'The Open Source Licensing War is Over' (infoworld.com) 90
It's time for the open source Rambos to stop fighting and agree that developers care more about software's access and ease of use than the purity of its license, reads a piece on InfoWorld. From the report: The open source war is over, however much some want to continue soldiering on. Recently Meta (Facebook) released Llama 2, a powerful large language model (LLM) with more than 70 billion parameters. In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can't be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others).
This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases."
And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.
This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases."
And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.
Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-viral (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:5, Insightful)
As the other stories posted here shows, there's nothing stopping people from taking BSD licensed code and patenting the ideas in it and then suing people.
All you need to do is take a look at Linux vs BSD. Look how much effort companies willingly pay to improve Linux, and look at where Linux is today. Conversely, Apple, and a whole bunch of other companies, have exploited the BSDs, like FreeBSD, and what have those BSDs got to show for it? They complain about how Linuxisms is creeping into everything, and how the BSDs have to keep up. Well, tough shit. That's what having a critical mass of developers does.
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Why should I stop using the MIT license that I've been using for the last 30 years?
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He prefers everyone to use his viral license. :D
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:4, Insightful)
He already answered that.
His argument is that if you GPL license your code you can still sell your code to companies, while if you release it under the MIT license then you have little ability to charge for the code to people who want to use your code in proprietary offerings.
I'm not sure I agree with that as a strategy, but it is correct if that is a path you want to go down.
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Correct. Bizzare that mods decided it was flamebait. Guess the truth hurts.
As you say, as the copyright holder you can license your code however you want, whenever you want. You cannot retroactively change the license on code you've already distributed, though. So if you release your pet project under MIT, that's great, but if it suddenly becomes important and attracts the attention of big companies, such as Microsoft, even if you wanted to make a little money on it you couldn't. Sure you can relicense
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As you say, as the copyright holder you can license your code however you want, whenever you want. You cannot retroactively change the license on code you've already distributed, though.
You misunderstand. The original repository stays the same, be it GPL or MIT. However as the owner you are free to create a new repository with the same code but a different license. Dual licensing has long been a thing, you just need separate repositories and clear ownership.
So if you release your pet project under MIT, that's great, but if it suddenly becomes important and attracts the attention of big companies, such as Microsoft, even if you wanted to make a little money on it you couldn't.
Untrue, owner dual license, separate repositories.
Starting with the GPL protects your future options as well as your code.
No, it protects FSF options. Hence the blank check to future GPL versions the FSF may issue. The GPL is constructed to maintain the politics/religion of the FSF. Now, if that's your chur
Re: Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-v (Score:1)
There is absolutely no requirement for separate repositories. Code can be dual licensed from a single source.
Depending on your use case, there may be advantages to having separate repos, but there will also be costs (additional maintenance overhead being an obvious one) so in general I would avoid this unless there are other reasons it would be beneficial, beyond licensing.
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There is absolutely no requirement for separate repositories. Code can be dual licensed from a single source.
Depending on your use case, there may be advantages to having separate repos, but there will also be costs (additional maintenance overhead being an obvious one) so in general I would avoid this unless there are other reasons it would be beneficial, beyond licensing.
That seem tricky, the GPL does not play well with other licenses. That might only work for GPL compatible licenses.
In the case I am most familiar with they have a script that replicates the file hierarchies and copies the files while replacing their normal corporate license header with a GPL license header. They work in the normal corporate repository. They run the script at milestones they want to tag. Not much overhead.
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He already answered that.
His argument is that if you GPL license your code you can still sell your code to companies, ...
He is wrong about that. The owner of code can always release it under a different license, the GPL does not convey any advantage there.
These more modern permissive license are often selected because they are preferred by developers looking forward to commercial opportunities.
GPL is a legacy license, it doesn't fit the needs of the community as well as the more modern permissive license. Hence the latter being chosen so much more often.
while if you release it under the MIT license then you have little ability to charge for the code to people who want to use your code in proprietary offerings.
The GPL permits no such thing. The owner has to release their code
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Why should I stop using the MIT license that I've been using for the last 30 years?
Because you are a heretic and not embracing the politics/religion of the FSF.
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Note that GPL "locks up" BSD code as much a commercial code "locks up" BSD code.
