I ask this because I think of the recent switch of Ubuntu to the Rust recode of the GNU core utils, which use an MIT license. There are many Rust recodes of GPL software that re-license it as a pushover MIT or Apache licenses. I worry these relicensing efforts this will significantly harm the FOSS ecosystem. Is this reason to start worrying or is it not that bad?
IMO, if the FOSS world makes something public, with extensive liberties, then the only thing that should be asked in return is that people preserve these liberties, like the GPL successfully enforces. These pushover licenses preserve nothing.
Coreutils has little commercial value to take can create a proprietary fork of. There is little value that can be added to it to make it worthwhile. The same is for sudo - which has had a permissive licence from the start. In all that time no one has cared enough to fork it for profit.
Not saying that is true of every project. But at the same time even GPL software has issues with large companies profiting off it and not contributing back. Since unless you are distributing binaries the GPL does not force you to do anything really. See mongodb and their move to even more restrictive licences.
The GPL is not the only thing that stops companies from taking open software. Not does if fully protect against that.
Not does everything need to be GPL. It makes sense for some projects and less sense for others. Especially libraries as that basically forces no company from using them for anything. Which is also not what you want from a library.
Okay then; what licence can we use to force any entity using a library to make their project open-source?
EDIT: clarification
None. The closest you can get is the AGPLv3.
If you go further, it will no longer be open source. This is the case for the Server Side Public License (SSPL) for example. It requires the entire system configuration to be released under the same license*. This sounds “open source friendly” but it’s actually just a proprietary license because it’s not realistically possible to legally comply with it. You cannot run standard hardware without proprietary firmware, which means you cannot run SSPLed software on it legally.
*This only applies if you host the software as a service but the result is the same. It basically violates the freedom to use the work for any purpose.
I don’t think there is a good license for that. The ones MongoDB used turned the open source community against them. But that is not really my point. I just mean that some projects using MIT won’t suddenly mean every company will start stealing and closing that software. Some things like coreutils and sudo just don’t have the commercial value to make that worth the effort. So there is no real need to worry about these two projects IMO. Other projects are a different story altogether though. Each project needs to make its own decision on what licence best suits it. The GPL is not the one and only license that is worth using.
I would say AGPL is the “safest” license still approved by the OSI. Could you share your opinion?
GPL is the only thing standing between us and Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
There’s a reason that “Stallman was right” is a meme in the FOSS world.
Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance? They already tried to use their customer licensing to restrict source access!
It only takes one successful proprietary product to gain mind-share and market-share and become a new de-facto standard, and then all of the original FOSS has to play catch-up and stay compatible to stay relevant.
See Jabber/XMPP for an example.
See Jabber/XMPP for an example.
There was a (short) time when I could chat with my friends on google hangouts (or whatever that was called back then) and facebook messaging via my own xmpp server. It was pretty cool and somehow felt like that’s the way things should be. Like email today (even if every big player is trying to destroy that too).
Maybe in some version of the future we’ll get that back.
Also on that topic, very interesting read:
Interesting, but ultimately a roundabout justification for why the author chose a non-FOSS license for their startup Slack-clone built on ATProto.
They talk about “pro-labor licensing” but what they mean is pro- their -labor, not pro- anyone else’s -labor.
GPL is already the most pro-labor licensing since it respects the work of anyone who contributes in equal measure, and does not hold the “original” founding author in higher regard.
It’s really quite something to rail so unequivocally against the “fascistic mega-corps” and “autocratic corpostates” in your licensing justification blog post and then build your commercial product on top of Bluesky .
Why are they pushover licenses? Because they don’t force people to contribute back? Because a lot of companies aren’t doing that for GPL licensed software either.
Also not really sure how this would allow a takeover, because control of the project is not related to the license.
It’s not so much about forcing to contribute, but rather keeping companies from selling commercial forks/having checks against profiting from work that happens to be freely available.
You can profit from GPL software. The only restriction is if you distribute it you also need to distribute modifications under the GPL.
GPL also does nothing for software as a service since it is never distributed.
GPL even explicitly allows selling GPL software. This is effectively what redhat do. They just need to distribute the source to those that they sell it to.
The GPL doesn’t place any restrictions on selling or profiting from GPL licensed works. It only requires that anyone distributing the work provides the recipients with the same rights under the GPL, ie. the right to view, modify and redistribute the source code.
This means that a company cannot take a GPL licensed work and turn it into a proprietary product.
The GPL doesn’t force to contribute. But if you make changes to it, you need to have these changes reflect the liberties you yourself received. Megacorporations use the so-called “Explore, Expand, Exterminate” model, the GPL stops this from happening.
I’ve heard it mostly as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
No
