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0 pointsjancsika4mo ago0 comments

Ok, even Doug Crockford has mucked around with licensing before, so this is definitely a digression and not aimed at CharlotteOS which looks fascinating:

I wish there was a social stigma in Open Source/Free Software to doing anything other than just picking a bog standard license.

I mean, we have a social stigma even for OS developers about rolling your own crypto primitives. Even though it's the same very general domain, we know from experience that someone who isn't an active, experienced cryptographer would have close to a zero percent chance of getting it right.

If that's true, then it's even less likely that a programmer is going to make legally competent (or even legally relevant) decisions when writing their own open source compatible license, or modifying an existing license.

I guess technically the "clarification" of a bog standard license is outside of my critique. Even so, their clarification is shoe-horned right there in a parenthetical next to the "License" heading, making me itchy... :)

0 comments

LavenderDay35444mo ago

OP here, it's not mucking around with the license just making sure people know how the GPLv3 works. You are not required to provide source code for the combined work unless it is conveyed. If you combine the covered work with closed source but don't convey the resulting product you are not required to provide any source to anyone.

Many people don't know that, hence the clarification note.

spookie4mo ago

Thanks for that. It's really incredible how much stigma GPLv3 has, makes you wonder sometimes.

hunterpayne4mo ago

Its almost impossible to have a non-begging based business model and a standard OpenSource license. So unless you want to donate a lot of work to some huge company's bottom line for free, a standard OpenSource license is a non starter. I'm sorry that you don't seem to understand the events that led to this state. But if you ever wrote an OpenSource platform that people wanted to use, you would know why the standard licenses don't work. That's why the social stigma is the other way around. Your position from the POV of OpenSource devs is naive at best and likely destructive to the developers themselves.

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