It's one of the biggest beefs I have with the GPL. They claim you can't "lock up" GPL code, which is true. But GPL projects take from BSD projects all the time, and even worse, the BSD project cannot get back improvements from the GPL project, making it a case where the GPL has "locked up" BSD code.
Now, some GPL developers notice this ad provide back BSD licensed patches, but that's generally not the norm.
As for me, my personal
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Sure but the BSD was designed to allow any sort of lock up like that, whether it's locking it open or locking it closed. At least with GPL'd code using BSD code the code is still open and visible. It doesn't just vanish into a proprietary black hole.
The NAS issue is interesting, but you really can't blame that on the GPLv3. The NAS device makers could certainly produce new firmware with a modern version of samba in it and comply with the license. They just don't want to and don't care. They can use the
GPL largely a legacy license. (Score:2)
GPLd code absolutely does not force anything to be GPL ... 1. Comply with the GPL and re-license your own code to be compatible
Ie option 1 coerces you to relicense your code as GPL. Hence the GPL is viral. The existence of other options does not change this, this viral nature remains regardless of whether it is 100% effective or not. The likely simplest and least costly option remains number 1.
In my mind, the GPL should always be the default for anyone who writes code for fun, or makes things on github to scratch their own itches.
GPL is largely a legacy license. New projects are overwhelming choosing more permissive licenses that better suit their needs. Commercial options are often one of these needs.
Few other open source licenses offer protection to keep your code open and free while at the same time preserve the potential to sell your code in a proprietary fashion.
That requires being the original author of the code, and in such a
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You have to be a complete and utter moron [to] accidentally GPL your code.
Or you have to be developing a large proprietary product that runs on Linux. My company spends lots of time and money ensuring that our turnkey application (and many others), which is a large COTS product we've augmented with millions of lines of enhancements, stays in compliance with the GPL, including having a full-time IP attorney on staff to help us stay in compliance (not find loopholes!). When we've made enhancements to GPL code, we've contributed them back; in a large company that jealously guards i
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Sure. Source code brought into a product from *any* source must be properly licensed and proven by legal to be use-able in a proprietary product. So GPL code is no different than code from any other source. It must be licensed, either under the original terms, or under negotiated special terms. All of this shows what utter bunk the article is. The code matters yes, but the source of the code absolutely does matter, now more than ever. Especially now with AI-generated code coming from who knows where.
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Do you think it would be any easier if you licenced some code from Oracle to include in your project?
Any publisher of any reasonable size is going to need an IP attorney doing something similar.
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You're right, it'd be just as hard, but the GP's point is still false: Your code can get accidentally GPL'd without everyone on the project being morons.
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No it cannot! The mods today seem to want to mod this down, but that's not how copyright works. If you use GPL'd code in an way that violates the GPL it simply means you've violated someone's copyright and you are now liable for legal damages. After settling those liabilities, you have three choices:
1. License your derived code under the GPL to comply with the license of the borrowed code
2. Remove the offending code (write your own code!)
3. Negotiate with the copyright holders a proprietary license that
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Or you have to be developing a large proprietary product that runs on Linux.
Running your proprietary program on Linux has exactly zero GPL implications. You can remove, "...that runs on Linux" from your sentence, as it is completely out of place and is totally irrelevant to anything.
You can also substitute, "...that runs on Windows" or "...that runs on Macs" or "...that runs on BSD" for "...that runs on Linux", and it would not change anything meaningful.
You can also substitute, "..stays in compliance with all the licenses of the proprietary software we use" for "...stays in compli
Code scanning for licences (Score:2)
Or you have to be developing a large proprietary product that runs on Linux. My company spends lots of time and money ensuring that our turnkey application (and many others), which is a large COTS product we've augmented with millions of lines of enhancements ...
and my favorite license name of all time, the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want" license.
At a previous job I had to train others in an environment where management wanted to avoid GPL code "because its viral". So they'd find a library that was GPL & their 1st instinct was to change the licence!
My manager also wanted me to change the name of the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want" license because they were offended. Nope, that's the name, they didn't have an abbreviation like GPL.
Finding an apple and calling it an orange won't change the code or license. If they want to avoid the GPL, they ne
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There's nothing viral about GPL. You can't catch it accidentally. You have to be a complete and utter moron accidentally GPL your code.
What makes GPL "viral" is when closed source calls out to GPL code the GPL license places open source demands on the closed source. This problem is solved by a more reasonable LGPL license which is GPL without the vampire clause. Many but not all GPL'd libraries tend to be LGPL for this reason.
