> Personally, I think putting an interoperability protocol implementation behind a copyleft license is a little unfortunate!
Huh, haven't thought of it. Just relicensed ancs4linux to MIT.
> Personally, I think putting an interoperability protocol implementation behind a copyleft license is a little unfortunate!
Huh, haven't thought of it. Just relicensed ancs4linux to MIT.
I love HN. Read an article that raises a reasonable point about a project’s license, and that project’s author shows up to announce they were convinced and changed the license accordingly. Repo was updated 5 minutes ago.
It’s things like this that give me hope for the world.
I'm not a scab, so I won't use permissive licenses on my unpaid projects. People who want to use them at work can cry me a river.
Same. Started to adopt AGPLv3 for every new project. With AI sucking up all the CV-driven contributors, it’s time to take back open source as a joyful hobby for nerds that enjoy programming and sharing their creations with one another, instead of being corpo stans that do free support for shareholder driven enterprises.
Do you think AGPL is going to stop a crawler from incorporating your work into their training set? I don’t. There are zero meaningful consequences atm.
That being said, I’m with you in spirit and in action, but realistically it’s pointless outside of living in accordance with your values.
Edit: Re-reading that, i just told you that your principles are pointless, and thats fucked up and wrong. I’m going to live in accordance with mine and not delete this, but apologies.
> Do you think AGPL is going to stop a crawler from incorporating your work into their training set?
No, but i propose we ostracize anyone who uses LLMs for the wrong reasons (i.e. not accessibility), and i hope you do too. The reasons are mostly not related to licenses, though, but it upholds licensing as a nice-to-have consequence.
(loved your comment edit)
Yeah, let’s go back to 1930 because if we cry wolf loud enough the wolf will disappear…? That it?
Doesn’t work like that. Better adapt and see how you can turn the tool to do your bidding rather than try to piss against the wind in the hope the wind changes direction the next 5 seconds. It won’t.
I don’t really care that the things I make will invariably be scooped up and ingested into the training data.
It’s rather that I think we all ought to stop making software that is primarily useful to businesses, because there is no more joy in that with AI-written PRs driving maintainers into burnout. Big tech finally has no more excuses as to why they don’t maintain all the bedrock libraries themselves. So I say, let them do that.
And on the other hand, since anyone can vibe code something now, the value of GitHub projects as CV material has gone down significantly, so I’d expect less people to do that. Good! Open Source as a community, as a movement, doesn’t need these people.
Let’s get back to the roots.
That's kinda how I'm thinking about this in terms of licenzing my upcoming projects.
The code is just going to be laundered anyways, so why bother putting on a license like AGPL that might just hinder adoption?
I went through similar thoughts. Settled on just dropping everything under MIT.
I'm using AI assistance a bunch, nothing fully vibe coded (yet) so what's it really matter? My "novel" approach to BOM line item attributes?
Then just not publish it I think.
What a thread.
Maybe there is hope for the internet?
I don't bother so much with licenses, but learned to reply with "that would be 1k bucks" instead of "you are welcome" where someone wants my library to do something it didn't before.
Not to be Debbie Downer but software licensing has no effect on what matters to billions of people.
We are facing very real global and societal issues that people on this site are actively exacerbating, like disinformation and climate change.
If a dude changing an inconsequential text file on GitHub gives you hope for the world, then please broaden your perspective.
So I'm guessing you don't do anything except what matters to billions of people? Always 100% fully generalized contributions, never making your local world a better place? Your only local contributions being to tell off people who are grateful that their lives are materially improved by someone else's smaller actions... You must be beloved by your community.
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Yet here you are, posting self-congratulatory comments about how you don't post self-congratulatory things.
IMHO this is even less meaningful/impactful than the comment that you objected to.
I don't think the point you're trying to make improves the quality of the discussion here. If a downstream project laments a license and the author changes it, that's good communication and cooperation. Complaining that people are happy with the outcome isn't productive.
Making one small corner of the world a little bit better is a good thing. There's not much use in complaining that it's not as big of an impact as could hypothetically be achieved on some larger issues.
“He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” -- William Blake
It's things like this that rob my of my hope for the world.
Lol. Someone liking this change is stupid for letting it lift their outlook, right? How stupid is it then to let this comment rob your hope.
:) Alternative reply to lighten mood in odd thread:
You understand I'm on your side here, right?
Sorry yes, giving silly alt reply
I saw someone smile at the park the other day, do you think you could talk to them for me?
I think you like very much to be a debbie downer
Not GP but I feel like that's kinda their point - the fact that we still have this platform to collaborate in such an organic way is truly remarkable and must not be taken for granted.
This is verifiably false. Without copyleft licensing like the GPL or permissive licensing like MIT and Apache we literally would not have the internet, or it would be somehow even more wildly dystopian and proprietary than it already is.
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Actually a lot of that bad stuff billionaires are doing is enabled by MIT licensed software. Like, device lockdown is illegal with GPL3
People are concerned about having homes to live in and having food to eat. They aren't concerned about 'device lockdown'. Try to see the bigger picture.
Device lockdown is why our biggest billionaires are billionaires. It's how they made their money and still make it.
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You are indeed being a Debbie Downer.
You must be fun at parties
Isn't this[0] the use-case that is supposedly covered by LGPL?
[0] copyleft-licensed library that could be legally linked into non-copyleft code base.
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Those poor multi-trillion dollar companies that can't use copyleft projects, whatever will they do?
Write copyleft software?
Nah, send the trench grunts to cry on the internet
Please consider using the LGPL instead.
Thank you for all the hard work and inspiration.
Hero
Thank you!
You might want to check again for something that has patent protection. apache2+llvm exception, or just the mozilla public license...
EUPL is also basically GPL without being viral, too.