I think so. Maybe dang or tomhow could switch the link :)
The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.
It's interesting to me to see how easily you can reach a much safer C without adding _everything_ from C++ as a toy project. I really enjoyed the read!
Though yes, you should probably just write C-like C++ at that point, and the result sum types used made me chuckle in that regard because they were added with C++17. This person REALLY wants modern CPP features..
I've seen Optuna used with some of the prompt optimization frameworks lately, where it's a really great fit and has yielded much better results than the "hyperparameter" tuning I had attempted myself. I can't stop mentioning how awesome a piece of software it is.
Also, I'm eager to see how well gpt-oss-120b gets uncensored if it really was using the phi-5 approach, since that seems fundamentally difficult given the training.
>1. It's important for people to understand how OSI co-opted the goodwill and some of the ideas from the Free Software movement.
Okay I don't understand why this is happening in the same breath you're suggesting that OSI is responsible for making everyone in the free software movement believe freedom of use (even in commercial cases) is required otherwise things are source available. GNU foundation, OSI, and even source available license writers basically agree on this part. Can you be specific here?
Because otherwise you're just reinforcing the perception I explained above, since largely the disagreement between OSI and the original free software people is that OSI supports too _permissive_ and too many non-copyleft licenses, not that the permissive or copyleft licenses need to enshrine certain license holders or disenfranchise others, or block commercialization or competitors. That's deeply antithetical to the idea of free or open software, regardless of the camp.
>2. I think they have some good ideas even if I don't agree with all of them.
AGPL, despite achieving all of your goals to prevent hyperscalers from free riding, is not one of them?
>I'm just a guy with 3 kids under 5 and not enough time to run any kind of rebranding project. I'm just angry that whenever someone launches a project that is more free than proprietary software but that isn't OSI approved, 90% of the comments are about why it isn't free or isn't open source.
Because the community has largely agreed on the principles codified by OSI. The principles you propose seem to betray the larger movement's intentions significantly, which is much bigger in scope than OSI.
>-1: You can't distribute this software if your name ends in "ezos".
>0-4 same as the rest.
That's a lot different than source available licenses actually, which usually declares enshrines the original license holder, even though it's not technically free under the other principles. I think if you thought up of a new consistent principle that didn't enshrine a single distributor or disenfranchise entire classes of other distributors, people would be open to the idea of a variant of free software.
But I think the bigger issue is that you think AGPL is failing somehow in not being restrictive enough compared to source available licenses. Maybe you could articulate that more clearly, and _that_ would gather more mind share. Merely stating that OSI is bad doesn't really change people's opinion of source available. Mostly reinforcing free software/copyleft maxi's ideas and insinuating GPL needs to be more common.
>I'm interested in realistic compromises to make more free software more viable in a world where Amazon, Google, and Facebook exist. I'm not interested in ideals about a very specific meaning of absolutely free software.
Okay, I'm confused why you bring free software or the free software definition into this at all then if you're just picking and choosing what parts of the original statement/bulletin you care about and what parts you choose to disregard, on top of disregarding the original movement and organization founded at its inception.
If you're hoping to rebrand source available software, why not call it something other than _free software_ if you want to do a rebranding? You could propose similarly internally consistent principles and attempt to cultivate a community. Call it 'fair source' or 'managed availability' or something. Refer to the 'freedoms' as rights, instead. You'd convince a much larger group and wouldn't have to pretend that principles for commercialization wasn't considered in 1985.
Since, again, from the start there the goal of free software was that no single company was supposed to be the single commercializer of a piece of software. That principles carries to the GPL.
If you're hoping to convince us that source available software is actually free software, you're giving me a great platform to talk to others about the history of actually free software and making yourself appear wrongheaded as if you didn't read the original bulletin or understand the larger software development community, or worse that you're attempting to co-opt our very specific yet widely accepted professional definition of free software.
>In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.
I think those concerns existed at the time of the writing of the first bulletin, if you read how they were expecting to be compensated. See the part titled "So, how could programmers make a living?".
>For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
Yep, the duty and obligation to redistribute, as mentioned in the bulletin above - but without a single company being the sole arbiter or commercializer of the source, as defined in the Free Software Definition you mention elsewhere. Freely, as in free speech.. A quote from the original bulletin:
```
This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a license.
It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort
will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state
of the art.
Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a
user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them
himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for
him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or
company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make
changes.
```
In the SaaS era, freedom is impinged not because hyperscalers make money off of free software. That was always the intended goal, because it isn't freedom like free beer or simply 'non-commercial uses'. Freedom is impinged because modifications of the software aren't redistributed if distribution is only done over generated artifacts on a network. AGPL is specifically for networked software like this.
