LICENSING: Are you dead set on GPL3?

AFAIK lgpl allows shared libs to be linked, but not statically unless there is an exception. It means a shared lgpl lib would not require the rest of your prog to be lgpl/gpl. Any changes to the lib require to be published though as in normal GPL.

Most of the tech multinationals pay a bounty per successfully awarded patent. For BlackBerry it was $5000. Interestingly, at BlackBerry that was per author so a nice sideline in extra income was to add everyone in your team as authors, then you all got $5000 each. The real authors got free drinks and food from everyone else for a few months, plus a great deal of goodwill.

I was sent an article touching on that recently:

I think there are two types of superstar engineer, the ones who like to get paid their worth and those who like extra freedom to choose their work and who they work with. You can usually have either, but not both unless you are quite lucky.

I would also say that European engineers generally tend heavily towards the latter type, mainly because earning more equals being taxed very considerably more, so in the end why bother grinding yourself into the ground for a few percent more take home income? In the US because capital income is taxed at 15%, your marginal tax rate actually falls as you earn more which is ludicrous and immoral, but if you were young I can see point of banging a few million into the bank by working very hard for a few years and then you can sit back for the rest of your life and never worry ever again about money or mortgages. Not exactly good for society having all your best and brightest retire young as millionaires, mind you.

Niall

4 Likes

Good article, I also think there are different Engineers, the core guys who produce foundation stuff and are interested in making that better and there are front end engineers who produce amazing apps that are fast to market and many fast to die, but everything is fast and uses many API’s. The latter are easier to identify output and pay, the former are just deeper and harder to quantify output. Personally I see them as very much equal in the requirements spec, but many ignore the former.

I think with SAFE app devs will get great rewards and core devs some recondition, I see the core folks needing lots and lots of unmanaged time to think and be driven hard by the App devs who want their API’s (I see Viv and his team pushing this part for us) and the APP devs get pushed by the end users and clients. So for us I see us getting a great system up and running that is very well engineered and then let the core engineers really take a ton of time to figure out how to make the core smaller more efficient and easier to use. The app devs will be doing the work then to keep everyone employed and the users should then use and consequently pay for everything with gusto because their experience is so good. That is the plan anyway lest folks go to where they want to go in terms of work and find their own place for as long as they wish with the ability to move freely between jobs.

I like the reward folks for patents, in our case its more likely papers and research, something I think we should investigate further, like contributions to boost and other OSS projects etc. being rewarded and of course worked on in work time, because it lifts everyone (creates a rising tide).

5 Likes

A slight counter argument @dirvine… The problem app authors face is intense competition. It’s a lottery, and many can work hard and never make money, even if their product is good. This pattern is repeated and encouraged by the ecosystems of the app store, in music, arts etc. Anything that appeals to the mass audience is prone to this winner takes all pattern, unlike the artisan / craftsman who is employed for her labour or output, not for popularity.

EDIT: Instead of reproducing the celebrity model, is there a way to foster the artisan craftsman softy? I guess they are more like the core developers, so maybe we can build on and extend that to support more people in honest useful labor?

EDIT2: I guess the answer is for app authors to form collectives, so big winners benefit from collective resources and in return share a proportion of their earnings with everyone.

Ah don’t get me wrong, In the end App devs are likely the most important, my point is the lower down folks are not visible and not understood. Sort of like the medical researchers and many others, its one reason I like resource based ideas rather than cash. A huge area, but we need to be able to give folks the time to work on all crazy ideas without applying monetary value as the only measure.

5 Likes

I like the first part of your proposition, as I do not have any problem seeing Alibaba killed. But the reason for that is that I do not like to see too much wealth or power concentrated in too few hands. Which is why the second part worries me. Alibaba is worth multiple billions of dollars. Somehow I don’t see your third proposition adding much at all. Closed source as the protector of the “billions of dollars” worth killer of a multi billion dollar company?

Not a very strong argument in favouring the MIT over the GPL license in my book.

Perhaps you can come up with a closed source example of how 250,000 companies would slay Alibaba, each of which would be worth a cool $1,000,000.

Is “accelerating adoption” be a worthy goal at any cost? Acceleration is nice, but permissive licensing means proprietary forks. Secretive forks can’t offer the same level of trust a free implementation of MaidSafe can. Since the big advantage of MaidSafe over other alternatives is trust, why encourage companies to implement competing mistrustful derivatives of MaidSafe? Competition is great, but not if it comes at the expense of what makes MaidSafe safe.

