The problem is that not even Creative Commons was able to come up with a real definition for non-commercial when they last (I think) revised the license. Essentially it means trivial uses (a photo in a grade school assignment) or its contentious in a way that reasonable people can disagree about. What constitutes acceptable usage of a properly attributed photo? Personally, I just properly attribute and stopped worry about whether most presentations constituted commercial use or not.
As both a consumer and producer, NC makes it kind of a pointless untouchable dead end even if I never intend to make a business out of something.
A lot of unintended things could be argued as commecial and who wants to risk it? If I do something purely as ahobby, and along the way make a youtube video about it, and that video pays money, I suddenly become techically in violation of non-commercial. Or I use it in a class where I was paid to teach. Or any number of ordinary possible uses that along the way do involve an exchange of money.
Let alone the freedom to change my mind in 5 years and decide I do want to sell something I made that initially I didn't.
I don't know what I might want to do tomorrow, so best to just not invest any of my time or effort into anything that might bite me later.
ND is 100x worse. Why even bother publishing a design at all then? Just sell your commercial propeietary product, and any users who want the plans you can just sell them more service for support and customization instead.
So I only apply BY-SA to be as similar to classic GPL as possible, and it's no problem at all if there is a business that can't accept the SA terms. It doesn't prevent selling a product, it just prevents being a dick and a thief (well on paper anyway, of course they go ahead and steal anyway but that's a different problem).
If I ever had something where I didn't want anyone else to be able to sell it, I just wouldn't publish it at all in the first place.
I wouldn't use an NC photo on a big company stage or in a marketing campaign. But I sort of convinced myself I wasn't being directly paid for most of the presentations that I did and do, so it was OK enough. And I don't materially rework most photos or text.
I use no commercial reuse (NC) yet years ago a polite young man from China emailed me letting me know that he was translating my stuff to resell under his name for money. To be honest, I didn’t mind and it made a good story to tell friends and family.
I had something similar happen with a book I wrote through a publisher. I went radio silence on him. Would have required contacting my publisher and I didn't need the hassle.
That's one of the reasons that defining NC broke down in the latest round of CC license revisions. Sure, even in the US, define NC as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. But that doesn't mean some mom-and-pop charity you agree with. It can easily mean a non-profit with goals you totally disagree with. And how about 501(c)(6)s like the NFL? And that's just US tax law.
I have been releasing books under Creative Commons for 20+ years. Share alike, no modifications, no commercial reuse. I sell my books via Leanpub (my books https://leanpub.com/author/books/published) and they can all be read free online (recommended to see if you like them), and if purchased the price can be reset to free, zero cost.
I like CC because I like my books to be read and I still make money. When people choose to pay I use that as a signal for which topics to put future effort into.
My wife has been my editor for ever, so this is a family business.
EDIT: over 20 years ago, I was what I think was Larry Lessig’s second ‘Featured Commoner’ and that was fun because they interviewed me and posted the interview in the CC web site.
I recognize your nickname because I have always enjoyed your comments on Lisp on here, so I checked out the site and disappointingly because of topic and appearance, look like AI slop to me.
As there's no publication date listed, and I'm particularly intolerant to slop, can you recommend a book of yours published before Autumn 2022?
My older books have real photographs on them (e.g., https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp) and newer ones have AI generated covers and some have AI generated figures. Look for books with photos I have taken of nature - those are the old books (exception is Java AI book that is 90% very old material, but has a new AI generated cover).
In the last year I have started vibe coding a lot, but I still take personal ownership of my latest code examples because I set requirements and provide a design, and ask AI coding harnesses to let me run and test the code so I tweak it. Anyway, it still feels like mostly my code and I prefer the new AI + Mark code over what I used to produce.
This has been a strange ride! I learned to program in 1965 and have always loved coding, but it is a weird new world we live in, my friend.
I don't like the phrasing of the EUPL because it says you have rights full stop and then in a later section it says there are actually conditions. For that reason I would not immediately be sure the conditions are even enforceable, other than "this was surely made by lawyers and therefore also surely valid".
Aside from that, it is nice to see Communication counted alongside Distribution; this should have been done from the start IMO.
Do these types of things really matter anymore? If you have tokens, given the source is available pretty easy to reimplement with plausible deniability.
I think there's been a mistake in the thinking that restricting the licensing on open source projects will make the companies that use them as a service would make them contribute.
They don't, the companies just replace the software in question.
If you think an LLM can just implement e.g. an alternative to the Linux kernel from scratch (or any other GPL licensed software), you might be falling for the marketing.
Have you seen LLMs build large, stable, pieces of software, that work well, with your own eyes? I have not. I have seen LLMs build small, well-understood things, and I've seen LLMs do super well with extremely well specified problems, but all the rest seems to be marketing (i.e. I couldn't observe or reproduce it).
