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Cake day: February 15th, 2025

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  • mainstream

    is the keyword here. Mainstream is really big.

    They come for the lions share first. You do nothing because you think you’re unaffected. Then later they will come for you. And nobody will do anything for you either.

    Of course, professional criminals like yourself (sarcasm) will find a way to escape the law. But I doubt it’s nice to live on the edge of society like that anyway, being unable to interact with most services.







  • If so, then imo the GPL is still working as intended.

    I guess it depends on the goal the author has. If the goal is to let big companies pay their employees for contributions to open source, then it seems GPL3 is not the right license. Which is also the reason why Linux is licensed under GPL2 btw.

    If the goal is to make companies avoid contributing and then copy it while claiming they did proper clean-room design (lets be honest, it happens all the time and rarely does anybody hear of it or bring it to court) … then yeah it works as intended.


  • HelloRoot@lemy.loltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlMy thoughts on GPL vs. permissive licenses
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    3 days ago

    More like, neighbour invites everybody to their pool, but if you go, you have to sign a legal agreement that you invite everybody to your whole house.

    Of course I wouldn’t go if I don’t want everybody in my house - so I can just build a pool myself and use that.

    At no point was I ever mad or appaled by the neighbours decision (nor did I insinuate that in my comment above). The neighbour is allowed to put any condition on the pool visit that they want to. But this is a discussion about whether such condition is beneficial to the pool owner or not and in what ways.

    It has pros and cons and is not as onesided as you claim.



  • HelloRoot@lemy.loltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlMy thoughts on GPL vs. permissive licenses
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    4 days ago

    I can tell you about a project I was working on at a previous job.

    There were open source kicad files for a thing we needed. We wanted to modify it slightly and then include it in our finished product and also offer it individually for tinkerers or as a replacement part. But they were licensed under GPL3.

    Because of the license, instead of contributing some improvements to the existing prpject, our engineers were instructed to just look at it and learn from it and then do a completely new internal project from scratch. They were told to make sure it could not be detected as a derivative and never use the existing files. And then to include our planned improvements. Just so that we could avoid licensing it as GPL3 and were free to do it however we wanted.

    So the end result is, a new proprietary thing got created, the company got money, the customers don’t get the source, the existing open source project got no contributions, even though it got exploited in a sense. There were other MIT licensed (and other licenses) projects where we have just contributed instead.

    Don’t ask me why exactly the management/legal was so against GPL3. I’m not really into understanding it deeply, but my takeaway from this is similar to OP.