8 Likes

I keep trying to take this issue seriously, but I take such a long view of things that:

  1. I am willing to post to a thread that is over six months old!
  2. Since I think “closed source” will eventually mean “assumed to contain malware,” (just as “tax” is starting to mean “theft to aggrandize violent rulers”), I don’t think licensing really matters. Let the closed-sourcers use our stuff. Their hubris will eventually kill them anyway.
  3. The debate over intellectual property that took place at voluntaryist.com suggests to me that the problem isn’t closed-sourcers making a buck off idealists, but rather the legal community making bucks off technologists and coercive authorities using licensing to justify their lust to interfere with taxation and control.

Disclosure: I am the webmaster for voluntaryist.com.

4 Likes

I don’t think you’ll have a lot of disagreement within the Project SAFE community. The GPL3 is defensive. The MaidSafe team will be happy to see the code forked and innovated on, even closed by some–as long as nobody tries to tell the rest of us that we can’t use it.

2 Likes

Richard Stalman said approximately: that we dont want software that enslaves, we want software that frees and empowers.

We may learn the hard way that nothing is more efficient or effective at enslavement than software.
So we have to pay attention to slippery slopes and subtle long term errosion that becomes oppressive tradition. With this in mind everything must be done in the interest of the end user. Its not a stake holder situation at all, because we are all at our most vunerable, especially against software, as end users.

1 Like

I’d say we’re all stake holders in this case, whether we realize it or not. That’s why the open-source, public approach is so wise on the part of MaidSafe. David and the crew realized long ago that they were working on something that was intended to empower everyone equally, regardless of previous stake in how things are. By making it completely open and using “licensing” only to ensure its use could not be denied to anyone, they acknowledge from the start that everybody has a stake inherently, and that no one can claim a superior position “legally”.

Very pure, philosophically. And actually the only hope for success, I think.

4 Likes

I agree with you. I would point out that its a freedom software approach, as opposed to merely open and that was a big difference. It turns out the difference between open source and the free (as in freedom not free beer) is crucial, open source in this case wasnt good enough hence GPL3.

2 Likes
2 Likes

Linus Torvalds has said that the single most important thing he did with Linux was to make it GPL.

Please don’t allow yourself to be bought and keep the license GPL. Some day you will make the same realization as mr. Torvalds.

2 Likes

And what about this? http://www.cnet.com/news/torvalds-no-gpl-3-for-linux/

Linus Torvalds said Wednesday that he won’t convert Linux to version 3
of the General Public License, as he objects to digital rights
management provisions in the proposed update.

Well GPL3 is anti digital rights management which is the much better approach and SAFE takes it as implied in its use of GPL3

You should read the MaidSafe contributor’s license agreement then. MaidSafe clearly has the upper hand legally. http://maidsafe.net/licenses/CONTRIBUTOR.txt

1 Like

Much better them than Google, HP or Microsoft. Also, a huge portion of the company is owned by the MaidSafe Foundation. Check out their charter.

2 Likes

Around 1995 Jack Ma Davos opened China to commerce on the Internet, brought focus to credit system, showed absence of this trust system the business proves unreliable, even within escrow. Yes government always takes a bite out, though his action opened the door for opportunity of transparent systems today. Learning from Hx in e-commerce is tremendous for forward innovation. I am excited to see peoples lives improve with all I read here, most especially the hope for new generations to come together and to build heroically, most importantly to retain fun in thoughtful and grounded creativity.

I will take a break to watch the film now :smile: Thank You for this @dyamanaka

1 Like

Sorry I downloaded the source and couldn’t find the copyright and searching brought me here. Please make sure the license in in the source. Thank you.

I only read the first few pages as, Well it’s Mahogany here…

Thank goodness you chose the GPLv3. We all know that the copyright holders can make GPL’d software non-free. This is why Canonical and Redhat like the contributor license agreements so much. They still control the code. And can in effect make it non-copyleft passing the control back to the developer and not the users and then use their power to "embrace extend and destroy . The only way I see it to enable user freedom is to pass the copyright to the FSF .

Anyway thanks and happy New Year

2 Likes