Edit: I'm not talking about throwaway slop that just needs to run long enough to get funding.
A lot of open source that we used to use as dependencies is trivial. Sometimes you only need 10% of the library.
No one is talking about kernel.
Also, changing license does not prevent you from forking the source code before the change. There are no new libraries with kernel level effort that use uncommon license.
Then again, it's not like even before the plagiarising slop machines you couldn't just get around licenses if you were dedicated enough to evil and was comfortable lying about the provenance of the code you're using.
Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.
For FOSS I personally prefer Apache 2.0 license, as 10 years from now I have no idea what people will need for their projects.
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
This, for some reason, has become a controversial idea — as evidenced by your comment being downvoted.
I honestly cannot understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects entirely. If your only goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead?
If people have a rational self-interest in helping build great works, than the projects simply manifest out of necessity. There is zero benefit in assuming everything is a zero-sum game.
With billions of people online someone is always having the best or worst day of their lives. I rather people be honest about what they think, and trust respectful disagreement is welcome. Have a great day =3
I am mostly just an anti-contaminating license proponent. Porting to multiple platforms gets complicated if you include a 3rd party commercial library with a project that on linking demands it also become publicly accessible.
For example, if someone wants to do something creative... they shouldn't have to cite 400 different peoples licenses. That isn't sustainable or fun.
I will stick with Apache 2.0, but understand different folks have other use-cases =3
That is why the FSF invented just one GPL, and said everyone should use this one or later. Then when they invented another one, it was automatically compatible. This way, the license is compatible, and you don't have to give up any freedoms.
GPL and LGPL works for a lot of people, but becomes a persistent issue when porting to other OS. They both still become a contaminating license if you have to static link something, embed 3rd party blobs, or even use icons for a consistent user interface experience.
Having a less restrictive FOSS compatible license that doesn't obligate people to modify the general purpose libraries for their edge case has proven important.
GPL only truly makes sense if targeting an OS supporting shared-object library paradigms. This is part of the reason why 95% of commercial Applications are running in an emulated/wrapper on the nix platforms.
The year of the Linux Desktop is still a ways off, and the foundational library structures are under constant upgrade or permutation. Snap/Flatpak/AppImage and Docker/RancherVM were all designed to try and mitigate the compatibility chaos of perpetual nix Beta release cultures.
It has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages similar to the Butterfly Effect bugs when something with the same name slightly changes behavior. =3
Which could make the business untenable. I'm not GP commenter, but I do want to be useful to these too.
And as others have said the deceptive term of "plugging the SaaS loophole" ignores that it means most software cannot be combined with it. Most. By far most.
Sure, some people will say "well fuck that software". And that's a stance. But it ain't freedom.
One problem is that people (mostly--we'll ignore the various edge cases) know what traditional *nix-style distribution looks like. No one knows what network interactions resolve to if someone with deep pockets and/or a grudge wants to file a lawsuit. So better to just run away.
Use an AGPL license if you like but--and I'm not even a lawyer--but I'll probably just walk away. Your software is probably not that interesting to compensate for any risk.
Yup. As I said in another comment "I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else".
Indeed, keeping track of every shader/asset/texture under CC BY-SA 4.0 was a nonstarter.
For media, 3D files, game FX, and icons it is only CC0 Public Domain projects we recommend to folks having fun. Keeping track of every Copyright and Copyleft trolls content demands is just too much work for small hobbies. =3
We also financially support people clearing barriers for future artists and creatives (clean Blender resources.)
One of the problems we found was people reselling other peoples pirated works, or plug-ins for features already in Blender for free. Cons will always con regardless of community intentions. Make something fun and beautiful instead =3
There can be issues with public domain in Europe (moral rights you can't disclaim yada-yada in some non-common law countries). And, as I distantly recall, there were some issues with CC0 related to patents. MIT-0 would probably be my choice absent deep legal research into the topic (though I have discussed public domain as related to software with IP lawyers as related to a book I wrote).
Trademarks are still a possible liability, which is why film sets use gaffers tape or stickers to cover equipment logos and branding. The photo can be CC0, but the coca-cola logo is still owned by a company.
Patent claim sections are the only legal part at the end of the document, and may only cover functional or process facets of an innovation. Software patents are also only valid in certain jurisdictions.
Generally speaking, if something has been time-stamped in the public domain you can challenge a patent for $2k. Since a global patent is around $240k to $600k each, most people would not want to take that bet with archive.org active.
The Patent first-to-file changes under the US system may have altered the 17 organizations disclosure limit rules, but as far back as I can recall any patented technology older than 19 years is almost certainly public domain. =3
Yes, especially in an actual commercial context (e.g. an ad on a billboard) companies are or should be very careful. I've had panicked last minute emails from organizations where some CC photo of mine was being slated to be used. I've said yes of course as they were usually some form of worthwhile charitable organization.
