4dpuzzle

Even then, you’ll be opted into sharing your information with Microsoft and their 942 business partners.

While I agree that many FOSS devs/maintainers would find donations and other monetary support very useful, please remember that money isn’t the solution for everything. This is especially the case for mental and emotional wellbeing. Funding might increase the entitlement and demands of the users on the maintainer’s time. What the maintainer really needs might be some time off or reduction on their workloads.

I’m all for donating to these projects. But don’t let that be an excuse to treat them badly and make unreasonable demands on them.

It wasn’t the simple mobile tools that was sold to zippoapps. It was the privacy of its userbase. SMT would have been worth nothing without that userbase - no matter how its developer wanted to spin it.

Oops! Thanks for the redirection.

As @ccryx pointed out, Ferdium is a fork that doesn’t force an account to be created. There is also Tangram with a slightly different approach.

You’re right. The ‘open source’ android phones are the perfect example. But FOSS needs to stop relying on these fascist hardware stack and opt for better open modular platforms. We have examples for such things - like the framework laptops or fairphones. It’s somewhat tolerable for laptops. But we are still too far behind in terms of mobiles and desk boxes needed for these sorts of projects.

I’m part of that group. If OSI and FSF want to control the definition of something, they should make new and unique terms, not just attempt to take over a concept that predates both of them.

Call it OSI-Approved Zero-Restriction Licensing or something.

Whether that term existed before it or not, that’s what people understand now. When talking about FOSS software, those definitions are what people expect - by a humongous wide margin. Calling those terms ‘generic’ is the weakest argument I have heard to dismiss the rigorous meaning people attach to it. Standards are centralized for a reason - so that everyone is on the same page. There’s nothing wrong with it. Claiming otherwise isn’t anarchy - it’s an intent to cause confusion*.

Trying to subvert those definitions and trying to pass of non-commercial as either Free software or Open source software are in my opinion, rather malevolent distortion of an existing paradigm meant to help only the companies that I mentioned before - those that want to exploit the FOSS ecosystem, but without making the necessary compromises. It’s an attempt to exploit a widely-held belief based on a rather vague and frankly misguided technicality.

Non-commercial sources already have an appropriate term - ‘source available’. It’s another generic term with a well-defined meaning. Hijacking the meaning of ‘open source’ and ‘free software’, instead of using this one is the perfect indication of the misleading nature of the hijack. And looking at the prevalence of this, I’m starting to suspect a widespread astroturfing/misinformation campaign.

Funny, that’s how I feel about OSI stepping in to claim control of that term.

Funny, they just used a generic term to mean something, while the exploiters use the term that means something to hide their true intentions and profiteer.

I felt like I was going crazy sometimes with how often people in the FOSS community insist that nothing is wrong when large companies are massively profiting off of unpaid labor that is meant to help people

Starting a project as just source-available or with noncommercial clause is just fine. But the definition of free software and open source are pretty unambiguous - software with noncommercial clause can’t be either. The problem really happens when certain companies/projects want the advantages of the FOSS label, but don’t want to make the compromises associated. Any FOSS project has certain advantages that comes with the label - promotion by individuals and industries, widespread training and external contributions. Some companies/projects start off as FOSS (almost always with CLA) and take advantage of all those. Then when they’re popular, they switch to non-commercial, citing competition. Hashicorp and Redis are examples of these. When they cite unfair competition, they’re outright denying the contributions of external players like contributors and industry that popularized it. It’s basically a rug pull.

Another form of this is a recent trend of people claiming that non-commercial clauses count as FOSS. I’ve heard weird claims like the FSF and OSI don’t a monopoly on the definition of what’s FS or OSS. Yet others simply ignore these definitions. Any project that wants to be source-available should compete on their own merit, rather than riding and exploiting the world’s preference for FOSS.

I think that non-commercial-use clauses are a good way forward for certain projects, and commercial licenses for others.

Just want to reiterate - it’s ok as long as it starts as such, instead of doing a bait and switch. But another method is to use AGPL or similar license for all your code. The corporations that exploit FOSS code hate this license. And that’s why they widely promote the idea that copyleft licenses are less-free compared to permissive licenses (less free for them to exploit, perhaps). Unfortunately, many FOSS developers have bought this BS.

by turning it into part of their closed-source product

Corporations convert a lot of FOSS code into part of their closed source products. Using copyleft instead of permissive license is a good way to prevent that. But that aside, there is one class of software whose exploitation can’t be solved with copyleft licenses - cloud software. Many companies that switched licenses were offering cloud services. And then AWS of GCP comes and offers their cloud version, forcing the smaller companies to go source-available. The main problem I see is, why are they cloud software? The main goal of free software is freedom - especially the freedom to privacy, to own the data and to decide on the computation. That’s much better served on local machines than on the ‘cloud’. That’s much easier today with machines that are magnitudes of order more advanced than a decade old ones in terms of computational power and storage. Yet, we see companies wanting to turn all that computing power and storage into mere thin clients with everything from note-taking tool to entire operating systems offered as SaaS. This entire problem happened because the ‘freedom’ part of ‘FOSS’ got de-emphasized in-lieu of profiteering.

You could lend a hand or donate some money, you know! I mean, they do provide it to you for free after putting up with all the shit that Google throws at them. You don’t have to be grateful. But the least you could do is not insult someone’s charity they pay with their personal time.

That’s my experience too. Never seen a single bug or crash.

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I never understand why people choose formats meant for local consumption and then use centralized cloud services to consume it. Podcasts aren’t the only example. RSS feed readers and git are others. If you want synchronization across devices, then use either a plain cloud storage or something even better - like syncthing.

There was an instance where Google used a GPL software (GNU units?) in their backend and didn’t release the modifications because they were technically not distributing it. So yes. It supports your suggestion of using AGPL where its purpose is not immediately apparent. It’s a good thing that people are starting to accept copyleft licenses after the anti-copyleft tirade promoted by the industry.

You know something went seriously wrong when people start rooting for Internet Explorer. Can we go back and reset?

That’s where Google succeeded. They bloated up the web standards so much that developing any of the alternatives to the required level is extremely hard. I doubt that even Google can create an alternative to chrome from scratch.

At this point, the only way for any of these to succeed is for the vast majority of people to actively avoid chrome.

Exactly! In fact, that was the original free software MO. The whole maintainership shenanigans became a thing after companies started exploiting it for free labor.

GPL code can be used in proprietary products as long as it is not distributed outside. There are a lot of such use cases.

The main driving force behind use of proprietary software in educational institutions are the software companies themselves. They have an incentive in it. When the students graduate and join the workforce, their employers are more likely to choose the software that these new workers already know. So it’s like an investment for software companies to get their software into the curriculum. They spend considerable money and effort into it. Regular people stand no chance in pushing for free software - mainly because most of them don’t even care.

I don’t know what people are expecting to happen with the Linux desktop. If there was ever a year of the Linux desktop, it was probably in the mid-2000s, when Ubuntu made the Linux desktop usable for regular people and promoted it with free installation CDs.

The Apache to AGPL re-licensing seems OK - considering that many other projects in similar situation chose non-FOSS licenses like BSL. But CLA replacing DCO? What will prevent the project from going closed-source in the future, without the approval of the contributors? This doesn’t look good for the project.