For example originally the GNU TLS library was GPLd making it impossible for any closed source project to use even if they made no changes to the underlying TLS code.
What makes GPL undesirable is not that people don
You DO NOT have to be an utter moron to GPL code (Score:2)
You DO NOT have to be a complete and utter moron accidentally GPL your code.
All it takes is copying and pasting a snippet of code from StackOverflow. How do you know where that code sample came from? How do you know what its license is? StackOverflow can't or won't tell you!
All it takes is using "Code Complete" or similar tools that do not tell you how much code is being reused, where it came from, or what license it has!
All it takes is using part of someone's MIT licensed or BSD licensed GitHub repository
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All it takes is copying and pasting a snippet of code from StackOverflow.
This is fucking bullshit.
First of all, DON'T COPY PASTE random bits of code you find on the internet.
And if that were true, then if people posted PROPRIETARY code, then you would be liable to heavy lawsuits from the owners of that code. There's nothing specific about the GPL that makes it legally dangerous to copy code you find anywhere on the internet.
The FACT is StackOverflow has T&Cs regarding the code snippets that gets posted on their site. And I would say most of the short snippets there
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All you need to do is take a look at Linux vs BSD. Look how much effort companies willingly pay to improve Linux, and look at where Linux is today.
Linux is where it is due to legal problems with BSD at a key moment. People wanted "unix on a PC", they generally did not give a crap about the politics/religion that came with the GPL. A lawsuit tied up BSD, letting Linux get to a useable state before BSD. So people started using Linux, the first practical "unix on a PC". Emphasize practical, licensing a commercial "unix" doesn't count.
Corporation have basically taken over Linux, they pretty much guide and direct its development. Its a long long time si
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, there's a reason why Linux ended up more mainstream than BSD.
It's basic game theory: Big businesses are more willing to contribute to the project under GPLv2 because they know that their competitors can't take the work private, make it incompatible, and then use it as exclusive leverage to compete against them.
Re: Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-v (Score:3)
Though boy, Red Hat is trying their plucky little best!
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But they try, time and again. There's lots of FOSS GPL code gone private. Code sharing is different than code theft. Thieves try to subvert licensing all the time, citing hubris, foam, and goo about how it doesn't make it a difference.
It does.
Capitalism in FOSS is pretty strictly defined, and they don't want to play by the rules, just snack on that tasty code, burp, and transfer funds. It's been this way for ages, and the wars over what license does what will continue. Code is tasty. Hours and efforts are l
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I think the lawsuit had more to do with things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:5, Interesting)
Webkit (Score:2)
Nothing else to be said really.
Re: Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-v (Score:2)
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Sqlite, while really great and everything, isn't exactly rocket science. Much of it was developed by one guy. Big companies aren't exactly dedicating major resources adding to it. They're mainly using it for free.
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Programmer's choice... Depends on who you're writing for.
Definition: loss of control -- end-user decides what happens on his machine.
A/V codec implementation? Users are other programmers, end-user loss of control is minimal. permissive is OK. The TCP stack IMO falls into this category.
Mail parsing library? Users are other programmers, end-user loss of control is quite high. Permissive questionable.
Mail client? Users are end-users. Loss of control is total. Permissive not OK.
As a programmer, you should also
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The BSD/MIT license is the best, if not the only license people should use if they want their code to be adopted. This is the best choice for useful libraries and software that are not patent encumbered.
Pick GPL/LGPL if you know the end product is likely to be repackaged and used for evil (eg ffmpeg, MAME, ScummVM) because that is essentially what happens, and the purpose of making it GPL it to ensure you can thwart the theft of the code.
But ultimately GPL is a political license. Committing to GPL, means yo
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The BSD/MIT license is the best, if not the only license people should use if they want their code to be STOLEN.
FTFY.
These 'do whatever you want' licenses do little more than guarantee that your once free code is locked up in a binary, robbing the end user of the rights that you wanted them to have!
BSD is particularly awful:
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by [the University of California, Berkeley] and its contributors.
The bit I put in brackets is often changed, but a surprising number of developers don't bother. I guess they didn't bother to read the license before slapping it on their project.
If you want a permissive license that still protects the rights of end users, you should take a look at the LGPL [fossa.com].
