Donetsk and Lugansk have been de facto independent for 8 years now

A fact that was not recognized by Russia until a few hours before sending in its troops.

the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Copyleft is that correct middle, in my opinion.

Depends what one’s goal is. Is fighting big tech is the most important thing to you, then yes. If you want to share with as many people as possible, no matter their ideology, then no.

Actually, I was only meaning use it internally to improve their own workflow.

They can still bundle it with other things, only release your code, secretly improving only what they did on top of your API and make money out of the bundle, so why stoppping there and using a free license rather than something with a NC clause?

On the other hand, one could argue that GPL would refrain a corp from including your software in their product, while at least the cite you get with the MIT license at least gets you some advertisement and potential.

What if other free software developers use a license incompatible with the GPL for their own reason, is it OK to deprive them from the right to simply incorporate your code in the name of fighting big tech?

I don’t mean to say that it does not make sense to use the GPL, it is probably the most sensible choice if your aim is to fight big tech corporations. But not every piece of software is written as a commercial weapon.

Tbh this sense of “we are even further in the future” sounds a bit crackpot. I like “Fediverse” :) Also I don’t like the trend of changing name

Wouldn’t “an evil company could use your product to make money” be an argument to never release anything for free?

Indeed, copyleft is not enough to guarantee that corporations won’t make money with your code. Without modifying the code, an evil company could increase its profit just by using your software. So maybe the software should not be free but contain some clause that restricts to non-commercial use only? Maybe throw in some antifascist clause so that fascists groups cannot use your program to increase their efficiency in recruiting more members? Since evil people don’t care about the law, maybe you should only distribute your software to people that you have personnally vetted? Add-in some cryptology so that they cannot distribute it to evil people themselves?

This never stops, it’s the usual question of freedom vs security. Permissive licences are the ones who lie at the freedom-most part of the spectrum.

But mostly, this discussion about copyleft has nothing to do with the post.

And that contradicts my comment because … ?

I got that, mine was a critic of copyleft in general. Maybe a bit out of place, but probably not more than your first snarky remark about copyleft on a post that doesn’t say anything about fighting corporations.

MIT license is a great way of making sure corporations will take this and run away with it

Copying is not theft :) That they “run away with it” by using it for their own projects doesn’t change anything to your use and development

Copyright 2019 Jason Yuan Design. All rights reserved.

not open source thought

Well, that’s why I didn’t name Firefox as a particularly good example of open-source, just a reference for the manpower needed.

Is there a good example of open-source web browser? For example, what do you use as a browser?

More generally, is there anything that passes you “hard fork” test for another reason than the scale effect? Is there any sign that the frustrated community members are more talented if the maintainer is hired by a non-profit rather than a private company?

Nah, I would just like it, if companies wouldn’t tout their projects being open-source, when that’s basically just misleading many users.

There is a precise definition of what is open source. If users think it encompasses more, that’s a problem of communication from part of the open source community.

just letting the “open-source” term die and finding a better word

Do you really think there is no advantage of a program being open source? Don’t you think it is a good thing that the online community can check the source code, fork it to remove the bits they don’t like, install a previous version if they don’t like the new one? Would you prefer if there was no open source Chromium, no ungoogled-chromium, no soft forks of it, so that one would need to run Chrome if they need to use an app developped for Chrome?

Do you exclusively use software that is designed by communities rather than companies?

they only have around 150 employees

So, they would need to build up a lot of expertise.

So, yeah, you kind of need to continue innovating, which requires manpower.

You would pretty much need to poach these employees, or build up a huge team of your own, to be able to move the project in a different direction.

Now, this seems to be more about the manpower needed to mantain a browser that about the open-source or free (or in fact even community-driven) natures of Chromium. Is there anything that makes Firefox more opensource than Chromium?

And even if that is not the case, a handful of frustrated community members can probably outperform the current maintainers.

LibreOffice

Again, even departing from the strict opensource definition, I think that how much a project is free come from the possibility to have a fork that works, not necessarily one that can compete with the original project. Is it necessarily a good thing if the development team of a projects can be outperformed by “a handful of frustrated community members”?

In fact, is your point that it would be better if there were no professional developers and only projects run by communities of hobbyists?

I do like Atom, although there’s no other editor that I’ve used as much to compare (except maybe saying that I find it as good as a tex editor as TeXStudio, TeXMaker and TeXShop). It does allow to collapse/expand

So, I don’t see Brave as a hard fork. They are very much dependent on Google continuing to open-source the Chromium code. And they don’t really have the capacity to make larger changes to the code base, or even just maintain the status quo, if Google decides to make changes that go against Brave’s interests.

Ok, thanks for clarifying, I definitely don’t know enough about Brave’s developement to comment on that. Do you mean that Brave’s team wouldn’t even have the manpower to mantain security updates if they want to harder-fork? I still don’t really understand what is the difference between Chromium and say KDE about the possibility to hard-fork.

they may be shit in one way or another, but they would never make a change with which the majority of the user base disagrees.

I see, thanks again. Indeed “community-driven” is a better fit label for that state of affair !

This means that these projects practically cannot be hard-forked (taking them into a different direction)

I don’t understand the implication, what is it that makes a hard-fork impossible? In fact, isn’t Brave a hard fork of Chromium?

such a fork would likely not gather many users either

The repo of the maintainer would get abandoned and everyone would contribute to a fork instead. With actual Chromium, though, not a chance of that happening.

In my understanding, while the freedom of forking the project is certainly determinant in the question of whether it is open source, I don’t see any relevance in the one of creating a fork that can get popular enough to strip the original project of its users.

it’s only technically open-source and you’re still eating whatever changes Microsoft/Google decide to include

Not sure I get the nuance, isn’t one always eating whatever changes the main developers decide to include?

Alternatively, I wish more programs would offer editable keybindings