
Scapegoating free software’s failures - _frkl
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/11/17/VC-Shill.html
======
AlexMax
They mention it in one of the lines of this blog, but apparently this
individual (perhaps with the help of others, it wasn't clear) has come up with
two of their own software licenses, with a website and everything.

[https://guide.licensezero.com/](https://guide.licensezero.com/)

> The Prosperity Public License (Prosperity) works a bit like a Creative
> Commons NonCommercial license, but for software. Prosperity gives everyone
> broad permission to use your software, but limits commercial use to a short
> trial period of 32 days. When a commercial user’s trial runs out, they need
> to buy a private license or stop using your software.

> The Parity Public License (Parity) works a bit like AGPL, but requires users
> to release more of their own code, in more situations. Parity requires users
> who change, build on, or use your work to create software to release that
> software as open source, too. If users can’t or won’t release their work,
> they need to buy a private license that allows use without sharing back.

I'm one of those folks that usually defaults to AGPL for their open source
work for practical reasons - it's much easier to go from a copyleft license to
a permissive one due to circumstance than the other way around. However, I
always found it a bit strange that there were dozens of variants of the MIT
and BSD license out there, but aside from the GPL and MPL no other popular
license really took up the mantle of copyleft, aside from perhaps the old
Sleepycat license.

This looks like a very appealing license on its face, but the fact that it's
specifically _not_ written in legalese is a little weird, though the fact that
the author is a lawyer is some reassurance.

~~~
rwmj
> _limits commercial use to a short trial period of 32 days. When a commercial
> user’s trial runs out, they need to buy a private license or stop using your
> software._

So it's clearly not Free Software because it doesn't respect freedom 0. Hardly
a surprise that Bradley Kuhn and the FSF object to it being classified as
such.

This is hardly a failure of "free software", just the author wants to try to
subvert the definition which the FSF has long established. Maybe the author
should try calling it something completely different (I suggest "trialware")
and then the FSF wouldn't be bothered.

([https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html))

~~~
kemitchell
I’ve never presented Prosperity, the noncommercial form, as free or open
source. The debate was about Parity, the strong copyleft form.

~~~
rwmj
Why not simply use the GPL?

~~~
kminehart
The GPL has always been criticized for its definition of distribution, which
allows companies to host SaaS offerings of GPL software without having to make
their modifications available.

Hosting a GPL-licensed server and receiving network activity does not
constitute distribution, which is why the AGPL exists.

------
catern
While this article's tone is somewhat angry and personal, it makes some quite
interesting points and takes a perspective that I've never heard before.

Before reading the article I was tentatively in favor of more expansive
copyleft licenses such as Mongo's SSPL, for various reasons. But I hadn't
considered something implied by that position, which this article says
directly: The FSF and what one might call "mainstream copyleft" are
aggressively defending corporate interests by attacking such licenses. Perhaps
they (the FSF et al) don't do it intentionally, but that's nevertheless their
effect...

~~~
api
I've thought this for years: the aggressive defense of super liberal OSS
licenses with no sort of "SaaS clause" or other limits turns FOSS into free
labor for SaaS companies.

SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and
can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways. The fact
that some of the pieces of a SaaS site are open source is meaningless and
changes nothing.

If all code must be free "as in beer" for all uses then this kind of SaaS
(paid or "free" and paid for via surveillance capitalism) is literally the
only possible business model. Well that and traditional 100% closed. The
Googles and Facebooks of the world are fine with that.

~~~
skybrian
Just as a side note, "free labor" is common and not necessarily a bad thing.
Whenever you give someone a gift, whatever work you did on it is effectively
free labor. You could also think of donations to charity that way when you
fund them out of your salary, not to mention volunteering.

It's true that often people don't want to do that, though, and this is
certainly understandable.

~~~
api
I don't want to give free gifts to surveillance capitalist companies.

------
danShumway
I recently developed a new vegan dish that addresses some of the practical
problems with veganism as a whole by using bugs as a substitute protein
source. Very promising, but these critics keep on attacking me, claiming I
can't call my product vegan because "technically" it uses animal by-products.

And I think this shows why the vegan community organizers and primary
advocates are actually anti-innovation. If the vegan movement wants to
actually achieve its ideals, we need to reject the old guard that
ideologically insists that no vegan dishes can contain meat.

