Comment by rixed

Comment by rixed 9 hours ago

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  > I care that software I depend upon survives long term.

  > "Fair" source does absolutely nothing to allievate those concerns.
Of course it does ! Git clone, problem solved.

I'm all in favor of free software, but it sounds a bit disingenuous to pretend that the GPL or even, to a lesser extent, the Affero variant, are providing a safe haven for sustainable software. The reality is, sadly, that free software depends on the good will of very few idealistic people who manage to somehow make a living while spending a lot of time on working for free ; and i must know since I've been lucky to be able to do this most of my life. This is no guaranteed survival or innovation.

While I believe it's very useful to remind users of the freedom they should ask for, I don't think it's useful to oppose free software with fair source, exactly like in the past it was important to remind users of the differences between free software and open source, yet it was counter productive to oppose them.

sfRattan 7 hours ago

> Git clone, problem solved.

What a myopic assumption. Availability of source code doesn't solve the legal problems that can arise in the wake corporate restructuring, as new owners work to impede forking and continuing a project outside their control.

Continuing a project in the wake of total organizational failure or capture means setting up legal entities to replace the broken/subverted ones. That's a problem separate from "is the code out there on the Internet for me to download?"

In comparison to the GPL and AGPL, "fair" source licenses are at best hastily drawn. They certainly do not have decades of accrued favorable legal precedent. They are often short and ambiguous because their authors have not imagined half the use cases they might potentially forbid in the name of "fairness". All these qualities are miasmal to long term project stability.

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  • rixed 6 hours ago

    In practice, what matters is that indeed the code is available in a form that makes it modifiable and that machines are available to run it on. Oracle and its hordes of malignant lawyers tried, and almost succeeded, to make this illegal with Java but thanksfully failed.

    Why would I need to set up "legal entities" to enjoy my freedom as a user of open source software, unless I'm trying to start a competing business? It's unclear to me what you have in mind. Please explain like I'm a myopic person.

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    • sfRattan 5 hours ago

      The people promoting "fair" source are specifically doing so to set up legal entities---companies---in order to run a business. That's fine, but it means users of their software should include the potential endgames of those legal entities in their assessment of the software's long term viability. That frame was implicit in my original point.

      Any sufficiently large and complex piece of software (free, nonfree, or proprietary) will eventually need some kind of inter-human organization and governance. It won't matter for a small program with complexity that can be managed inside the head of one person but, again, "fair" source as advocated by its own proponents is about software of sufficient complexity to justify legal entities owning, stewarding, guiding, and managing it.

      And, IIRC, Oracle and its lawyers, when trying to digest Sun Microsystems, choked on the GPL specifically at least twice: with both MySQL and OpenOffice. The GPL's well thought out protections enabled independent institutions to form around successor forks to those projects. Would the same have been possible with a relatively new, less well thought out "fair" source license? I don't think so.

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      • rixed 2 hours ago

        I don't know what exemple you have in mind, but we were discussing n8n, redis, elastic search... Probably you have much more complex projects in mind?

        If I go tu use, say, redis, in a way that the license permit, I don't give a single dime about the legal entity behind it. I just `apt-get install redis`. If I want to modify it for my need, I can `apt-get source redis`. When the next version of redis comes with a more restrictive license, or if features are removed, I just stick to a previous one. Maybe I fork it myself if it's really important for me. Probably, we will be many doing so, we will regroup, share our modifications and improvements. I've experienced this kind of colaborative maintenance of some dead project a couple of times in the past, and all te governance that was ever needed was a mailing list.

        Now, sure, some project are more complicated. If, god forbid, postgresql or gcc were to disapear I would not trust myself, or any single individual, to maintain a private fork for long withough the quality deteriorating. But again, people would regroup, cooperate, and we will be able to figure it out.

        Compare this with proprietary software, were you truly have no recourse. I've seen wonderful pieces of software in the past, that I loved an used daily, disaprear entirely because the company that produced it went belly up, leaving no alternative than to desperately run the old versions on an emulator still years after because nobody ever managed to redo something as good. And now they are gone, for good, with few people ever remembering them.

        So, these are the exemples I have in mind, this is why I don't understand how one could equate fair-source with proprietary -- assuming that the restrictions tainting the "fair" software just prevent the user from competing with the software producer. The user has a ton of power with fair source compared to proprietary.

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