Worth noting that the "escape hatch" clauses in the EUPL that allow converting it into other licenses mean it's only ever as strong as the weakest license it names for such an operation, AKA EPL/MPL/LGPL.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
This article would do better if it simply enumerated the problems with the LGPL and addressed how this new license which I've never heard of addresses those problems. This hinting and alluding might make great SEO, but that's fit for neither the audience of people producing software, nor for HN.
The article seems pretty clear that the LGPL is too weak compared to the EUPL for this author, and one of the main concerns is the "SaaS loophole" which I assume would be addressed by the AGPL but also seems addressed by the EUPL.
But the EUPL itself says that derivative works may be distributed under the LGPL instead, as long as those works are derived from both a EUPL and LGPL parent. This seems kinda trivial to abuse and the author should have noticed this clause if that was their main concern.
What are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing?
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
If you are trying to monetize your software, the biggest factor is whether or not your customer trusts you.
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
I think it definitely hurts adoption. No hobbyist or experimenter wants to delve into legalities head first by first having to understand the licensing terms of software, whereas permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are easily-understood and familiar.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
"The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business."
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)
Excuse me but as both a hobbyist and commercial software developer I say that the gpl (any version) is quite simple enough. There is no need to go all the way to bsd/mit just to get safety and clarity and freedom from encumberance.
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
right but the GPL explicitly allows commercial use, which isn't what the original comment was about ("use in production requires a fee"); i agree with the previous comment that such a license is hard to assess for a hobbyist, but the GPL is not such a license (hence yes it's simple enough)
In practice AGPL might achieve that. It does allow commercial use, but a lot of big businesses, especially big tech, will not use it. On the other hand it is a clear, OSI approved, FOSS license.
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
Once you decide on a non-free license, in the FSF sense, in the DFSG sense, and in the open source sense, does the details of the license matter much? You want as many people to pay as possible, and you do not wish for others to compete with you providing this software.
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
You might also be interested in the O'Saasy license (https://osaasy.dev/) which is in the similar vein, but simpler.
HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.
I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.
Good points, the second is very "dual-licensing" in nature. BUSL is certainly the more "mature" option and there's a higher likelihood people came across it in the wild.
I was a bit surprised to read that there was an OSI-approved license with usage restrictions and wondered if I had missed the memo. But you seem to be correct and it's not OSI-approved and therefore is not generally considered to be an open source license.
The heat around this particular issue has cooled down a bit and I'm not sure anyone is especially happy with the state of affairs. But questions around AI have sucked a lot of the oxygen from the room for now.
Isn't that what Epic, MiniMax, Z.ai, and others are doing, where a license is free for personal use / low revenue projects, but cost a (steep) fee for commercial use? They don't use dual licenses, but rather a tiered license.
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
if the EUPL actually closes the SaaS loophole (first time i'm hearing about it though) in a legally grounded way i can see it being used by people outside the EU who say the AGPL is unenforceable/is actually nonfree/is too hard to actually comply with
If one licences open source under a strong copyleft licence (say AGPL3) presumably one can open up later and issue under weaker licences (say MIT) if one chooses?
Presumably you can also sell access to it with a full commercial licence if one chooses?
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
Also there’s only one trillionaire and that varies by the stock that day. And it’s not because he abused open source, he’s just the greatest huckster of all time.
CC BY-NC-ND is what I'm also increasingly using (for non-code), though not always, and disheartenedly. (And as commented, the non-code context is different.)
I discussed NC in my other comment. But, yes, ND is arguably counter the whole remix culture that was supposedly part of the impetus for Creative Commons in the first place. I do kind of see the logic behind prohibiting, say, a remix of a video or photo in a way that misrepresents the subject. But I also don't particularly like it.
True enough; philosophically, I am still in the BY camp (a.k.a. BSD/MIT/etc.), and I do not particularly care about the NC part, but ND is increasingly important for non-code. But if they could do even the BY properly, it would be a step to the right direction (and, to some extent, I think they're doing that).
ND is important for those who do "authoritative writing" (for a lack of a better term); i.e., when you write with your real name, you do not want nonsense and disinformation associated with your name.
