Why is SSPL not considered FOSS while other restrictive licenses like AGPL and GPL v3 are?
So I have an answer for this. Basically all of the entities listed that relicensed their projects to the SSPL, also relicensed their projects using the dual licensing scheme, including one proprietary license. That’s important later.
The SSPL’s intent is probably that the deployment framework used to open source this software must be open sourced. I like this intent, and I would consider it Free/Libre Software, but it should be noted that another license, the open watcom license, which requires you to open source software if you simply deploy it, is not considered Free Software by the FSF. I don’t really understand this decision. I don’t count “must share source code used” as a restriction on usage cases. It seems that the FSF only cares about user freedom, whoever is using the software, and views being forced to open source code only used privately as a restriction.
Now, IANAL… but the SSPL’s lettering is problematic. What is part of the deployment system? If I deploy software on Windows, am I forced to open source windows? If I deploy it on a server with intel management engine, am I forced to open source that? Due to the way it is worded, the SSPL is unusable.
And a dual license, one proprietary and one unusable means only one license — proprietary. There’s actually a possibility that this is intentional, and that the intent of the SSPL was never to be usable, but rather so that these companies could pretend they are still Open Source while going fully proprietary.
But, for the sake of discussion, let’s assume the SSPL’s intent was benevolent but misguided, and that it’s intent was not to be unusable, but rather to force companies to open source deployment platforms.
Of course, the OSI went and wrote an article about how the SSPL is not an open source license but that’s all BS. All you need to do is take a look at who sponsors the OSI (Amazon, Google, other big SAAS providers) to realize that the OSI is just protecting their corporate interests, who are terrified of an SSPL license that actually works, so they seek to misrepresent the intent of the SSPL license as too restrictive for Open Source — which is false. Being forced to open source your deployment platform still allows you to use the code in any way you desire — you just have to open source your deployment platform.
Is there some hypothetical lesser version of SSPL that still captures the essence of it while still being more restrictive than AGPL that would prevent exploitation by SaaS providers?
AGPL. There’s also Open Watcom, but it’s not considered a Free Software license by the FSF, meaning software written under that wouldn’t be included in any major Linux distros.
I think in theory you could make an SSPL that works. But SSPL ain’t it.
Of course, there are problems with designing an SSPL that works, of course. Like, if you make it so that you don’t have to open source proprietary code by other vendors, then what if companies split themselves up and one company makes and “sells” the proprietary programs to another.
Putting something on GitHub is really inconsequential if you’re making your project open source since anyone can use it for anything anyway,
Except for people in China (blocked in China) or people on ipv6 only networks, since Github hasn’t bothered to support ipv6, cutting out those in countries where ipv4 addresses are scarce.
So yes, it does matter. Both gitlab and codeberg, the two big alternatives, both support ipv6 (idk about them being blocked in china). They also support github logins, so you dob’t even need to make an account.
And it’s not a black or white. Software freedom is a spectrum, not a binary. We should strive to use more open source, decentralized software, while recognizing that many parts are going to be out of our immediate control, like the backbone of the internet or little pieces like proprietary firmware.
What was it? I’m planning to do a nextcloud deployment via helm soon.
sn1per is not open source, according to the OSI’s definition
The license for sn1per can be found here: https://github.com/1N3/Sn1per/blob/master/LICENSE.md
It’s more a EULA than an actual license. It prohibits a lot of stuff, and is basically source-available
.
You agree not to create any product or service from any par of the Code from this Project, paid or free
There is also:
Sn1perSecurity LLC reserves the right to change the licensing terms at any time, without advance notice. Sn1perSecurity LLC reserves the right to terminate your license at any time.
So yeah. I decided to test it out anyways… but what I see… is not promising.
FROM docker.io/blackarchlinux/blackarch:latest
# Upgrade system
RUN pacman -Syu --noconfirm
# Install sn1per from official repository
RUN pacman -Sy sn1per --noconfirm
CMD ["sn1per"]
The two pacman
commands are redundant. You only need to run pacman -Syu sn1per --noconfirm
once. This also goes against docker best practice, as it creates two layers where only one would be necessary. In addition to that, best practice also includes deleting cache files, which isn’t done here. The final docker image is probably significantly larger than it needs to be.