But there are a lot of, often unclear, rules related to publicity and model rights that are by no means clear across geographies. Even leaving aside Eiffel Tower light displays, I'm sure a lot of the photos I've taken in Europe and put up on Flickr or Facebook could be an issue if someone really wanted to pursue it.
Yes, that's what I mean. I have used open source software before, and deployed it and so on, but no one has ever offered me to work 1 day a week or something like that during my job hours on an open source project, contributing something. Maybe at a future job.
> it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work
It's an idea as old as any:
The freedom to restrict the freedom of others, is it really a freedom?
It is a tiresome debate. People can argue about it until the sun sets without reaching an agreement. Better to be clear about which kind of freedom you mean, and respect the choice of others.
Plenty of businesses have been started around free software without necessarily restricting the freedoms of others. It is often argued that this constitutes a better approximation of a truly free market than the entry barriers intellectual property law can put up.
Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
Why does it have to be forced? Why can't murder just be legal and if you want to murder that's fine and if you don't, that's fine too...
It was not forced charity from the original author. They were free to choose any license. The original author is the only one in the position to choose to be charitable or not. No one else's opinion on charity matters.
Rather being thoughtful and principled enough to choose a copyleft license is the truest charity of all and the most valuable for all other consumers forever after.
It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
If I get something from you and the only terms are not money but simply attribute and share-alike, that is not some burden.
That's like saying the only terms are you can have this for free and you can use it for any purpose you want, but just promise not to punch me in the face. "What? Outrageous! It's totally unreasonable to make it a condition enforced by law that I can't punch you in the face and still take your stuff."
>Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical.
>It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
Adding what is effectively an end user copyright DRM submarine under the flag of FOSS is tantamount to sabotage.
I do not see the distinction between copyright and copyleft trolls. They both demand end users give up freedoms to meet a selfish ideal.
If someone wants to control how people use their stuff, than just stop calling it a FOSS work. Some seem very passionate about the subject, but I don't think anyone has ever been murdered over shitty code. =3
It's not forced charity (for them), it is restricted charity (for you).
You wouldn't operate a food bank and give 1000 cans of beans to someone who plans to throw them through the windows of cars. You only give the beans to people who you think are going to eat the beans. Same with software. Free software is given to make the world better, not to make it worse.
Nor should you demand every can of beans donated must be eaten with stinky blue cheese.
Again, disguising a commercial work as FOSS is silly behavior... One can demand whatever you like in the EULA, but it only ever hurts honest players. =3
This article would do better if it simply enumerated the problems with the LGPL and addressed how this new license which I've never heard of addresses those problems. This hinting and alluding might make great SEO, but that's fit for neither the audience of people producing software, nor for HN.
I do appreciate the link to the article and came via HN. I don’t think you can speak for either the audience of people producing software nor for HN.
Another article comparing LGPL and this license sounds good and I am interested in that as well. This article though is a good nudge to start thinking about licensing.
What are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing?
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
You might also be interested in the O'Saasy license (https://osaasy.dev/) which is in the similar vein, but simpler.
HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MIT-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.
I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.
The heat around this particular issue has cooled down a bit and I'm not sure anyone is especially happy with the state of affairs. But questions around AI have sucked a lot of the oxygen from the room for now.
Once you decide on a non-free license, in the FSF sense, in the DFSG sense, and in the open source sense, does the details of the license matter much? You want as many people to pay as possible, and you do not wish for others to compete with you providing this software.
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
This framing ignores the fact that many people pick up technologies because they want to be able to switch the vendor that is hosting it for them. If I'm hosting a LAMP stack from some shared hosting provider, it's easy for me to just move to a different hosting provider because all the software is open source and anybody can host it. This falls apart when companies choose the BUSL, which is why it's not considered OSI open source.
I think it definitely hurts adoption. No hobbyist or experimenter wants to delve into legalities head first by first having to understand the licensing terms of software, whereas permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are easily-understood and familiar.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build the business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
Excuse me but as both a hobbyist and commercial software developer I say that the gpl (any version) is quite simple enough. There is no need to go all the way to bsd/mit just to get safety and clarity and freedom from encumberance.
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
"The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business."
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)
Will hobbyists and experimenters that has no interest in understanding licenses go out of their way to locate specific licensed code, or are they more likely to just ask the AI/agent to cobble together stuff without care of any licenses?
Isn't that what Epic, MiniMax, Z.ai, and others are doing, where a license is free for personal use / low revenue projects, but cost a (steep) fee for commercial use? They don't use dual licenses, but rather a tiered license.
