A new community space for discussing free software | Hacker News Reader

A new community space for discussing free software

writefreesoftware.org

57 pointswicket22 comments

This is welcome news. More and more projects are only (or mainly) reachable via proprietary platforms like discord.

Another interesting project from Drew DeVault, I wish it well.

At a glance it seems much like the FSF's members-only forum, [0] except, well, not reserved for paying members.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/associate/about-the-member-forum

I went to the site hoping to see forums discussing the commercialisation of OSS. Ya know, how to make enough money so you can afford to do this as a day job.

There is a pretty quiet section on funding, pretty low down. Not much there.

First forum though (organised by category) is how not to sign a CLA [1].

The thread seems determined that no contribution should be made to a project that ends up going commercial.

I feel this is the subtle underlying theme in too many OSS discussions. Not just the overt "free as in freedom", but also the covert idea that "free means non commercial".

I say covert, because of course the FSF manifesto specifically says you can sell free software. You're not even limited to selling your own software, you can sell -anyones- free software.

Which leads a developer to a place where they like something enough to want to contribute something to the project, but at the same time add limits to the project -now- to give them fewer options in the future.

If a project disappoints you, sure, fork it then. If you don't want people to profit from your free labor, then simply don't give it. And if you don't want to sign a CLA then don't sign it.

(I expect this comment won't age well as the front page of the site changes :)

[1] https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/anti-cla-action-wh...

>The thread seems determined that no contribution should be made to a project that ends up going commercial.

The thread seems to have no issues with free software being commercial, they take issues with a CLA that either allows an organization to relicense your contributions or have an exclusive ability to sell those contributions. In essence, preventing you from selling their free software while they can sell yours.

Also, the conclusions of that thread largely seem to be the same ones you reached. Refuse to sign a CLA you don't agree with, fork projects egregious policies, and don't contribute to things you disagree with.

They can't prevent you from selling the software now. You can do whatever you like up to thr point they change the license, at which point you can fork it.

They are preventing you from leveraging -their- (not released under free license) updates after that point.

I'm not so sure, some of them are worded saying they own all copyright attributed to the project. Seemingly they could say anyone besides them selling it is violating their copyright and at least spawn a nightmare court case.

If its currently under an OSS license then anyone can sell it.

Of course if it's not currently under an OSS license then whatever their license days applies.

I think people's stated positions on CLAs are often not clearly thought out.

Mostly when I've seen people object to CLAs, it's on the grounds that it's not acceptable for any company to be able to take freely contributed code and fork it into a proprietary licenced version or change of open source license, yet... the same people encourage contributions to permissively licensed projects, such as MIT/BSD/Apache license, which explicitly grant companies the ability to do those same things!

Some CLAs are almost identical to the effect of contributions being under a permissive license like MIT/BSD/Apache.

So when I've seen blanket CLA objections, I usually have the impression the person hasn't really thought about what it means, and they're saying it as more of a cultural signifier than anything with a clear goal.

I've encountered this while evaluating whether to release a project under the GPL, where I wanted the option to relicense it more permissively later (for everyone), and I wanted that to be clear up front with any contributors. For that, a CLA seems appropriate, but the community has evolved to find them objectionable.

> I went to the site hoping to see forums discussing the commercialisation of OSS. Ya know, how to make enough money so you can afford to do this as a day job.

Why? Elastic, Redis, Mongo etc. have enough funding, employees and supporters enough to argue for themselves (and do, often and loudly), since they have the commercial revenue and favourable to themselves licenses. Why should the community be their mouthpiece?

Yes, it looks like many (most) people there don't understand copyright law or the contract law of contribution licensing. It looks like that to some, freedom means their ability to control others. They keep using the word "freedonm" but I don't think the word means what they think it means.

Also, they don't mention the mandatory CLA of all FSF projects, the grandparent of all free software.

The FSF copyright assignment isn't mandatory at all, and has never been. Many GNU projects use it, many don't. The copyright assignment also has wording to the extent that the FSF cannot just relicense things under a non-free software license.

