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No wait, I know Oracle has a bad rep which is deserved, but TruffleRuby and GraalVM is truly open-source, not open-core. They actually did something great this time.

Someone pointed this out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42323293






> You will need to sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement (using an online form) for us to able to review and merge your work.

Read my lips:

N. O.

Read the CLA. This is a trap, do not get yourself or your company caught in it. It is open-source for now, until it gets enough traction. Then the rug will be pulled, the code will be relicensed as well as any further development or contributions.

This is insane, I cannot believe anyone can read and understand this and not consider the abuses of power it allows:

> 2. With respect to any worldwide copyrights, or copyright applications and registrations, in your contribution:

> ...

> you agree that each of us can do all things in relation to your contribution as if each of us were the sole owners, and if one of us makes a derivative work of your contribution, the one who makes the derivative work (or has it made) will be the sole owner of that derivative work;

> you agree that you will not assert any moral rights in your contribution against us, our licensees or transferees;

> you agree that we may register a copyright in your contribution and exercise all ownership rights associated with it; and

> you agree that neither of us has any duty to consult with, obtain the consent of, pay or render an accounting to the other for any use or distribution of your contribution.

I would go as far as to state that anyone who contributes any code to this works against open source (by helping out an obvious rugpull/embrace-extend-extinguish scheme that diverts adoption and contribution from cruby/jruby) and against their fellow developers (by working for free for Oracle).


For what it worth, in France so called moral rights are "innaliénables", so you legally can't get rid of them, and I wouldn't be surprised this holds in most Roman civil law countries (most countries in the world). Just like you can't decide to get rid of all your civil rights and become a slave of the nice company that promised to treat you well and free you of the hurdle to take decisions by yourself. So IANAL but this contract is not only ignominious but is actually trying to require authors to make promises that they can not legally make.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)


Oh wow! Thanks for the clarification! Is the case same with JRuby?

JRuby -- no CLA.

Java is problematic though. See my other comment.


I mean Java and MySQL are from Oracle as well.

MySQL was forked and the fork is the defacto standard shipped by linux distros. To me the only MySQL that existed was the one by Sun, now MariaDB has completely succeeded it.

Do you see the licensing/distrubution clusterfuck with Java as a good example of open-source stewardship by Oracle? Which Java disto are you using?[1]

Do you see the Google v. Oracle Java API copyright case as a good example of open-source stewardship by Oracle?

You know what else is prudently (/s) stewarded by Oracle? ZFS. That is why it is still not a part of the Linux kernel. A company that is basically a meme with the amount of lawyers it imploys would easily find a safe way to allow integration into the Linux kernel if only they wanted to contribute.

The examples above show exactly why Oracle has a decidedly bad reputation. On top of that, their CLA enshrines their shit treatment of the open-source movement and their free slave labour^W^W^W open-source contributors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#OpenJDK_builds


GraalVM tends toward open core. They have entire test suites and test tools that are internal-only that make developing it kind of difficult.



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