Write Free Software
writefreesoftware.org
writefreesoftware.org
Moreover, but in my own opinion, nowadays free software is more about the obligation to share the modifications. I gather that many know what open source is, but that obligation, is crucially important and embodies the political statement of the FSF. It's what puts free software truly apart (and makes it great, IMHO). So I'd move the copyleft explanation higher in the list, closer to the 4 freedoms.
It seems to me that the website is taking the position of explaining free software from first principles, rather than as this branch or strain of open source that you already have to understand to really get. I think that's a good thing.
Just give it sometime and you'll see many examples of that in this very thread. Everytime the topic of opensource license comes up, there will surely be a comment that conflates "source available" with "opensource" or even worse insist that "source available" also qualifies to be "opensource". It is like words don't mean anything anymore. It is like apple is apple and pear is also apple because it looks round and we can eat it. stops ranting. Coming back to this post, I think it is valuable to explain opensource from first principles like this.
There have been a spate of startup products that advertise themselves as "open source" to capitalize on the marketing/SEO advantages of doing so. And when called out on this in comments or whatever, the founder eventually presents some kind of argument along the lines of, "well if anyone can read the code then it is open!" or even the old "language can evolve" canard that people trot out when they want the meaning of a commonly-understood word or phrase inverted to fit their specific business or political agenda.
Attach the same adjective to "park" or "road," and you'll understand my frustration with people claiming dominion over the word, "open." You don't have an obligation to cut the grass or fill a pot hole.
If you want people to understand what you mean, use more specific language like, "copy-left." That was a fabrication of the open source movement and doesn't clash with commonly understood language. If they don't already understand the jargon, at least it will be obvious, and they can seek out the definition.
No, I don't care what some open source foundation defines it as. I don't recognize their authority to extend the definition of the word, "open."
But copyleft already means something different from open source. It's more like what people unfamiliar with open source software think that open source software is.
We wouldn’t have our modern BSDs if it weren’t for people being frustrated with source-available Unix. BSD initially started out as essentially a collection of additions to AT&T Unix. Eventually after the divestiture of AT&T and the resulting dramatic price hikes for Unix source licenses, the Berkeley developers embarked on a campaign to replace AT&T source code to develop a fully open source Unix. They beat GNU to the punch (see GNU Hurd), only to be stymied by lawsuits from AT&T.
Ultimately copyleft is mostly a bureaucratic exercise, and it ends up stifling collaboration in all but the most hostile environments (such as the one Linux faced in its early days).
Today, many companies basically ban GPL-licensed or otherwise copyleft software projects, perhaps apart from a handpicked list of exceptions, because they don't want to deal with the hassle. MIT, fine, GPL, no. And that's pretty sad. Because it means that if write a new project you need to choose between "people will use it but it won't be copyleft" and "copyleft but a sizeable part of the community won't touch it with a 10ft pole".
(I won't start discussing the merits of copyleft itself, if that's what your "why do you care?" question was aiming at.)
At the same time, there are shining examples of commercially used and developed copyleft software like Linux, Blender, OBS-Studio. I doubt there exist many companies that banned really all GPL-licensed software, including Linux.
This shows that the GPL itself is not necessarily a hinderance to commercial use or development. In the end many hardware vendors accepted the GPL as a fact of doing business and opened their drivers to add them to the Linux kernel. With NVidia being the most prominent counter example.
Exactly, it is a hack that weaponizes the very system of software copyright against iself. Companies want the power to restrict everyone except license payers to use their software? Fine, then we can restrict their right to restrict our rights.
I think any criticism of copyleft should also contain the exact same criticism od copyright itself. Especially since it's copyright that started stifling collaboration in the first place... Originally, all software was "free software", since the concept of software copyright didn't even exist.
Take it from a graybeard, this is absolutely not true. "Software copyright" has always been a thing, from day 1. Early on, it didn't really affect things too much, but most software was under copyright.
What exactly do you mean by "day 1"? First algorithm written? First computer program written? First program shared between machines? I remember reading Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in.
I am not familiar with exact history of US software copyright, so if you have any hard info about that, I'd be happy to read it, and correct any of my future statements on the topic.
But, looking back on the earliest times that I was involved with computers -- which predates microcomputers entirely -- all of the software that came with the machines was copyrighted, as evidenced by the copious amount of copyright notices all over everything.
> Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in.
