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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> It's a hundred times easier to solve any potential IP problems for a successful project

Tell that to the original author of libevhtp, who is currently homeless. To paraphrase him, "the ideals behind BSD are great until someone derives massive profits from your work and doesn't share."

Yes, there are other issues contributing to his being homeless; my point is that putting careful thought into your licensing is important, if only because you can't always change it later. Being clear on IP ownership is also quite important, especially with the threat of someone with an army of lawyers landing on your doorstep.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13423607

EDIT: Fixed name of library, thanks for the check.

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The original author of libevent --- if we're talking about the C library that provides a common event interface between select, poll, epoll, &c --- is Niels Provos. Niels is definitely not homeless; he works at Google and spends his weekends making Wootz steel and forging swords from it.

The person you're talking about is the author of libevhtp, a small HTTP library built on top of libevent. Apparently, Chromium uses or at some point used libevhtp.

https://github.com/ellzey/libevhtp

Not sure how "small" it is. Seems like a significant work to me, worth some appreciation, including a financial one.

It replaces one feature of libevent, is built on top of libevent, has fewer users than libevent, and is substantially smaller in code size than libevent. That's all I meant to communicate by the word "small".

Sure, there are smaller and larger libraries. The fact that the author of the smaller library is homeless doesn't make it less tragic. I mean the pathos of the OP still holds even if the named person (and number of lines of code) is different.

I hadn't even heard of libevhtp before it was brought up as a failure of the open source model. But I'll bet a pretty big chunk of readers know what libevent is. That's not a minor mixup. All I'm interested in is correcting it, and now that I have, I'm not not interested in litigating any of the rest of this.

Fixed, thanks!

He was also a maintainer of libevent. http://archives.seul.org/libevent/users/May-2015/msg00000.ht...

I'm not surprised. He seems quite smart and engaged with the project. But he became a maintainer in 2015; the project itself goes back to something like 2002.

That is a reason to use the AGPL when working on free software. Using a BSD license gives you (the creator) zero protection from bad commercial actors who want to use the software without contributing back. The AGPL is not the right choice for every project but I do believe it is a good choice for software which can be trivially setup as a service. For instance, an open source web application, an open source database, an open source irc server, etc... I think Linus did the right thing going with the GPL for Linux and sticking with version 2.

Protection from what? Most people release their open-source work in the "just do whatever the f you want" spirit. If there is a commercial opportunity you can always re-license / offer paid support.

Protection from someone monitizing your work before you can monetize on it. If they get a copy of the code released under the BSD license, no amount of re-licensing will help get a penny.

In fact, many people will simply re-host re-licensed work, in an effort to keep the "free" version available.

> Tell that to the original author of libevent, who is currently homeless.

Can you cite your sources for this claim? I checked the Wikipedia article for Libevent[0]. The original author, Niels Provos, appears to work for Google[1].

-----

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libevent

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Provos

Wrong library name, fixed. Thanks!

How would a different license have helped the author of libevhtp?

He basically had two choices:

- BSD style license where people can use it without paying him, and modify without contributing back

- GPL or proprietary: it's highly unlikely anybody would have used his library. Even LGPL would probably have limited usage significantly.

Or the hundreds of other licenses out there from the dozens of creative commons to Apache, Python, and more.

How would a different license (say, AGPL) have helped? He could have gotten paid for his work via a dual license. Putting code out there under a BSD style license effectively eliminates that option from the table; what corporation is going to pay for something that's legally and morally free?

Lots of usage at a price of $0 gives the same result as 0 usage at a different price.

One user at $N gives a lot more money than 1000N users at $0.

Depends on your goals, I imagine. Making a living, or making a name?

If this had been GPL or AGPL, even dual licensed, it wouldn't have been included in a BSD-style licensed product like Chromium. And Google or any entity behind such a product probably would have written something similar themselves. There is a nonzero chance that they would have acquihired Libevthtp Inc. to get his expertise and IP and allow them to relicense as whatever they wanted... but that's a small chance indeed. So there were really no paying customers, and the market clearing price for a copyleft libevhtp is effectively $0.

Like a startup, writing open source requires that you find customers (or employers) who will pay, or you do it as a passion project. In an ideal world people would have basic income and could write open source all day long, but that's not our world.

> So there were really no paying customers

Well, there were no customers who would pay the original author. Chromium still required developers to incorporate and maintain the library. Money was spent on the library, it's just that none of that money was given back to the original developer.

> or you do it as a passion project

Doing a "passion project" doesn't mean that you need to give everything away. If there's the chance my passion project could make money, why deprive myself of that chance before I even begin?

Lots of passion projects licensed GPL which make money; and lots of passion projects licensed BSD which don't have a single user.

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