~~~
claudiulodro
Your dish isn't vegan though. It may be an improvement over eating meat, but
it still creates suffering for living creatures. I don't know why you need so
strongly to apply the "vegan" label to whatever your dish is, especially when
it seems to involve literally eating "meat" from insects. Just call it
"sustainable omnivorism" or something.

~~~
danShumway
Now take the same reaction you just had, and apply it in the context of Kyle's
post.

> _When I wrote a strong copyleft license for dev tools, the FSF faithful
> objected. Why wouldn’t a movement best known for dev tools and software
> freedom want a copyleft license that requires devs using dev tools to make
> their work free?_

Because it's not Free software. It may be an improvement over proprietary
software, but it's still restricting user freedom. Just call it "Source
Available" or something.

~~~
kemitchell
Why aren't SSPL, API Copyleft, Parity, CAL, and Icepick free software
licenses?

GPL restricts my freedom to build and share closed applications with free
libraries, in order to prevent the creation of closed software that restricts
others' freedom.

AGPL restrict my freedom to build and share network applications as closed
software with free code, in order to prevent the creation of closed software
that restricts others' freedom.

Why can't a license restrict my freedom to build closed applications with free
dev tools, in order to prevent the creation of closed software that likewise
restrict others' freedom?

~~~
danShumway
The licenses you mention are not Free Software licenses because restricting
what people _do_ with their software (and not just how they share it) violates
rule 0.

> Why can't a license restrict my freedom to build closed applications with
> free dev tools, in order to prevent the creation of closed software that
> likewise restrict others' freedom?

It can.

If just won't be a FOSS license by the traditionally understood definition of
FOSS. For better or worse, the Free Software definition guarantees more
freedom around end-user usage than it does around how you distribute software.

And maybe you think that's an arbitrary distinction. That's fine. You can
build anything you want. You could build your own "Software Equality" or
"Extended Copyleft" movement, or whatever you wanted to call it. Maybe it'll
be even better than FOSS. The only thing you can't do is confuse people by
calling your licenses something that they're not.

Nobody is upset that SSPL, API Copyleft, Parity, CAL, and Icepick exist.
They're all fairly interesting licenses. I'm glad that they exist. Just stop
trying to co-opt a movement and blur lines that have been clearly understood
for years.

~~~
kemitchell
> It just won't be a FOSS license by the traditionally understood definition
> of FOSS. For better or worse, the Free Software definition guarantees more
> freedom around end-user usage than it does around how you distribute
> software.

I appreciate your frank admission of the distinction, but I have yet to hear a
good defense of it that both rests on something other than "that's the way we
said it is" and doesn't trap GPL or AGPL.

The understanding you describe exists, but I can't agree that it's broadly
shared or accepted. If there's a tradition, it belongs to a very narrow tribe.
That tribe isn't growing particularly fast precisely because its tenets are so
esoteric and don't stand up to typical hacker interrogation by those not
thoroughly marinated in the political history. That's the "byzantine, insular
ideology of copyleft" I mentioned in the blog post.

> The only thing you can't do is purposefully confuse people by calling your
> licenses something that they're not.

I can call it open, and I do. Folks may hear both your view and mine, but the
result isn't confusion. It's a choice.

There is no proprietary right in the terms "free software" or "open source".
And there is no good reason for those presently ill served to pretend those
ill serving them enjoy such a right. When a better mousetrap comes along, the
designer of the last model doesn't get to pull the words "mouse trap" out of
the newcomer's mouth. As in software, so in licenses: lead, follow, get out of
the way, or get run over. When I follow my people to a license problem, I try
my best to lead with solutions.

> Nobody is upset that SSPL, API Copyleft, Parity, CAL, and Icepick exist.

