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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Naive. Guy picks a license that allow anyone to do anything they want with his code. Later realizes that was not appropriate when he's trying make money. Changes to an obscure license that on the surface seems to fix the problem.

Your options are: MIT / BSD, GPL, LGPL, AGPL. All others are unnecessary and create needless incompatibility.

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I'd have to agree with this stance. You choose MIT when you are happy to share your source with no strings attached. Some do pick MIT with this intent, but that was not the case here. But rather a case of either miscommunication or wanting to have the pie ("look how altruistic I am") and eating it too ("look how business-minded I am").

I mean, there’s a chance it’s exactly what he said, “I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted the code to be available for people to learn from, and to make it easily auditable so users could validate claims I have made about the privacy and security of the platform.” … it doesn’t have to be some to be some sort of nefarious OSS altruism, it really could be, “maybe people would want to see how this works”… that ends up leading to … oh crap a bunch of people who have never contributed, and will never contribute, are hosting versions of what I created and taking money that I really would like to have to feed my family.

To be unfairly cynical here, the sentence you quoted sounds to me like "I chose to not have a front door. I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted my home to be available for people to learn from my interior design choices and decorations. Then I discovered that people walked in, started to eat out of my fridge, leave dirt everywhere and carry off some of my chairs, and it hurts".

The fault here lies not with the persons who use the maintainer's code exactly in line with the license, no matter what other _intentions_ he might have had.

OP never talked about fault. They made an original decision, and now they've changed their mind. I don't see what the big deal is.

Possibly, but that would be pretty damning. A license isn't something you should YOLO. If he is that laissez-faire about licensing the source code then what other important aspects of the project has he not given sufficient thought.

Misunderstanding or failing to predict the legal ramifications of choosing an extremely popular license is in no way an indicator of programming care or ability. They’re different sets of skills.

Also, something starts off as a nothingburger side project, so you make some decisions based on that. Then it develops a bit, and turns into something you care about and are able to turn into a business. What people want and expect changes over time, and a license on a codebase that is basically developed by one person, isn't a marriage.

I think the MPL is a useful license as well, and underrated/underused.

It's less viral than the GPLs when just using the licensed work, and less permissive than MIT / BSD because changes have to be open sourced, when the program using the changed library is distributed.

And IIRC you can convert from MPL to GPL?

MIT & BSD don't include a patent grant, that's a good reason to go with the Apache license.

The Apache license is IMO ok in isolation. But its good to minimize the number of licenses used to enable sharing of code between programs. I also have a serious dislike of the Apache Foundation for their continued "support" of the joke that is OpenOffice and its trademark. That is such a disservice to open source and Free Software that I boycott them.

I don't think Guy really cares. They made their project, and they want the source to be available, and so chose a license that allows for that.

Naive. Users who think a project that is Open Source will remain Open Source forever.

Authors gave the right to change license to a proprietary one. Users being surprised by this are as equally naive as developers who think you can make money writing Open Source.

Well, the versions that were published as open source will remain open source forever. That's never a guarantee for new updates by the same author, for any licence.

Don't forget MPLv2 and EUPL.

Open Source is not a business model.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, but for the people in the back: "Open source is not a business model!" As RMS has stated on multiple occasions, it's not a business model and has never been a business model. It is a model to enshrine software freedoms. Nothing more, nothing less.

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