Unless you're implying that the GNU foundation, Richard Stallman, or the free software movement generally ever viewed even narrowly commercially restrictive licenses as free software. Which you can tell from the source documents and all others in this comment thread, that is obviously not the case.
So for Amazon, I used to work there and not sure I can talk about specifics, but there was AGPL software used outside of the AMIs but they were approved on a case by case basis. Ghostscript is public and used in the AMIs that are shipped standard, and ofc is used sometimes by Amazon. And if any modifications went out, it was of course gladly republished, but I don't think any forks of AGPL software were being maintained to the best of my knowledge.
>I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.
No, afaik, unfortunately. That might drastically change how you distribute its base. I was a little unclear but I had meant "No but at least the most common distro ships it in their archive" with my first comment.
>The extent of virality added by the additional clauses is not clear.
The Neo4J case was one piece of a longstanding part of GPLv3 caselaw where the virality is clear.
>My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.
Just a recap of your responses so far:
So AGPL has no case law and might even be unenforceable, so therefore it you should use non-free source available licenses. Oh, it does have case law and hyperscalers have been forced to open source their forks like of BDB?
Well, the virality hasn't been tested and FSL would be an easier case. Oh, it has been tested, multiple times and licensees have had to work out an agreement like in the Neo4j case - such that judges would actually be able to rely on prior art unlike FSL?
Okay, well, even if that's all true - Amazon could just firewall it anyways. How? Well they would simply use vast resources to create proprietary hardware, create a fork for proprietary hardware despite that making it impossible to receive patches from the main fork, and then sell that as a service.
Based on the above, I think you've done what you can to convince me.
Because everyone was always a user in the definition of free software! Because it's free as in free speech.. In the first bulletin where the definition was made, Stallman envisioned no restrictions on distribution and a user being a business was entirely unrelated to how compensation were to occur: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
>My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.
It's not dirty, it just doesn't follow the principles the rest of us espouse. We're interested in software that follows these principles via a license like this.
That you're ascribing malice to the entire FOSS community seems a bit strange, when they're the ones who created the free software definition in the first place. The source is available but is not free software even in the original definition.
>Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.
So, personal theory, wrt AGPL. Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.
>The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.
You're right that a business might offer a fee for free software under this definition, but that's unrelated to it being free to distribute under any clauses.
Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.
Is Amazon Linux a common Linux distro? If so, it's often distributed with AGPL licensed code, I can think of a few pieces of software it has that are AGPL. They haven't been able to do internal forks of Ghostscript, if they were ever to do so, because of AGPL.
Debian is also the other more common one distros with AGPL software included with it.
Other things like forks of BerkleyDB by hyperscalers have all ended up as FOSS because of AGPL. Presumably this is a better example of where non-AGPL code would have not actually seen the light of day.
Sorry, I'll put that in air quotes, I don't believe free software is disease causing :) just speaking about the common concern is whether or not AGPL copyleft applies to everything involved in responding to a network request (it does not).
>An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.
In US courts, the case law shows that the "virality" is not really an open question because of GPLv3 case law, and has never been interpreted that way. I'm not sure why you're commenting about this scenario when you're unaware that this has been actually tried in courts.
In fact, we saw that in infamous Neo4j AGPL case, actually. AGPL worked as intended and protected the AGPL software in a similar way to LGPL. The court went on to protect non-GPL compliant additions that Neo4j made as being considered contagious, even, going even further to protect the original licensee than intended with the original unmodified license.
So, just recapping, you've gone from stating that Amazon could firewall off AGPL because it has no case law, and after learning it does has its case law includes GPLv3 that it simply may not be 'viral' enough because that hasn't been tested in court, to now learning it has been tested in court and successfully enforced.
Oh I agree! And I think it's straightforward to comply with.
I was just explaining the common legal concerns that pop up with the license, and that too much 'contagion' has historically been a gripe about its lack of case law.
Yes, that's the MongoDB variant which codifies it directly, and SF Conservancy and other legal entities promotion FOSS licenses states that the network stack contagion concern does not actually apply for the AGPL. But because AGPL doesn’t dig into the definition of "access", simply defining it as “users interacting with it remotely through a computer network”, nor define clear boundaries for how the "contagious" part of GPLv3 interacts with the rest of the network stack of this clause, it has meant that some lawyers think that a court may overly broadly interpret the definition.
So far this contagion concern hasn't actually played out, and big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros - and nothing thus far has been compelled to be open sourced that isn't AGPL software.
The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.