You have to be rather large and a big deal for this to work - b/c if it gets any traction people will re-implement any code base that's not huge. I know FFTW has this model and the SMILE library as well. I've heard some people also do this with MATLAB/Octave. I wish this was integrated in to something like Github - where you can click to buy a proprietary license for a library and all dependencies.
In practice AGPL might achieve that. It does allow commercial use, but a lot of big businesses, especially big tech, will not use it. On the other hand it is a clear, OSI approved, FOSS license.
Well, the language is clear enough. What's not clear are the implications of the language. And, honestly, the sensible default for a lot of companies is just not to go there. And big companies tend not to operate on hopes and prayers to avoid distracting and expensive lawsuits. Without going into details I have enough familiarity with the space to know that a lot of open source-friendly companies either avoid AGPL entirely or discourage its use.
If you are trying to monetize your software, the biggest factor is whether or not your customer trusts you.
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
How does MIT build any more trust than a copyleft licence like AGPL? At the very least AGPL stops people "stealing" your work without contributing back their changes?
AGPL does not do anything to force people to contribute their changes back. They have to make the changes available, however that's very different from actually contributing back. It is not hard to make a low quality contribution that the upstream would for very good reason refuse even though it 'works'.
The poster child for this is chromium which is GPL because it has clear and obvious roots in the old KHTML code of 20 some years ago. In theory you can contribute to Google movement and I suppose some people do but realistically Google controls it completely and they will do whatever they want. even though the source is available it is effectively not a contribution back.
You can't be stealing what is given away for free.
Developers that choose copileft license want to see al changes shared under the same license.
Developers that choose permissive want their code to be of use to as many developers as possible for whatever they want to use it for.
>MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
You've chosen the license which allows "stealing", why did you do that if you don't like that? Nobody forced you to do that, I hope.
How can I trust the person who published their code with the strict legal terms, but becomes sad when other people use their code exactly as the author said it could be used?
Every once in a while I read discussions about licenses, and puzzled every time why the author of the software chooses free license when the freedom of copying and distribution is seem to them as pirating. If the license is not suitable for you, why choose it?!
Licenses are about legal possibilities. You're looking for social/moral terms instead if I understood you correctly (something like CoC).
After many years of thinking about this, I have arrived in the exact same place. I think the SQLite team learned this in the early days, and have done very well for themselves, giving away all of their source code for the product itself, free of charge, and then having folks pay for consulting and enhancements, which they remain particularly strong at because of their closed, comprehensive regression test suite.
I like the AGPL but don’t often use it. (I did recently license two coding harnesses I wrote as AGPL.)
A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do. In the USA the collusion between government and big tech is starting to smell a little bit like fascism. Sorry, I have only complaints, not any good answers.
>A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do.
Is the concern that anybody will be earning money on your software (just that), or that you won't get any money, or that they will earn money and don't give back the code?
If the company earns money and opens the code, is that OK for you?
Just for you and for everyone information, Richard Stallman himself told people not only to sell their own software, but the software written by others as well!
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
AGPL, just as all other GPL, does not prohibit selling the software. If you goal is to make your software unsellable, please use your own licensing terms (there's nothing wrong with that!!!)
Yes. The clean way is to use the strongest copyleft license you can find, probably AGPL. Even if corporations are technically allowed to use it, they don't want to risk touching it with a three-meter pole. Then you offer to sell them a different license. Hobbyists and OSS folks usually have no issue with AGPL.
Do you have data on that last bit, or just a guess? As a hobbyist and OSS developer I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else.
Sure, but for anything except large companies it has a bootstrapping problem. I'm absolutely not going to use AGPL software in a test one-person trying to sell a service kind of deal. So if it takes off, I'm already on a non-AGPL stack, so why reach out at that point to get a commercial license for software I don't even use?
And hell, even without money involved, I'm not going to make a hobby project with AGPL software either. Not only may I have small parts of the project I've not opensourced, but AGPL is untested in how far the virality goes. Are my backup cronjobs in scope? I certainly don't want to be the test case for this. Even if I win against an AGPL troll, I'll still lose.
This means you have only solved the problem for large companies, and specifically those who have money and who have a functioning procurement system that's developer-driven. Which is a very narrow use case.
Again, that only works for large companies, and for companies that can exists even if their service is downloadable.
Which fine, you can choose to take that political stance. But that's a stance of "I want to change the world to my liking", not "I want to help the world/people".
Up to you, of course, but I prefer to help not only large companies.
You're basically describing open core. It's hard to get the balance right. Give too much away for free and people won't buy your full product. Give too little away and they can't really properly evaluate it.
> Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
Yes, it's called language. Contracts are nothing but text, so why don't you just write down what you think should be the rules around using your software by other people?
I get the urge of a lot of developers to pick an existing third party license from the shelf, but just as you can write your own code - and are not required to use ready-made libraries/frameworks - you can write your own open source license for your software.
