Or "open source when obsolete" because that's what it is, fundamentally. Of course, it sells less and makes it way more obvious what these delayed open source licenses are at their core: "we'd like to make people believe we respect their freedom, but are not actually convinced with giving them that".
Isn't two years of security patch lag a big deal?
Also I feel like "obsolete" is the wrong word for that.
Your phrasing is malicious. It waves off a 40 year fight from many reasonable people as extreme and ridiculous, or as religious-like.
Did you expect me to answer "no, nothing else than puritanism" to your question?
Well, I won't.
That's like saying that although I could, I won't vote for candidate C who is against the freedom of the press when candidate C would prevent awful newspaper N from publishing its horrible bullshit.
I'd prefer newspaper N not to publish bullshit, or even to not exist at all, but I wouldn't want this to cost the freedom of the press.
AWS doing terrible things shouldn't cost us user software freedom.
Yes, indeed, there's stuff that I will do or won't do out of principles, of course! Even if it would be convenient to do otherwise! Is this an alien concept?
How is this difficult to understand that someone doesn't want compromises on rights that ought to be fundamental?
I've written about this in other comments, but this happened to me in 2015 hosting Elasticsearch and the official Elasticsearch hosting offering just didn't support CPU configurations that were proper for geohashing heavy workloads. I had to switch to AWS to get that. They even talked to the head of sales, and they said, yeah, we're working on it, but right now your best bet is to switch. Under a license like this, that wouldn't be possible.
Being stuck between "host it yourself" or "don't have the latest features" is pretty far from a rock and hard place.
Businesses are precisely and exactly people.
Yes a business is made out of people, but that's a very different thing from what I was talking about.
(And please don't mention sole proprietorships, what I meant should be plenty clear now.)
We're talking about freedoms, not the ability to interact with the legal system.
Company personhood and its implications and restrictions differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and in countries like the USA the exact definition is still a matter up for debate.
There is this blind trust in open source model taken to a unhealthy or misguided extreme in a lot of online discussion.
A two year delay is pretty reasonable and liberal. It allow costumers that dont want to accept the new licence able to continue as-is by simply following an older version.
In my case, it's not about any open source model, it's about software freedom.
What's unhealthy is non-free software, and there's nothing extreme in having this opinion.
If you base your opinions on pure black and white tests without considering the actual tradeoffs of the license then that's blindness.
It's not a hard thought experiment. Just imagine this license applied to whatever database you're used to spinning up in the cloud on whatever provider you want. If that one provider doesn't have the plan you're looking for, you're forced to take on the work of hosting it yourself because no one is allowed to do that for you and let you pay them because the license forbids it.
Free software encurrage interoperability to a degree, but interoperability and free software are very separate things.
And hosting providers are not evil or bad for making highly coupled systems. Its a valuable service companies gladly pay for, and a compromise developers need to calculate in their plans.
And competitors can still host a mildly older version freely, so that prevents long term lock-in even if I ignore self hosting.
So the main company still has to compete to keep business, which is good for everyone, but they keep some control over the hosting business, which means they're less likely to get crushed and stop updating. I think it sounds good overall.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
That license restricts what you can do with the software due to a business interest of the author. Therefore, it's non-free or proprietary.
> That license restricts what you can do with the software due to a business interest of the author.
Yes, it restricts you from offering a competing hosted service. Do you offer a competing hosted service to Liquibase using Liquibase's source code? Is this something you ever would conceivably do? If not, how does this restriction affect your life in any way?
> Therefore, it's non-free or proprietary.
I never claimed it was Free Software.
That's exactly what my comment is addressing! People advocating for Free Software don't usually advocate that _only_ the software they use should be free; they advocate for the freedom of all users.
> I never claimed it was Free Software.
You did not, indeed. Sorry if my wording gave the impression I was trying to put claims in your post. That phrase is an answer to this question from you:
> Why do you object to FSL for this specific type of software
We object to it because it makes the software proprietary rather than free.
Personally I call that something other than promoting freedom. Quite the opposite.
Please, there's no point in arguing like that. There's no need to mischaracterize or reword what another user is saying.
I don't think we'll get much further in this discussion if you consider yourself a fan of the FSL, a proprietary license. Your time will be better spent replying to other people.
> There's no need to mischaracterize or reword what another user is saying.
You directly linked to a post by RMS which says things like "When you use proprietary programs or SaaSS, first of all you do wrong to yourself, because it gives some entity unjust power over you. For your own sake, you should escape." Among many other examples in that post, and countless other FSF posts, telling people not to use non-Free Software. This is not a mischaracterization.
Granted, these are RMS's statements, not yours. But I assumed that since you linked to that post and are espousing similar concepts, you are endorsing its contents and hold the same views. If that is not the case, my apologies. But perhaps you could clarify whether or not you think RMS is correct to tell people not to use non-Free software?
