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Moral of the story? Use GPL. If only Etherpad had done so in the first place.
by shiven 11y ago
Moral of the story? Use GPL.
If only Etherpad had done so in the first place.
- VieElm 11y agoIf EtherPad had been GPL I have my doubts Hackpad would have ever been forked from it or if Hackpad would have even been a thing.
- quadrangle 11y agoSo, maybe more people would have used and even contributed to Etherpad then… who knows
- rspeer 11y agoEtherpad was completely unmaintainable when it was shut down as a service and open-sourced. Its first, open-source major rewrite (etherpad-lite) didn't work. It took a second major rewrite by a profit-motivated startup (Hackpad) to become useful again. I think that if Etherpad had been GPLed, we would still have nothing but etherpad-lite, and we would lament Etherpad as a lost technology.
- kentonv 11y agoI'm curious what you mean when you say etherpad-lite "didn't work". I use it fairly regularly and while I'll agree it's not nearly as refined as Hackpad, it seems to basically function. (Note that I'm not debating the GPL point. I don't personally think Hackpad's forking the code has had any meaningful effect on etherpad-lite's popularity; there are plenty of collaborative document editors out there.)
- rspeer 11y agoIt would corrupt its data when too many people were using it at the same time.
- castell 11y agoWrong. The current Etherpad open source project and what you mean are not the same. The first one is the predecessor of Google Wave Java based product, and the current one "Etherpad Lite" is a JavaScript & Node.js based open source project - a reimplementation, possible as Google open sourced the original Java code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad
- kentonv 11y agoEtherpad was not a predecessor to Wave -- Wave was already released when Etherpad was acquired. They did use similar ideas, though.
- gst 11y agoYou probably mean AGPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License)? The GPL wouldn't have made a difference, as it doesn't require you to release the source of something that you run as a web service.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoThe Web is the Ultimate Copy Protection http://advogato.org/article/216.html http://advogato.org/article/216.html
- PebblesHD 11y agoFascinating article, and with original comments from 2000, neat! It's interesting to see the arguments for and against protections of these sorts haven't changed in a long time.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoI emailed the link to RMS. (He's very good about replying to mail.) He responded by saying that he was aware of the problem, and wanted to solve it but could not do so anytime soon.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoTo be clear, I mailed him the link in 2000.
- shurcooL 11y agoI don't think that's a good reason to use GPL. I think it's better for something to be open source when its creator wants it to be open, not because they're forced to.
- timonovici 11y agoGPL wouldn't made a difference here, since it's a web service. The AGPL story is different. I think you are too trusting when you say that the creator goodwill will prevail - as an author, you are better off making this enforceable, even if you don't plan to sue anyone. Also, one can go the MySQL way - dual licensing. You end up with more options in hands by using AGPL, and that's a good thing.