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Is the FOSS world in danger of a corporate takeover, thanks to pushover licenses? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I ask this because I think of the recent switch of Ubuntu to the Rust recode of the GNU core utils, which use an MIT license. There are many Rust recodes of GPL software that re-license it as a pushover MIT or Apache licenses. I worry these relicensing efforts this will significantly harm the FOSS ecosystem. Is this reason to start worrying or is it not that bad?

IMO, if the FOSS world makes something public, with extensive liberties, then the only thing that should be asked in return is that people preserve these liberties, like the GPL successfully enforces. These pushover licenses preserve nothing.

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[–] 46 points 9 months ago (2 children)

See Jabber/XMPP for an example.

There was a (short) time when I could chat with my friends on google hangouts (or whatever that was called back then) and facebook messaging via my own xmpp server. It was pretty cool and somehow felt like that's the way things should be. Like email today (even if every big player is trying to destroy that too).

Maybe in some version of the future we'll get that back.

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    You're on the fediverse where that is a possibility.

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  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    It's not really a same thing. I can't reach my mother or neighbor over fediverse since they don't know nor care what that is. But they use whatsapp, facebook and other stuff which are in their own walled gardens and there's no option to communicate to those gardens with anything I self host.

    And trying to convince everyone to switch is not a battle I'm actively fighting for multiple reasons. Of course I mention signal, fediverse and everything to anyone who's willing to listen, but those encounters are pretty rare.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    The problem you are describing in this comment is a social problem, not a technological one. In the previous comment I answered, a technological problem was described, and I offered a technological solution.

    I am on the fedi, I do not proselytize to anybody that's not on the fedi, nor do I interact outside of it. I am not fighting a battle, nor do I need to change people. There's tons of people on the fedi that I can interact with. If people like where they are, they can continue to enjoy that, and I don't have to bother them. I call my parents using the phone.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    It's kinda-sorta social problem, but originally not the way you intend. It used to be possible to self host XMPP and chat with people regardless of the platform since both Google and Facebook (it wasn't Meta at the time) adopted the protocol. But then they changed their policy and created the walled gardens they have now and thus it's a social and/or political problem.

    They fully followed the playbook of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish which eleijeep@piefed.social mentioned few messages up the thread and pretty much devastated XMPP out of existence. Sure, there's still handful of users and project itself isn't dead, but before their policy change I saw quite a lot of servers around which are now either dead or forgotten.

    On a previous comment I didn't mean to describe that as a technological problem but a problem related to big corporations embracing FOSS projects/protocols and killing them by introducing their own walled garden variant of it.

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