Their kali image has similar issues:
RUN set -x \
&& apt -yqq update \
&& apt -yqq full-upgrade \
&& apt clean
RUN apt install --yes metasploit-framework
https://www.docker.com/blog/intro-guide-to-dockerfile-best-practices/
It’s still building right now. I might edit this post with more info if it’s worth it. I really just want a command-line vulnerability scanner, and sn1per seems to offer that with greenbone/openvas as a backend.
I could modify the dockerfiles with something better, but I don’t know if I’m legally allowed to do so outside of their repo, and I don’t feel comfortable contributing to a repo that’s not FOSS.
I can’t find the source code for this extension
I use this too, and it should be noted that this does not require wireguard or any VPN solution. Rathole can be served publicly, allowing a machine behind a NAT or firewall to connect.
LXD/Incus. It’s truly free/open
Please stop saying this about lxd. You know it isn’t true, ever since they started requiring a CLA.
LXD is literally less free than proxmox, looking at those terms, since Canonical isn’t required to open source any custom lxd versions they host.
Also, I’ve literally brought this up to you before, and you acknowledged it. But you continue to spread this despite the fact that you should know better.
Anyway, Incus currently isn’t packaged in debian bookworm, only trixie.
The version of lxd debian packages is before the license change so that’s still free. But for people on other distros, it’s better to clarify that incus is the truly FOSS option.
Dockers manipulation of nftables is pretty well defined in their documentation
Documentation people don’t read. People expect, that, like most other services, docker binds to ports/addresses behind the firewall. Literally no other container runtime/engine does this, including, notably, podman.
As to the usage of the docker socket that is widely advised against unless you really know what you’re doing.
Too bad people don’t read that advice. They just deploy the webtop docker compose, without understanding what any of it is. I like (hate?) linuxserver’s webtop, because it’s an example of the two of the worst footguns in docker in one
To include the rest of my comment that I linked to:
Do any of those poor saps on zoomeye expect that I can pwn them by literally opening a webpage?
No. They expect their firewall to protect them by not allowing remote traffic to those ports. You can argue semantics all you want, but not informing people of this gives them another footgun to shoot themselves with. Hence, docker “bypasses” the firewall.
On the other hand, podman respects your firewall rules. Yes, you have to edit the rules yourself. But that’s better than a footgun. The literal point of a firewall is to ensure that any services you accidentally have running aren’t exposed to the internet, and docker throws that out the window.
You originally stated:
I think from the dev’s point of view (not that it is right or wrong), this is intended behavior simply because if docker didn’t do this, they would get 1,000 issues opened per day of people saying containers don’t work when they forgot to add a firewall rules for a new container.
And I’m trying to say that even if that was true, it would still be better than a footgun where people expose stuff that’s not supposed to be exposed.
But that isn’t the case for podman. A quick look through the github issues for podman, and I don’t see it inundated with newbies asking “how to expose services?” because they assume the firewall port needs to be opened, probably. Instead, there are bug reports in the opposite direction, like this one, where services are being exposed despite the firewall being up.
(I don’t have anything against you, I just really hate the way docker does things.)
Probably not an issue, but you should check. If the port opened is something like 127.0.0.1:portnumber
, then it’s only bound to localhost, and only that local machine can access it. If no address is specified, then anyone with access to the server can access that service.
An easy way to see containers running is: docker ps
, where you can look at forwarded ports.
Alternatively, you can use the nmap
tool to scan your own server for exposed ports. nmap -A serverip
does the slowest, but most indepth scan.
Yes it is a security risk, but if you don’t have all ports forwarded, someone would still have to breach your internal network IIRC, so you would have many many more problems than docker.
I think from the dev’s point of view (not that it is right or wrong), this is intended behavior simply because if docker didn’t do this, they would get 1,000 issues opened per day of people saying containers don’t work when they forgot to add a firewall rules for a new container.
