Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

When licensing with a permissive license, YOU (as open source developer / contributor) are being generous, you're giving your code away expecting NOTHING in return other than (in most cases) a copy of the license with the finished product. That's open source, the rules or license does not change if it's used by another OS developer, an indie startup, a charity, or a multi billion developer.

View on HN

It'd be interesting to see a license that's permissive for non-commercial use and copyleft for commercial use. Or maybe the copyleft kicks in when the commercial derivative work starts earning a certain amount of money. It would be kind of like dual licensing under CC BY-NC and CC BY-SA.

I think it would still count as a free and open source software license, and it would allow small and independent developers to use the software without worrying much about the license, while requiring big companies to release the source of the derivative work.

Like the BSL? The Business Source License: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/

Kindof like Qt? They have it set up so you can use it under the LGPL terms, but if you pay them, you can negotiate a proprietary license (for example: if you wanted to statically link[a]).

[a]: The LGPL allows proprietary usage, but only when the LGPL library is dynamically linked in. The reason being that if it’s a separate binary file (.so, .dll, etc.), the user can replace it with their own version. If you statically link it (embed it in the program binary), the full GPL kicks in (IIRC).

Whoever owns Qt now is so threatening (I suppose they think of it as "aggressive marketing" but it's really threats) that it looks safer to treat Qt as GPL, or avoid it entirely.

Whoever owns Qt is: Qt. They were spun off from Digia (the company that bought them from Nokia) in 2016.

It felt like Qt was (relatively speaking) all over the place when they were owned by Nokia, but have been in a slow decline of mindshare for years. Of course, that's concurrent with the rise of Electron as the cross-platform app wunderkind.

When they were owned by Nokia you knew Nokia wants Qt to be used everywhere. Now it's not safe to use it without a lawyer on retainer.

Plus, from my friends who still do Qt, they're trying to turn it into an Electron-like platfom with Qt Quick and QML and the result isn't exactly the dependable platform that we used to know and love.

That doesn't really surprise me. It's not really a bad idea, but it's also probably an idea that they should have been able to deliver five or six years ago, and maybe had something better than Electron by now. (And of course licensing that didn't scare people off seems like it would have also been a good idea...)

It would not count as free or open source

It goes against freedom 0, and criteria 5 and 6 of the open source definition

https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/freesoftware.en.html

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

The BSL strikes a good balance there: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/

As it always resolves to an open source license after a set amount of time + is always free in many other ways.

What I'm thinking of would affect freedom 3 more than freedom 0. I guess by "use" I meant "incorporate in another program". But I still think it counts as free and open source because it doesn't actually prohibit commercial redistribution, it just switches to a different license type.

It's GPL plus an additional permission that noncommercial derivative works don't have to share the source code.

Anyway it's probably not actually a good idea.

I think this is more likely to hurt a project than to help it. Companies will avoid it entirely, putting work into something with a more permissive license. If there isn't an equivalent, they might implement one, open source it (a lot of tech companies have open sourced some big things), and that will be the one that gains popularity.

As long as as developers are willing to develop something 80% as good or a company open sources something that good, the one with the messy license will never get the same traction.

Looks like for a lot of companies putting in a paragraph of text acknowledging they used the MIT-licensed work is a mission impossible. A short paragraph of text, come on!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com