What's the deal with the name? Openrsync implies to me that it's an open source alternative to a closed source program. But the original Rsync is GPL? Is this just the pushover license making it "more open"?
And GNU folks would say the GPL is actually the more open choice because it forces the project to stay open.
Two different ways of thinking about it I guess... it's nice to have choices and I don't think one is more or less "correct", more a matter of opinion/taste I guess.
It kind of reminds me of the equality of opportunity people versus the equality of outcome people. One sets the starting conditions for developers, the other the ending conditions for users.
GNU folks would say that the GPL does more to protect the freedom of end users by guaranteeing their right to access the source code, whereas permissive licenses allow users to receive binaries, the source code corresponding to which is unavailable to them.
I'm not trying to be idly pedantic here, but to emphasize one of things I genuinely admire about the FSF, SFC, etc.: while they do have words, concepts, and terms of art they're attached to, they're actually pretty good at always explicitly tying their positions back to a specific and well-articulated vision of software freedom. They don't usually get caught up in pure terminology ("what is maximally open?", "what is really free?"). They tend to be clear about whose rights they aim to promote and protect and why, and the bigger picture that fits into.
Whether you agree with them or not, I think it's a more defensible position than a shallow terminological squabble.
As someone that is somewhat aligned with those groups, I also want to say this: licenses are just tools for promoting freedom. It's a question of strategy and tactics. All permissively licensed free software is still free software, and the vast majority of it undeniably contributes positively to software freedom on the whole. (The only concrete exceptions I can think of are uses of permissively licensed free software code to implement things like Intel's Management Engine, DRM, maybe some Trusted Computing stuff.) OpenBSD is free software and it's good shit. We should think of licensing questions like this as a friendly dispute among people who have all given generously to support software freedom.
> In practice, GPL is pro-user, BSD/MIT is pro-business.
Yet every time a GPL licensed product competes against a BSD licensed product in an open market, even when inferior the GPL product wins in the long run.
That's because the GPL ecosystem leapfrogs the BSD one every time one of those pro-business businesses sells proprietary add-ons while the former stands on one another's shoulders.
It's almost like free markets composed of multi vendor ecosystems are business friendly?
(Sarcasm aside, the weasel word here is "business". Customers and vendors are both businesses. Monopolies are very business-friendly for the vendor, just not for anyone else.)
It's a rule that's mostly only true for self-contained products though, it hasn't been true for things like codecs and SSL stacks, and components used by proprietary and free products alike.
I don't think the FSF would say that. They prefer the GPL, because it prevents someone from making a closed derivative, but I haven't seen them ever claim it is more open than "permissive" licenses.
A true morality must be based on consent, not coercion. Humanity may not be there yet, and therein lies the argument for force (and thus copyleft); but the ultimate goal should always be to reduce its necessity.
It’s not coercion. You’re free to not use it, or alternatively do what these folks did, write your own. Coercion would be forcing people to use it through some mechanism, which clearly isn’t possible with GPL.
I see this, and the spiritual example that immediately comes to mind is that which is labeled as "crime". Would it be more moral that a murderer must first consent to being judged and sentenced, or that there is a system which automatically comes into play to hopefully deter but also punish it when it happens?
The paradox clears itself up if you look at what tolerance actually is. It's simply not interfering with people's agency over themselves. Given that your right to self-agency doesn't entitle you to restrict others' self-agency, behavior that does try restricting others' agency is automatically not included in "tolerance."
> BSD license is unrestricted, it tolerates taking open source and closing it, thus always being at risk of things closing down.
There is no such risk. If someone wishes to make a closed source derivative of the BSD-licensed original, it does not deprive anyone of the original. That remains there, just as open as before.
The BSD license is why we have Valkey and not a purely closed-source Redis. It would have been much easier to perform the rugpull if Redis had initially been GPLed.
And how exactly did the BSD license make creating Valkey easier? GPL and BSD licenses both have the source in the open. Anyone creating a fork, can easily do so for either BSD or GPL licensed projects. Since Redis is a database, which the user won't be using a binary of, even using a fork of a supposedly GPL-licensed Redis would not require you to share your modifications with your user, same as BSD.
On top of badreligion42’s point, that both licenses allow forking just as easily - don’t you have the rugpull part backwards?
Afaik BSD licensed stuff can be re-licensed under any more closed licenses at any time, where as to re-license GPL, you need consent from every single contributor.
But i’m not familiar with the redis-valkey story so, maybe there is some nuance i am missing?
OpenSSH was a 'reaction' to the original SSH(.com) code getting closed source:
> OpenSSH originated in 1999 as a fork of Björn Grönvall's OSSH, which derived from Tatu Ylönen's original SSH 1.2.12 release, the last version distributed under a license permitting open-source redistribution before Ylönen's subsequent software became proprietary under SSH Communications Security.[4]
It was probably the second thing with the Open— prefix by this group of developers, OpenBSD itself being the first. They simply ran with the naming convention. OpenBGP/OSPF were developed as alternatives to Quagga (GPL).
No. The name only means it’s made by the OpenBSD team, nothing more. If they made their own Python port, it’d be called OpenPython, even though the original is FOSS.
So is OpenSUSE made by the BSD team? OpenOffice? OpenShift? OpenCV? OpenAI?
It is not reasonable to claim this prefix unambiguously refers to the OpenBSD team. I do not understand why so many in this thread are pretending this isn't a confusing choice.
> Is rsync going closed source? If not, how is that the same thing?
Not closed source, but with rsync 3.0 it changed its license to GPL3, which a lot of folks don't like: BSD/MIT licenses have zero limitations on use and distribution, GPL2 (rsync 1.x, 2.x) forces one to release code, GPL3 (rsync ≥3.x) adds further restrictions.
Some folks want to distribute code with as few restrictions as possible. Other folks have a great good/goal in mind (e.g., 'all software is open source') and so add 'local restrictions' to hopefully achieve greater non-restrictions.
> This system has been merged into OpenBSD base. If you'd like to contribute to openrsync, please mail your patches to tech@openbsd.org. This repository is simply the OpenBSD version plus some glue for portability.