I understand many wants location and other tech details removed for #privacy reasons. But removing credit, copyright and #license info is for me like stealing. And makes me hesitant to post any of my images on Mastodon.
Even Meta/Facebook now preserves this info in images posted to their platform(s) - as shown...
I have a possibly tricky #licensing question for all of you people who are not my #lawyer. I have collected a corpus of #email1 to help tune #notmuch
There are about 200k messages collected from two public mailing lists and the Enron corpus. In a fit of public spirit I thought I should upload it as a dataset to https://zenodo.org. But I have no idea what license, if any to put on the data set. Anyone with similar experience? Somehow the Enron corpus ended up CC licensed, but I don't know if any lawyers were harmed in the making of that decision.
Let's pretend we're proponents of free and open source software, enlist an army of week intentioned FOSS developers to contribute to our project, and once successfully deployed in many enterprises across the industry...
Pull the rug out and convert it into a proprietary product with a bunch of undisclosed, hidden code that we won't ever show you - Muahahaha...
Yeah. I see this happening right now in several prominent and celebrated open source projects that you're probably completely oblivious to those sinister objectives.
This is why the most ubiquitous desktop operating system in the world is Minix.
What's that you say?
Yup, Minix. But that's no secret, the cat was out of the bag on that one a few years back (after being secretly so for many years).
Before you contribute any more code, translations, or documentation to a software project, consider this:
Now, there's another point to be made here, without specifically naming any projects currently abusing user contributions. Let's call this hypothetical project "hammer&anvil", itself a fork of a popular software project - but claims it's all about being free and transparent, wanting to distinguish itself from the project it's forked from by adopting GPL3 instead of a permissive license.
Sure, the project's BDFL (let's call her "Strawberry Daiquiri"), says one day, "were forming a fork of project X because they've formed a company and I'm afraid what they are going to do with X because it's under a permissive license. This girl will be brutally transparent and completely run by the community under the philosophy of anarchy, but we're going to call it a sociocracy so you don't know that it's really just me making a proprietary product for my own ambitions".
Well, Miss Daquiri decides to capture by capitalizing upon the sentiment that folks have for Copyleft - it's supposed to protect free software, right?
Well, this fork (hammer& anvil) is a hosted solution - meaning SaaS, meaning, it runs elsewhere (other than in your computer) in the cloud as a publicly accessible service. Hmmmm.
That means that the most appropriate Copyleft license is likely the AGPL, and not the GPL as one would expect fur a desktop or other local program that you actually download and install in your laptop or server.
The GPL requires that when you distribute (give away or sell) your program, either by letting someone download or handing it to them on a USB stick, Etc., You must also make available ALL of the source code, including any changes you've made to the program.
But if you run a modified GPL program as a service in the cloud you don't have to provide ANY off the changes you've made to the code.
Hmmm.
With AGPL you do have to supply your users with ANY code modifications you've made to the running service to which they have accounts...
So let's just say that you fork Mastodon, and call it Glitch-Soc, modify it, and run it in the cloud for people to create accounts on and use (for free or for monthly subscription fees - it doesn't matter). ANY and ALL changes to the code base that you make MUST be made available anytime a user asks for the source code, because it's an #AGPL licensed product.
And in reality, such is actually the case with this exceedingly popular and capable #fork. It's a fine product in it's own right.
But had you changed the license to all contributions moving forward to #GPL, you wouldn't have to provide any modifications you made (unless you give or sell the software product itself on say, a USB stick or via download).
Why? Because you're just allowing them to access and use your service, your not actually giving them the program to use for themselves elsewhere - so any modifications you made since forking under a different license (GPL instead of AGPL) isn't something you have to show them.
You've essentially created a #proprietary product (if you're so nefarious as to hide your code changes by butt disclosing them), the only code of which you must supply being that which existed under the AGPL before you forked it.
