34 ms·

Mold linker may switch to a source-available license

205 points by MForster 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
> The new license would be something like individuals can use it for free but corporate users have to pay. mold started as my personal project, and I've been working on this full time for two years so far. I thought that I could earn a comfortable income if mold become popular, but unfortunately, I'm still losing my money. I think I need to take an action to make the project sustainable long term. This seems totally reasonable to me, honestly. Guess what, companies building your product on top of high-quality FOSS software? Turnabout is fair play. If we're going to rot our software infrastructure to it's soul by adding endless SaaS subscriptions to everything, then why shouldn't FOSS developers get in on the fun? This is the software dystopia we've created, where marginal-utility products get built on the backbreaking work of unpaid contributors. If they don't like it, they can fork the AGPL version or use a different linker. It's a very dog-eat-dog play, but realistically this is what our software industry has turned into. IMO, it's honorable to defend both your individual users and FOSS community while also charging your corporate users for the support they expect.
- rektide 4y ago
  Reasonable but death. Rather than become a part of the world, this immense value would be a mere glimmer, would not get adopted at any notable scale. It sucks. Whats happening now isnt fine. I wish so much the world could recognize value & merit & allocate some support for it. But all the rationalization in the world doesnt change the base truth that this plan would mean death.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I mean, the alternative is that the lead developer runs out of money and just drops the project altogether. If they have an enterprising personality, I see no reason why they shouldn't chase this opportunity as an alternative to letting their project fall apart/get "adopted" by an abusive maintainer.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      Potentially the other alternative would be a large tech company hires them to work on an open source mold full time.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        That doesn't really end up going well either. There are many such cases where Red Hat/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Amazon buys up a sterling young FOSS developer and makes them spend the rest of their life fixing the issues for [PRODUCT] while their project becomes less-and-less relevant by the day (see: CUPS, Clang, Minix).
        nrabulinski 4y ago
        How has cups or clang became less relevant?
        smoldesu 4y ago
        CUPS is still great but mostly because it's initial implementation was so straightforward. It's existence today is mostly maintenance-mode with a priority for fixing Mac bugs, which is understandable but also occludes the possibility for future improvement or adding support for other platforms. Clang is still relevant because LLVM is great, but as a compiler it's mired in a great deal of political hangups and general pickiness. I don't write C++ for a living, but my experience using the GNU C tooling has been much smoother than Clang and Cmake. I'll admit that both of those projects aren't exactly dead, but it would be a shame if Microsoft/Google/Apple bought Mold and malformed it to their desires.
        jabl 4y ago
        > CUPS is still great but mostly because it's initial implementation was so straightforward. It's existence today is mostly maintenance-mode with a priority for fixing Mac bugs, which is understandable but also occludes the possibility for future improvement or adding support for other platforms. The CUPS lead author left Apple a couple of years ago, and CUPS development is now mostly focused on Linux under the auspices of the Openprinting organization. (I understand the CUPS lead author still has some side consulting gig in providing bug fixes to Apples version of CUPS.)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    What do you think will happen when there's no funding nor motivation to maintain the project? Death.
    - spijdar 4y ago
      I'm of a mind to agree with GP, but I also agree that lack of funding and motivation will kill the project. Unfortunately, to me this just means the project will probably die. If the author is feeling burnt out and losing money on it, I don't think trying to pivot to a commercial license will help, since as others have mentioned, I don't think many businesses rely on mold specifically, and since the performance gap isn't astronomical, many companies will just drop in lld and be done with it. At least, that seems likely to me. I guess we might find out?
  - ketralnis 4y ago
    > would not get adopted at any notable scale Sure, it doesn't sound like that's their goal
- dist1ll 4y ago
  I feel conflicted. The FOSS label is an extremely powerful statement and draws in lots of users. To switch the license is very poor taste in my opinion, and not much different from a bait-and-switch. It should be a maintainers responsibility to be very clear about their goals for this project. I feel that they jumped the full-time gun too quickly, and now users will be paying for it
  - googlryas 4y ago
    The code he developed will still be licensed under the old license, just going forward new changes won't be. You can fork it right now and keep a FOSS version if you'd like. But it's not a bait and switch because we don't have a right to his future work under whatever license we like. Imagine the developer was hit by a bus right now, or became a cloistered monk. Same difference.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - lmm 4y ago
      > But it's not a bait and switch because we don't have a right to his future work under whatever license we like. Imagine the developer was hit by a bus right now, or became a cloistered monk. Same difference. If he takes people's donation money with the implicit or explicit promise that he's going to make a good-faith effort to continue working on the code, he has a moral obligation to do that IMO. Getting hit by a bus wouldn't be his fault, but choosing to abandon it to become a monk would be.
      - iudqnolq 4y ago
        > If he takes people's donation money with the implicit or explicit promise that he's going to make a good-faith effort to continue working on the code In the absence of clear language I think it's unreasonable to expect a small amount of money to create an infinite obligation. I'd expect a donation to be spent on development expenses, including time. I'd expect the developer to continue developing until the money runs out, or return the remaining money. Imagine you have GitHub sponsorships providing $2,000/month. You use that money to cover all your expenses and work on OSS full time. Everyone stops donating today. Surely you'd get a job and stop working on OSS full time?
- msla 4y ago
  If this catches on, I expect a lot more people on Hacker News will suddenly have Grave Concerns about how Free those Copyleft licenses are.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    That have always been clear from the beginning that is why you get everyone using GNU/Linux instead of the BSDs, although Apple and Sony enjoy using parts of them on their platforms.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    The problem in this case isn't with the copyleft licenses. It's with the CLA (i.e., "even though my project is copyleft, if you want to contribute to it, you have to give me a pushover license to your changes too"). Without the CLA, this project would indeed be safe from him doing this.
    - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
      I'm confused. Copyleft doesn't grant a right to contribute upstream. It's perfectly reasonable for a maintainer of a copyleft project to say "I only accept contributions if you give me $1,000." Copyleft grants you the right to make changes and redistribute the resulting work under a compatible license. If you have a problem with CLAs, don't sign them. Many people do not care. Even without a CLA the author could simply remove contributions and still relicense. This isn't novel, and has been done before. Obviously it may be difficult to remove contributions.
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        It's rare for an important software project to be 100% a one-man show. Combined with the difficulty of removing contributions, wouldn't rejecting CLAs basically keep this kind of thing from happening at all?
        xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
- pjmlp 4y ago
  In a way, shareware, public domain and demoware have won, after the FOSS hype cycle, as it appears to be the only way to secure a source of income, and not everything can be done via selling support.
  - jabl 4y ago