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Sure the BSD license has enabled widespread uptake of some components like openssl and openssh. The problem now with openssl is no one who uses it in their software and products wants to do any of the work to maintain it and bug fix it. The zero effort part of complying with the license just might be part of the problem. So I'm not completely sure I want any uptake of the code I write if that is the case!
As a person cranking out pet hobby projects, the GPL protects my freedom more than any other license.
Hardly a new thing (Score:2)
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I call it capitalism-based advertising.
As with most developers, IANAL... (Score:2)
As developers, we are not lawyers and honestly many of the different flavors of licenses are so ambiguous it is not clear whether or how we can leverage "open source" software in our own projects/implementations.
I mean, I pick modules all the time from NPM, from Java Maven Central, from github, etc. I honestly don't know, regardless of the license stamped on it, if I can use the code, if I can modify the code, whether I can use it in personal projects or business projects, ...
I do understand that I can't ju
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mostly that it doesn't seem to apply to me the developer, and if it really did apply to me, then there'd be clear summaries/explanations attached to each one with a TL;DR section that explained it.
The thing with copyright law is that it applies to you, the developer, whether you sell or not. Legally speaking, there's no default permissive allowance just because you can freely download and use it for non-commercial purposes. If a code developer wants their code to be legally usable in a typical freely way, they have pick *something*, or else there's no legally defined path to use the code they provide apart from specific individual agreement between the user and the developer.
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Sorry, I should have been clear...
I'm distinguishing between the developer of the open source solution vs the developer who consumes the solution.
I get that the developer who creates the code needs to have a license to protect their own investment...
But for the developer that wants to take all of these various pieces and integrate them into an application, they're often looking at a varying list of licenses with different restrictions, all to solve business problems. So it's not just a simple question of "C
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I agree that the licenses are verbose and nuanced and needlessly complicated due to some person nitpicking on one detail versus another. I was focused on the fact that, unfortunately, this statement doesn't pan out:
I do understand that I can't just sell those open source projects, but that's not the business I'm in, so that wouldn't affect me anyway.
Doesn't free you from having to worry about those verbose, nitpicky license choices by the developers of software you consume. Consuming the open source libraries means you have to know the gist of at least LGPL, AGPL, GPL, BSD-2, BSD-3, MIT, and Apache (others depending). About the only stuff y
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The problem with developers today is that they're so terrified of "reinventing the wheel" that all they spend all their time aggregating various third-party libraries in the hope that the product they want will eventually emerge, all under the delusion that this is saving them time and effort.
Try writing your own code, reserving third-party libraries for things you can't or shouldn't write yourself. Not only will the end result be significantly smaller, faster, more secure, and use fewer system resources,
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Try writing your own code... Not only will the end result be significantly smaller, faster, more secure, and use fewer system resources...
I do not believe that is generally true. TDD is not always in use, developers frequently do no performance testing on their own code, and it is all to easy to create insecure software.
These things can be possible if you have unlimited time, money and resources. Most projects are not so lucky...
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The irony is that including a third-party library often takes more effort than writing the feature yourself.
There's a story I often tell about my search for a 'date picker' control 20 years or so ago. I spent a whole morning searching for and evaluating various third-party solutions looking for anything suitable. I only found one that could have possibly been used, but it came with a massive dependency and wasn't a great fit anyway. After I gave up searching, it only took about an hour or so to write my
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And the same problems exist regardless of the code being used is open source or not. Say you want to use Qt, Parasolid, and Oracle SQL in your product. That's licensing, redistribution, and royalty terms of three different commercial products that you must comply with.
Open source only trips up companies because initially they think oh, it's available to download for free and so it must be free to use! Why they think open source code is different than proprietary I'll never know. Everything used must alw
This is ludicrous... (Score:3)
If a developer chooses no license, you can't touch it, no matter how it is. It's silly to declare that people shouldn't bother declaring license as long as they commit to github.
You could advocate for declaring public domain, or selecting a BSD-style license, or copyleft. However, code without any selection made is just untouchable.
The assertion that software without license nor public domain is pretty much in all software is false. It may be true that developers picked a permissive license without much care about it, but there is almost always a license. If there isn't a license/copyright statement, then it's still a non-starter for use.
If you want your code to be useful at all, you must declare your intent, otherwise the default is, legally, the user can't even use the code for private use.
Is that true in the US?. (Score:2)
Is that the case in the 'States? And if so, in which states in particular?