> We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I don't agree with this at all. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business, this is a very modern mindset.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use like MIT unless you are a large company. Everything else is still MIT, it's my way of giving back.
The complaint here is, that those business are not necessarily "bringing people into the community", unless you are talking about passive users, who do not contribute. The businesses simply use the stuff built at no cost to rake in big money, while the person, who did the actual work does not see a cent. This is different with copyleft licenses like AGPL. Only that many businesses are so afraid of contributing anything at all, that they often don't want to use AGPL or even GPL licensed software.
>All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
This is not true. Open source is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good thing that open source unlocks.
Also theres not multiple trillionaires in the world, and the one trillionaire we have did that largely by innovating and creating new stuff rather than just leveraging existing OSS for profit...
Worth noting that the "escape hatch" clauses in the EUPL that allow converting it into other licenses mean it's only ever as strong as the weakest license it names for such an operation, AKA EPL/MPL/LGPL.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
You are describing the compatibility clause as if it's settled that the EUPL simply allows you to convert to a compatible license. The compatibility clause is an unfortunate ambiguity, but it's not the intention of the license authors to lose strong copyleft and SaaS loophole protections this way. See for example here [1] [2] [3].
* BigTech can take your EUPL library and write a small wrapper in MPL
* such a wrapper can therefore be used in any project, even a closed one that is a network service.
* however all of that still qualifies as distributing EUPL, and the EUPL core would still need to be made available under EUPL (whether modified or not).
Saying that since I have an MPL wrapper then all the code is MPL is not allowed.
So you can't just copy all the code and change the license to MPL.
This is basically AGPL without virality and anti-tivo, correct?
I read a few dozen comments to see if I could get an answer to this in the thread, but it does appear to be a case where we're highlighting one of the risks of picking up a new license: folks don't agree on how to interpret it.
I'm very curious why the author didn't simply use AGPL, but I haven't done a deep dive on the text of the EUPL, so maybe that's the next step.
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
Also there’s only one trillionaire and that varies by the stock that day. And it’s not because he abused open source, he’s just the greatest huckster of all time.
The post seems like a poorly disguised political rant “I don’t like the US, I don’t like the rich” with the license change being an excuse to post it to a technical forum.
if the EUPL actually closes the SaaS loophole (first time i'm hearing about it though) in a legally grounded way i can see it being used by people outside the EU who say the AGPL is unenforceable/is actually nonfree/is too hard to actually comply with
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
I hate that some people like to put us all in the same bag. Please don't include me. I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I publish it as such because it's a present to the world at large that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT.
You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please.
Agreed. I don't care if some big tech company uses my work to become even richer, or even if they use my code in some closed software. It doesn't harm me or others, as third parties cannot take away the work I gave to the commons. They may not give to the commons in the way I did, but nobody is any worse off than if the company developed their own software from scratch. So why should I care?
If one licences open source under a strong copyleft licence (say AGPL3) presumably one can open up later and issue under weaker licences (say MIT) if one chooses?
Presumably you can also sell access to it with a full commercial licence if one chooses?
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
That is a lost cause, because the AI companies are above the law now. Copyright doesn't apply to them, felonies committed by them (via their agents) are not prosecuted, and if the AI bubble were to burst, they would be bailed out because by now, all American pensions and the ETFs of the rest of the world depend on them staying fantastical capital black holes.
But what we still can do is stop programming for free for Big Tech, and this license at least gets us closer toward that goal.
The current argument AI owners use is that it falls under fair use as "transformative use", so the licence is entirely irrelevant. If that wasn't the case anything trained on GPL code would have to be released under the GPL.
I'm now sure what if any argument they are using in Europe. Most countries here have a "fair dealing" exemption which is similar to USA "fair use", but it doesn't include "transformative use". The closest would be "pastiche", but that wouldn't really cover it.
A license is a waiver of your rights that are enshrined in law and enforced by the government. It can't take away rights that other people are allowed, unless you get them to agree voluntarily in exchange for something they feel is of equal or greater value.
For example you can say someone can only copy this CD if they pay you $10. Ordinarily you're allowed to sue them for copying it, but you're allowed to promise not to sue them, under any condition whatsoever, such as them paying you $10.
But you can't say someone can only resell this CD if they pay you $10. You already don't have the right to sue them for reselling it, so they have no reason to listen to you.
> If the Licensee Distributes or Communicates Derivative Works or copies thereof based upon both the Work and another work licensed under a Compatible Licence, this Distribution or Communication can be done under the terms of this Compatible Licence
Doesn’t this mean you can take any EUPL licensed software, incorporate any of the more permissive “compatible licenses” and therefore bypass much of the protections?
When open source was becoming a huge thing for everyone to participate in - say 20ish years ago, I always saw a dichotomy that people seemed to gloss over.