I'm glad to hear you say so, but I've received lots of feedback from people
who are upset. And not just because "license proliferation". Have a look at
the OSI license-review archives ... though I don't generally recommend that.

> The licenses you mention are not Free Software licenses because restricting
> what people do with their software, and not just how they share it, violates
> rule 0.

Making changes and building applications are things that people _do_ with
software, ways that people _use_ software, in common parlance. The only folks
I know who want to split that hair aim to defend FSF's free software
definition. That definition was largely a post hoc rationalization designed to
alleviate the cognitive dissonance between the increasingly libertarian,
permissive bent taking over open source ideology via OSI/ESR and the overt
prescriptivism of GPL. OSI revels in permissionlessness and an idealized,
rules-free environment. GPL is full of rules.

It was politically expedient to draw a line around GPL and say "no rules,
except these rules, because we need these people as allies". Not rigorous. Not
otherwise coherent.

> Just stop trying to co-opt a movement and blur lines that have been clearly
> understood for years.

That movement hasn't moved in some time. The initiative is out of initiative.
There is no widespread understanding of the details we're discussing. We are
both rarefied wonks.

The movement you seem to think I'm coopting was itself coopted. Open source
"won" by giving software freedom to developers who don't pass along to end-
users in turn. I don't apologize for writing copyleft licenses that eschew the
compromises of the earlier forms. Especially in light of their performance to
date.

~~~
danShumway
> That definition was largely a post hoc rationalization designed to alleviate
> the cognitive dissonance between the increasingly libertarian, permissive
> bent taking over open source ideology via OSI/ESR and the overt
> prescriptivism of GPL.

This is... a view of that debate, and to be fair it's not necessarily
unfounded. But let's assume it's 100% accurate.

Would you say that debate was a good thing for the FOSS movement as a whole,
or was it a painful years-long argument that fractured the community and
forced otherwise productive developers to waste hundreds of hours arguing with
each other?

I don't understand the point-of-view of someone who looks at the GPL, says,
"that exception was an arbitrary compromise" and then concludes, "let's add
_more_ arbitrary compromises."

> I don't apologize for writing copyleft licenses that eschew the compromises
> of the earlier forms.

I'm not asking you to. I just don't see why that has to involve attacking a
tribe that is resistant to fundamental changes of this sort, and that is
perfectly happy with its current growth and direction. I don't see what any of
that has to do with your ability to build or promote new licenses, and I don't
see why the narrow nature of the FOSS tribe means that suddenly we shouldn't
be free to create our own terms that accurately and narrowly describe what we
stand for. Say what you want, brand dilution is a real thing, and you are
causing it.

And what possible benefit could there be to having this argument? Call your
licenses Copyleft++, or Shared Source, or Liberty Licenses, or Social Good
Licenses, or Share Alike. You say that you're not trying to co-opt a movement,
but I don't understand what benefit you could ever gain from going to war with
the existing FOSS community other than to seize on the existing expectations
of users who feel like they already understand and can trust what FOSS
software is and how it acts in the real world.

> When a better mousetrap comes along, the designer of the last model doesn't
> get to pull the words "mouse trap" out of the newcomer's mouth.

No, of course not. But if you build a bear trap and start advertising it as a
mouse trap, I'm going to call you out on that. You can say the distinctions
that we have are arbitrary, you can say that the community is small, you can
say that we're dumb for holding on to them, you can say that most people want
a new movement that's more receptive to their specific goals, you can say
we're ineffective. Fine. But the distinctions still exist, and they allow us
as a community to precisely describe ourselves, and we have used them for
years, and you don't have the right to arbitrarily take them away.

If you think you can build a better movement, and you obviously think you can,
then _go build a better movement._ I have no objection at all to different
communities approaching user freedom from different angles and philosophies. I
welcome that, the more the merrier. I would genuinely, sincerely love to see
more alternatives to the FOSS movement spring up, because I admit that the
FOSS movement can't address everyone's needs on its own.

It's especially fantastic to see lawyers getting involved, because there's a
huge, real need for more variety of pre-built licenses that devs can safely
adopt, and there are a very small number of people who are both advocating for
user freedom and equipped to build those licenses. It's really, really good.
Just stop saying that it's FOSS.