> if you consider yourself a fan of the FSL
I live in a free society and can be a fan of whatever license I want -- meaning, I can express free will in how I select what software I use, and how I license software that I create. That is freedom. I am not trying to dictate what software or licenses you use, because I respect your freedom to do the same.
What do we do now?
> It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses
Nope. "Free" has specific meaning in this context, this qualifier doesn't apply here. It's the whole point. If you believe it applies, you've fundamentally misunderstood the free software definition and what's at stake for the free software movement.
More specifically, the qualifier is not relative to a specific entity and what freedom it actually needs / uses at some given point in time.
I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.
To go further with the comparison, there's nothing in being against compromising on the freedom of the press that's blindness or being black and white (or maybe it's being black and white, but I can't see how it would be wrong).
> I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.
Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.
GPL and MIT fully fulfill the exigences of the free software definition, there's no compromise here.
Choosing between GPL and MIT may involve compromises, but we are talking about something else, you are moving the goalposts here.
(note: I kept updating my previous comment, probably while you were writing this, sorry for this)
(edit: ah, you noticed)
> Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.
Violating an NDA is a matter of law and contracts that can equally apply to software, it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.
If you are speaking about protecting one's source, then it's orthogonal (and probably also an important mechanism for) freedom of the press.
> it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.
I would say the ability to run a competing business within two years is less fundamental than the ability to talk about what you saw at your former job.
Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.
No. Someone can use some MIT licensed software for any purpose and can strictly do anything with it that the GPL would allow.
Just as free.
However, I do agree that permissive licenses like the MIT allows someone to build proprietary software with the code, and the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result. That would be the reason why I wouldn't license my software under permissive license except for specific cases.
One could argue the MIT actually gives more freedom to the user: they can, with a MIT source code, build and distribute a proprietary derivative. Of course, this doesn't mean this additional freedom is desirable.
> Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.
Yeah, just like laws limit your freedom to run free software for any purpose. You, for instance, can't legally take /bin/ls with you to go kill someone even if its license itself doesn't explicitly forbid it. I'm pretty fine with this.
I have some feeling we do agree that freedom is never absolute and kinda argue past each others.
That's the part I was talking about.
So I don't know why you started your post with "No."
> I'm pretty fine with this.
Cool. And I'm fine with some other restrictions. So we're agreeing that being fine with a restriction doesn't necessarily mean anyone has "lost the direction" of free software? And instead we can talk about the specific dangers of a restriction without reflexive rejection?
> That's the part I was talking about.
> So I don't know why you started your post with "No."
You are mixing two different users. FreeBSD user A enjoys software freedom. macOS user B doesn't. A and B are different people. And notably, the release of macOS didn't make FreeBSD disappear, so A still fully enjoys their freedom even though B doesn't with the downstream software (but could with the upstream software as well).
If you are mixing user A and user B, your mental model of this stuff is not clear and reasoning with it is going to be difficult and frustrating. And it makes you reach incorrect conclusions such as "permissive licenses are less free for the users than copyleft licenses".
> So we're agreeing that being fine with a restriction doesn't necessarily mean anyone has "lost the direction" of free software?
Laws are supposed to protect individual and collective freedom and interests. They do this by putting limits on what you could do that would prevent others from enjoying their own freedom.
(of course, I know we are far from this ideal; also laws aren't perfect and issues should be fought against - it's actually, in practice, a constant fight because different (groups of) people have different interests and priorities - but that's another concern and mixing concerns makes things hard to reason about)
License restrictions that compromise on software freedom are simply not comparable to whatever it takes to make a society work. They are not making a tradeoff for your own good as a user. They are benefiting the software provider at the cost of the user's freedom.
> Laws are supposed to protect individual and collective freedom and interests. They do this by putting limits on what you could do that would prevent others from enjoying their own freedom.
I'm not sure where you're going with this when my example was NDAs. NDAs aren't there to protect freedoms, they only remove freedom. Laws enforce them, but in the same way that laws enforce license restrictions.
Okay, I would agree more with this phrasing. That's the issue I have with permissive licenses.
> NDAs aren't there to protect freedoms, they only remove freedom.
To be fair, I'm also not a fan of most NDAs indeed.
> Laws enforce them, but in the same way that laws enforce license restrictions.
Yep, I agree with this.
So do you also see what I meant about both permissive and copyleft licenses giving up some freedoms? You can't have it all.
A restraint on running a particular type of business isn't great for software freedom, but if it's narrow and temporary I don't think it ruins the entire license. The gap in freedom is avoidable but also it's much smaller than the gaps you can't avoid.
For ongoing freedom, If I was choosing between plain MIT and a GPL clone that bans competiting companies but reverts to pure GPL after a couple years, I would pick the latter.
Not a fan of the framing but I get your point (of view).
> For ongoing freedom, If I was choosing between plain MIT and a GPL clone that bans competiting companies but reverts to pure GPL after a couple years, I would pick the latter.
Reasonable. I would find the 2 years delay unbearable and pick MIT, but I wouldn't enjoy doing so. It's fortunate I don't have to pick :-)