You're either writing software for fun and you are happy to give it away. In which case anyone's use of it is to do as they please including make money is just bragging right for you.
Or you write software for a living in which case giving it away for free is dumb. You want to charge maximally for your money making output.
The EUPL sound like a good idea - preserving some of the ideas of the FSF (copyleft) but in a way that governments and companies can actually use to develop their own software.
Personally I'm still in the BSD camp, but my current ranking is BSD/MIT > EUPL > (L)GPL now.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] threadThe magic of the web has always been that things would continuously morph through being reinterpreted and all, and that just doesn't happen with ND.
I can of course see the valid reasons why one would pick that license, but it's still.. kinda sad that it's culturally dead.
As both a consumer and producer, NC makes it kind of a pointless untouchable dead end even if I never intend to make a business out of something.
A lot of unintended things could be argued as commecial and who wants to risk it? If I do something purely as ahobby, and along the way make a youtube video about it, and that video pays money, I suddenly become techically in violation of non-commercial. Or I use it in a class where I was paid to teach. Or any number of ordinary possible uses that along the way do involve an exchange of money.
Let alone the freedom to change my mind in 5 years and decide I do want to sell something I made that initially I didn't.
I don't know what I might want to do tomorrow, so best to just not invest any of my time or effort into anything that might bite me later.
ND is 100x worse. Why even bother publishing a design at all then? Just sell your commercial propeietary product, and any users who want the plans you can just sell them more service for support and customization instead.
So I only apply BY-SA to be as similar to classic GPL as possible, and it's no problem at all if there is a business that can't accept the SA terms. It doesn't prevent selling a product, it just prevents being a dick and a thief (well on paper anyway, of course they go ahead and steal anyway but that's a different problem).
If I ever had something where I didn't want anyone else to be able to sell it, I just wouldn't publish it at all in the first place.
https://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
https://www.techdirt.com/2014/03/27/german-court-says-creati...
I use no commercial reuse (NC) yet years ago a polite young man from China emailed me letting me know that he was translating my stuff to resell under his name for money. To be honest, I didn’t mind and it made a good story to tell friends and family.
I like CC because I like my books to be read and I still make money. When people choose to pay I use that as a signal for which topics to put future effort into.
My wife has been my editor for ever, so this is a family business.
EDIT: over 20 years ago, I was what I think was Larry Lessig’s second ‘Featured Commoner’ and that was fun because they interviewed me and posted the interview in the CC web site.
As there's no publication date listed, and I'm particularly intolerant to slop, can you recommend a book of yours published before Autumn 2022?
In the last year I have started vibe coding a lot, but I still take personal ownership of my latest code examples because I set requirements and provide a design, and ask AI coding harnesses to let me run and test the code so I tweak it. Anyway, it still feels like mostly my code and I prefer the new AI + Mark code over what I used to produce.
This has been a strange ride! I learned to program in 1965 and have always loved coding, but it is a weird new world we live in, my friend.
Aside from that, it is nice to see Communication counted alongside Distribution; this should have been done from the start IMO.
It is a viable argument, and people shouldn't bury such insights given the estimated $9Tn worth of opensource work that was appropriated. =3
They don't, the companies just replace the software in question.
Have you seen LLMs build large, stable, pieces of software, that work well, with your own eyes? I have not. I have seen LLMs build small, well-understood things, and I've seen LLMs do super well with extremely well specified problems, but all the rest seems to be marketing (i.e. I couldn't observe or reproduce it).
Edit: I'm not talking about throwaway slop that just needs to run long enough to get funding.
Also, changing license does not prevent you from forking the source code before the change. There are no new libraries with kernel level effort that use uncommon license.
Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
I honestly cannot understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects entirely. If your only goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead?
With billions of people online someone is always having the best or worst day of their lives. I rather people be honest about what they think, and trust respectful disagreement is welcome. Have a great day =3
Copyleft doesn't say that they can't, it says they have to make their changes available
For example, if someone wants to do something creative... they shouldn't have to cite 400 different peoples licenses. That isn't sustainable or fun.
I will stick with Apache 2.0, but understand different folks have other use-cases =3
Having a less restrictive FOSS compatible license that doesn't obligate people to modify the general purpose libraries for their edge case has proven important.
GPL only truly makes sense if targeting an OS supporting shared-object library paradigms. This is part of the reason why 95% of commercial Applications are running in an emulated/wrapper on the nix platforms.
The year of the Linux Desktop is still a ways off, and the foundational library structures are under constant upgrade or permutation. Snap/Flatpak/AppImage and Docker/RancherVM were all designed to try and mitigate the compatibility chaos of perpetual nix Beta release cultures.