    Nah, FOSS is going stronger than ever. But just as before, it's the ones that are playing the 'commodify your complement' game that are winning, while those that think that FOSS by itself is a business model are struggling.
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      The buzzword "open source" was kinda designed to appeal as a business model, so F-less OSS is indeed struggling.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      If big boys take out the funding from key projects, meaning stop paying their employees to contribute, everything would crumble. Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS and hardware, closed source.
      - jabl 4y ago
        > If big boys take out the funding from key projects, meaning stop paying their employees to contribute, everything would crumble. What's your point? If Microsoft goes bankrupt, the MS ecosystem would crumble. And so on, ad infinitum. Nothing lasts forever. Since people aren't clairvoyant, they make an effort at evaluating risks vs benefits, and end up continuing to use both MS products and FOSS software. > Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS and hardware, closed source. Yes, that's that whole 'commodify your complement' thing I mentioned. But so what? As long as those companies contribute free software that is useful, enjoy the ride. Maybe the current privacy-invading ad funded IT hegemons will fail one day and be replaced by something else, but at least whatever comes next will have a big pool of hopefully useful software to start building on top of.
bloudermilk 4y ago
Are there any examples of popular OSS projects using a non-commercial-only license?
- rectang 4y ago
  No, because excluding commercial users is a field-of-use restriction, and you're not FOSS if you only offer a license which imposes a field-of-use restriction. Which is fine! Just don't call it FOSS.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Furthermore, it's really hard to define what non-commercial actually means. Creative Commons spent something like a decade trying to scope a reasonable definition and eventually ended up essentially punting. With a few exceptions like (arguably) secondary public education use, pretty much any non-trivial use has some commercial component.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    > you're not FOSS > don't call it FOSS The grandparent comment clearly said OSS.
    - detaro 4y ago
      Their statement is just as true if you insert "OSS" instead of "FOSS".
      - Grimburger 4y ago
        Playing the semantic game over what is or isn't "open source" is very draining sorry. If I can look at it, that's open source software to me, you can define that phrase however you want and I'm happy with that too :)
        account42 4y ago
        There is no semantic game, open source software is a term of art with a much more specific meaning than the source being available. If you find this draining then you can simply stop trying to misappropriate the term.
rectang 4y ago
Is the maintainer is the only copyright holder? If not, and other authors have contributed under the AGPL, the maintainer can't switch the license. EDIT: I found this in the linked blog post: > I can change the license (or sublicense) because I wrote almost all the code myself, and all remaining patches to mold are licensed under the dual license of MIT/AGPL.
- suprjami 4y ago
  Thanks, this was my first thought too.
- stefantalpalaru 4y ago
  > I can change the license (or sublicense) because I wrote almost all the code myself, and all remaining patches to mold are licensed under the dual license of MIT/AGPL. He's wrong about that. That MIT license is not an attribution of copyright, which is what he needs to relicense external contributions. This is why corporate-run projects make you sign a CLA where you renounce copyright. This is why GPL licenses have an "any later version" formula, to allow project owners to move to a newer version of the GPL license later on.
  - comex 4y ago
    He can relicense everything except the code from those patches, while keeping that code under the MIT license. He will be required to preserve the MIT copyright notice and license text, and if he wanted to initiate a copyright lawsuit he would have to exclude those bits from what he's suing over, but otherwise there's no problem. GPL-family licenses have a stronger need for "any later version" than permissive licenses, since the virality rule means you can't just combine code under different GPL licenses in the same program. (Technically, the MIT license also grants the right to sublicense, so he actually could change the license, but only if the new license incorporated the MIT license's attribution requirement. Probably. The license is vague and I'm not a lawyer.)
    - nh2 4y ago
      More details here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/105912/can-you-change-code-distributed-under-the-mit-license-and-re-distribute-it-unde https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1059...
D13Fd 4y ago
I think this is totally fine, but they will need a better definition of what is and is not permissible. “Corporate” is a word that has many meanings. What about other entity types-sole proprietorships, partnerships? How about for-profit vs non-profit? Educational use? By students vs. schools themselves and faculty? Etc. If you start restricting things by type of use, you need an exceptionally thorough and clear license or you are going to wind up precluding many more people than you intend to.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The BSL (the proposed license) is fairly clear about this if you read the license. Most sole proprietorships and corporations of all types that make money or sell a product using it would have to pay. It's not clear that any of this is legally enforceable, though.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    > It's not clear that any of this is legally enforceable, though. I'm pretty sure that it is legally enforceable in most jurisdictions, B2B contracts are almost always stronger/more binding than consumer ones (since that protections granted under consumer protection laws are gone, and there is a reasonable presumption that the parties have read and understand the contract). The blurrier part is for sole proprietorships, since it depends on whether their specific jurisdiction considers them as consumers under consumer protection laws (which uniformly weakens contracts to the extent that it does not comply with the guarantees for consumers). (Note that in most jurisdictions, most "copyright licenses" are considered as contracts. For example, multiple cases in French courts have resolved that GPL2 is considered a contract.) Also, the license text: https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/
    - JonChesterfield 4y ago
      That's curious. In the UK a contract requires consideration and I can't see any here.
dark-star 4y ago
- jessermeyer 4y ago
  Deeply and needlessly cynical. rui tried to fund a high-value software infrastructure project on its own merit and it's not feasible long term. So a change is required. Hardly a bait and switch 'extortion'.
  - dark-star 4y ago
    Well, maybe going all-in in building a "high-value software infrastructure project on [your] own" is not a good idea if you don't have any concrete plans for funding right from the start? Changing the license to a non-FOSS is basically the most knee-jerk reaction you can do in that case. Find a maintainer. Give the project to the community. Become a regular contributor in your own spare time instead of the main (and sole) developer. There are so many better ways to handle such a situation. If you replace "building software" with "building a road" (or some other similar real-world infrastructure project), everyone would agree that it's a self-made problem and that there are other ways out rather than just "from tomorrow on this will be a toll-road". You can turn the road over to your city/municipality. Or you could let other take over the maintenance. If the road is useful, there will be others. If it isn't, well, everyone moves on.
    - eropple 4y ago
      > Give the project to the community. Why? Did the community give to him? It certainly sounds like it hasn't. What obligations does one have to a community that doesn't give back? > There are so many better ways to handle such a situation. Better for who? You? Or him? If open-source communities want open-source, they're going to need to come to grips with the need for people to eat, and to do that they are at minimum going to need to pass the hat. If they're not going to do that, this happens, and telling somebody who isn't you what they should do for "the community when "the community" doesn't support them is, frankly, wrong verging on immoral.
    - 4y ago
iLoveOncall 4y ago