In Canada, employers are told in no uncertain terms to specify that their proprietary code is "all rights reserved", because there's British case law that failing to do so puts it into the public domain. German companies say the same, so I suspect that may be the law in the EU as well as the British Commonwealth...
"Deploying at scale" (Score:3)
Meh. 24GB consumer cards can run quantized models up to ~35-40B parameters with ease; the largest LLaMA 2 model is 70B and can be run on a pair of 24GB cards if quantized. Doesn't require some insanely expensive system with 8x H100 processors or whatnot.
Those insanely expensive systems are needed for training. It's tough enough to train even a 3B model on a 24GB card. Training large models takes a huge amount of VRAM. Otherwise you're stuck training LoRAs for preexisting models, which will change the behavior but not heavily impact the fundamental information on which the model is based.
Re: "Deploying at scale" (Score:2)
Fwiw I think the author means "at scale" here running it as a service for other people
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Are you seeing people doing a lot of training/fine-tuning for LLMs? So far, I've been able to solve all my issues with clever prompt design and plugins, but I'm sure that will change at some point.
Thanks!
Open enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway.
Anyone who repeats the FUD that open source (by which they mean "copyleft" style of licences, in context) is against corporations lose all credibility. They unquestioningly repeat all the FUD they've heard.
Propaganda and gaslighting (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but this story reads like gaslighting and propaganda. Many developers - and users - care very much, and for good reason.
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Spot on. This story reads like, "Oh, you still care about licenses? Don't you know you're the only one? You should get with the times! We've all moved on."
Nice try, guys.
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If you squint, you can see the RedHat/IBM copyright on it.
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Many
Many is a dishonest word. If there are two people and one disagrees with the other, then literally half of people have taken a position. On the flip side if there's 1000 people with one opinion and a billion with another, those 1000 people could be described as "many" while also being an incredibly irrelevant minority.
And despite what people think, yeah the people who give a shit about the specific details of open source licenses are very much an irrelevant minority.
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It is comedy gold... "Everyone should just shut up and do things MY WAY"
Sorry, but... (Score:2)
SaaS killed open source (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is late to the party.
SaaS software killed most of open source's movement momentum a decade ago. The vast majority of code being written at companies these days is as closed as ever -- and it's still on github. It's accessible to employees in a corporate account, hosted and run on a server somewhere, and only accessible to users in the form of API access.
In other words, it's closed source. Even if it depends or relies on hundreds or thousands of open source libraries or modules! Most early licenses simply didn't consider the SaaS model when they were devised. They were intended to prevent the distribution of binaries without the distribution of code.
But for the most part companies simply stopped distributing binaries. It's perfectly within most licenses to run the code on behalf of users without giving them access to their code or data.
The GPLv3 attempted to correct for this, but it never caught on -- this battle years ago was the first big sign that "open source" was going to be won by SaaS companies.
Re:SaaS killed open source (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, GPLv3 does nothing for SaaS scenario. You can still freely use GPLv3 and privately modify it for SaaS applications.
AGPL is the license that takes aim at SaaS, but it's rarely invoked.
Re: SaaS killed open source (Score:2)
Ah thank you! AGPL is what I was thinking of.
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> The GPLv3 attempted to correct for this, but it never caught on -- this battle years ago was the first big sign that "open source" was going to be won by SaaS companies.
What does the GPL3 have to do with this? The GPL (any version) is not, and never was, an open source license. Richard Stallman would roll his eyes in desperation if he heard you calling it as such.
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Every one of those closed-source SaaS systems, relies on plenty of open source components. I don't think open source is quite so dead as it may seem.
This struggle is eternal.... (Score:1)
Time for closed source rambos... (Score:3)
OPEN SOURCE THEIR CODE!
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But they can't do that because then everyone would see how much code they've stolen. So they have to keep fighting. And now with AI generating code scraped from all sorts of sources, they know they absolutely have to keep their code secret
Huh? (Score:2)
Summary: Something that has no useful purpose* is supposedly the new definition of open source, and nothing else matters?
* As highlighted by the capital needed. Not to mention LLMs seem to be gimmicky at best and horribly power hungry.
