Comment by voakbasda
15 hours ago
I love HN. Read an article that raises a reasonable point about a project’s license, and that project’s author shows up to announce they were convinced and changed the license accordingly. Repo was updated 5 minutes ago.
It’s things like this that give me hope for the world.
I'm not a scab, so I won't use permissive licenses on my unpaid projects. People who want to use them at work can cry me a river.
Same. Started to adopt AGPLv3 for every new project. With AI sucking up all the CV-driven contributors, it’s time to take back open source as a joyful hobby for nerds that enjoy programming and sharing their creations with one another, instead of being corpo stans that do free support for shareholder driven enterprises.
Do you think AGPL is going to stop a crawler from incorporating your work into their training set? I don’t. There are zero meaningful consequences atm.
That being said, I’m with you in spirit and in action, but realistically it’s pointless outside of living in accordance with your values.
Edit: Re-reading that, i just told you that your principles are pointless, and thats fucked up and wrong. I’m going to live in accordance with mine and not delete this, but apologies.
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I don't bother so much with licenses, but learned to reply with "that would be 1k bucks" instead of "you are welcome" where someone wants my library to do something it didn't before.
Not to be Debbie Downer but software licensing has no effect on what matters to billions of people.
We are facing very real global and societal issues that people on this site are actively exacerbating, like disinformation and climate change.
If a dude changing an inconsequential text file on GitHub gives you hope for the world, then please broaden your perspective.
So I'm guessing you don't do anything except what matters to billions of people? Always 100% fully generalized contributions, never making your local world a better place? Your only local contributions being to tell off people who are grateful that their lives are materially improved by someone else's smaller actions... You must be beloved by your community.
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Making one small corner of the world a little bit better is a good thing. There's not much use in complaining that it's not as big of an impact as could hypothetically be achieved on some larger issues.
“He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” -- William Blake
It's things like this that rob my of my hope for the world.
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I saw someone smile at the park the other day, do you think you could talk to them for me?
I think you like very much to be a debbie downer
Not GP but I feel like that's kinda their point - the fact that we still have this platform to collaborate in such an organic way is truly remarkable and must not be taken for granted.
This is verifiably false. Without copyleft licensing like the GPL or permissive licensing like MIT and Apache we literally would not have the internet, or it would be somehow even more wildly dystopian and proprietary than it already is.
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Actually a lot of that bad stuff billionaires are doing is enabled by MIT licensed software. Like, device lockdown is illegal with GPL3
People are concerned about having homes to live in and having food to eat. They aren't concerned about 'device lockdown'. Try to see the bigger picture.
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You are indeed being a Debbie Downer.
You must be fun at parties