I feel for the maintainer, but looking at the performance chart in the readme, I think any engineer will have a hard time getting their company to approve paying a license for such a small improvement over LLVM ld. My big-tech company and my team don't care that build time for a small part of our application is 5 minutes (not a clean build, that would be an hour), so I know they wouldn't pay to save 10 seconds. And linking is not even all of the time to build your application. From a financial point of view, the fact that the author is in Singapore and has a goal of $10K a month doesn't help.
- jessermeyer 4y ago
  If an engineer at a FAANG company reduced their global link times by even 10% they'd be promoted into early retirement. Mold is an order of magnitude faster.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    The guys that improved dependency download time by up to 80% at my company (Amazon) sure as hell are enjoying the 3% raise they got like everyone else. I agree with you that Mold is an order of magnitude faster than the competition (sometimes). However in that case the absolute value is more representative than the relative number. Your linking time going from 10 seconds to 1 or 2 seconds is only a tiny improvement.
    - liuliu 4y ago
      Nobody only spent 10s on linking. For any reasonable sized binary (in the range of 100 to 200 MiB) it is somewhere around 50s to 60s before mold. People regularly links 1GiB binary for living during their development cycle. If you use small binary or primarily using Go, probably not the target audience of mold. Otherwise I actually agree mold is amazing but have limited commercialization potential unless author expands the scope (like RAD Game Tools) / take some VC money (much like Emerge Tools)
      - jeffbee 4y ago
mkoubaa 4y ago
Have they considered funding from a software foundation?
- wmf 4y ago
  What foundations provide funding? My understanding is that they're willing to manage funding that you provide.
  - Nemo_bis 4y ago
    https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html
    - wmf 4y ago
      Yikes, I wouldn't want to be the 501st project on that list.
      - orthecreedence 4y ago
        Why?
        wmf 4y ago
        Unless they have billions and tons of staff, they can't provide much money or attention to each project.
        Nemo_bis 4y ago
        They currently have more money than they're able to give away, from what I understand. Try! Also, Horizon 2027 has about 100 G€ in budget, the more you use it the more you can get. ;)
nu11ptr 4y ago
I think this is fine. The author has the right to do whatever they want with their own product. Bummer for me as I like this linker, but probably wouldn't use it if this change is made, as my small one person company wouldn't be able to pay. That said, I personally don't see it being successful if this is done, and my suspicion is it might even be forked so an open source version could remain. It sucks that they aren't making any money, but I don't think this type of project works in any model except open source anymore. I could be wrong and hope for the sake of the author that I am.
svnpenn 4y ago
I support this. I use this with some of my projects: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0
trurl 4y ago
I think one thing that would definitely help the mold project is to have a clearer price and licensing model. The only thing I can find is https://opencollective.com/mold-linker https://opencollective.com/mold-linker. It would be much easier to be able to go to my manager with that kind of information. Right now the conversation goes: "Hey, this linker could save us quite a bit of time on our enormous executable." "Okay, how much will it cost us?" "Well, there is this site where you can donate on a regular basis."
doorman2 4y ago
Are there any out-of-the-box non-commercial licenses? I’ve wanted to do this too, but I’m too lazy to find an appropriate license.
- ralmidani 4y ago
  Lots of options here: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
- wmf 4y ago
  https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/
- rileyphone 4y ago
  Mongo, Graylog, and Elastic use the SSPL.
1letterunixname 4y ago
jeffbee 4y ago
I think there is a prima facie case that nobody* cares about linker speed. bfd is a terrible linker written by weirdos and it's still the default linker on every mainstream Linux. You'd think that an organization like Canonical would benefit from faster builds, but they still use bfd. Not even gold, which has been available for 16 years. Definitely not lld, which has been around for 5 years. The amount of performance they are already leaving on the table is huge, so who would expect them to be suddenly interested in build performance? * for values of "nobody" excluding Google.
- maccard 4y ago
  That's just not true. Every c++ project I've worked on has cared about linker and compiler speed. Unfortunately I work in windows-land where we use MSVC, but stuff like [0] makes our lives so much easier. [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/faster-c-iteration-builds/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/faster-c-iteration-bu...
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  Games dev cared, at least up to the playstation 4. The Sony linker was much faster than the Microsoft one (plus built to an unreasonable QA bar) and that cut turnaround times for builds enough that it was worth developing against the playstation and testing against the xbox, which Sony considered a competitive advantage. Also people, at least those same users, had really strong views on bugs in linkers. If the game is broken because the linker trashed it, you've only worked that out after debugging through your own code and through the compiler output, by which point you're well past patient and understanding. Sadly for this project I consider linkers to be a fundamental design mistake. Or at least obsolete. Lowering to machine code before combining files wins you runtime overhead and implementation obfuscation in exchange for reduced memory consumption. Linking an intermediate form then writing machine code (in elf if you like) from that single blob is better. I'm pretty sure it can be done in lower memory overhead than linking machine code if you're so inclined.
  - andrekandre 4y ago
    > Linking an intermediate form then writing machine code (in elf if you like) from that single blob is better. I'm pretty sure it can be done in lower memory overhead than linking machine code if you're so inclined. do you mean its better for build performance or for the final output?
fefe23 4y ago
I love mold and wish the author all the best, but I don't think this will work. First of all, the usual suspects who rip off high quality open source projects have been known to just create a fork if the license changes (see Amazon and Elasticsearch). If you do this, you have to have the right license from the start. Second I'm not sure the value proposition is great enough to warrant corporate payments. As awesome as mold and its performance savings are, I don't think they even register on the dashboard of corporations. Maybe a few companies selling build pipeline services could be persuaded, like Github and Gitlab, But for those I think it would make more sense to talk to them and get them to give money voluntarily. In my experience companies don't just give you money. They do it if they are acutely aware of a problem, like when OpenSSL turned out to be massively underfunded and lots of corporations realized they are dependent on it. I don't think any company is dependent enough on mold yet. I think the author should talk to the Linux foundation or the LLVM foundation and should get them to pay him a stipend or something. With this move he'll probably not help the situation much. Also AGPL is already pretty restrictive. Are you sure there are corporations ripping you off? Could it be that they just never even heard of mold?
- _dhruva 4y ago
  > Maybe a few companies selling build pipeline services could be persuaded, like Github and Gitlab The problem is almost all CI/CD jobs use custom docker images bundled with distro provided compiler toolchains. Replacing linker in CI/CD jobs transparently is extremely hard/impossible/undesirable.
  - fefe23 4y ago
    Excellent point, it might run counter to the idea of building exactly as if on that platform! Didn't think of that.
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    You can package it up yourself, put it in a private repo like JFrog, and build a new Docker image.
- wyldfire 4y ago
adrr 4y ago
So is this a copyright agreement or a EULA? Copyright agreements only cover distribution and if you something internally, it doesn’t cover your usage. Only if you distribute the code does it come into play.
- rpdillon 4y ago
