Apertis v2024 released

The GNU utilities underline that giving people freedom is always good. There's no point being made that working around licences is always good. It depends on the goal.

The Unix implementations that were released under, for example, a BSD licence, were often modified by vendors and then the source code wasn't provided for the modified version. Same for X Windows / xfree86. So they were free software when published by the developers, but weren't free software when used by the users.

Richard invented the GPL licences to fix this problem and ensure that users received the freedoms.

Apertis is the opposite. They're looking for clever ways to help companies *not* give freedoms to users.

One of the selling points for Apertis is it's ability to be used in places where the GPLv3 would be problematic. The fact that rust-coreutils and other such packages are written in a memory safe language was definitely seen as a positive, however it's not the main focus of Apertis.

Collabora is a consultancy. We strongly believe in open source and work with a number of large companies, promoting and helping them to make use of open source, including frequently submitting improvements upstream. For instance, if you look back at the development statistics for previous kernels on this site, you will see Collabora come up in the most active list from time to time. This is a result of the work we do with our clients.

We will make pragmatic choices (as we have in the case of package selection in Apertis) to enable our clients to use open source, whilst ensuring that we honour the licensing terms for the projects that we choose / are able to use in the given circumstances.

> They say they're removing GPLv3 as a means to solve a problem, but the problem is barely described. And when the solution is so harmful, a bit of justification should be expected.

The problem is that clauses, such as the anti-tivoization clause in the GPLv3, make it impossible for a company looking to ship a consumer focused device, specifically one that needs to comply with strict regulations (typically requiring the manufacturer to ensure that unsanctioned changes can't be made to the software), to use software under that license. This is not a new issue, it's been known about since before the GPLv3 was finalised and is why the Linux kernel still ships under the GPLv2 license.

We're honouring the licensing terms as chosen by the projects involved. As a result the freedoms of each projects users are being maintained as requested by their authors. I agree, there are projects that grant more freedoms to their users, however for the reason described above we avoid using those projects so as not to violate the freedoms they wish to provide their users. There is a pragmatic balance that sometimes needs to be made here in certain circumstances.

In using a Linux based OS on a device, there are still large portions of that OS that are licensed in a way that require source to be shared, but do not require the device to be modifiable. For example kernel support where, unlike a mature low level utility, there is likely to be some support added (and such support is typically upstreamed as we prefer to avoid heavily modified downstream vendor kernels or carrying out-of-mainline patches in Apertis), which can broadly benefit the FOSS community in providing improved access to support for the SoC, functionality in SoCs using similar/identical IP cores or other ancillary components that may well be used in other devices. A common alternative is a proprietary OS such as VxWorks or QNX is used instead, where no such advantage for the FOSS community exists.

> Cars, like medical devices, are (IIRC) not in the "consumer products" definition ("any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes"). I don't remember the details, it was many ago that I last looked into that. There are probably some good docs available. The GPL FAQ gives just two examples of consumer products: portable music players and digital video recorders.

I don't know what to say. I personally own a car that's used for personal, family, and household purposes. They're classed as consumer goods, hence the issue.

I'm a little confused how you think that definition doesn't cover cars. It sure as hell includes *my* car! Even my van, which is *mostly* used for business purposes is also used for daily domestic stuff...

I think the problem is extremely obvious. It's called a "lost opportunity". As in "if we don't do this we will get locked out of the market".

And while the GPL fanatics don't seem to care about whether FLOSS is actually used or not, so long as they can live in their digital cave, some of us would actually like to see FLOSS make a difference in the real world. I'm actually rather gutted that my company would rather pay for OpenQM, than use the GPL2 ScarletDME.

If I write NEW code for Scarlet, I'll almost certainly MPL it, with the *deliberate* intention that the owners of OpenQM can incorporate it. I don't particularly like the idea, but imho the alternative is worse.

Cheers,
Wol