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A comment on Rust has been forked to the Crab Language. Parent comment

Re:Rust has been forked to the Crab Language by toyg on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @11:26AM (#36125980)
1. Obviously you don't need licenses without copyright; but copyright will never go away, it's just too good an invention for too many fields of endeavour. FSF and GNU have never been anti-copyright and never will be, and that's just fine.

2. Nobody stops anybody from creating new licenses, in fact many many projects tried to do just that (MPL etc). Most of them fail simply because you cannot have your cake and eat it too, you either allow some things or you don't. You either require source code for programs users interact with on the network, or you don't; I'm not sure what middle ground is there to find. If you want to release certain parts of a website but not others, you can do it already in many areas - any SPA client-side code can be covered by GPL 3, for example. AGPL in many ways was a proto-GPL3, and it's to the FSF's credit that they didn't drop it, but actually updated it when v3 came about. They even try to explain the differences with dedicated documentation [0].

[0] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...

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Re:Rust has been forked to the Crab Language by alexvoda on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @06:02AM (#36136525)
1. My point is that by doing so they are not and have never been as ideologically pure as they and others believe they are. They are taking a pragmatic utilitarian stance instead of one based solely on ethics yet they chastise everyone else for ethical impurity (Stallman always swings around the big word "ethical") for choosing even the least bit of pragmatism. Their stance is fine but their hypocrisy is not.

2. The popularity of FOSS licences to some degree depends on endorsement by FOSS organisations like FSF and OSI. Custom licences are actively avoided and criticised. The GPL3 does nothing to protect against SaaS because that is not a threat that was envisioned by Stallman at the time. He was more concerned (and rightfully concerned) about Tivo-isation. Tivo-isation is a Right to Repair issue and it is really painful today. But Tivo-isation and SaaS are just different sides of the same coin called erosion of ownership. By failing to more strongly endorse the AGPL and by failing to provide a LAGPL, Stallman and the FSF (Stallman's fanclub) neglected the threat of SaaS. The LAGPL would have probably had more impact than just complaining about SaaS at conferences. Eventually some projects like MongoDB switched to non-FOSS licenses and others like CockroachDB switched to the BSL which eventually reverts to a FOSS licence after a predefined amount of time. For all of these projects the AGPL would have resulted in almost no adoption, but the LAGPL might have been a viable option. The FSF failed at their main job of license stewardship by failing to provide the licences society needed while being one of the two gatekeepers of licence proliferation.

Note, by SaaS I am currently referring to PROVIDER HOSTED SaaS which implies a service provider doing the computing on behalf of the user. SaaS can also be just a licensing model like it is for Photoshop.

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