  IANAL. Copyright covers four rights, one of them being distribution. It also covers creating derivative works, copying, and public performance. Many licenses based on copyright put restrictions on use; indeed, the BSL (the same license the author is thinking of moving to) does exactly this. In the case of the GPL, you only need to provide source code to those you distribute the software to; that may be what you're thinking of with respect to distribution, but that's more an artifact of the GPL (and its goals) than copyright.
hedora 4y ago
As a corporate open source developer, we would be forced to switch off mold immediately if we were using it, for at least two reasons: 1) Whether or not we could get finance to pay for a license, we would not be willing to force the rest of our community to pay. 2) What is a "user"? A developer seat? What if CI / CD has a public facing github queue? Are people submitting PRs users? Do end users of our service count? I'd strongly suggest a "call for pricing" model until you have good answers to the above. (Good == what the market will bear; figuring out will require you to initiate run ~ 100 customer calls). Also, why revert to GPL, not AGPL3 or Apache? GPL is a weird middle ground these days. "Some users get Freedom, but unlike with AGPL, Google, AWS and *aaS users get to pound sand. Also, unlike Apache, maybe we will patent troll you later." This stuff is hard. Good luck!
- googlryas 4y ago
  Why would you need to switch off immediately? You can still use the version you're using in perpetuity with the license you agreed to. If the main developer died, would you feel the need to immediately switch off of it? Is anyone even tracking the liveliness of the developer in your org?
  - hedora 4y ago
    Specifically for mold: It is a commodity (there are other linkers), and the main reason to use it is developer productivity. Using a fast, bitrotting and unsupported linker is worse than using a slow, up-to-date linker. We'd probably wait one release cycle to switch (maybe the replacement linker introduces bugs or something.) Having said that, there is a clear line from "linking is 5x faster" to $10-100K annual savings for the business, so I'd support paying a substantial license fee. (I do not hold the purse strings, so that doesn't matter in my current gig.)
steeve 4y ago
We (Zenly) would have absolutely paid for mold (should we have lived). Linking the app was 40s on a M1 Pro.
dang 4y ago
Related: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54sX5F8_ccwCy0zpGh3MXk/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54s... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582179
eikenberry 4y ago
Given the horrible performance of the LLVM compiler and linker I'd think Apple or one of the other LLVM backers would jump at hiring/funding this guy. Making the LLVM compiler/linker faster should be a top priority given how important it is to developer UX and productivity.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wyldfire 4y ago
  > Given the horrible performance of the LLVM compiler and linker lld is second only to mold in performance. Rui used to work on lld at Google. Apple has a significant investment in ld64 and probably doesn't want to abandon it.
  - mshockwave 4y ago
    > Apple has a significant investment in ld64 and probably doesn't want to abandon it. Yep, Facebook and a few people in Google are actually the primary contributors to LLD's MachO support
Kukumber 4y ago
Very disappointing, that's a slap in the face to everyone who contributed If you wanted to monetize your project, you should have done it from the beginning with the proper license Getting exposure and contributions only just to change the terms is just disgusting
- trillic 4y ago
  Guess he'll be slapping himself in the face...seeing as if you read the blog post you'd know that he can change the license because he wrote essentially all the code...
  - Kukumber 4y ago
    That's not the point, breaking trust, manipulation and betrayal are, if you don't care about that, then you should not complain when one random dude changes his popular library to spread a political malware [1] [1] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabotage-code-added-to-popular-npm-package-wiped-files-in-russia-and-belarus/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabot...
    - sodality2 4y ago
      It is not a break of trust, maniupulation, or a betrayal. A FOSS license is not a guarantee or promise of perpetually working on a project, for free - in fact it is specifically never guaranteeing anything. You will always be able to use the version of Mold right before the license is switched.
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  Right, if the project is no longer financially viable in its current form, the moral thing to do would be to walk away entirely. Then nobody wins, but hey, at least he did the right thing. Or would that be disgusting too? Also, if you don't like it, fork the last open source version. Your comment reads like "how dare this person not do free work for me!"
syrrim 4y ago
A better link might the google doc explaining in detail: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54sX5F8_ccwCy0zpGh3MXk/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54s... >A major obstacle in getting financial support is most companies don't have an internal process to start funding an open-source project. If they need to buy a license, that's fine, that's part of their usual business. But supporting (or giving money away to) "free" software is almost impossible. It raises too many questions at every level of management. What is the accounting item it should be categorized to? Is there any legal implication? Who can approve it in the first place? And last but not least, why do they have to do it if it's available for free? I would think you could work around many of these problems without going source-available. You could simply sell licenses to people despite already handing out an open source license for free (the sqlite approach iirc). Since the project is apparently otherwise AGPL licensed, I would think businesses would be quite open to receiving a normal commercial license instead. To sweeten the deal further, you could come up with some list of enterprise features that would be uniquely available in the commercial variant. As a risk of using the BSL, I would cite the danger of the project becoming less popular among average developers, an effect that might compound in the long term ultimately killing the project. I don't personally use mold, so I don't know how strong this effect would be.
secondcoming 4y ago
He could try putting ASCII-art adverts in the output
berry_sortoro 4y ago
layer8 4y ago
More projects should do this, if only for everyone to get a better picture about if and when this is viable.
bb88 4y ago
"It's even a bit ironic that I had been asked by several big-name companies when mold/macOS would become available, since they wanted to use it for their multi-billion-dollar businesses. But none of them gave me financial support." He's giving it away for free and then expects multi-billion dollar companies to pay for it. When they don't because they have no legal requirement, he feels gypped. This is kind of a dumb way to run your business.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  They clearly have a need (macOS version), but won't pay literally the only person on the planet who will fulfull their need, why?
  - bb88 4y ago
    License? Only one guy to handle the support? Dev is an Unknown quantity? Bad economy? Cost he's asking is too high? Cheaper for companies to build it themselves? I have a lot of questions about it too. But it's clear there's something wrong in his business model here.
    - SergeAx 4y ago
      AGPL is quite permissive license, they may use last AGPL licensed version for quite long time. One guy handling support doesn't stop them from using the product on Linux, does it? Dev is the best quality in the world, as I said. I mean, there's no one who could be better. If it's cheaper to build by themselves, why they didn't to that already?
      - 1letterunixname 4y ago
        AGPL is a restrictive license. You can't do a TiVO or a SaaS app with it.
        detaro 4y ago
        How is either of those relevant for mold?
devit 4y ago
They could make only the OSX version proprietary, which would not be a big issue since OSX users have already opted in to slavery.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  I remember a program once that used a model kind of like this. The main program itself was FOSS, and so were the Git and SVN plugins for it, but the ClearCase and SourceSafe plugins for it were proprietary and very expensive. (Unfortunately, I don't remember what the program was.) This is one model of open core I can get behind: make everything FOSS except compatibility/integration with other non-FOSS things. It's a win-win: if you care about being 100% FOSS, you'd have no use for the proprietary plugin, and conversely, if you do need it, then you're already contaminated anyway.
ksec 4y ago
I am wondering if the author is still open to sell Mold to change its license to MIT for a few million.