My problem with this, is that when running a public facing server, this ends up with people exposing containers that really, really shouldn’t be exposed.
Excerpt from another comment of mine:
It’s only docker where you have to deal with something like this:
---
services:
webtop:
image: lscr.io/linuxserver/webtop:latest
container_name: webtop
security_opt:
- seccomp:unconfined #optional
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=Etc/UTC
- SUBFOLDER=/ #optional
- TITLE=Webtop #optional
volumes:
- /path/to/data:/config
- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional
ports:
- 3000:3000
- 3001:3001
restart: unless-stopped
Originally from here, edited for brevity.
Resulting in exposed services. Feel free to look at shodan or zoomeye, internet connected search engines, for exposed versions of this service. This service is highly dangerous to expose, as it gives people an in to your system via the docker socket.
If you need public access:
https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
From this list, I use rathole. One rathole container runs on my vps, and another runs on my home server, and it exposes my reverse proxy (caddy), to the public.
I recently noticed that it’s now integrated into Canvas, a FOSS online learning management software which my college (and my high school, and my middle school) have used.
To bad no one bothers with it, forcing everyone to use zoom instead. Which sucks, because the first day of online classes, zoom permissions weren’t set up properly, meaning no one could join the meeting. Probably wouldn’t have happened with BigBlueButton.
I’m not too well versed in rustdesk, but it seems that they use end to end encryption (is it good? Idk).
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/2239#discussioncomment-5647075
I have experience with a similar software that uses relays, syncthing. With syncthing, everything is e2ee, so there’s no concern about whether or not the relay’s are trustworthy, and you can even host your own public relay server.
I find it hard to believe that rustdesk, another relay based software, wouldn’t have a similar architecture.
edit: typo
Nothing that is more questionable than lxd, which now requires a contributor license agreement, allowing canonical to not open source their hosted versions, despite lxd being agpl.
Thankfully, it’s been forked as incus, and debian is encouraging users to migrate.
But yeah. They haven’t said what makes proxmox’s license questionable.
Someone recommended ssh, which is good, but it can’t do udp connections.
https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
From this list, I selected rathole since they claimed to be more performant than frp, the most popular solution.
Don’t do unattended upgrades. Neither host nor containers. Do blind or automated updates if you want but check up on them and be ready to roll back if something is wrong.
Those issues are only common on rolling releases. On stable distros, they put tape between breaking changes, test that tape, and then roll out updates.
Debian, and many other distros support it officially: https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades. It’s not just a cronjob running “apt install”, but an actual process, including automated checks. You can configure it to not upgrade specific packages, or stick to security updates.
As for containers, it is trivial to rollback versions, which is why unattended upgrades are ok. Although, if data or configuration is corrupted by a bug, then you probably would have to restore from backup (probably something I should have suggested in my initial reply).
It should be noted that unattended upgrade doesn’t always mean “upgrade to the latest version”. For docker/podman containers, you can pin them to a stable release, and then it will do unattended upgrades within that release, preventing any major breaking changes.
Similarly, on many distros, you can configure them to only do the minimum security updates, while leaving other packages untouched.
People should use what distro they know best. A rolling distro they know how to handle is much better than a non-rolling one they don’t.
I don’t really feel like reinstalling the bootloader over ssh, to a machine that doesn’t have a monitor, but you do you. There are real significant differences between stable and rolling release distros, that make a stable release more suited for a server, especially one you don’t want to baby remotely.
I use arch. But the only reason I can afford to baby a rolling release distro is because I have two laptops (both running arch). I can feel confident that if one breaks, I can use the other. All my data is replicated to each laptop, and backed up to a remote server running syncthing, so I can even reinstall and not lose anything. But I still panicked when I saw that message suggesting that I should reinstall grub.
That remote server? Ubuntu with unattended upgrades, by the way. Most VPS providers will give you a linux distro image with unattended security upgrades enabled because it removes a footgun from the customer. On Contabo with Rocky 9, it even seems to do automatic reboots. This ensures that their customers don’t have insecure, outdated binaries or libraries.
