being mean... would you? Sorry but I don't consider letting Lucy set up the football and giving it a solid go to be kind and equitable. It's called "being a mark."

SloopJon 5y ago

> it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expenses necessary to develop it Without necessarily taking a position on the ethics, I would point to macOS and its derivatives as a clear example of this. Apple invested significant resources into a successor to System 7 called Copland, abandoning it in 1996. While the purchase of NeXT in 1997 hugely influenced the design of OS X, look at all of the free and open source projects that accelerated its development: Mach, Clang/LLVM (and GCC before it), KHTML, KJS, CUPS, much of the BSD and GNU userland, and the list goes on. macOS, and by extension iOS, would not be where it is today without its open source core. Put a little spit and polish on it (no small thing, of course), add a kernel extension named Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext, and voila: new O/S.

favorited 5y ago
The flip side (of this specific example) is that several of those projects were either started or nearly exclusively funded by Apple. - Mach's primary architect, Avie Tevanian, was hired by NeXT to productize it, and he continued that work at Apple with XNU and the OS X strategy to replace the classic MacOS - Apple hired Chris Lattner after he finished his PhD (where LLVM was started) and then created Clang and open-sourced it, as well as other LLVM tools like libcxx - Apple hired Michael Sweet (creator and maintainer of CUPS) and paid him to maintain it for several years As you say, Apple's software wouldn't be where it is today without open source. But major open source projects either wouldn't exist at all (e.g., Clang) or would have needed someone else to pay for their maintenance (e.g., CUPS) without Apple.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

There are 10s of thousands of open source projects out there going smoothly, please don't make any drastic decisions based on anecdotal evidence.