Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ranger_danger 318 days ago
Yes I understand... but they already knew that the license explicitly allows this, and they already knew companies regularly take advantage of FOSS without giving back, so I'm not sure why they were expecting to get lucky or something.

To me this is just like getting upset when someone forks your open source project. Which ironically I've seen happen a LOT. Sometimes the original developer/team even quits when that happens.

It's like... they don't actually want it to be open source, they want to be the ONLY source.
1 comments
immibis 318 days ago
Because they don't think about it deeply - that's why reminders are necessary. They think they're only donating to people with similar attitudes to themselves. xGPL licenses (SSPL included) are the license family most similar to that...

... but MIT is what corporations told them they want. There has been a low-level but persistent campaign against xGPL in the past several years and the complaints always trace back to "the corporation I work for doesn't like xGPL." No individual free software developer has a problem with xGPL (SSPL not included).

link
ranger_danger 317 days ago
> No individual free software developer has a problem with xGPL

I do... I consider it the opposite of freedom. I think it places severe restrictions on your project that make it hard/impossible for some people (like companies) to use, especially if your project contains lots of code from other people that make it really hard/impossible to try to re-license if one day you decide you like/need money (assuming you have no CLA, I don't like those either).

But I also realize there's different kinds of freedom... freedom TO vs freedom FROM.

Some want the freedom TO do whatever they want... and others want freedom FROM the crazy people doing whatever they want.

I wish there was a happy medium but centrism doesn't seem to be very popular these days.

link
immibis 317 days ago
Which part of the GPL do you consider to be a "severe restriction" that "makes your project impossible to use"?

I agree that you can't legally take a bunch of GPL code and relicense it as proprietary. That's the point.

Freedom to/from is a false dichotomy; most rights can be expressed equivalently in either "to" or "from" form.

link