Taken literally, Richard Stallman is simply wrong here. But I doubt that he meant that all software was free of copyright (simply because it wasn't). In the US, before 1978(?), you had to register your copyright and it was legally possible to intentionally not copyright works. Lots of software did that, so there was certainly software that wasn't under copyright. I suspect that's what Stallman was talking about. The need to file to obtain copyright protection does mean that copyright didn't apply "by default" then. But that's not saying that there wasn't copyrighted software!
There's no such thing as "software copyright", by the way. It's just "copyright", and software doesn't have any sort of special status now, nor did it then.
As to hard info regarding the history of US copyright, there's tons of it available online. You could do worse than reading the various histories and issues the government has at www.copyright.gov.
The way I see it, there are two positions on software, both valid:
1. You want to develop a piece of software for your own sake, and potentially sell it to others. You copyright it and keep it proprietary.
2. You want to develop a piece of software in collaboration with other people. You apply an open source license to it.
My point about copyleft adding unnecessary bureaucracy to collaboration only applies to case 2. In case 1, you don't want that collaboration, and the copyright system helps you achieve that.
I should also note that if the copyright system didn't exist, most software would still not respect the 4 freedoms. Code would still be kept secret by companies (and employees would be contractually prevented from leaking it), and they would still impose hardware + software restrictions on which software you could install on hardware they sell. Even worse, they could actually do this with Linux or GNU utils as well.
The GPL isn't hacking the copyright system against itself, to "disable it" for software. It's hacking the copyright system to extend protections that would not be possible in a world without copyright.
And if it weren't for software copyright, we wouldn't need that protection at all!
In a software-copyright-less world, reverse engineering wouldn't be a copyright violation, so the scenarios you mention would be very unlikely to happen.
Not to mention, with so much software moving to SaaS models, access to even the binaries to be able to do reverse engineer them is going to be extremely hard.
Also, embedded devices using GNU utils and Linux would have no reason to allow any access to the code running on them in a world without copyright.
So you're saying I can reverse engineer Windows software, and use the results in my own product, without Microsoft raining hell on me?
Wow, those ReactOS guys are really dumb with their clean-room reimplementation then! Someone send them a fax!
I switched back largely because of the popular confusion about what "open source" actually is, and also because modern open source advocates have come to think that "open source" means that there's an overt collaboration aspect to it. In my projects, there is not. So it's easier to avoid the mess and just go with copyleft.
I think you are just talking about a situation where someone forks an open source code into a private one. But the original author still has the code. If someone steals my house but I get to keep my copy… nobody has lost anything.
I don’t think analogies to physical objects work all that well for software.
MIT is free as in free tech support, the sooner people accept that the better off we'll all be.
AGPL doesn't have such problems because it's more radioactive than anything for companies = will be used only by other free software developers
It's the reverse: corporations pay for most OSS software development. Where individual developers do it, it's voluntary. If your summary were true and complete, how would you explain either of those sentences?
Doubt. Every once in a while there's news posted here attesting to the opposite. Case in point:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859
Even if that's the case, it doesn't change anything. They should all be paying for free as in freedom software development instead. Like the Linux kernel where 80% of patches come from people hired to work on it.
> Where individual developers do it, it's voluntary.
I used to do it voluntarily too. Now I believe we're working against our own best interests and therefore I'll use AGPLv3 in all of my new projects.
That's fine. Just don't blame corporations for using the previous software in a way you licenced.
Personally I don’t mind something like MIT / Apache. If you wanna hack it and not guarantee stability, just hack on and make it clear in your culture, and companies relying on it get the instability as their problem. How you support your software isn’t the same question as how you license it.
(From the tooltip in https://writefreesoftware.org/learn/.) This seems to be the most objectionable statement made, though it is properly hedged. The description in the paragraph above it is pretty unobjectionable, too.
Who has ever meant this?
Saying “we don’t need another license” is like saying we don’t need more software, since there is already plenty of software “serving different kinds of needs.” We create new tools to address specific concerns in a better way. What’s the problem?
No, MIT license is not deprecated. Ton of FOSS projects use it and will continue to use it.
OK, well, if that's not good enough for you: The other two Blue Oak board members listed at that site — Heather Meeker and Luis Villa — both have serious reputations in this field.
(Disclosure: Kyle Mitchell is a friend, and both a good lawyer and a good guy.)
Simply, there are services and facilities that are wrapped in a GUI that could readily be lifted and plopped into a "service", so just seems that AGPL would be better.
Not sure if that's a good idea or not.
