Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 5, 2020 10:48 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (9 responses)

All those projects have been killed by the same “open source” ideology that objects to free software licenses.

The core of the problem is that people wanted a free lunch and being able to use commons without any maintenance obligation (because free software licensing is effectively an obligation to share maintenance, if only by making it possible to centralize fixes).

The end result is you *can* *not* rely on commons without the kind of out of band internal maintenance organization the FAANG set up for themselves. Thus they are the only ones able to productivize and monetize stuff, and hobbyist projects don’t survive deployment “it needs to continue working” reality checks.

Unlike other companies the FAANG do not need a copyleft-style framework to organize maintenance cooperation. First, they are big enough to reach critical mass just by themselves. Second, they are big enough to control the behavior of their partners without the need of a software licensing stick.

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 5, 2020 16:37 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

> All those projects have been killed by the same “open source” ideology that objects to free software licenses.
Not following. These projects were killed because nobody is interested in maintaining them.

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 6, 2020 13:13 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (7 responses)

The whole point of the “open source” ideology is not to bother with sharing fixes and maintenance with others. That’s the only way it differs from free software and that’s the only reason it is perceived as cheaper than free software.

Just copy things, you don’t owe anything to anyone, project bring-up costs is zero.

However, all the maintenance bits that are not shared accumulate over time and over dependency links, exactly like poison in the foodchain. What kills most of those projects maintenance-wise is the shore of keeping all the third party code they build upon secure and up to date.

That’s why “open source” works for a Google (where every employee has to commit fixes to their internal giant mono-repo regardless of what the license says) and not for smaller entities (that only have software licensing to organize maintenance sharing).

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 6, 2020 13:35 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> The whole point of the “open source” ideology is not to bother with sharing fixes and maintenance with others. That’s the only way it differs from free software and that’s the only reason it is perceived as cheaper than free software.

Not quite.

The whole point of "open source" ideology is that "we get to use software someone else wrote without paying anyone anything for it"

Maintaining or fixing it internally? Or even periodically updating it? Please. That would require actual work.

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 6, 2020 17:38 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

> The whole point of the “open source” ideology is not to bother with sharing fixes and maintenance with others.
Nope. The whole point of open source is to not be forced to disclose your whole IP if you use one small GPL library.

> However, all the maintenance bits that are not shared accumulate over time and over dependency links, exactly like poison in the foodchain. What kills most of those projects maintenance-wise is the shore of keeping all the third party code they build upon secure and up to date.
And that's exactly why FAANG actually do push out fixes into open source projects.

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 7, 2020 9:37 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

As I already wrote, open source works for FAAMGs because their scale and centralization builts-in fix collection (and once you’ve collected them it’s a small step to share them back).

For everyone smaller it does not work because there is a lack of incentive to share and merge back fixes. Projects are set up without caring about maintenance and fix flows and hit the resulting stack maintenance wall after a short while.

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 7, 2020 17:14 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

This is true in general, smaller software companies often don't have internal processes to ensure that their software is maintained. It doesn't really matter which license is used.

In general, large successful open source projects work kinda like trade associations, so it's in the participants' best interests to chip in with maintenance and improvements. And by nature, small companies rarely have time or money to participate in trade associations.

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 13, 2020 9:01 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (2 responses)

> The whole point of open source is to not be forced to disclose your whole IP if you use one small GPL library.

That doesn't accord with any definition I've heard of "open source". But anyone who thinks it unfair that they have to disclose their IP if they use one GPL library is a jerk. If you don't like the terms of a work, you can ask for it to be changed and I think most small developers have their price. But you don't get to take from someone else because they're small and you can dismiss the value of their work. If it's really so small, then rewrite it.

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 13, 2020 9:28 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

If you think of it from the *developer's* point of view it is perfect Open Source.

The resulting work is not Open Source, so from the end user's point of view it isn't Open Source, but that isn't the point of Open Source. (It *is* the point of Free Software, and that's the difference between the two!)

Cheers,
Wol

Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

Posted Oct 13, 2020 16:24 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Has I ever said that it's OK to _violate_ licenses? I think that using GPL is stupid, but yeah, that's your right.

Moreover, my position is that the landscape should be littered with corpses of companies that violated the GPL.