Yes, I think of it more in the context of photo and video integrity, but you can certainly imagine an unscrupulous individual rewriting something and changing the meaning. Of course, I doubt a license would stop that person.
The problem is that not even Creative Commons was able to come up with a real definition for non-commercial when they last (I think) revised the license. Essentially it means trivial uses (a photo in a grade school assignment) or its contentious in a way that reasonable people can disagree about. What constitutes acceptable usage of a properly attributed photo? Personally, I just properly attribute and stopped worry about whether most presentations constituted commercial use or not.
For FOSS I personally prefer Apache 2.0 license, as 10 years from now I have no idea what people will need for their projects.
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
I am mostly just an anti-contaminating license proponent. Porting to multiple platforms gets complicated if you include a 3rd party commercial library with a project that on linking demands it also become publicly accessible.
For example, if someone wants to do something creative... they shouldn't have to cite 400 different peoples licenses. That isn't sustainable or fun.
I will stick with Apache 2.0, but understand different folks have other use-cases =3
This, for some reason, has become a controversial idea — as evidenced by your comment being downvoted.
I don’t understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects of open-source software entirely. If your main goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead.
If people have a rational self-interest in helping build great works, than the projects simply manifest out of necessity. There is zero benefit in assuming everything is a zero-sum game.
With billions of people online someone is always having the best or worst day of their lives. I rather people be honest about what they think, and trust respectful disagreement is welcome. Have a great day =3
I don't like the phrasing of the EUPL because it says you have rights full stop and then in a later section it says there are actually conditions. For that reason I would not immediately be sure the conditions are even enforceable, other than "this was surely made by lawyers and therefore also surely valid".
Aside from that, it is nice to see Communication counted alongside Distribution; this should have been done from the start IMO.
> I don't like the phrasing of the EUPL because it says you have rights full stop and then in a later section it says there are actually conditions. For that reason I would not immediately be sure the conditions are even enforceable.
Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
> Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
2. Scope of the rights granted by the Licence
The Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive,
sublicensable licence to do the following, for the duration of copyright vested
in the Original Work:
- use the Work in any circumstance and for all usage,
- reproduce the Work,
- modify the Work, and make Derivative Works based upon the Work,
- communicate to the public, including the right to make available or display
the Work or copies thereof to the public and perform publicly, as the case may
be, the Work,
- distribute the Work or copies thereof,
- lend and rent the Work or copies thereof,
- sublicense rights in the Work or copies thereof.
Those rights can be exercised on any media, supports and formats, whether now
known or later invented, as far as the applicable law permits so.
In the countries where moral rights apply, the Licensor waives his right to
exercise his moral right to the extent allowed by law in order to make effective
the licence of the economic rights here above listed.
The Licensor grants to the Licensee royalty-free, non-exclusive usage rights to
any patents held by the Licensor, to the extent necessary to make use of the
rights granted on the Work under this Licence.
This is a lot more rights than just to use and there is absolutely nothing about conditions in this entire section.
There's not even a hint of conditions until three sections later where it starts modifying section 2, which feels sloppy to me.
Do these types of things really matter anymore? If you have tokens, given the source is available pretty easy to reimplement with plausible deniability.
If you think an LLM can just implement e.g. an alternative to the Linux kernel from scratch (or any other GPL licensed software), you might be falling for the marketing.
Have you seen LLMs build large, stable, pieces of software, that work well, with your own eyes? I have not. I have seen LLMs build small, well-understood things, and I've seen LLMs do super well with extremely well specified problems, but all the rest seems to be marketing (i.e. I couldn't observe or reproduce it).
Edit: I'm not talking about throwaway slop that just needs to run long enough to get funding.
A lot of open source that we used to use as dependencies is trivial. Sometimes you only need 10% of the library.
No one is talking about kernel.
Also, changing license does not prevent you from forking the source code before the change. There are no new libraries with kernel level effort that use uncommon license.
Then again, it's not like even before the plagiarising slop machines you couldn't just get around licenses if you were dedicated enough to evil and was comfortable lying about the provenance of the code you're using.
Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.
I think there's been a mistake in the thinking that restricting the licensing on open source projects will make the companies that use them as a service would make them contribute.
They don't, the companies just replace the software in question.
