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rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe
it’s true that most companies would look at these licenses and think “it’s not worth our time to maybe get sued over this”

but if they actually want to use the software, they will just ignore the ethics clauses because those elements are extremely non-justiciable and therefore legally might as well not exist in the license

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rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe
yeah the llvm relicensing has done something similar — with a few years less history, but probably more contributors — except they've been promising to do a black-box rewrite of anything sourced from someone they can't convince to relicense / assign copyright

rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe

Hed posted:

I read it, it makes sense. I don’t see how any company would use any software that a creator could revoke permission to use. but that’s probably fine.

yeah, the vision here seems to be that people pay for temporary, revocable licenses for all their software; that’s pretty wildly customer-unfriendly, if you saw poo poo like that in any other context you’d recognize it as exploitative. it puts customers completely at the mercy of their software makers, who can legally shut down their entire business at the drop of a hat. it’s a world where actually everybody develops almost all their software in-house and from scratch instead of ever getting to build on other people’s work and expertise

and it kindof feels like that’s the point, that the whole thing is motivated by a fear that the jobs are all going away. but i’m pretty sure if this were widespread it would actually just make software intractable for almost everybody and there would be way fewer jobs

except actually it wouldn’t do any of that, the market would just demand sane licensing/sales terms

rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe
i get your argument about not giving stuff away to google and facebook for free

but those companies are not actually built on top of open-source software in any way that fits your narrative about having gotten big by exploiting massive free labor. when they heavily use open-source projects, they’re pretty much always huge contributors, assuming they didn’t start the project themselves. the alternative to open-source here is just that all of that work is fully proprietary to those same companies. google is perfectly capable of writing its own os instead of funding linux

rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe
you just have a really different idea in your head of what open-source development communities look like than anything i have ever seen

i'm not saying it's wrong, open source can be very different from community to community

but in my experience open source is 90% a low-friction way for companies to collaborate that would completely just not happen if executives had to hammer out a contract and a working group for every new idea. and if anything it's usually massively to the benefit of the smaller partners, who get to make product changes that would never happen otherwise because they're too far down the big companies' priority list (or they're actively uninterested in). like making something work on top of a different database or take commands remotely or support big-endian systems or something. and then everyone else benefits from it being available even if they don't contribute. the alternative to that is just a lot of silos

rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe
i figure we have another two or three years before it's common wisdom that everything about blockchain is a scam (which is not to say that there won't still be true believers). at that point there are going to be an awful lot of programmers with weird gaps on their resumes from 2019–2022

rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe
i feel obliged to point out that on the sorts of oss i work on, where the vast majority of work is company-directed, "exposure" is actually a fairly reliable way to get hired. probably just another way in which it's not what rotor has in mind, other than the lack of controls over ends thing

rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe
think of the small, struggling adtech startups (whose entire business model is to get acquired by facebook or google)

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rjmccall
Sep 7, 2007

no worries friend
Fun Shoe

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

a lot of people keep getting told that they will reap real rewards from doing open source work. build a portfolio, make something useful and it is an inherent good, you will get recognized, the successful open source people do make money, etc. etc.

it sounds like this dude did get recognized. it’s just that he got recognized as a crazy idiot who nobody wants to employ. and that was before this latest poo poo

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