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Thanks for sharing this thought, it hadn't occured to me that this could be an issue. Would the choice of AGPL or MPL for a licence have satisfied your concerns

by loufe 2y ago

Thanks for sharing this thought, it hadn't occured to me that this could be an issue. Would the choice of AGPL or MPL for a licence have satisfied your concerns?

bayindirh 2y ago
As a person who shares OPs concerns, (A)GPL is acceptable, in v2 or v3 form. Anything permissive is not, because allows a closed fork, which everybody wants to do to rob free software ecosystem to undo what has been done over these years. Because "monies".
- switchbak 2y ago
  Personally I haven’t seen this motive across any of the organizations I’ve worked at. They usually seem more interested in minimizing maintenance costs, which means they try to upstream changes where possible or practical. What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod?
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Any hardware company which would want to block 3rd party firmware from loading or executing on their systems. They can add a small handshake code to every binary on that system to authenticate via TPM or the processor's embedded secure element on start. They don't need to make extensive changes. Pull the latest, patch, compile, burn to FW. TaDa! IOW, TiVoization 2.0. GPL2 makes it very hard already, but GPL3 makes it impossible. With permissive licenses, it's very possible. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
  - trelane 2y ago
    > What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod? Maybe ask these folks: https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Having both available means that someone can use it under the MIT license to produce a proprietary version.
gr4vityWall 2y ago
While I don't share OP's concern, I believe AGPL is much more preferable, yes.
tmtvl 2y ago
For me the most important thing is the rights of the end user. So I consider the AGPL the best of all licenses I am aware of. And hey, if Google bans AGPL software then it must be doing something right.

by loufe 2y ago

Thanks for sharing this thought, it hadn't occured to me that this could be an issue. Would the choice of AGPL or MPL for a licence have satisfied your concerns?

bayindirh 2y ago

As a person who shares OPs concerns, (A)GPL is acceptable, in v2 or v3 form. Anything permissive is not, because allows a closed fork, which everybody wants to do to rob free software ecosystem to undo what has been done over these years. Because "monies".

switchbak 2y ago
Personally I haven’t seen this motive across any of the organizations I’ve worked at. They usually seem more interested in minimizing maintenance costs, which means they try to upstream changes where possible or practical. What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod?
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Any hardware company which would want to block 3rd party firmware from loading or executing on their systems. They can add a small handshake code to every binary on that system to authenticate via TPM or the processor's embedded secure element on start. They don't need to make extensive changes. Pull the latest, patch, compile, burn to FW. TaDa! IOW, TiVoization 2.0. GPL2 makes it very hard already, but GPL3 makes it impossible. With permissive licenses, it's very possible. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
- trelane 2y ago
  > What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod? Maybe ask these folks: https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

Having both available means that someone can use it under the MIT license to produce a proprietary version.

gr4vityWall 2y ago

While I don't share OP's concern, I believe AGPL is much more preferable, yes.

tmtvl 2y ago

For me the most important thing is the rights of the end user. So I consider the AGPL the best of all licenses I am aware of. And hey, if Google bans AGPL software then it must be doing something right.