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.
Corporate loves it! Free, unpaid work means no opensource spirit can stop them in court. Pushover license is a perfect name for it.
This isn’t a recent development; it’s been going on for decades. Indeed, most of the reason we use the terms “FOSS” and “open source” instead of the original term—“free software”—is that “open source” was deemed more corporate-friendly.
“Pushover license” is a pretty descriptive way to call it. I’ve seen quite a few dumb takes on coreutils that focus on the “Rust rewrite” part and not “MIT-licensed rewrite”. Pushover licenses have a place, but to me the goal here is pretty transparent and I don’t like it.
I like permissive licenses for libraries, that way you leave room for corporate collaborators, however, all my binaries and end user apps are copy left.
Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it’s far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company.
Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it’s nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work.
It’s like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It’s like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that’s open source. You get no power and you get no money.
It’s exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not mean that you didn’t exploit them. And for the record that’s how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that’s exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be.
I really don’t see the “we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license”, all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there’s solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it’s the standard “real communism has never been tried” argument. AGPL is the only thing that I’ve seen so far that’s an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.
Imagine having to pay for each library your computer uses. We’d just as soon stop using computers than do that.
Imagine paying for Windows
I used an Open Source library for work.
I asked my company to consider donating to them.
Nothing…They’d rather pay for MS Teams even when it doesn’t work reliably.
I offered to help with setting up a WebRTC server.
Nothing…The only ones actually caring about donating to FOSS projects are a few of the developers, that realise the effort that goes into it and also have enough money to spare.
It is guaranteed those who talk about this have ZERO clue about the licenses of the software they directly use, or have been always installed on their systems.
it does concern me a lot that both uutils and ladybird use permissive licenses
