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I knew people in general are terrible to whoever is providing something for free but WTF.
Atleast he also gets occasionally nice emails
He concluded the brief talk with one last email; it was from an 11-year-old child who had found curl useful in some project they were working on. It included an expression of gratitude that, Stenberg said, was truly heartwarming.
Yeah, it’s once again a case of a central piece of software in a very precarious situation, and businesses that aren’t … quite mindful of the fact that they’re making demands from someone they’re not paying.
Exactly. At the same time the same businesses are claiming record profits, and not contributing to that central piece of foss software at all in any way (like the car manifacturers mentioned in the post).
Yep. I wonder if that CRA compliance stuff won’t change that. Industries with strict demands on safety should be putting in work and resources to ensure that those demands are actually met, but how the CRA deals with FOSS took a bit of work to not be a complete disaster, and I can’t imagine it’s easy for FOSS projects to work out the details there.
As in:
- The automotive industry absolutely should be CRA compliant,
- it’d be nice for everyone if cURL was known to be CRA compliant,
- compliance doesn’t appear by magic, someone has to put in work,
- companies that should be CRA compliant should help with that work.
In the case where they don’t want to pitch in, well, something cURL-equivalent but known CRA-compliant won’t just fall off the back of a wagon, which means the companies that need compliance have a problem.
Then again, apparently the HPE Nonstop ecosystem has
gitavailable on their platform all through the spare-time efforts of all of one dude, which absolutely shows that critical systems are willing to rely on precarious software, so I’m not gonna hold my breath.You put it well. Big Companies who rely on these libraries should put in the work. They have the money and resources to help FOSS projects reach compliance.
Video: https://youtu.be/YEBBPj7pIKo
I still think we need a foss license that requires a donation (in money, not neccessarily code) for professional use.
Such a license would neither be regarded as free software nor open source.
Some other alternative could be making
GPL-3.0-or-later+ a Contributor License Agreement a more common option, so that it is possible to tell companies that if they want to use the library in some closed-source application, they need to work out a license deal.CLAs are frequently involved in turning software proprietary though, so it isn’t exactly held in the highest esteem in the FOSS community.
And without a CLA you essentially get the Linux kernel situation, which will be stuck on GPL2 forever, since they can’t reasonably get everyone to agree to switch to GPL3, especially since some copyright holders are not just unwilling, but unreachable or dead (and in several jurisdictions copyright lasts for decades after death).
Personally I suspect public funding, similar to science, education and libraries, is a more likely option, though that’ll be an uphill political struggle a lot of places.
So a “here’s the code, do whatever you want with it, but you must contribute your changes” is open source but a “but you must contribute money if you make money with it” isn’t? Isn’t that just nitpicking?
Not free software; of course, makes sense. Rather a limited free software.
Isn’t that just nitpicking?
No, because the definitions are phrased very differently. Software doesn’t have to be copyleft to be considered FOSS either, as is the case with tons of BSD and MIT and whatnot code that’s used in proprietary programs—all they have to do is make it clear that they’re using their software (and even that’s not a given).
Even with copyleft licenses like the GPL, as long as they never distribute their software to anyone they don’t have to offer them the source code either, as with so many backends. The AGPL gives consumers of distributed systems some more rights.
Free software is mostly about providing you rights when you encounter the source code, meaning that you’re allowed to modify it and share it. This is as opposed to stuff like “source available” licenses that permit you to read the source code, but not modify or share it.
+1 because this is a much more concise description of free vs open source, the exact obligations of the (A)GPL license, and of use vs distribution, than what I’ve written in the past vis-a-vis proposals of non-free licenses like SSPL and Futo.
Golf isn’t you must contribute your changes.
It just grants a user and only a user the right to get a copy, that is build able.
A diff tree, or the forced upstreaming is not required. You don’t even have to provide a copy to the original author unless they are a user!