> We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I have to disagree. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. You take some, you give back. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business. And not having access to it would absolutely not have stopped corporate behemoths from getting where they are, but would have killed many small businesses and startups.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use, unless you are a large company. The code becomes MIT-licensed automatically after a set window to remove maintainability concerns.
The complaint here is, that those business are not necessarily "bringing people into the community", unless you are talking about passive users, who do not contribute. The businesses simply use the stuff built at no cost to rake in big money, while the person, who did the actual work does not see a cent. This is different with copyleft licenses like AGPL. Only that many businesses are so afraid of contributing anything at all, that they often don't want to use AGPL or even GPL licensed software.
The causality is wrong here. You chose to work for free with no reward, and _then_ companies found your work and used it. Presumably you started out working for free because it was intrinsically rewarding (otherwise: stop doing work you hate for free?).
> "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires."
I hate that some people like to put us all in the same bag. Please don't include me. I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I publish it as such because it's a present to the world at large that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT.
You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please.
Agreed; I mentioned Elon because the post made the reference quite explicit by saying "trillionaires", probably given the context Bezos or Gates would've been better examples though.
>All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
This is not true. Open source is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good thing that open source unlocks.
Also theres not multiple trillionaires in the world, and the one trillionaire we have did that largely by innovating and creating new stuff rather than just leveraging existing OSS for profit...
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
Other languages can be found here: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eu...
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.
I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.
- BUSL is OSI-approved and listed in SPDX, so corporate lawyers won't be scared away by it: https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html
- With BUSL the restriction is revenue-based. You can still create competing products, but would have to pay a licensing fee.
Of course it isn‘t.
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
Presumably you can also sell access to it with a full commercial licence if one chooses?
The EULA needs a clause that 10% of the market cap of a company will be paid to the IP holder upon violating it.
They cover a very specific niche GPL/AGPL/etc. do not cover properly.
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
The magic of the web has always been that things would continuously morph through being reinterpreted and all, and that just doesn't happen with ND.
I can of course see the valid reasons why one would pick that license, but it's still.. kinda sad that it's culturally dead.
Because for me, it would be the exact other way round.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
Copyleft doesn't say that they can't, it says they have to make their changes available
For example, if someone wants to do something creative... they shouldn't have to cite 400 different peoples licenses. That isn't sustainable or fun.
I will stick with Apache 2.0, but understand different folks have other use-cases =3
I find that very surprising, but I have seen some shops practice clean room coding policies. =3
I don’t understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects of open-source software entirely. If your main goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead.
With billions of people online someone is always having the best or worst day of their lives. I rather people be honest about what they think, and trust respectful disagreement is welcome. Have a great day =3
Aside from that, it is nice to see Communication counted alongside Distribution; this should have been done from the start IMO.
Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
There's not even a hint of conditions until three sections later where it starts modifying section 2, which feels sloppy to me.
Have you seen LLMs build large, stable, pieces of software, that work well, with your own eyes? I have not. I have seen LLMs build small, well-understood things, and I've seen LLMs do super well with extremely well specified problems, but all the rest seems to be marketing (i.e. I couldn't observe or reproduce it).
Edit: I'm not talking about throwaway slop that just needs to run long enough to get funding.
Also, changing license does not prevent you from forking the source code before the change. There are no new libraries with kernel level effort that use uncommon license.
Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.
It is a viable argument, and people shouldn't bury such insights given the estimated $9Tn worth of opensource work that was appropriated. =3
They don't, the companies just replace the software in question.
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I have to disagree. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. You take some, you give back. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business. And not having access to it would absolutely not have stopped corporate behemoths from getting where they are, but would have killed many small businesses and startups.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use, unless you are a large company. The code becomes MIT-licensed automatically after a set window to remove maintainability concerns.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License
I hate that some people like to put us all in the same bag. Please don't include me. I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I publish it as such because it's a present to the world at large that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT.
You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please.
I wish we could spend less (collective) time here on HN talking about/worrying about Elon Musk.
We're (allegedly) here for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
What SpaceX and/or Tesla are doing could certainly satisfy that, worrying about Musk himself certainly isn't.
This is not true. Open source is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good thing that open source unlocks.