249
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
113 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent