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from the click-to-agree-information-wants-to-be-free dept.
Software developer Bryan Cantrill has a second, more detailed, blog post on EULA plus Copyright frankenlicenses. The combination of the two appears to bring in a lot of baggage from both proprietary licensing and EULAs while being dressed up as FOSS. He writes a blog post in response to a longer discussion on HN and blog post from the CEO of Confluent. He discusses the situation, raises quite a few questions (three are quoted below), and concludes with an assessment on the seriousness of the problem and a call to action.
This prompts the following questions, which I also asked Jay via Twitter:
1. If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software?
2. Do you consider the Confluent Community License to be a contract?
3. Do you consider the Confluent Community License to be a EULA?
[...] To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! I don’t think I’m being too alarmist when I say that this is potentially a dangerous new precedent being set; it would be very helpful to have your lawyers offer their perspectives on this, even if they disagree with one another. We seem to be in some terrible new era of frankenlicenses, where the worst of proprietary licenses are bolted on to the goodwill created by open source licenses; we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:11PM (1 child)
I agree that "Software which you can view the source code but without the required open source license is called \"source available\" or \"source viewable\" software", but based on experience I disagree with "never \"open source\"". You may feel that the terms *should* be used in the way that you describe, but they often aren't. And I'm not certain that all the groups that split off the term "Open Source" had the same reason for doing so. I accept that *some* of them had the reason that you are saying. I'm rather certain that some members of that group had very different reasons, that they considered not the best publicity to assert publicly.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:15PM
The Government is a Bird