Docker doesn’t “bypass” the firewall. It manages rules so the ports that you pass to host will work. Because there’s no point in mapping blocked ports. You want to add and remove firewall rules by hand every time a container starts or stops, and look up container interfaces yourself? Be my guest.
Docker is a way for me to run services on my server. Literally every other service application respects the firewall. Sometimes I want services to be exposed on my home network, but not on a public wifi, something docker isn’t capable of doing, but the firewall is. Sometimes I may want to configure a service while keeping it running. Or maybe I want to test it locally. Or maybe I want to use it locally
It’s only docker where you have to deal with something like this:
---
services:
webtop:
image: lscr.io/linuxserver/webtop:latest
container_name: webtop
security_opt:
- seccomp:unconfined #optional
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=Etc/UTC
- SUBFOLDER=/ #optional
- TITLE=Webtop #optional
volumes:
- /path/to/data:/config
- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional
ports:
- 3000:3000
- 3001:3001
restart: unless-stopped
Originally from here, edited for brevity.
Resulting in exposed services. Feel free to look at shodan or zoomeye, internet connected search engines, for exposed versions of this service. This service is highly dangerous to expose, as it gives people an in to your system via the docker socket.
Do any of those poor saps on zoomeye expect that I can pwn them by literally opening a webpage?
No. They expect their firewall to protect them by not allowing remote traffic to those ports. You can argue semantics all you want, but not informing people of this gives them another footgun to shoot themselves with. Hence, docker “bypasses” the firewall.
On the other hand, podman respects your firewall rules. Yes, you have to edit the rules yourself. But that’s better than a footgun. The literal point of a firewall is to ensure that any services you accidentally have running aren’t exposed to the internet, and docker throws that out the window.
A tip I have is to move away from manjaro.
When you use a rolling release, you lose one of the main features of stable release distros: Automatic, unattended upgrades. AFAIK, every stable release distro has those, and none of the rolling releases do (except maybe opensuses’s new slowroll and centos rolling, but I wouldn’t recommend or use them).
Manjaro has other issues too, but that’s the big one.
Although I use arch on my laptop, I run debian on my server because I don’t want to have to baby it, especially since I primarily access it remotely. Automatic upgrades are one less complication removed, allowing me to focus on my server itself.
As for application deployment itself, I recommend using application containers, either via docker or podman. There are many premade containers for those platforms, for apps like jellyfin, or the various music streaming apps people use to replace spotify (I can’t remember any of the top of my head, but I know you have lots of options).
However, there are two caveats to docker (not podman) people should know:
Podman, however, respects your firewall rules. Podman isn’t perfect though, there are some apps that won’t run in podman containers, although my use case is a little more niche (greenbone service and vulnerability scanner).
As for where to start, projects like linuxserver provide podman/docker containers, which you can use to deploy many apps fairly easily, once you learn how to launch apps with the compose file. Check out this nextcloud dockerized, they provide. Nextcloud is a google drive alternative, although sometimes people complain about it being slow… I don’t know about the quality of linuxserver’s nextcloud, so you’d have to do some research for that, and find a good docker container.
your typical manga/light novel weebo
No chinese support :(
I read a ton of web novels translated from Chinese, and reading the untranslated versions would be a fun way to learn Chinese. Or Korean.
I don’t really like the Japanese light novels as much.
Edit: hmmm, it seems like their are similar projects, and some have custom language support. I may need to look into those into the future.
The tldr as I understand it is that Mac M1/M2 devices are unique in that the vram (gpu ram) is the same as the normal ram. This sharing allows LLM models to run on the gpu of those chips, and in their “vram” as well, allowing you to run bigger models on smaller devices.
Llama.cpp was the software that users did this with originalky. I can’t find the original guide/article I looked at, but here is a github gist, where the commenters have done benchmarks:
https://gist.github.com/cedrickchee/e8d4cb0c4b1df6cc47ce8b18457ebde0
No, I think if you’re using the nextcloud all in one image, then the management image connects to the docker socket and deploys nextcloud using that. The you could be able to update nextcloud via the web ui.
https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one?tab=readme-ov-file#how-to-update-the-containers