Re:Making Open Source software safer and more secure
by teddyh on Thursday January 13, 2022 @04:57PM
(#29927460)
What you’ll have is an unmaintained insecure fork held in place by a company who doesn’t have to do any maintenance, since they, and their code, are declared “secure” by fiat.
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Re:Making Open Source software safer and more secure
by animal_spirits on Thursday January 13, 2022 @05:00PM
(#29927512)
I don't see how that's any different than where we started from? Google can't just take over an open source library and declare no one can work on it any more.
Re:Making Open Source software safer and more secure
by teddyh on Friday January 14, 2022 @04:40AM
(#29932436)
If it’s MIT or otherwise permissively licensed, they absolutely can take it over by forking, putting enough work into it that it’s not worth continuing the original version, and then not releasing it openly, or with complicated entanglements.
If it’s GPL or similar, the process is slower. They will probably immediately start a grand redesign which will, incidentally, not use the GPL library. In the short run, they will start a replacement implementation of the GPL library, incidentally permissively licensed. Both will take time, but usually gets there.
Both of these cases are seen all the time.