~~~
kemitchell
Enjoying this conversation!

> I don't understand the point-of-view of someone who looks at the GPL, says,
> "that exception was an arbitrary compromise" and then concludes, "let's add
> more arbitrary compromises."

I don't think we should carve more ugly exceptions into a bad rule. I think we
should have a better rule that better serves the underlying purpose.
Specifically: license conditions that require developers using open source to
build software to contribute their own work alike ought to be welcomed, no
which kind of "use" as we slice and dice that term triggers the obligation. In
FSF-speak: copyleft can regulate exercise of freedom 0 and freedom 1 as well
as freedom 2 and freedom 3, to the same end, adaptable for both activist and
pragmatic business use.

> I just don't see why that has to involve attacking a tribe that is resistant
> to fundamental changes of this sort, and that is perfectly happy with its
> current growth and direction.

Because that resistance to change creates and perpetuates restraints that
prevent developers from addressing pressing, practical problems. Embedded
library developers have recognized license choices at hand to keep their work
free, or to dual license. Service library developers do not. Distributed-
application developers have established license choices to keep their work
free or to dual license. Developer toolmakers do not. And so on.

Intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously, the old-guard
posture picks winners and losers. No picking losers, then claiming to
represent them.

> going to war with the existing FOSS community

I'm not at war. But there is no singular FOSS community to go to war with. And
again, doctrinal specifics---like being able to rattle off the four freedoms
from memory---aren't characteristic of any broad set. They're common knowledge
only among a particular cohort of developers who came into open practice in
particular ways at particular times. I suspect that includes both of us, but
not nearly everyone. It took me way too long to internalize that.

For example, I published a noncommercial software license a while back and
took great care _not_ to present it as "open source". Many of its early
adopters did anyway. When I reached out to them to warn of the feedback I
thought they should expect, the answer was often "nobody I code with cares
about any of that". I'd send them the Open Source Definition or links to
fsf.org. No awe. Lots of good questions I couldn't answer.

That was my experience with the maximal-copyleft license and OSI, too. After a
number of weeks, I had to report back that approval didn't seem likely, but
that I didn't feel I could make a strong case why in any but political terms.
The developers I thought I was serving by taking the debate for the team
responded, almost unanimously: "We don't care. I know open source, and it's
open source. Why are you wasting your time on that process in the first
place?"

> But the distinctions still exist, and they allow us as a community to
> precisely describe ourselves, and we have used them for years, and you don't
> have the right to arbitrarily take them away.

Sure I do, but not arbitrarily.

I believed as you do, that FSF and OSI definitions represent rigorous, legal-
flavored standards. Having actually dove into them now, the only precision to
take away is false precision. Without linking you to a bunch of long blog
posts: The OSD is a fork of DFSG, which OSI holds out as a technical standard,
but Debian never did. When the text actually met many eyeballs under OSI, the
org ended up making a bunch of hasty changes and commentaries to stem the tide
of hackers reading it to exclude GPL. Twenty years later, I still saw comments
on OSI's mailing list to the effect that the nondiscrimination criteria
prohibit copyleft---more confounding than helpful. In the intervening time,
OSI approved a number of controversial and just plain bad licenses. They
approved stronger-than-GPL copyleft terms like OSL and RPL.

If the organizations' work in today's climate is to preserve a winners'
history of open licensing circa 2000-2010, they should build that monument.
Monuments don't move. Movements have to.

If "the movement" was just a tribe, you're right. It belongs to its time and
place ... long past. But if "the movement" was really more than that, a set of
goals beyond mere market penetration and a very niche kind of fame, the mantle
belongs to those advancing those goals. Developers unhappy with where software
freedom has run aground don't deserve to be marker for scorn or shorn of their
"open source" identity. If that happens, they won't bend over backwards to
honor open source as predecessor. They'll turn on it. New tribe.