Here is some information: https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2022/fall/copyright-assignment-... and maybe https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers...

The FSF CLA is so they can relicense to a newer license if some new vulnerability is found, like why GPL3 was needed. I'm mixed on my opinion of that.

Okay, so they're building "safe", but "powerful" spaces with "political awareness that extends further than a simple understanding of free software liberation and includes solidarity against all struggles for liberation". I wouldn't be interested in joining even without this craziness, but there has to be a significant amount of people who read this stuff and think that it's at least a bit strange. I feel like I'm in some dystopian novel where everything has the opposite meaning of what it presents itself as. I wonder what the numbers are though. How many people are unaware of what this is? How many know what it is, but promote it for Machiavellian reasons? How many are too afraid to speak out? And most importantly, what will it take to free ourselves from these freedom fighters? A well organized minority will always rule a disorganized majority. I suppose some other group will have to organize around a different, but equally pragmatic set of principles?

Yeah folks who are willing to donate their personal time to work on projects that benefit others having political beliefs that mirror this is wild, right? Who could have possibly seen that one coming...

So you don’t like their political positions?

Free software has always had a socialist bend.

No Free Software is communism!

Marx wrote in his [Critique of the Gotha Programme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_the_Gotha_Programm...): [To each according to his contribution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_each_according_to_his_contr...).

The original text is: Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!

This means you contribute to Free Software as much as you can and you take from Free Software as much as you need.

This is the most ethical way of human coexistence.

>So you don’t like their political positions?

I don't like that they're pushing political positions on me that have nothing to do with free software, as defined by RMS . It's not unreasonable for them to want to exclude people who don't share their political views, but my hope is that another, more inclusive (in the real sense) group will outcompete them. There are many people who could make great contributions to free software, but who don't share your political views. If human flourishing is our goal, why should we not accept their contributions? The software speaks for itself.

>Free software has always had a socialist bend.

In what way?

RMS was politically and ideologically pushy, and an activist. The GPL is very opinionated and pushy. Its basic design was to use copyright / contract law to push an ideology on adjacent software. People who are drawn to RMS (who have actually heard him speak in his own voice) are most likely more political and ideological, and left-leaning, than the average person, whether they realize it or not, because he was those things intensely and acutely. I’m personally extremely off-put by him, and without being able to qualify exactly why, I can tell you that same part of me is off-put by socialism. RMS and socialism have the same smell. It’s the smell of only seeing the bad in so-called capitalism, capitalists, the profit motive, companies, business people, etc, when so much of the wealth of our time was produced by those very people / things. Like, wake up — the vast majority of these amazing technologies and products were developed and brought to mass market in highly-capitalist countries, largely fueled by the profit motive (though of course research institutions played a huge role). AT&T, IBM, Xerox, HP, the companies that built this world of software and hardware that RMS wants to be ‘free’, were… companies.

What am I trying to say… I think most of the time it takes a company and capitalism and a profit motive to lay the golden egg, as in produce and bring to mass market an innovation that raises living standards and extends human potential. This doesn’t mean companies do no wrong. They do tremendous wrong and need to be regulated. But I think the best approach is one of embracing and reforming capitalism, rather than opposing it.

To me the issue isn't that they're left leaning, but that they're using free software movement to push unrelated political ideas on everyone. I have mixed feelings about GPL, but at least it's closely related to the original idea of free software, and there are other licenses. Their post is using vague language that can refer to anything. Whether they realize it or not, this is what they're doing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38279543

Which corporation and which profit motive gave us Linux?

I said “most of the time” because of Linux, which is an exception that proves the rule. Otherwise you’d list ten major open source successes at the same scale and impact of Linux that everyone knows. But there’s really just the one big big big one, vs countless proprietary big ones that everyone knows and uses.

Honestly, the Linux foundation donations and red hat gave you Linux as it is today.

The usable, rock solid, trustworthy OS is not the initial version that Linus released.

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