As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.
Um. Mongodb changed its license before AWS offered a mongodb compatible service. And since I can't get the source code for documentdb, either it isn't actually using a fork of mongodb, or Amazon isn't complying with the AGPL. I think the latter is pretty unlikely.
AWS never offered MongoDB as a managed service, or used any of their server software when it was licensed under APLv3, or SSPLv1.
However, we have contributed patches to MongoDB even after their license change to improve its performance on Graviton processors. Because that's what's good for customers, and MongoDB is an important customer and partner.
AGPLv3 gives all the permissions needed to offer software as a manged service, just like every other FOSS license does. Unfortunately, in my personal opinion, the license has been co-opted by companies that do not care about Software Freedom, and rather hope that companies fear the license so they choose an alternative commercial agreement [1]. I don't think that's good for the community.
> Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service?
Each use of AGPLv3 licensed software has to be reviewed to ensure that the obligations of the license can be and will be met (and also screen for cases where it is known that the vendor of software does not prefer a company like Amazon import the software under a FOSS license). Today we use AGPLv3 licensed software internally, and include AGPLv3 licensed software in Amazon Linux (Ghostscript, in particular).
> Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service?
Yes, in varying ways. For example, it is not easy to provide "funding" for something like Apache Kafka. You need to have people working on the upstream.
> Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?
Yes, but not all changes are appropriate for upstream.
> But the (modified) source is available to consumers of the service either way, under the AGPL?
If Amazon made an AGPLv3 licensed program available to others over a network, it would have an obligation to provide to anyone that has access to that program the complete corresponding source.
Today, there aren't any services from Amazon that offer AGPLv3 licensed programs as a service. An example that may come to someone's mind is Grafana, but there is a partnership there, and AGPLv3 is not the binding license in that case.
In my personal opinion, AGPLv3 compliance is not difficult, so long as the licensor of the software is committed to community-oriented copyleft enforcement principles [1].
I think it would be awesome if Amazon could offer hosted AGPLv3 software, plus revenue share with the developers, code contributions to the original project and public forks containing non-upstreamable changes.
If AWS decides to copy your product, going closed-source or source-available just means they have to copy it from design docs or protocol specs. That's more friction than being able to reuse code outright, but it's not going to stop them.
If Amazon don't have a need to change anything in software, they'll just provide it as service without any problems. AGPL permits this.
If they have to change something, then they would likely want want to return hose changes in upstream to lower maintenance burden. Or just publish changes on github of upstream doesn't want to accept them. AGPL is fine with this too.
If Amazon would like create similar offering but with some secret sauce that they don't want to share, then they'll develop in-house solution from scratch and sell it as a service in AWS.
I heard there was a lawsuit about this, but can't find the outcome. Can someone please enlighten me how that story ended (if it had - but I think it should, it's been quite a while ago)?
I enjoyed the post and this is off-topic but when I was younger I was very pro-GPL and I still like copyleft, but to me the logic behind it makes less and less sense as time goes on. RMS compares software to a physical book you can modify, make copies of, and share with your friends, but in my opinion, software is much more like a power drill, a tool you can modify with difficulty and let people borrow. The analogy for software as media is also ironic because the FSF themselves claim that the GPL is not intended for media works and recommend other licenses (like Creative Commons which I support).
I do like the idea that GPL prevents big corps from taking advantage of programmers, but the idea that a GPL program is inherently better than a proprietary program written by an independent developer no longer makes sense to me, though independent proprietary software is often abandoned. But more importantly, it doesn't seem fair when a company makes an AGPL devops tool and then a bigger corp just sells that product as a service. When companies like MongoDB decide to change their licenses so that Amazon doesn't steal all their customers, I don't feel bad about it at all. I have no skin in this game but it blows my mind that there are FSF people who defend massive corporations essentially reselling a smaller company's work solely for the sake of ideological purity. Someone can correct me if I've been misinformed here.
This is not a barrier. Amazon is perfectly able to publish their changes if any. Because the moat is that its hosted inside AWS at a button click. They can also host it for cheaper as they don't have to pay anything to develop the product.
Then why did Mongo relicense? I assumed that AGPL was not enough to maintain their business which is why they are now using a more extreme form of AGPL that is no longer considered Free.
You can fully, legally use AGPL software as Amazon was doing as long as you follow the licensing terms.
Which doesn’t help the FOSS developers extract money out of the cloud users because they can just use the free (for whatever value of ‘free’ Amazon provides) bundled version without any support contacts or whatever.
If your entire business model is based on giving away the software you can see how this might be a problem, no?
Are you disagreeing with me or just giving more detail? Because I think that's what I was saying. My opinion is that this is not fair to a company like MongoDB.
For clarification: MongoDB is still Free as in beer, but not free as in Libre. IOW, Anyone can use MongoDB without paying money, but they cannot offer it to others as-a-service without providing the entire stack of hosting software back to the community. And of course AWS won't do that. So therefore the license is not 'free' to AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.