------
arminiusreturns
All of the licenses this person defends have serious defects which are being
ignored here. FSF saw and understood there were many weaknesses in gplv2 which
is why they worked so hard on gplv3, which is the standard bearer for copy
left in my opinion, including it's derivatives like a/l(gpl).

The main criticism that is valid is the "gunshy enforcement" by FSF, but if
you listen to people like Eben Moglen they are very open about the fact that
they have been working on the long game of getting into a position where
enforcement would be effective instead of weaken the copyleft movement via a
failed enforcement action, and that they have known it would take many years
and even decades before the law side would catch up and be ready. I do think
they need to step it up, but these are things that FSF et al already
acknowledge and are working to address.

I have to admit a certain amount of conflicting views here, as I am at the
same time sympathetic to entities afraid of doing work that others might then
use and profit off of without contributing back (such as MangoDB claims), but
I am also sensitive to claims that the licenses they are pursing could also be
used as a cudgel to get more people towards paying them instead of using FOSS
versions, and also to the fear of corps that SSPL could be a dangerous license
if misconstrued. Which is why Mongo was dropped by RedHat, Fedora and
Debian...

In general I think that (a/l)gplv3 did most of the work actually needed to
solve these issues, and that attempts like SSPL, however laudable, are likely
to fracture and weaken FOSS as a whole and, being incompatible with gpl, I
cannot support them. There are ideas there that are important and should be
discussed however.

I have put my actions where my mouth is on this issue. I have worked very hard
to make the majority of my daily desktop and server stacks gpl or gpl
compatible. (which means I steer far clear of mit/bsd licensed things if I
can) The few exceptions are things I always keep an eye out for alternatives
on.

An interesting SO on the SSPL:
[https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/sspl-
and...](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/sspl-and-the-open-
source-definition)

In essence, I mark it as a sign of honest discussion when someone admits the
weaknesses to their arguments. There is none of that here, ergo...

~~~
kemitchell
I believe I mentioned enforcement only in closing. As far as licenses go, my
criticism was sharper: FSF licenses as _intended_ allow substantial bodies of
activist work to benefit venture capital-backed, closed-software companies.
Those intentional drafting decisions are incongruous with a post-hoc politics
of VC scapegoating.

You mentioned Moglen's public writing on enforcement, and I think you
summarize it fairly. But it is precisely that posture that I criticize as
gunshy. The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement lay it shorter
and plainer.

The idea that the law isn't ready for GPL enforcement is laid bare by _other_
organizations' success enforcing GPLs. This has some folks within the FSF camp
worried:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1mGG4JYurE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1mGG4JYurE)
They are losing the power to construct and enforce their own social truth
about the licenses they published.

~~~
arminiusreturns
Well, I have to admit, you make some convincing points. I feel like I have a
lot of reading to do. Are there any books or even blogs that really delve into
the meat of the subject you can recommend? I think there is a lot of internal
criticism in FSF that doesn't get leaked due to fear of it portraying a
weakness, but that needs to be talked about regardless, and you are doing
that. Thanks for a balanced response.

~~~
kemitchell
Unfortunately, there's no single tome directly on point of these debates that
I'm aware of. Some of these debates are very old, but some are also basically
current events. I'd also be suspicious of any one point of view, including my
own.

As for blogs, I'd strongly recommend all the folks mentioned in the post, all
of whom I link from my blogroll
([https://writing.kemitchell.com/blogroll.html](https://writing.kemitchell.com/blogroll.html)).

Bradley Kuhn:
[http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/](http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/), but see also
[https://copyleft.org](https://copyleft.org), to which he's contributed
extensively

Heather Meeker: [https://heathermeeker.com/](https://heathermeeker.com/)

Van Lindbergh: [https://processmechanics.com/](https://processmechanics.com/)

My own: [https://writing.kemitchell.com](https://writing.kemitchell.com)

I think I remember correctly that Bradley and Van were generally against SSPL,
while Heather and I were for it. But you should ask them, rather than take my
word for it!

For a more general reading list, see this one from Blue Oak Council:
[https://blueoakcouncil.org/lawyer-reading-
list](https://blueoakcouncil.org/lawyer-reading-list)

------
thibaultamartin
Frank Karlitschek (Nextcloud and Owncloud founder) has a very interesting take
regarding open source and licences[1]

[1]: [https://karlitschek.de/2019/08/open-source-if-more-than-
lice...](https://karlitschek.de/2019/08/open-source-if-more-than-licenses/)