Nothing wrong about a self-serving link but not disclosing it that seems a bit off to me.
off topic : on the other side, i think is inevitable that at some point in the future players will have AI assistants looking at their screens , making decisions and inputs just like a real human, (heck! you can sort of do that now with linux/x11 , screen grab and proton very easily), i personally would love to see competitive gaming involving AI agents and assistance.
https://writefreesoftware.org/blog/free-software-games/#but-...
tl;dr: access to the source code will help people develop cheats but it's not really required, your game's gonna have cheaters unless you do server side cheat mitigations.
* Keyboard macros. Actions that require multi keys pressed in sequence can be done with one key press.
* Bigger viewport. Your client has information about the entire visible map, but by default only shows a certain part on your screen. Client side hack zooms out the view and shows you a much larger area.
* Auto disable. A very strong cheat. If an enemy suddenly jumps on you from out of vision, immediately cast disable spell on them. Doesn't matter if you were looking somewhere else or doing something else.
Valve can't prevent people from creating these cheats, but they put code in other parts of the close source client that detects the usage of these cheats. Then they create a list of these cheaters and every few months have a ban wave. And change the code enough to break the cheat.
Plus there are things that happen outside your viewport that affect whats in your viewport, and trying to limit your client from knowing those things would cause all sorts of graphical artifacts.
Eg. there are some spells that affect an entire area (and have graphical affects associated with the whole area). Even if part of the spell area is in your Fog of War, your client needs to know about it completely, for the graphic drawing algorithms to run. The client draws the whole thing, and then obscures the part that should not be visible to you. Otherwise, the graphic algorithms would become get additional complexity that will possibly have performance impacts.
Chess is already there. It's really easy to cheat. You can though analyze games after the fact and pretty reliably conclude whether somebody cheated. That's one example of server-side cheating mitigation. No matter what the client feeds you, cheaters are detected and eventually banned.
The rest IMO just becomes part of the game. Pure client side stuff like macros isn't unfair if everyone can use them.
I suspect the reason behind that is lobbying by large companies who can't use software like that, so they push complete open source without restrictions so they can benefit from it.
From the Code of Ethics:
> This document continues to be used for its original purpose - providing a reference to fill in the "code of conduct" box on supplier registration forms.
and
> No one is required to follow The Rule, to know The Rule, or even to think that The Rule is a good idea.
Makes it pretty clear to any but the most conflict seeking people out there that it's just a box filler (for some contract purposes) and not an expectation for the community generally.
Does this mean that the software released under an OSI license with the Commons Clause attached [1] is considered "free" by their definition? Because CC allows all of the above, but prohibits commercialization.
If not, then perhaps they should elaborate on that aspect.
https://writefreesoftware.org/learn/four-freedoms/#0-use-the...
There are also specific comments about non-free source-available software here:
https://writefreesoftware.org/learn/#what-is-source-availabl...
> You are entitled to the use of any free software for any purpose, including commercial use – counter-intuitively, you can sell free software.
There are also sections which go into the utility of copyleft to mitigate some of this.
Might be worth going into more detail in a blog post.
In common parlance of people somewhat exposed to the software licensing it means "use for work", because of the proliferation of "personal use" and "commercial use" licensing duos.
Realizing that this clause also covers other people being allowed to sell your work is a non-trivial effort. I'd also argue that this would go very much against expectations of FOSS newcomers as it's pretty much counter-intuitive as it goes against the altruistic spirit of the FOSS. Hence the need to have it explained upfront and very clearly.
One of them will read through the website and get excited to give FOSS a try. He will put in the work, release the project only to see it getting reskinned and put up for sale. This will be as unexpected as it will be demoralizing. So this eventuality needs to disclosed upfront and not hid behind amorphous "commercial use" and misleading "a fee [...] for instance to cover the costs of bandwidth". Just be frank with those whom you are trying to convert, especially about the caveats.
Otherwise this looks pretty good (though my first impression was "who is this? why should I read it?" so it took me a while to get into it) - I'll definitely be sending it to people; it's clean, tidy & straightforward.
One nit-pick: the term "free software" is often understood to be narrowly defined (copyleft), so including permissive licences is tricky, though they're at least described AFTER the copyleft section, which is nice.
Although... is MPL copyleft???
I quite like it. It's much simpler to understand and easier to comply with than LGPL.
Compare to the LGPL, which has different rules depending on the exact details of how the library is constructed and linked.
What it doesn't do is force you to license non-MPL-2.0 source code files under the MPL-2.0, even if you combine the two into a binary. It is explicitly non-viral, but still enforces copyleft protections onto the originally licensed code.