Trying to hoodwink people with pretty words, eh? (Score:3)
Licenses are as important as ever. You will find out if you violate one and it matters to the person or company whose license you violated, or if you stupidly publish under an overly permissive license and find your work has been turned against you through embrace, extend, extinguish. There are powerful actors who want nothing more than for you to think licenses don't matter, so that they can take from you without giving back. Learn from the past or learn through your own mistakes.
Sure but as soon as it ends... (Score:2)
And will BOTH sides be laying down arms? (Score:3)
The battle isn't over until BOTH sides lay down their arms. Do you really see the big corporations ever stopping their push towards more and more easily-exploitable licenses?
No? Me neither. And that means either the "open source Rambos" keep pushing back in the other direction, or we all roll over and let the businessjerks call all the shots.
That is how it *always* happens in every domain. Democracy. Capitalism. Cultural "properties". As soon as the little guys doing the work stop actively pushing back, the powerful people exploiting it creep steadily forward until everything is shit again.
software wars map (Score:1)
Endless rent seeking (Score:2)
That's basically what this all amounts to.
Everyone wants to get paid for existing, rather than delivering value. And truthfully, no one wants to pay for value, they pay because they are forced to. Making money writing software for anything but a corporate overlord is unlikely. Those days are long gone.
A world where there was no rent-enabling copyright and patent law on software, that would be an interesting world.
"Disclosed Source" is mostly Useless (Score:3)
A license that forbids use in a commercial use is no license at all for use cases that matter. This is disclosed source, not open source. It maybe helps some researchers, but even for them, I'd prefer they work with solely open source, since my tax dollars fund them, so I want to benefit directly from their output, which means giving me code that I can use without restriction.
an unparsable but still heartbreaking final speech (Score:3)
Why is this stupid troll thread on Slashdot? (Score:2)
The premise of the article is absurd and the piece unworthy of being deliberately spread by Slashdot or anyone else.
msmash lazy as usual.
Well... that's one person's opinion. (Score:2)
As a closed source software developer by day and more of an open source software user than a developer by night I am coming at this from more of an open source hardware perspective as that I do contribute to.
I pass on including or contributing to any non-commercial licensed projects. Sorry.. I think helping them would be a waste of my time and ultimately counter-productive.
Now, I'm not making anything to sell myself. But I was there to watch what happened with 3D printers. Sure, a lot of people that wanted
Re: (Score:2)
What exactly is a "non-commercial licensed project?"
Two llama are better than three hundred and twenty (Score:2)
Still not clear to me what the legal basis is for Facebook or anyone else in believing people are legally required to respect license claims to any publicly available AI model. Neither do I understand what "open source" has in common with freely available bags of weights. There is no "source code" so what does calling this open source even mean?
All that aside from what I recall only commercial use restriction for Llama-2 kick in at the 700 million user mark which excludes the vast majority of commercial u
In other news... (Score:3)
This is like Vladimir Putin declaring that the war has been won, without notifying the Ukrainians about it.
drivel (Score:2)
What a piece of drivel.
No, the distinction matters.
No, Amazon doesn't just get to call thing whatever it wants because marketing thinks so.
No, this conflict isn't over at all.
So what is the article trying to tell us?
Don't know.
Neither do they, probably.
Whatever... (Score:2)
If you're an open source developer, you can choose to license, or not license, your code however you want. There's no reason we should *all* have any particular attitude about open source licensing. To each their own.
Open source needed when humanity breaks new ground (Score:1)
Secret source is only good for making money as stopping bad actors can be done by Open Source also.
I guess Matt didnâ(TM)t get the memo (Score:2)
Matt Asay clearly doesnâ(TM)t understand that Meta / Facebook is the mediaâ(TM)s punching bag. Using negative media press about Meta as a jumping off point for an article about âoedefacto open source licensingâ is an oddly non-sequitur jump.
In addition, does Matt actually understand what the issue is with pseudo-open source LLMâ(TM)s? He seems to think itâ(TM)s an issue of being pedantic about licensing, but my understanding is that the issue is actually more about how one goes
This guy works at Mongo? (Score:2)
Setting aside the uhm, rhetorical quality of this article, this is an utterly bizarre take for a Mongo employee to take.
There's a very pay no attention to the man behind the curtain quality to that reality. Mongo's business pretty thoroughly depends on their license so Amazon can't just run whatever they want. Their head of developer relations has to know his argument is nonsense. I suspect they just want people calling things like what Meta is doing open source so the door is open for Mongo to be similar a