~~~
kemitchell
Nice post. I’d say Van Lindberg’s Cryptographic Autonomy License and my own
Icepick License respond to a number of its concerns.

------
zbentley
> GPLv2 and v3 gave hobbyists, students, and anti-corporate hackers a means to
> _feel_ as though their work resists the evil empire of the software
> industry, while in fact serving it up with unpaid work product. From the VC
> point of view, the GPLs break the dam on that pool of labor, flooding
> venture prospects with freebie technology.

That seems concerning and deeply cynical. Mostly because I worry that it may
be accurate.

~~~
baot
I think it's silly: the idea that free software is primarily done unpaid is
just a myth, as can be seen from the attendees of any major free software
conference, or the commit history of the major codebases. The killer feature
of copyleft is as a way for standards to propagate within industries so that
duplicate work can be avoided. Any benefits that end users get are a happy
coincidence.

~~~
pmjordan
This is certainly true for the big headline projects. For every one of those,
there's a hundred small but widely used libraries or tools whose sole
maintainers (or tiny groups of maintainers) struggle under the workload of
keeping it going, as they do so in addition to whatever pays their bills -
with no obvious route to recompense for that unpaid labour. Worse, large users
of the tool or library get to make modifications without sharing them with the
original author and rest of the world.

 _the idea that free software is primarily done unpaid is just a myth, as can
be seen from the attendees of any major free software conference_

I'll point out that just because you mostly see delegates from big businesses
to FOSS conferences, that doesn't mean this is a representative sample. It can
just as well mean that the long tail of contributors isn't able to attend.

Of course, had the maintainers of the small-but-popular tool/library chosen a
license under which the big corporate users were forced to contribute any
local modifications back, this may in itself have prevented the popularity of
the tool or library in the first place. Because for many developers and
companies, using an AGPL (or even GPL or LGPL) licensed tool or library is
absolute anathema.

(GPL in whatever form of course does not help with financially compensating
independent developers, so it wouldn't fully solve the problem.)

------
purpleidea
Despite all the points the author tries to make, he forgets to mention the
most important one: license proliferation is not a positive thing for people
who care about software freedom. He's responsible for proliferating, and I
hope it stops. Lack of innovation in licensing isn't the problem. Corporate
greed is.

~~~
kemitchell
The licenses I’ve contributed to don’t rehash old licenses. They represent new
choices. Some patch holes in old forms. Some break new ground.

If “license proliferation” means something even stricter, like “no new
licenses, even if they do new things”, there’s no good argument for it as a
policy, other than protecting those currently “winning” who fear change.
Database proliferation is not killing software. Nor is framework proliferation
or markup language proliferation or programming language proliferation.

------
mark_l_watson
Just my opinion, but the author sounds like a corporate shill (I realize he is
a VC): “ The old, creaky pillars of the free software movement need convenient
scapegoats, because the facts on the ground raise serious doubt about the
effectiveness of their leadership and the byzantine, insular ideology of
copyleft they impose.”

The state of software development and benefits to society from FSF licenses
are, I believe, manifest.

I also support other open source licenses, I am not criticizing them, I am
merely defending FSF licenses.

I guess that my personal bullshit meter gets tripped up when something is an
attack rather than a balanced discussion.

~~~
detaro
> _corporate shill (I realize he is a VC):_

[citation needed]

Your comment seems more to prove his point than refute it.

~~~
mark_l_watson
The header said “Venture Capital Shill”, so I thought I was using a term he
self identified with. Maybe I was wrong about that and it is just the title of
the article.

