If you see the AGPL licenses on my free and open source work and you think “damn you, I can’t use this to enrich myself or my corporation without sharing back what I’ve built on top of what you’ve freely shared and thus contribute to cultivating a healthy commons where others might enjoy the same benefits from my work that I want to obtain from yours” (a) you really have long-winded thoughts and (b) well, you already see the flaw in your reasoning.
(Remember this whenever anyone complains about ‘the viral nature of GPL’ or sings praises for (neo)’liberal’ licenses like MIT and BSD that enable corporations to partake of the free labour of others and enclose the commons.)
@onepict
Yep. It was only recently I properly understood why I was always reluctant to contribute to a permissive #FOSS project. I knew it was bad, but Redis have given the example I needed to explain it in one word.
All my own projects are GPL and I will never contribute to anything like #MIT, #Apache or #BSD licensed code. If I need a project I'll just fork and switch it to GPL. #Licensing
We now understand why permissive #licensing is bad for #FOSS.
#Redis taught us why #GPL is important and #MIT, #Apache, #BSD etc allow corporations to enclose and steal our contributions.
#Israel's use of #Lavender for targeting in #Gaza, which may also use the code we donated to the commons, shows that we need to be more restrictive if we want to avoid assisting war crimes and probable #genocide.
I hope some lawyers are on this, and will help us add exclusions to protect from such use.
Have you seen a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that's made to a single commercial entity (so foundations or non-profits excluded) that does not reserve the right to sub-/dual-/re-license on their part unilaterally? (Where?)
Or: have there been legally binding restrictions on the licenses that they might choose?
(neo)’liberal’ licenses like MIT and BSD that enable corporations to partake of the free labour of others
implying that the #GPL / #AGPL doesn't let corps partake in the free labor of others too> and enclose the commons
Your "open commons" is worthless if it's effectively still proprietary. Case in point: #Mastodon's #ActivityPub extensions that pretty much everybody else have to support (Mastodon is AGPL, and it's not realistic to implement ActivityPub strictly to the spec and expect it to be compatible with Mastodon). Or GNUisms (implemented by #GNU software which are GPL) that #BSD userlands are forced to support. Or #Matrix where there's basically only one server implementation that is usable (#Synapse whichis AGPL). I could go on and on.
The Anti-Capitalist Software License (#ACSL) can be adapted but as it stands does not require disclosure of derived code, instead limits use to individuals and organisations which do not exploit labour, but are either non-profit / educational, or employee owned.
Reviewing some content in this ante-penultimate (!!!) chapter of _Business Success with #OpenSource _ and suspect I may have been in an "I'm sick of this crap" mood when I wrote this.
Shout out to @dabeaz for making "Practical Python" 1 available under a creative commons license. It works well for the hands on survey of programming languages course I'm #teaching this term. We only have 12 classroom hours to devote to #Python, but so far it's working better than my previous humble attempts based on "Dive into Python 3". No disrespect to the latter book, but somehow my translation into labs always seemed a bit disjointed. I don't yet know how the students are absorbing things, but to me the Practical Python based version seems to give a more coherent (and elegant) view of Python.
I am using the book/course unmodified, except that #ikiwiki automagically adds backlinks to where given sections are referenced in my add-on materials [2]. That shows the benefit of CC #licensing I guess.
If you're writing open-source software, please do yourself and other software developers a favor and familiarize yourself with how software licensing works. As an Ubuntu Developer, much of my work involves auditing the source code licensing of various applications. Most of these applications have miserably complicated licensing situations, sometimes with licensing violations involved. I also occasionally run into licensing or copyright terms that an author probably didn't intend to specify, but that they did specify unambiguously nonetheless.
For instance, did you know that if you state that a file is "under the GPL license" without specifying what version, that means that the user of your file can use it under any version of the GPL they want to? Look at GPLv1 Section 7, GPLv2 Section 9, and GPLv3 Section 14 if you don't believe me. I found a file written in 2017 with these licensing terms. Did the author mean to do this? Probably not, they probably wanted to use GPLv3 (or maybe GPLv2). But since they didn't specify a version, I'm within my legal right to use this code under GPLv1's terms if I care to. I'm not going to do that since I have no interest in using this file for anything, but it goes to show you how a slip-up in your licensing specification can cause people to have rights or be free of restrictions you didn't want to give them or let them be free from.
Another (very very common) slip-up is for most of the source code in a repository to have license headers specifying GPLv2 or later, but with no repository-wide license specified in an AUTHORS or README file, and with a GPLv2 license in a LICENSE or COPYING file. What you probably think this does is license your program under GPLv2 or later, but what it actually does is give you a messy mixed-licensing situation with some files licensed GPLv2 only and some files licensed GPLv2 or later. Why? Because the default repository-wide license is GPLv2 as set by the LICENSE or COPYING file, and all of the headers that specify GPLv2 or later are overriding that default license.
You may think, "Why can't someone just infer that because most of the files are GPLv2 or later, that all of them are?" Great question! There's two answers. One, if you unambiguously specify something you didn't mean to specify, whatever you specified is what's legally binding. There's not room for "well that's what I said, but what I meant was..." in licensing. Secondly, many projects actually use multiple licenses in one project (for instance you'll have GPL, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, and MIT licenses all in one application). So how does one know if you just "accidentally" specified the wrong license, or if you meant to make a mixed-license application? They can't determine your intent with 100% certainty, so they have to obey what you said, not what you meant to say.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. This is just advice on how to help keep software developers from having headaches and problems reusing code.
"In the model we are developing, #libraries would own digital [#books], just as they do with physical books. Libraries would be able to both transfer their books to other libraries and to update books as needed for #preservation or to adapt to new #formats. Rights holders would retain #copyright to their works…Lending would be restricted to one reader at a time."
A start-up biotechnology company says it received the okay for its investigational new drug application of an anti-viral drug to treat a whole class of seasonal flu strains.
🇺🇸 Does anyone happen to know what is the #licensing of using #SFSymbols from #Apple? I want to do a presentation about smart home and use these icons in it. I warn you that the topic is not limited to Apple solutions onl
🇵🇱 Czy ktoś orientuje się może jak wygląda licencyjnie korzystanie z #SFSymbols od #Apple? Chcę zrobić prezentację na temat inteligentnego domu i wykorzystać w nim te ikony. Uprzedzam, że temat nie ogranicza się tylko do rozwiązań Apple
The slides of my talk at the tech, law and popular culture conference Gikii are now online at https://bit.ly/gikii23 (Google Slides).
Using memes and financial data from FOI requests, I argued that, when it comes to digitised cultural heritage collections, many institutions have copyright and access policies that conflict with relevant law, lose money and – crucially – undermine their public missions.
Still, I think it would have been better if #Freesound.org would have never allowed non-libre sounds (like -NC) to begin with, but it's better than nothing.
I mean, #Wikimedia Commons has been proving for a very long time it's possible.
Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive (www.theregister.com)
One in five users can expect an audit in the next three years