205 points by MForster 4y ago

> The new license would be something like individuals can use it for free but corporate users have to pay. mold started as my personal project, and I've been working on this full time for two years so far. I thought that I could earn a comfortable income if mold become popular, but unfortunately, I'm still losing my money. I think I need to take an action to make the project sustainable long term. This seems totally reasonable to me, honestly. Guess what, companies building your product on top of high-quality FOSS software? Turnabout is fair play. If we're going to rot our software infrastructure to it's soul by adding endless SaaS subscriptions to everything, then why shouldn't FOSS developers get in on the fun? This is the software dystopia we've created, where marginal-utility products get built on the backbreaking work of unpaid contributors. If they don't like it, they can fork the AGPL version or use a different linker. It's a very dog-eat-dog play, but realistically this is what our software industry has turned into. IMO, it's honorable to defend both your individual users and FOSS community while also charging your corporate users for the support they expect.

rektide 4y ago
Reasonable but death. Rather than become a part of the world, this immense value would be a mere glimmer, would not get adopted at any notable scale. It sucks. Whats happening now isnt fine. I wish so much the world could recognize value & merit & allocate some support for it. But all the rationalization in the world doesnt change the base truth that this plan would mean death.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I mean, the alternative is that the lead developer runs out of money and just drops the project altogether. If they have an enterprising personality, I see no reason why they shouldn't chase this opportunity as an alternative to letting their project fall apart/get "adopted" by an abusive maintainer.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Potentially the other alternative would be a large tech company hires them to work on an open source mold full time.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      That doesn't really end up going well either. There are many such cases where Red Hat/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Amazon buys up a sterling young FOSS developer and makes them spend the rest of their life fixing the issues for [PRODUCT] while their project becomes less-and-less relevant by the day (see: CUPS, Clang, Minix).
      - nrabulinski 4y ago
        How has cups or clang became less relevant?
        smoldesu 4y ago
        CUPS is still great but mostly because it's initial implementation was so straightforward. It's existence today is mostly maintenance-mode with a priority for fixing Mac bugs, which is understandable but also occludes the possibility for future improvement or adding support for other platforms. Clang is still relevant because LLVM is great, but as a compiler it's mired in a great deal of political hangups and general pickiness. I don't write C++ for a living, but my experience using the GNU C tooling has been much smoother than Clang and Cmake. I'll admit that both of those projects aren't exactly dead, but it would be a shame if Microsoft/Google/Apple bought Mold and malformed it to their desires.
        jabl 4y ago
        > CUPS is still great but mostly because it's initial implementation was so straightforward. It's existence today is mostly maintenance-mode with a priority for fixing Mac bugs, which is understandable but also occludes the possibility for future improvement or adding support for other platforms. The CUPS lead author left Apple a couple of years ago, and CUPS development is now mostly focused on Linux under the auspices of the Openprinting organization. (I understand the CUPS lead author still has some side consulting gig in providing bug fixes to Apples version of CUPS.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- counttheforks 4y ago
  What do you think will happen when there's no funding nor motivation to maintain the project? Death.
  - spijdar 4y ago
    I'm of a mind to agree with GP, but I also agree that lack of funding and motivation will kill the project. Unfortunately, to me this just means the project will probably die. If the author is feeling burnt out and losing money on it, I don't think trying to pivot to a commercial license will help, since as others have mentioned, I don't think many businesses rely on mold specifically, and since the performance gap isn't astronomical, many companies will just drop in lld and be done with it. At least, that seems likely to me. I guess we might find out?
- ketralnis 4y ago
  > would not get adopted at any notable scale Sure, it doesn't sound like that's their goal
dist1ll 4y ago
I feel conflicted. The FOSS label is an extremely powerful statement and draws in lots of users. To switch the license is very poor taste in my opinion, and not much different from a bait-and-switch. It should be a maintainers responsibility to be very clear about their goals for this project. I feel that they jumped the full-time gun too quickly, and now users will be paying for it
- googlryas 4y ago
  The code he developed will still be licensed under the old license, just going forward new changes won't be. You can fork it right now and keep a FOSS version if you'd like. But it's not a bait and switch because we don't have a right to his future work under whatever license we like. Imagine the developer was hit by a bus right now, or became a cloistered monk. Same difference.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lmm 4y ago
    > But it's not a bait and switch because we don't have a right to his future work under whatever license we like. Imagine the developer was hit by a bus right now, or became a cloistered monk. Same difference. If he takes people's donation money with the implicit or explicit promise that he's going to make a good-faith effort to continue working on the code, he has a moral obligation to do that IMO. Getting hit by a bus wouldn't be his fault, but choosing to abandon it to become a monk would be.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      > If he takes people's donation money with the implicit or explicit promise that he's going to make a good-faith effort to continue working on the code In the absence of clear language I think it's unreasonable to expect a small amount of money to create an infinite obligation. I'd expect a donation to be spent on development expenses, including time. I'd expect the developer to continue developing until the money runs out, or return the remaining money. Imagine you have GitHub sponsorships providing $2,000/month. You use that money to cover all your expenses and work on OSS full time. Everyone stops donating today. Surely you'd get a job and stop working on OSS full time?
msla 4y ago
If this catches on, I expect a lot more people on Hacker News will suddenly have Grave Concerns about how Free those Copyleft licenses are.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  That have always been clear from the beginning that is why you get everyone using GNU/Linux instead of the BSDs, although Apple and Sony enjoy using parts of them on their platforms.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  The problem in this case isn't with the copyleft licenses. It's with the CLA (i.e., "even though my project is copyleft, if you want to contribute to it, you have to give me a pushover license to your changes too"). Without the CLA, this project would indeed be safe from him doing this.
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    I'm confused. Copyleft doesn't grant a right to contribute upstream. It's perfectly reasonable for a maintainer of a copyleft project to say "I only accept contributions if you give me $1,000." Copyleft grants you the right to make changes and redistribute the resulting work under a compatible license. If you have a problem with CLAs, don't sign them. Many people do not care. Even without a CLA the author could simply remove contributions and still relicense. This isn't novel, and has been done before. Obviously it may be difficult to remove contributions.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      It's rare for an important software project to be 100% a one-man show. Combined with the difficulty of removing contributions, wouldn't rejecting CLAs basically keep this kind of thing from happening at all?
      - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
pjmlp 4y ago
In a way, shareware, public domain and demoware have won, after the FOSS hype cycle, as it appears to be the only way to secure a source of income, and not everything can be done via selling support.
- jabl 4y ago
  Nah, FOSS is going stronger than ever. But just as before, it's the ones that are playing the 'commodify your complement' game that are winning, while those that think that FOSS by itself is a business model are struggling.
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    The buzzword "open source" was kinda designed to appeal as a business model, so F-less OSS is indeed struggling.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    If big boys take out the funding from key projects, meaning stop paying their employees to contribute, everything would crumble. Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS and hardware, closed source.
    - jabl 4y ago
      > If big boys take out the funding from key projects, meaning stop paying their employees to contribute, everything would crumble. What's your point? If Microsoft goes bankrupt, the MS ecosystem would crumble. And so on, ad infinitum. Nothing lasts forever. Since people aren't clairvoyant, they make an effort at evaluating risks vs benefits, and end up continuing to use both MS products and FOSS software. > Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS and hardware, closed source. Yes, that's that whole 'commodify your complement' thing I mentioned. But so what? As long as those companies contribute free software that is useful, enjoy the ride. Maybe the current privacy-invading ad funded IT hegemons will fail one day and be replaced by something else, but at least whatever comes next will have a big pool of hopefully useful software to start building on top of.

