this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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You say that ironically, but in the early days of Google its motto was "Do No Evil" and it promoted non-intrusive advertising. There was this sense that Google was a company of engineers and that you could trust them.
(disclaimer: I didn't trust them.)
Google was a company of engineers that you could trust, however, like Boeing (which was another "Company of Engineers") they were slowly replaced by business execs who probably haven't written a line of code in their life (Save for maybe some VBA for some businessy excel spreadsheet)
This is why I love FOSS products. You get the advantage of using well engineered code, without the risk of that code falling into the hands of exploitive capitalists.
Permissively-licensed stuff (e.g. MIT, BSD) still has that risk. What you really want is copyleft (e.g. GPL) specifically, not just FOSS.
You can change the license at any point. You just can't make people change the license of past copies
gpl prevents you from doing that fyi
gpl does not prevent the owner from changing the licence later. (Unless it is also making use of someone else's gpl components.)
For example, Qt has a free version which is under the GPL; and a paid version which is not. So if you were making software with Qt, if you were using the free version, you'd be compelled to also release your product under GPL. But you could then later switch to a paid subscription and rerelease under some other licience if you wanted to.
Actually it doesn't
doesnt it require any modified versions of the code be shared, preventing a change to a non-copyleft liscence?
Not if the copyright owner changes the license. When you are the creator you can do what you please. With that being said you can not do that if the public writes code. That's why you see CLAs (contributor license agreement)
Important to note that this only applies to future releases by the legal copyright owner. If the community doesn't like it (and they often don't), someone else can fork it from the last time it was GPL, and contributors can abandon the original codebase in favor of the GPL fork. As a result, it is extremely unwise to try to de-GPL software with a lot of contributors, as the copyright holder doesn't have a great chance at competing with a fork if contributors jump ship.
Linus Torvalds could legally pivot Linux to a proprietary license if he wanted to, but we'd probably see it replaced with a fork called "Binix" or something within a few months, and he'd be in charge of abandonware at that point.
Agreed although Linux would be really hard to relicense. You would need to get approval from every single person who every contributed
oh ok, thanks for telling me!
The execs don't know wtf VBA is. Those are the middle managers, at best.