Both #Copyleft and permissive open source #licenses like #BSD and #MIT can be a good thing, or they can be abused beyond the intentions of the #FOSS inclined project contributors. Just make sure that you understand what can and cannot be changed where your intended purpose for the #distribution and #availability of source code is concerned....
There are BIG differences between the ramifications of each #license and how they can affect transparency and distribution of your free gifts to the world.
In our hypothetical scenario with hammer&anvil, the #BDFL, #Strawberry Daiquiri, has decided that she's going to launch a hosted service, and she's going to include things that you don't see and can't be aware of behind the scenes which, if disclosed, you would have nothing to do with - but you'll never know what kinds of scary things she's done with the product that only resembles the original on the surface, because Miss Daquiri will never have to show you the code she has added behind the scenes.
"Beautiful Victor, Beautiful."
-The Monster, speaking to his creator in the film, 'Frankenstein, The True Story'.
Be informed that admin of alpaca.gold, a data scientist, has explicitly claim that remote posts pulled and stored in their server are consenting those data to be use for whatever purpose that he likes.
to seldo: thank you for justifying my reason for not using my name, photo, or share anything personal in public. You have successfully made your point that fediverse is not a safe place from exploits.
@rootadmin while the tone of the conversation is unpleasantly sarcastic, I believe seldo is right in noting that each instance can store the remote posts for as long as they want, having it declared or not in their policies.
I also believe that the universal search of public posts cannot be limited either, once we posted something publicly, we consented it to be public.
The limitations begin with regard to what they can do with that content, and that depends on the terms in which we licensed it, and yes they are legally obliged to comply with the terms of our license and liable to be sued by us if they infringed them.
So yes, they have an implicit license to copy and store forever your post, but not the right to copy, modify, distribute or create derivative works based on it, unless you have explicitly granted such right to them. And you can sue them if they do.
But, enforcing your rights could be complicated and expensive, but possible, and particularly interesting if we put all our claims against a powerful abusive actor together in class action or something similar, which I am very sure we will start witnessing very soon.
Unfortunately your final conclusion is sadly accurate, the #Fediverse is not a safe place from exploits, in the same way a bus is not safe from molesters or a hammer is not safe from being used for bludgeoning, as all these are crimes that can be prosecuted only after they have been committed or at least obviously attempted.
Great write-up on what's happening with #RedHat and the change of #licensing to its #linux distribution by @sjvn for #ZDNet - his take is that while it's not a license violation, it's breaking the spirit of the license.
My only surprise here is how long it took Red Hat to take a more profit-oriented approach - aligning it more closely with the IBM ethos.
Translation: They would rather slash the value of their own search results (ie, strip all the actual fact-checked, verified local sources of information) than pay a fair price for news content.
It's like with any commercially licensed content:
If I - like #ALDI - don't want to pay €€€€ in music #licensing fees, I can jist chpose not to play any music at all or evidently only play music not covered by collection agencies.
@thegibson I wonder why I haven't seen much talk on possible licensing schemes to disallow that. It's not a silver bullet, but already using CC BY-NC-SA for toots could be helpful against corporate takeover. Or maybe Mastodon admins in secret still think that at some point they'd like to monetize? #licensing
A project I contributed a small amount to, recently added a license: #CommonsCause and I thought no much of it, until they started claiming that this license is “open source”
I created a pull request to replace it with “source available” but was rejected
"Activists have found this discussion frustrating, but kept the nature and tenure of these discussions as an “open secret” until now because we all had hoped that Red Hat's behavior would improve. Recent events show that the behavior has simply gotten worse, and is likely to get even worse."
Is there an AGPL-like strong copyleft license that is easy to understand, uses clear and unambiguous wording and is internationally applicable (e.g. in Germany)? #foss#licensing
On The Risks of Permissive Licensing (socialhub.activitypub.rocks)
Also, the AGPL isn’t something that commercial operations are afraid of. There are plenty of examples of industry using AGPL software....