5 ms·

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

by 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
> 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. It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code, just because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine when someone became a licensee, you could say that old/existing licensees can continue to use the old terms. But new licensees can be obligated to use new terms. > 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. I doubt either of those organizations would fund Rui's work here. But it might be interesting to try and combine efforts with some of the incremental-compile/link ideas in Rust, Zig, and C++. > Could it be that they just never even heard of mold? This is likely the case. Maybe it would make sense to advertise it at conferences like OSSNA or similar.
- leni536 4y ago
  > It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code, just because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine when someone became a licensee, you could say that old/existing licensees can continue to use the old terms. But new licensees can be obligated to use new terms. Any old licensee that holds the source of the old code with the original AGPL license can distribute the code with the original license to anyone else. They have the license to do so. That is anyone can just press fork on github, and keep distributing all the AGPL versions with the original license.
omoikane 4y ago
I wonder if AGPL is exactly the problem. There are certain large corporations that wouldn't touch anything with AGPL, and thus have little incentive to sponsor projects like mold because they see little benefit from it. Dropping AGPL might be a step in making friends with some corporations while losing some open source friends, but the latter don't pay the bills.
- poulpy123 4y ago
  He is specifically explaining that big companies are using his code. They are not afraid of AGPL but they just don't want to pay him
- fefe23 4y ago
  This argument may make superficial sense if you talk about a library, which is not the case here. The AGPL does not prevent Amazon from linking their proprietary code with mold. It prevents you from selling a linker service that is built on mold without giving people the source code to mold. My understanding of AGPL is that Amazon wouldn't even have to open source their service. So the license is not in the way of commercial exploitation. In fact, OP makes exactly that point, that he is thinking about needing a more restrictive license, not a less restrictive one.
  - lights0123 4y ago
    As an example of a company that doesn't touch AGPL, Google's policy is to "maintain an aggressively-broad ban on all AGPL software": https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy/ https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
    - bembo 4y ago
      They make it sound like some kind of deadly disease.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      It seems that this is why the author (ex-googler) chose AGPL. It's FLOSS but also works as a barrier for them.
josephcsible 4y ago
> 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). Your moral connotations are backwards. Elastic did a bad thing by changing their product from a FOSS license to a proprietary license. Amazon did a good thing by forking the last FOSS version and maintaining that one. (Yes, it's weird to think of Amazon as the good guy, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.)
wbond 4y ago
I know various companies have been looking into sponsoring his work for iOS, since it can make a big difference in the edit/build/run cycle since linking times can be fairly high. I was even personally supporting it for those reasons for a number of months. From what I understand, it is part way there to fully supporting what is needed on macOS/iOS, but then it is hard to throw money at it when it isn’t a replacement yet, especially since sponsorship isn’t guaranteeing work goes into your needs. So sort of a chicken and egg situation. Recently it seems work has been focused on some mainframe architectures, and I wasn’t actually using it at all, so I stopped sponsoring. All this to say is that it isn’t specific to mold, but open source projects in general. If the source is available and it works, there is no incentive to sponsor, and if it doesn’t yet do what you want, there isn’t a guarantee that your sponsorship will move the needle.

by fefe23 4y ago

_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

> 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. It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code, just because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine when someone became a licensee, you could say that old/existing licensees can continue to use the old terms. But new licensees can be obligated to use new terms. > 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. I doubt either of those organizations would fund Rui's work here. But it might be interesting to try and combine efforts with some of the incremental-compile/link ideas in Rust, Zig, and C++. > Could it be that they just never even heard of mold? This is likely the case. Maybe it would make sense to advertise it at conferences like OSSNA or similar.

leni536 4y ago
> It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code, just because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine when someone became a licensee, you could say that old/existing licensees can continue to use the old terms. But new licensees can be obligated to use new terms. Any old licensee that holds the source of the old code with the original AGPL license can distribute the code with the original license to anyone else. They have the license to do so. That is anyone can just press fork on github, and keep distributing all the AGPL versions with the original license.

omoikane 4y ago

I wonder if AGPL is exactly the problem. There are certain large corporations that wouldn't touch anything with AGPL, and thus have little incentive to sponsor projects like mold because they see little benefit from it. Dropping AGPL might be a step in making friends with some corporations while losing some open source friends, but the latter don't pay the bills.

poulpy123 4y ago
He is specifically explaining that big companies are using his code. They are not afraid of AGPL but they just don't want to pay him
fefe23 4y ago
This argument may make superficial sense if you talk about a library, which is not the case here. The AGPL does not prevent Amazon from linking their proprietary code with mold. It prevents you from selling a linker service that is built on mold without giving people the source code to mold. My understanding of AGPL is that Amazon wouldn't even have to open source their service. So the license is not in the way of commercial exploitation. In fact, OP makes exactly that point, that he is thinking about needing a more restrictive license, not a less restrictive one.
- lights0123 4y ago
  As an example of a company that doesn't touch AGPL, Google's policy is to "maintain an aggressively-broad ban on all AGPL software": https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy/ https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
  - bembo 4y ago
    They make it sound like some kind of deadly disease.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    It seems that this is why the author (ex-googler) chose AGPL. It's FLOSS but also works as a barrier for them.

josephcsible 4y ago

> 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). Your moral connotations are backwards. Elastic did a bad thing by changing their product from a FOSS license to a proprietary license. Amazon did a good thing by forking the last FOSS version and maintaining that one. (Yes, it's weird to think of Amazon as the good guy, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.)

wbond 4y ago

I know various companies have been looking into sponsoring his work for iOS, since it can make a big difference in the edit/build/run cycle since linking times can be fairly high. I was even personally supporting it for those reasons for a number of months. From what I understand, it is part way there to fully supporting what is needed on macOS/iOS, but then it is hard to throw money at it when it isn’t a replacement yet, especially since sponsorship isn’t guaranteeing work goes into your needs. So sort of a chicken and egg situation. Recently it seems work has been focused on some mainframe architectures, and I wasn’t actually using it at all, so I stopped sponsoring. All this to say is that it isn’t specific to mold, but open source projects in general. If the source is available and it works, there is no incentive to sponsor, and if it doesn’t yet do what you want, there isn’t a guarantee that your sponsorship will move the needle.