~~~
detaro
You literally quoted part of the section that describes that the author
considers that label an unfair attack made to allow people to ignore his
arguments. And then used said label to attack him and ignore his arguments.

The article is worth reading more carefully, even if you don't agree with him.

~~~
yabadabadoes
I read the article as carefully as I could given its style and I think the
author is injecting the negative sentiment by self abasement to give himself
license to anger, etc.

The GPL was written by an institutional employee that was upset by VC backed
plans to co-opt internal software and turn it into a profit vehicle. In that
context the compatibility of everyone's interests but VC interests make
perfect sense.

The claim that copy left is failing and byzantine are haberdash. That many
people don't understand GPL and that it is succeeding in its direction and not
the one they assumed is an argument that could be made and should at a minimum
be significant to VCs.

------
StavrosK
So if I want to write an OSS library that can't be used for monetary gain,
what license do I release it under? AGPLv3?

EDIT: Actually, I misspoke, since monetary gain isn't the problem. I should
have said "used against user freedom", but that's much less well-defined. I
want a license that is as "open" as possible, for whatever definition of
"open".

~~~
_frkl
I'd say as strongly copy left as possible, although that will inevitably bring
with it some restrictions for users. Parity (
[https://paritylicense.com/](https://paritylicense.com/) ) is my favourite at
the moment (created by the blog posts author).

It's interesting in that it doesn't try to prescribe the license downstream
projects use as long as it's free (in contrast to for example GPL) but is, at
the same time, very strict in regards to when it applies (basically every time
Parity-licensed code 'touches' non-free software), which means there is no
Saas loophole for example.

~~~
StavrosK
That's an interesting license, thanks! I would have liked some examples about
what exactly it does, because reading the text doesn't make all the
ramifications clear, but it looks promising.

~~~
_frkl
If some of the text is unclear, you can submit an issue on the license' GitHub
repository. Kyle (the creator of the license) considers this an issue with the
license, and is very open to improve the text to eliminate any such issues
readers have.

~~~
StavrosK
I will, thanks. It's not unclear in a legal way, just in a human "what can my
users/forkers/etc do with this license" way (which may still be a valid issue
to open).

------
StreamBright
> their work resists the evil empire of the software industry

Not sure that the creators of BSD really cared about the things this article
is talking about when created BSD license. Many of the opensource projects
that I use are either created or maintained by the "evil empire of the
software industry".

------
ncmncm
The author makes interesting points well illustrated by the abuses, by
multinational corporations and internet fatcats, of the licenses we depend
upon.

But he neglects to mention the fundamental point that the community is not
well served by a proliferation of licenses.

~~~
jitschlit
So, what is the alternative? What am i supposed to do if I think there is no
license that deals satisfactory with the problems I have, and I'm can't create
a new one, because, well, it makes things a bit less straightforward for my
users?

~~~
ncmncm
One alternative, for the author, would have been to mention it. Address it,
even.

~~~
_frkl
To me, it's not really proliferation if the license addresses issues no other
license addresses. Just because it adds one or more licenses to the number of
existing licenses, doesn't mean those licenses should not exist.

Also, as a developer I think choice is good. If users have to do a bit more
work to figure out whether they can or want to use code because of its license
then that is unfortunate, but not too much to ask.

Why exactly do you think writing such a new license is doing more harm than
good?

~~~
ncmncm
It might benefit the author, a little, but it imposes new costs on everybody
else.

~~~
_frkl
I guess that's where we disagree. I think the existence of such a license
might be -- in some cases -- the one thing that motivates the author to create
a project in the first place (its for me, anyway). And I don't think open-
source has any obligation to come with 'no cost' for its users.

Reading (and respecting) its license is the least one can do when using
somebody elses code. If that takes time, then one just has to factor that in
when deciding whether to re-use someone elses code or not.

------
machbio
Are there any books to read about the complete list of software licenses ?

------
FisDugthop
It would be nice if there were a license that forbade corporate use entirely.
Corporations are not really people, after all.

