They're silly, folks. Intellectual property is a spook.
Under communism all software will be free to share, use, and modify without restriction.
This post inspired by the current Ruby mimemagic gem license drama.
In case you're not following:
- mimemagic is a Ruby library (gem) used for detecting the MIME types of files, either by their extension or by their content
- it's widely used and included in Rails
- it was MIT licensed
- it was using an xml file from freedesktop dot org, which is a GPL project
- the GPL license means that every project that uses that software must also be GPL licensed - open-source, freely usable/modifiable/etc
- someone from freedesktop pointed this out to the mimemagic maintainer
- the maintainer republished the gem as GPL and yanked all the MIT licensed gems, breaking builds everywhere, and making rails currently uninstallable
I have a big headache because of ideology.
That's a fascinating read, thanks for sharing! I'd never seen the FAFO license before but I like that one too. Reminds me of Doug crockford's "don't use it for evil" license clause which the FSF people got mad about, Google Code won't host it, and IBM's lawyers specifically asked for an exception to it lol
Yeah, any time. I don't think I'm ever going to write code in my own time that can be used to make profit.
Christ, that was Crockford? How long until he comes out with a "GPL: The Good Parts" license and says something misogynistic in it?
Surprised he hasn't already tbh