318 karma · joined September 5, 2011
From section 13: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software."
Your statement is incorrect: "You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license."
Even *HOSTING* a private instance puts you under Affero. Even if the instance isn't public, if you so much as have a contractor remotely accessing an internal deployment of a customized Affero-licensed software then they can ask for this customization.
Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use."
The pattern is effectively always the same. Many companies use this license to offer a free version while offering a "way out" by providing an "enterprise license". They get you hooked because it's open source. But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you.
It's a matter of personal choice. I choose NOT to use any Affero licensed software if I can help it.
Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage.
DISCLAIMER: 2nd hand story.
I had discovered this author by reading another book he wrote entitled "Advanced Chip Design, Practical Examples in Verilog". Also self-pub and also suffering from lots of self-pub issues. But the essentials were more-or-less there.
It's got its quirks, but it's good enough to get a good idea of what things would look like. Most irritating is when its 3D viewer fails because of some random error as a separate window and has to be closed and reopened. Then again this was an older version. Maybe things got better since.
One area I'm particularly interested in is the correlation to diabetes. It's a factor that I found being mentioned here and there in some references. In the immediate case that interests me, there's a 20+ year history of type 2 diabetes and a recent scan showed severe bilateral hypocampal atrophy. When googling for a link between the two I found this: "Lower insulin secretion was significantly associated with HPGA (hippocampal and parahippocampal gyrus atrophy) in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. The results of this study support the hypothesis that insulin‐signaling abnormalities are involved in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8504906/
Yet, the mechanism of this, if indeed there's causality (not just correlation) does not seem to be known.
There is something to this idea ... using git as a distributed (micro-)blogging/publishing system.
Also, re RISC-V. I'm all for that. But an ISA does not make a chip. There is far more to what ARM offers than just its ISA: production-grade cores and surrounding blocks on bleeding edge nodes, etc. They could, theoretically, start selling a RISC-V fetch and decode unit (think of it as a Unix API on top of Windows) and still come out on top.
I'd conjecture that there are likely already toy projects at ARM to do just that, if nothing else as POCs by individual engineers eager to show colleagues how easily this could be done.
Now, whether strategically ARM would do this is another question. I suspect they'd hold off as long as it was realistically possible. But the deal is that an ISA is only one part of a huge stack of IP. And in that arena, ARM has a huge lead, especially considering that the granularity of the increment in terms of potential open source contributions is gated by huge costs that individuals can rarely take on on their own and lots of often arcane domain-specific knowledge.