bloudermilk 4y ago

Are there any examples of popular OSS projects using a non-commercial-only license?

rectang 4y ago
No, because excluding commercial users is a field-of-use restriction, and you're not FOSS if you only offer a license which imposes a field-of-use restriction. Which is fine! Just don't call it FOSS.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Furthermore, it's really hard to define what non-commercial actually means. Creative Commons spent something like a decade trying to scope a reasonable definition and eventually ended up essentially punting. With a few exceptions like (arguably) secondary public education use, pretty much any non-trivial use has some commercial component.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  > you're not FOSS > don't call it FOSS The grandparent comment clearly said OSS.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Their statement is just as true if you insert "OSS" instead of "FOSS".
    - Grimburger 4y ago
      Playing the semantic game over what is or isn't "open source" is very draining sorry. If I can look at it, that's open source software to me, you can define that phrase however you want and I'm happy with that too :)
      - account42 4y ago
        There is no semantic game, open source software is a term of art with a much more specific meaning than the source being available. If you find this draining then you can simply stop trying to misappropriate the term.

rectang 4y ago

Is the maintainer is the only copyright holder? If not, and other authors have contributed under the AGPL, the maintainer can't switch the license. EDIT: I found this in the linked blog post: > I can change the license (or sublicense) because I wrote almost all the code myself, and all remaining patches to mold are licensed under the dual license of MIT/AGPL.

suprjami 4y ago
Thanks, this was my first thought too.
stefantalpalaru 4y ago
> I can change the license (or sublicense) because I wrote almost all the code myself, and all remaining patches to mold are licensed under the dual license of MIT/AGPL. He's wrong about that. That MIT license is not an attribution of copyright, which is what he needs to relicense external contributions. This is why corporate-run projects make you sign a CLA where you renounce copyright. This is why GPL licenses have an "any later version" formula, to allow project owners to move to a newer version of the GPL license later on.
- comex 4y ago
  He can relicense everything except the code from those patches, while keeping that code under the MIT license. He will be required to preserve the MIT copyright notice and license text, and if he wanted to initiate a copyright lawsuit he would have to exclude those bits from what he's suing over, but otherwise there's no problem. GPL-family licenses have a stronger need for "any later version" than permissive licenses, since the virality rule means you can't just combine code under different GPL licenses in the same program. (Technically, the MIT license also grants the right to sublicense, so he actually could change the license, but only if the new license incorporated the MIT license's attribution requirement. Probably. The license is vague and I'm not a lawyer.)
  - nh2 4y ago
    More details here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/105912/can-you-change-code-distributed-under-the-mit-license-and-re-distribute-it-unde https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1059...

D13Fd 4y ago

I think this is totally fine, but they will need a better definition of what is and is not permissible. “Corporate” is a word that has many meanings. What about other entity types-sole proprietorships, partnerships? How about for-profit vs non-profit? Educational use? By students vs. schools themselves and faculty? Etc. If you start restricting things by type of use, you need an exceptionally thorough and clear license or you are going to wind up precluding many more people than you intend to.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
The BSL (the proposed license) is fairly clear about this if you read the license. Most sole proprietorships and corporations of all types that make money or sell a product using it would have to pay. It's not clear that any of this is legally enforceable, though.
- zinekeller 4y ago
  > It's not clear that any of this is legally enforceable, though. I'm pretty sure that it is legally enforceable in most jurisdictions, B2B contracts are almost always stronger/more binding than consumer ones (since that protections granted under consumer protection laws are gone, and there is a reasonable presumption that the parties have read and understand the contract). The blurrier part is for sole proprietorships, since it depends on whether their specific jurisdiction considers them as consumers under consumer protection laws (which uniformly weakens contracts to the extent that it does not comply with the guarantees for consumers). (Note that in most jurisdictions, most "copyright licenses" are considered as contracts. For example, multiple cases in French courts have resolved that GPL2 is considered a contract.) Also, the license text: https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/
  - JonChesterfield 4y ago
    That's curious. In the UK a contract requires consideration and I can't see any here.

dark-star 4y ago

jessermeyer 4y ago
Deeply and needlessly cynical. rui tried to fund a high-value software infrastructure project on its own merit and it's not feasible long term. So a change is required. Hardly a bait and switch 'extortion'.
- dark-star 4y ago
  Well, maybe going all-in in building a "high-value software infrastructure project on [your] own" is not a good idea if you don't have any concrete plans for funding right from the start? Changing the license to a non-FOSS is basically the most knee-jerk reaction you can do in that case. Find a maintainer. Give the project to the community. Become a regular contributor in your own spare time instead of the main (and sole) developer. There are so many better ways to handle such a situation. If you replace "building software" with "building a road" (or some other similar real-world infrastructure project), everyone would agree that it's a self-made problem and that there are other ways out rather than just "from tomorrow on this will be a toll-road". You can turn the road over to your city/municipality. Or you could let other take over the maintenance. If the road is useful, there will be others. If it isn't, well, everyone moves on.
  - eropple 4y ago
    > Give the project to the community. Why? Did the community give to him? It certainly sounds like it hasn't. What obligations does one have to a community that doesn't give back? > There are so many better ways to handle such a situation. Better for who? You? Or him? If open-source communities want open-source, they're going to need to come to grips with the need for people to eat, and to do that they are at minimum going to need to pass the hat. If they're not going to do that, this happens, and telling somebody who isn't you what they should do for "the community when "the community" doesn't support them is, frankly, wrong verging on immoral.
  - 4y ago

iLoveOncall 4y ago

I feel for the maintainer, but looking at the performance chart in the readme, I think any engineer will have a hard time getting their company to approve paying a license for such a small improvement over LLVM ld. My big-tech company and my team don't care that build time for a small part of our application is 5 minutes (not a clean build, that would be an hour), so I know they wouldn't pay to save 10 seconds. And linking is not even all of the time to build your application. From a financial point of view, the fact that the author is in Singapore and has a goal of $10K a month doesn't help.