It has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages similar to the Butterfly Effect bugs when something with the same name slightly changes behavior. =3
It is why the wxWidgets has a license that allows creating monolithic commercial blob dependent binaries for Windows, Linux Gtk/X11, and MacOS.
https://wxwidgets.org/about/licence/
People should not static link GPL/LGPL code to closed source blobs, and expect copyright/copyleft trolls to leave their project violating licenses. =3
This is sometimes impossible with mystery binary blobs from manufacturers. =3
And as others have said the deceptive term of "plugging the SaaS loophole" ignores that it means most software cannot be combined with it. Most. By far most.
Sure, some people will say "well fuck that software". And that's a stance. But it ain't freedom.
Use an AGPL license if you like but--and I'm not even a lawyer--but I'll probably just walk away. Your software is probably not that interesting to compensate for any risk.
For media, 3D files, game FX, and icons it is only CC0 Public Domain projects we recommend to folks having fun. Keeping track of every Copyright and Copyleft trolls content demands is just too much work for small hobbies. =3
We also financially support people clearing barriers for future artists and creatives (clean Blender resources.)
https://polyhaven.com/
And procedural textures with bake export (actually made Blender usable for mere mortals):
https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary
One of the problems we found was people reselling other peoples pirated works, or plug-ins for features already in Blender for free. Cons will always con regardless of community intentions. Make something fun and beautiful instead =3
Patent claim sections are the only legal part at the end of the document, and may only cover functional or process facets of an innovation. Software patents are also only valid in certain jurisdictions.
Generally speaking, if something has been time-stamped in the public domain you can challenge a patent for $2k. Since a global patent is around $240k to $600k each, most people would not want to take that bet with archive.org active.
The Patent first-to-file changes under the US system may have altered the 17 organizations disclosure limit rules, but as far back as I can recall any patented technology older than 19 years is almost certainly public domain. =3
But there are a lot of, often unclear, rules related to publicity and model rights that are by no means clear across geographies. Even leaving aside Eiffel Tower light displays, I'm sure a lot of the photos I've taken in Europe and put up on Flickr or Facebook could be an issue if someone really wanted to pursue it.
I find that very surprising, but I have seen some shops practice clean room coding policies. =3
It's an idea as old as any:
The freedom to restrict the freedom of others, is it really a freedom?
It is a tiresome debate. People can argue about it until the sun sets without reaching an agreement. Better to be clear about which kind of freedom you mean, and respect the choice of others.
Plenty of businesses have been started around free software without necessarily restricting the freedoms of others. It is often argued that this constitutes a better approximation of a truly free market than the entry barriers intellectual property law can put up.
Or, a copyright troll is functionally indifferent from a copyleft troll.
It is important to keep the path clear for kids to build their own success stories. =3
Why does it have to be forced? Why can't murder just be legal and if you want to murder that's fine and if you don't, that's fine too...
It was not forced charity from the original author. They were free to choose any license. The original author is the only one in the position to choose to be charitable or not. No one else's opinion on charity matters.
Rather being thoughtful and principled enough to choose a copyleft license is the truest charity of all and the most valuable for all other consumers forever after.
It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
If I get something from you and the only terms are not money but simply attribute and share-alike, that is not some burden.
That's like saying the only terms are you can have this for free and you can use it for any purpose you want, but just promise not to punch me in the face. "What? Outrageous! It's totally unreasonable to make it a condition enforced by law that I can't punch you in the face and still take your stuff."
I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical.
>It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
Adding what is effectively an end user copyright DRM submarine under the flag of FOSS is tantamount to sabotage.
I do not see the distinction between copyright and copyleft trolls. They both demand end users give up freedoms to meet a selfish ideal.
If someone wants to control how people use their stuff, than just stop calling it a FOSS work. Some seem very passionate about the subject, but I don't think anyone has ever been murdered over shitty code. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
Ok buddy whatever you say.
These arguments are so ridiculously invalid I'll trade you a Clockwork Orange for a "not even wrong" suggested google.
Talk about "passionate about the subject" indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
You think it's just awful? Ok.
You wouldn't operate a food bank and give 1000 cans of beans to someone who plans to throw them through the windows of cars. You only give the beans to people who you think are going to eat the beans. Same with software. Free software is given to make the world better, not to make it worse.
Again, disguising a commercial work as FOSS is silly behavior... One can demand whatever you like in the EULA, but it only ever hurts honest players. =3
Another article comparing LGPL and this license sounds good and I am interested in that as well. This article though is a good nudge to start thinking about licensing.
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MIT-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.
I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build the business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
The poster child for this is chromium which is GPL because it has clear and obvious roots in the old KHTML code of 20 some years ago. In theory you can contribute to Google movement and I suppose some people do but realistically Google controls it completely and they will do whatever they want. even though the source is available it is effectively not a contribution back.
