paequ2

TIL! Interesting!

Ah, yep. FUTO License is neither Free™ nor Open Source™ (nor are they trying to be). However, they still allow users to see, modify, and distribute code.

You may use or modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

But, yeah, they're aiming for something different.

community contributions to the codebase, assuming that was an objective

I don't think that's the main objective of the FUTO license. I believe the main objective is to incentivize developers to create great software that respects individual users and fights back against the big tech oligarchy.

But that implies that for commercial users – like a corporation – they’ll have to negotiate a separate license

Yep. That's the point.

they can buy their way into any sort of license terms they want, and the normie user can’t complain.

I don't quite see the issue here. Can you explain a little more? A third-party would just get a license to sell the software, not to develop it.

trust that Futo Holdings won’t do something reprehensible with the copyrights, be it licensing to certain hostile countries or whatever.

Isn't this currently possible with Open Source™? Like the whole point of Open Source™ is that anyone can use the software for anything, right? ICE probably uses Linux now to manage people in internment camps in the US. If anything, wouldn't the FUTO license be better for potentially preventing this?

would corporations even want to contribute? ... CorpA’s contributions are available for CorpB to use, but CorpB has zero obligation to ever contribute a line of code which CorpA could later benefit from

Isn't this exactly the case in Open Source™? Google may contribute something to Linux, but my company will never contribute anything. Seems like Google is ok with my company benefiting from their work.

FUTO License is not open source. They do not claim to be open source. They're not trying to be open source. They call themselves "source first".

Hm. That's a good question actually. I get the feeling this FUTO license is more designed for local apps, not SaaS.

If the license changes to something hostile. The users can keep using the version before the new license. Someone could even fork the project and offer it for free. This is allowed.

You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

But for SaaS, there's also the cost of running servers on the cloud... so you either foot the bill and offer the SaaS for free OR you ask for a commercial license.

Which... actually... is this the end of the world?

You could still have your fork. People could still offer it online publicly. But as soon as you start getting so many users that you need to ask for donations, then you'd have to pay.

Seems like individual app users wouldn't be affected much. Only people setting themselves up to be service providers would end up paying.

I still feel like it’s shady to keep calling it “open source” when open source is already well defined.

They are not open source. They do not currently claim to be open source.

https://futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/

calling our software “open source.” ... we’re changing. ... We’ll use the term “source first” instead for our projects.

Oh, interesting. Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) was involved BUSL (BSL) and Post-Open.

• Making the Business Source License Open Source Compliant
• Business Source License (BSL 1.1): Requirements, Provisions, and History

If you statically link against an LGPLed library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.

Yeah, I think this is the hard part with Go. I've never seen anyone do anything with objects in Go. Everything is compiled into 1 binary, often statically linked. I'm not sure it's possible to build a Go binary by using object files.

TIL about Post-Open license. I've also been looking at BSL and FUTO's Source First license.

LGPL

The license seems to be targeted towards languages like C/C++. On the other hand, languages like Go do a lot of static linking, so it may be impossible to comply with this license in Go.

MPL may be a good alternative here.

you don’t care that much about the AGPL clauses (e.g. because your app isn’t a server).

I've been thinking about this recently... Let's say you develop some local CLI. You think it's not a server, so you license as GPL.

Later someone comes and offers your CLI as SaSS. They write the server piece that just calls your local CLI on their server and pipes the input and output between the user.

So... should you always prefer AGPL over GPL?

Every car I've owned has had a way to change the speedometer from freedom units to ✨ metric ✨ .

For knowing what speed I should be going, I roughly follow these numbers. (Note, these are not equivalent.)

• 35mph -> 50km/h
• 60mph -> 100km/h
• 70mph ->110km/h

Also, very roughly 10km ≈ 5mi.

However, most of the time I just follow the flow of traffic.

I voluntarily switched to metric like 10 years ago, so meters, celsius, grams, etc make more sense to me now.