I think this is a reasonable take. To add a slightly more unreasonable one to it,
I would rather just never read GPL source fullstop. I don't want the copyleft to taint me and inadvertently reproduce copyleft code where I can't, so I will just avoid reading it entirely. I try to avoid using GPL libraries entirely if I can help it since inevitably I may need to circle back and read some of the source.
It's an interesting idea and I cheer those who manage to live in an ideologically pure bubble but I don't think it's fair to say GPL is strictly more free than BSD/MIT.
I saw Tom be the awards emcee at Yale's hackathon and I don't really get why he acts the way he does. It's some persona that makes people hate startup founders even more than they already do. Add the Yale tag to that and boom you've got your classic Ivy privilege douchebag. I know people from Ivies (including my own) and it's really rare for people to act like this. Is he giving these groups a bad name? I don't know him personally, and he's probably a fine guy, but it seemed like by the end of the event people were sort of sick of his antics.
>MRI executes Ruby via an interpreted stack-machine bytecode language known as YARV
On Wikipedia:
>Since YARV has become the official Ruby interpreter for Ruby 1.9, it is also named KRI (Koichi's Ruby Interpreter), in the same vein as the original Ruby MRI, named for Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto.
AFAIK, technically, ruby 1.9 and later are no longer MRI, but KRI. So, yeah, I would say that technically speaking, refererring to current versions of ruby as "MRI" is not terribly correct.
On the other hand, to tell the "default" ruby apart from jruby and rubinius, one might still refer to it as "MRI". Also, Robert Metcalfe once said something to the effect that "Ethernet cannot die - if something comes along to replace it, it will just be called Ethernet" or something along those lines. Maybe something similar is at work here? (Sloppiness is more likely, though.)
I am not 100% sure, but wasn't KRI a fork of MRI that at some point simply was merged? It would be a bit strange if the whole interpreter would be called KRI when most code was still written by Matz. Though Ko1 is the main developer currently Matz is still the visionary and decision maker.
A problem is that if you want to sync regular text files to apps on your phone we have formed somewhat of a Dropbox monoculture where DB is generally the main or sometimes the only syncing option available in mobile apps. We should really start to move away from these tools.
Syncthing is great, but the devs say they can't develop a mechanism for sync between operating systems on the same computer, which is something I really need.
You could do as I do: Syncthing on laptop <> Raspberry Pi <> phone.
Now all changes made on either the phone (OS #1, in your case) or laptop (OS #2) will be synced to the Pi (or VPS) ready to be picked up by the other device when switched on/synced. Placing a device between the two others ensures that all files are up to date.
Without it you can run into situations where you've updated a file on the laptop that is also open on the phone, accidentally saving the phone changes over the laptop changes, then saving the laptop changes back over the phone changes. Syncthing has versioning, but this setup negates the need for most rollbacks.
I use it to keep notes in simple text files with Vim and Notepad++. No need for markdown or images here, so I just use basic formatting, timestamps and hashtags to help with searching and browsing.
Including an encrypted filesystem, alongside Syncthing's encrypted syncing, can keep data that bit more secure.
All open source, all encrypted, all self-hosted. Give yourself 30 minutes to set it up, if that.
Notes:
The Pi is the Pi2, but until a recent upgrade it worked fine on the Pi1. The phone is an n900, still doing a great job 5 years on... but in need of a replacement, preferably another phone that can install arbitrary Linux software and is not walled into an 'apps' ecosystem.
The OP was interested in Android support. I don't think there's an app for Syncthing, but you could SSH to your VPS, with notes synced to your laptop? You're just missing that middle device in that case.
Most of programming is done in something reminiscent of type theory. Actual languages are more complicated because they either are impure (C, C++ etc) or involve non-total functions (Haskell). Idris, Coq and Agda can be reduced to some sort of type theory.
On the other hand, most of mathematics can be done in first order logic (FOL).
As for English, I'm not much of a linguist but I believe the closest equivalent to the above for English (and other natural languages) would be Categorical Grammar or maybe Montague grammar.
The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS everywhere because of Eich.
Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS project. It won't die.
The comments I read took rather a different position I thought - that they believe people should not use Firefox because Mozilla "fired" Eich. Still a sickening position.
At the time, Mozilla was savaged by both the far left and far right. Both sides called for boycotts.
The comments in this story appear to be from the right in this case. I guess the left lost interest (not surprising since they got what they demanded, for Eich to be removed - or maybe just leftists don't read that website).
The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera.
I don't believe Firefox will ever gain marketshare again but Mozilla still has some time to come up with another bread winner before they've lost relevance. They got some serious technology in the works with Servo and there is still lots room to improve browsing on mobile for those that are paying attention.
"The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera."
What's the leading browser on mini-computers and mainframes? Mozilla is not a significant player in mobile and that does not look to be changing and that's where we are headed.
Sure, but they still have time before we get there and like I said before there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of web browsing on mobile. There is a reason people prefer to use apps instead of the web on mobile but not the desktop.
I've never lived in SF but this is a reason why people sometimes mention how they prefer to live elsewhere. I've lived in Los Angeles and New York and I feel a nice sense of diversity in interests and backgrounds [of all forms] and I like it. And the tech communities aren't too small either.
As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.