jessermeyer 4y ago
If an engineer at a FAANG company reduced their global link times by even 10% they'd be promoted into early retirement. Mold is an order of magnitude faster.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  The guys that improved dependency download time by up to 80% at my company (Amazon) sure as hell are enjoying the 3% raise they got like everyone else. I agree with you that Mold is an order of magnitude faster than the competition (sometimes). However in that case the absolute value is more representative than the relative number. Your linking time going from 10 seconds to 1 or 2 seconds is only a tiny improvement.
  - liuliu 4y ago
    Nobody only spent 10s on linking. For any reasonable sized binary (in the range of 100 to 200 MiB) it is somewhere around 50s to 60s before mold. People regularly links 1GiB binary for living during their development cycle. If you use small binary or primarily using Go, probably not the target audience of mold. Otherwise I actually agree mold is amazing but have limited commercialization potential unless author expands the scope (like RAD Game Tools) / take some VC money (much like Emerge Tools)
    - jeffbee 4y ago

mkoubaa 4y ago

Have they considered funding from a software foundation?

wmf 4y ago
What foundations provide funding? My understanding is that they're willing to manage funding that you provide.
- Nemo_bis 4y ago
  https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html
  - wmf 4y ago
    Yikes, I wouldn't want to be the 501st project on that list.
    - orthecreedence 4y ago
      Why?
      - wmf 4y ago
        Unless they have billions and tons of staff, they can't provide much money or attention to each project.
        Nemo_bis 4y ago
        They currently have more money than they're able to give away, from what I understand. Try! Also, Horizon 2027 has about 100 G€ in budget, the more you use it the more you can get. ;)

nu11ptr 4y ago

I think this is fine. The author has the right to do whatever they want with their own product. Bummer for me as I like this linker, but probably wouldn't use it if this change is made, as my small one person company wouldn't be able to pay. That said, I personally don't see it being successful if this is done, and my suspicion is it might even be forked so an open source version could remain. It sucks that they aren't making any money, but I don't think this type of project works in any model except open source anymore. I could be wrong and hope for the sake of the author that I am.

svnpenn 4y ago

I support this. I use this with some of my projects: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0

trurl 4y ago

I think one thing that would definitely help the mold project is to have a clearer price and licensing model. The only thing I can find is https://opencollective.com/mold-linker https://opencollective.com/mold-linker. It would be much easier to be able to go to my manager with that kind of information. Right now the conversation goes: "Hey, this linker could save us quite a bit of time on our enormous executable." "Okay, how much will it cost us?" "Well, there is this site where you can donate on a regular basis."

doorman2 4y ago

Are there any out-of-the-box non-commercial licenses? I’ve wanted to do this too, but I’m too lazy to find an appropriate license.

ralmidani 4y ago
Lots of options here: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
wmf 4y ago
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/
rileyphone 4y ago
Mongo, Graylog, and Elastic use the SSPL.

1letterunixname 4y ago

jeffbee 4y ago

I think there is a prima facie case that nobody* cares about linker speed. bfd is a terrible linker written by weirdos and it's still the default linker on every mainstream Linux. You'd think that an organization like Canonical would benefit from faster builds, but they still use bfd. Not even gold, which has been available for 16 years. Definitely not lld, which has been around for 5 years. The amount of performance they are already leaving on the table is huge, so who would expect them to be suddenly interested in build performance? * for values of "nobody" excluding Google.

maccard 4y ago
That's just not true. Every c++ project I've worked on has cared about linker and compiler speed. Unfortunately I work in windows-land where we use MSVC, but stuff like [0] makes our lives so much easier. [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/faster-c-iteration-builds/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/faster-c-iteration-bu...
JonChesterfield 4y ago
Games dev cared, at least up to the playstation 4. The Sony linker was much faster than the Microsoft one (plus built to an unreasonable QA bar) and that cut turnaround times for builds enough that it was worth developing against the playstation and testing against the xbox, which Sony considered a competitive advantage. Also people, at least those same users, had really strong views on bugs in linkers. If the game is broken because the linker trashed it, you've only worked that out after debugging through your own code and through the compiler output, by which point you're well past patient and understanding. Sadly for this project I consider linkers to be a fundamental design mistake. Or at least obsolete. Lowering to machine code before combining files wins you runtime overhead and implementation obfuscation in exchange for reduced memory consumption. Linking an intermediate form then writing machine code (in elf if you like) from that single blob is better. I'm pretty sure it can be done in lower memory overhead than linking machine code if you're so inclined.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  > Linking an intermediate form then writing machine code (in elf if you like) from that single blob is better. I'm pretty sure it can be done in lower memory overhead than linking machine code if you're so inclined. do you mean its better for build performance or for the final output?

fefe23 4y ago

I love mold and wish the author all the best, but I don't think this will work. First of all, the usual suspects who rip off high quality open source projects have been known to just create a fork if the license changes (see Amazon and Elasticsearch). If you do this, you have to have the right license from the start. Second I'm not sure the value proposition is great enough to warrant corporate payments. As awesome as mold and its performance savings are, I don't think they even register on the dashboard of corporations. Maybe a few companies selling build pipeline services could be persuaded, like Github and Gitlab, But for those I think it would make more sense to talk to them and get them to give money voluntarily. In my experience companies don't just give you money. They do it if they are acutely aware of a problem, like when OpenSSL turned out to be massively underfunded and lots of corporations realized they are dependent on it. I don't think any company is dependent enough on mold yet. I think the author should talk to the Linux foundation or the LLVM foundation and should get them to pay him a stipend or something. With this move he'll probably not help the situation much. Also AGPL is already pretty restrictive. Are you sure there are corporations ripping you off? Could it be that they just never even heard of mold?

_dhruva 4y ago
> Maybe a few companies selling build pipeline services could be persuaded, like Github and Gitlab The problem is almost all CI/CD jobs use custom docker images bundled with distro provided compiler toolchains. Replacing linker in CI/CD jobs transparently is extremely hard/impossible/undesirable.
- fefe23 4y ago
  Excellent point, it might run counter to the idea of building exactly as if on that platform! Didn't think of that.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  You can package it up yourself, put it in a private repo like JFrog, and build a new Docker image.
wyldfire 4y ago

adrr 4y ago

So is this a copyright agreement or a EULA? Copyright agreements only cover distribution and if you something internally, it doesn’t cover your usage. Only if you distribute the code does it come into play.

rpdillon 4y ago
IANAL. Copyright covers four rights, one of them being distribution. It also covers creating derivative works, copying, and public performance. Many licenses based on copyright put restrictions on use; indeed, the BSL (the same license the author is thinking of moving to) does exactly this. In the case of the GPL, you only need to provide source code to those you distribute the software to; that may be what you're thinking of with respect to distribution, but that's more an artifact of the GPL (and its goals) than copyright.

