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Is the FOSS world in danger of a corporate takeover, thanks to pushover licenses? (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I ask this because I think of the recent switch of Ubuntu to the Rust recode of the GNU core utils, which use an MIT license. There are many Rust recodes of GPL software that re-license it as a pushover MIT or Apache licenses. I worry these relicensing efforts this will significantly harm the FOSS ecosystem. Is this reason to start worrying or is it not that bad?

IMO, if the FOSS world makes something public, with extensive liberties, then the only thing that should be asked in return is that people preserve these liberties, like the GPL successfully enforces. These pushover licenses preserve nothing.

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[–] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I don't think there is a good license for that. The ones MongoDB used turned the open source community against them. But that is not really my point. I just mean that some projects using MIT won't suddenly mean every company will start stealing and closing that software. Some things like coreutils and sudo just don't have the commercial value to make that worth the effort. So there is no real need to worry about these two projects IMO. Other projects are a different story altogether though. Each project needs to make its own decision on what licence best suits it. The GPL is not the one and only license that is worth using.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I would say AGPL is the "safest" license still approved by the OSI. Could you share your opinion?

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    There is no one size fits all safest option. Details matter and each project needs to read the licenses and decide on which suits their needs best.

    MIT is probably the safest option for a company creating a library wrapping their service where there is no real value in others taking that code. Or for simpler libraries that are fairly easy to reproduce so the need to steal the code is low. Or you just don't care what others do with the code.

    GPL is probably safest for some hobbies that does not care about companies and just wants everyone that is using their project to not bake it into a product they distribute. But also means companies likely wont want to use your project if it is a library.

    LGPL might be a good option for library code if you want other companies to use and contribute back to some complex library you are using that is hard to reproduce in isolation.

    Other licenses are needed if you want to prevent other hosted services from using your project without contributing back.

    Different licenses exist for different reasons and it all depends on what you want for your project.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Thanks for sharing your opinion and expanding.

    In the past I used to think the same. Or rather, probably naïvely, I considered the GPL to be a bit of a nuisance, and preferred LGPL or MIT software.

    Now I've changed my mind and started preferring AGPL for all my code. If a big company likes your MIT or LGPL code, they can legally steal it. If it's GPL at least you get some safeguards, but they can still take it and put it on a server without the need to release the source code. That's why I started to believe AGPL is the only "safe" license approved by the OSI, at least at the moment.

    Of course I agree that MIT and GPL or LGPL make sense in some cases, but I would say in general they don't protect users' freedom anymore in today's cloud-first world.

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