You've chosen the license which allows "stealing", why did you do that if you don't like that? Nobody forced you to do that, I hope.
How can I trust the person who published their code with the strict legal terms, but becomes sad when other people use their code exactly as the author said it could be used?
Every once in a while I read discussions about licenses, and puzzled every time why the author of the software chooses free license when the freedom of copying and distribution is seem to them as pirating. If the license is not suitable for you, why choose it?!
Licenses are about legal possibilities. You're looking for social/moral terms instead if I understood you correctly (something like CoC).
AGPL doesn't bar use in commercial production, but the requirements usually scare off any corporate from using it in production.
A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do. In the USA the collusion between government and big tech is starting to smell a little bit like fascism. Sorry, I have only complaints, not any good answers.
Is the concern that anybody will be earning money on your software (just that), or that you won't get any money, or that they will earn money and don't give back the code?
If the company earns money and opens the code, is that OK for you?
Just for you and for everyone information, Richard Stallman himself told people not only to sell their own software, but the software written by others as well!
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
AGPL, just as all other GPL, does not prohibit selling the software. If you goal is to make your software unsellable, please use your own licensing terms (there's nothing wrong with that!!!)
And hell, even without money involved, I'm not going to make a hobby project with AGPL software either. Not only may I have small parts of the project I've not opensourced, but AGPL is untested in how far the virality goes. Are my backup cronjobs in scope? I certainly don't want to be the test case for this. Even if I win against an AGPL troll, I'll still lose.
Also relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596403
Which fine, you can choose to take that political stance. But that's a stance of "I want to change the world to my liking", not "I want to help the world/people".
Up to you, of course, but I prefer to help not only large companies.
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International
Yes, it's called language. Contracts are nothing but text, so why don't you just write down what you think should be the rules around using your software by other people?
I get the urge of a lot of developers to pick an existing third party license from the shelf, but just as you can write your own code - and are not required to use ready-made libraries/frameworks - you can write your own open source license for your software.
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I don't agree with this at all. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business, this is a very modern mindset.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use like MIT unless you are a large company. Everything else is still MIT, it's my way of giving back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License
They cover a very specific niche GPL/AGPL/etc. do not cover properly.
This is not true. Open source is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good thing that open source unlocks.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
[1] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di...
[2] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/ho...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45422512
* BigTech can take your EUPL library and write a small wrapper in MPL
* such a wrapper can therefore be used in any project, even a closed one that is a network service.
* however all of that still qualifies as distributing EUPL, and the EUPL core would still need to be made available under EUPL (whether modified or not).
Saying that since I have an MPL wrapper then all the code is MPL is not allowed.
So you can't just copy all the code and change the license to MPL.
This is basically AGPL without virality and anti-tivo, correct?
I'm very curious why the author didn't simply use AGPL, but I haven't done a deep dive on the text of the EUPL, so maybe that's the next step.
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
I hate that some people like to put us all in the same bag. Please don't include me. I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I publish it as such because it's a present to the world at large that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT.
You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please.
Presumably you can also sell access to it with a full commercial licence if one chooses?
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
The EULA needs a clause that 10% of the market cap of a company will be paid to the IP holder upon violating it.
But what we still can do is stop programming for free for Big Tech, and this license at least gets us closer toward that goal.
I'm now sure what if any argument they are using in Europe. Most countries here have a "fair dealing" exemption which is similar to USA "fair use", but it doesn't include "transformative use". The closest would be "pastiche", but that wouldn't really cover it.
And if you expand the acronym EULA you will actually find that it is… a license agreement.
If EULA is the same as a license, why would MSFT not just use a license? The intellectual contortions of the AI boosters here are stunning.
I don't understand this question.
For example you can say someone can only copy this CD if they pay you $10. Ordinarily you're allowed to sue them for copying it, but you're allowed to promise not to sue them, under any condition whatsoever, such as them paying you $10.
But you can't say someone can only resell this CD if they pay you $10. You already don't have the right to sue them for reselling it, so they have no reason to listen to you.
Doesn’t this mean you can take any EUPL licensed software, incorporate any of the more permissive “compatible licenses” and therefore bypass much of the protections?
You're either writing software for fun and you are happy to give it away. In which case anyone's use of it is to do as they please including make money is just bragging right for you.
Or you write software for a living in which case giving it away for free is dumb. You want to charge maximally for your money making output.
No. YOU changed your mind, to become less free and more authoritarian.
> gained little for users
What? The world runs on Linux.
> or developers.
Were you even there before "everything" was open source and/or free software?
> our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
Yeah that was always allowed.
The problem with freedom is that people get to make their own choices, eh?
Personally I'm still in the BSD camp, but my current ranking is BSD/MIT > EUPL > (L)GPL now.