hedora 4y ago

As a corporate open source developer, we would be forced to switch off mold immediately if we were using it, for at least two reasons: 1) Whether or not we could get finance to pay for a license, we would not be willing to force the rest of our community to pay. 2) What is a "user"? A developer seat? What if CI / CD has a public facing github queue? Are people submitting PRs users? Do end users of our service count? I'd strongly suggest a "call for pricing" model until you have good answers to the above. (Good == what the market will bear; figuring out will require you to initiate run ~ 100 customer calls). Also, why revert to GPL, not AGPL3 or Apache? GPL is a weird middle ground these days. "Some users get Freedom, but unlike with AGPL, Google, AWS and *aaS users get to pound sand. Also, unlike Apache, maybe we will patent troll you later." This stuff is hard. Good luck!

googlryas 4y ago
Why would you need to switch off immediately? You can still use the version you're using in perpetuity with the license you agreed to. If the main developer died, would you feel the need to immediately switch off of it? Is anyone even tracking the liveliness of the developer in your org?
- hedora 4y ago
  Specifically for mold: It is a commodity (there are other linkers), and the main reason to use it is developer productivity. Using a fast, bitrotting and unsupported linker is worse than using a slow, up-to-date linker. We'd probably wait one release cycle to switch (maybe the replacement linker introduces bugs or something.) Having said that, there is a clear line from "linking is 5x faster" to $10-100K annual savings for the business, so I'd support paying a substantial license fee. (I do not hold the purse strings, so that doesn't matter in my current gig.)

steeve 4y ago

We (Zenly) would have absolutely paid for mold (should we have lived). Linking the app was 40s on a M1 Pro.

dang 4y ago

Related: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54sX5F8_ccwCy0zpGh3MXk/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54s... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582179

eikenberry 4y ago

Given the horrible performance of the LLVM compiler and linker I'd think Apple or one of the other LLVM backers would jump at hiring/funding this guy. Making the LLVM compiler/linker faster should be a top priority given how important it is to developer UX and productivity.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wyldfire 4y ago
> Given the horrible performance of the LLVM compiler and linker lld is second only to mold in performance. Rui used to work on lld at Google. Apple has a significant investment in ld64 and probably doesn't want to abandon it.
- mshockwave 4y ago
  > Apple has a significant investment in ld64 and probably doesn't want to abandon it. Yep, Facebook and a few people in Google are actually the primary contributors to LLD's MachO support

Kukumber 4y ago

Very disappointing, that's a slap in the face to everyone who contributed If you wanted to monetize your project, you should have done it from the beginning with the proper license Getting exposure and contributions only just to change the terms is just disgusting

trillic 4y ago
Guess he'll be slapping himself in the face...seeing as if you read the blog post you'd know that he can change the license because he wrote essentially all the code...
- Kukumber 4y ago
  That's not the point, breaking trust, manipulation and betrayal are, if you don't care about that, then you should not complain when one random dude changes his popular library to spread a political malware [1] [1] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabotage-code-added-to-popular-npm-package-wiped-files-in-russia-and-belarus/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabot...
  - sodality2 4y ago
    It is not a break of trust, maniupulation, or a betrayal. A FOSS license is not a guarantee or promise of perpetually working on a project, for free - in fact it is specifically never guaranteeing anything. You will always be able to use the version of Mold right before the license is switched.
orthecreedence 4y ago
Right, if the project is no longer financially viable in its current form, the moral thing to do would be to walk away entirely. Then nobody wins, but hey, at least he did the right thing. Or would that be disgusting too? Also, if you don't like it, fork the last open source version. Your comment reads like "how dare this person not do free work for me!"

syrrim 4y ago

A better link might the google doc explaining in detail: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54sX5F8_ccwCy0zpGh3MXk/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54s... >A major obstacle in getting financial support is most companies don't have an internal process to start funding an open-source project. If they need to buy a license, that's fine, that's part of their usual business. But supporting (or giving money away to) "free" software is almost impossible. It raises too many questions at every level of management. What is the accounting item it should be categorized to? Is there any legal implication? Who can approve it in the first place? And last but not least, why do they have to do it if it's available for free? I would think you could work around many of these problems without going source-available. You could simply sell licenses to people despite already handing out an open source license for free (the sqlite approach iirc). Since the project is apparently otherwise AGPL licensed, I would think businesses would be quite open to receiving a normal commercial license instead. To sweeten the deal further, you could come up with some list of enterprise features that would be uniquely available in the commercial variant. As a risk of using the BSL, I would cite the danger of the project becoming less popular among average developers, an effect that might compound in the long term ultimately killing the project. I don't personally use mold, so I don't know how strong this effect would be.

secondcoming 4y ago

He could try putting ASCII-art adverts in the output

berry_sortoro 4y ago

layer8 4y ago

More projects should do this, if only for everyone to get a better picture about if and when this is viable.

bb88 4y ago

"It's even a bit ironic that I had been asked by several big-name companies when mold/macOS would become available, since they wanted to use it for their multi-billion-dollar businesses. But none of them gave me financial support." He's giving it away for free and then expects multi-billion dollar companies to pay for it. When they don't because they have no legal requirement, he feels gypped. This is kind of a dumb way to run your business.

SergeAx 4y ago
They clearly have a need (macOS version), but won't pay literally the only person on the planet who will fulfull their need, why?
- bb88 4y ago
  License? Only one guy to handle the support? Dev is an Unknown quantity? Bad economy? Cost he's asking is too high? Cheaper for companies to build it themselves? I have a lot of questions about it too. But it's clear there's something wrong in his business model here.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    AGPL is quite permissive license, they may use last AGPL licensed version for quite long time. One guy handling support doesn't stop them from using the product on Linux, does it? Dev is the best quality in the world, as I said. I mean, there's no one who could be better. If it's cheaper to build by themselves, why they didn't to that already?
    - 1letterunixname 4y ago
      AGPL is a restrictive license. You can't do a TiVO or a SaaS app with it.
      - detaro 4y ago
        How is either of those relevant for mold?

devit 4y ago

They could make only the OSX version proprietary, which would not be a big issue since OSX users have already opted in to slavery.

josephcsible 4y ago
I remember a program once that used a model kind of like this. The main program itself was FOSS, and so were the Git and SVN plugins for it, but the ClearCase and SourceSafe plugins for it were proprietary and very expensive. (Unfortunately, I don't remember what the program was.) This is one model of open core I can get behind: make everything FOSS except compatibility/integration with other non-FOSS things. It's a win-win: if you care about being 100% FOSS, you'd have no use for the proprietary plugin, and conversely, if you do need it, then you're already contaminated anyway.

ksec 4y ago

I am wondering if the author is still open to sell Mold to change its license to MIT for a few million.