In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.

This year I decided to switch my “default license” to EUPL-1.2. This is an OSI-approved free software license created and published by the European Union. And it is quite a divergence from the licenses I’ve used in the past. EUPL is a strong copyleft license that closes the “SaaS loophole” by requiring reciprocal licensing regardless of how the software is distributed.

Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along.

We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.

And so it is time to stop messing about with permissive licenses. If corporations don’t want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own.

  • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
    11·
    23 hours ago

    Not to invalidate his points but:

    We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.

    We have free software. We have Linux. We have Graphene OS.

    Everybody can build whatever they want. That’s a huge win.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      10·
      22 hours ago

      Everybody can build whatever they want.

      I do not see how that adresses his core argument - that permissive licenses enabled things we do not want and which subvert individual and collective freedoms.

      More to the point, the GPL and its sisters are designed to grant rights to people.

      While the “everybody” in your sentence above includes corporations like Microsoft, Facebook and Anthropic which do very unfree things with open source tools.

      This is not the same intent.

      • ravenn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        1·
        6 hours ago

        someone can want permissive licenses, want people to not use it in a way someone doesnt see fit, want individual and collective freedoms, and understand that one of those wants is not like the others (perhaps its strictly incompatible) and accept that inside themself is a want to police freedoms while wanting no policing of freedoms. freedom is just that. a seagull does not seek permission to migrate, or devour horseshoe crabs while migrating. freedom has a nature.

        so to address the core argument, freedom is a double edged sword. to make it single edged is to make it something other than freedom. and thats fine to want, but the argument for permissive licenses being used for things dear programmer didnt intend being something to avoid is an argument for something other than freedom.

        i usually lurk, but this weird cognitive dissonance is all throughout this and similar communities. yes people have a freedom to share code freely, and not worry about political and economic nuances of what copy right left or wrong means. yes poltical influences have the freedom to murky the waters. yes economic influences have the freedom to feed you that murky water of contracts and aggreements and chain you into their systrms. yes you have the freedom to just turn the binky blinky box off and touch grass. yes it doesnt mean its fair. fair is an event run by carnies.

        so maybe we shouldnt argue what is fair when it comes to freedom of expression (the umbrella shielding all copyleft arguments), but instead argue the reality that if you do something with technology, others should reasonably be free to assume you would be okay with that technology being used.

        and that could he a very unpeaceful way of handling it.

        and to really argue avout copyright is to argue that a string of 0’s and 1’s through an interpreter that can also be defined as 0’s and 1’s is something more than the clever rybbing of two (often very large) base 2 numbers against each other for whatever purpose we really wish. and that concept itself isnt copyrightable, because its the nature of reality. and if some people learned to procedurally generate those numbers and procedurally rub them against each other, perhaps those people are just doing math and it happens to send this comment into existence, by sheer odds of brute force.

        hopefully someone reads this and understands just how immature (not wrong, just underdeveloped in thinking style) the arguements of freedom for me with code and not for thee really is.

        thank you for coming to my rant. im going back to lurking.

      • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        22 hours ago

        I do not see how that adresses his core argument

        It doesn’t, as I wrote in my first sentence. Free software alone is just nice enough that it is more than a little gain.

        • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
          1·
          22 hours ago

          So, your argument is merely that the point he blogs about does not matter? Or do you somehow not want people to discuss it? Why?

          • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
            2·
            22 hours ago

            So, your argument is merely that the point he blogs about does not matter?

            No

            Or do you somehow not want people to discuss it?

            No

            I wrote that I don’t want to invalidate his points. I think they are valid.

            All that our efforts did

            That statement is just too strong.