[HN Gopher] Mold linker creator considers changing the license
___________________________________________________________________
Mold linker creator considers changing the license
Author : mshockwave
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-11-06 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Grimburger wrote:
| All seems like reasonable points, it's highly project-dependant
| but since switching to mold I've seen solid overall speedups. If
| I was to put a saved time value on that for me alone it would be
| huge. At $1200/month in donations for full time work, the value
| large companies get out of it is huge.
|
| The actual meat of the title buried down in the tweets:
|
| > Given this situation, I'm seriously considering changing the
| mold/macOS license (not mold/Unix license) from AGPL to a
| commercial, source-available one. Something like individuals
| would be able to use it for free but companies have to pay.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I've donated to FOSS projects before. I have never and will never
| donate to any proprietary software projects.
| j-krieger wrote:
| It's incredibly sad that companies worth literal trillions of
| dollars don't have a couple thousand dollars to spare for open
| source developers who create insanely valuable software for their
| employees. I remember that brew's (the defacto standard macos
| package management tool) maintainer had similar projects in the
| past.
|
| Bad tools grind operations to a halt and feel incredibly
| dissatisfying to work with. Mold is insanely fast and pushing
| further in a problem space (linking) that can't be avoided and
| has in the past been dominated by slow tooling. Corporations save
| real dollars when their developer uses free software by open
| source maintainers, but due to their greed and their top heavy
| management which lacks insight on what speeds up development they
| give nothing back.
|
| ---
|
| One solution I would propose is that industry giants form a
| general OSS funding collective, which selects interesting /
| helpful oss projects and grants funding to their developers.
| sph wrote:
| Perhaps the idea of creating open source hoping that these
| trillion dollar companies pay you is misguided and naive.
|
| It's like being an employee and hoping that your boss gives you
| a raise once in a while. In my experience you have to demand
| it, and often get it (yet most people are terrified at the idea
| of doing so), but otherwise the big boss wouldn't try to pay
| more for something they're already getting (for free).
|
| It's not big business' fault, it's how people behave in
| general. It's basic human psychology.
|
| If you want to make a living out of your software, don't make
| it open source, hope it's complex enough you'll get hired as a
| consultant, or build a company out of your open-source project.
| Relying on donations it's like busking every day hoping a music
| executive offers you a record deal.
|
| I've seen far too many brilliant engineers having a hard time
| scraping by because they have no sense of business. It's a
| valuable skill to learn.
| Vecr wrote:
| Does no one else have copyrights preventing a license change?
| That's one thing I like about contributing to projects (at least
| those without license assignment), is once you do that the main
| author(s) can't re-license the project at all without your
| consent. They could re-write all your code instead, but it at
| least makes it harder.
| aseipp wrote:
| That's not entirely true, the "threshold of originality" is
| relevant. Contributing typofixes or even things like minor non-
| functional refactorings (i.e. renaming methods or variables)
| isn't going to qualify as an original contribution. A common
| mistake is thinking stuff like relicensing is some kind of
| binary 1-or-0 thing. It's not. It's a legal concern, not a
| technical one and is therefore subject to many messy human
| interpretations of ownership, law, et cetera.
|
| In any case it does not matter here because contributing to
| mold requires your changes to be available under both AGPLv3
| and MIT, and so any derivative proprietary works can be
| considered derivatives of the MIT licensed version. It
| therefore isn't "changing the existing license", it's "making a
| proprietary derivative, which the existing license allows."
| jacooper wrote:
| Paid software support and seems to be the way to go, but I don't
| think this really works for this project.
| josephcsible wrote:
| How do GNU and LLVM maintain linkers while staying financially
| solvent without going proprietary? Why won't the same strategy
| work in this case?
| tristan957 wrote:
| Companies pay employees to work on them.
|
| If you know of a company who could support Rui, then please
| let him know.
| pyler wrote:
| He was working for Google but he left recently, no? I doubt
| Google would have any problem if he works on mold linker
| full time.
|
| I believe he decided to do things this way.. one man show
| is always problematic (atleast it is easy to go back to lld
| if anything happens to the author or the project itself)
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Part of a reason is because most companies don't have an
| internal process to start supporting an open-source project. If
| they need to buy a license, that's fine, that's part of a usual
| business. But giving money away to "free" software? There's no
| precedent and hard to justify.
|
| The author already sells licenses, so I am not sure that is the
| case.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-06 23:02 UTC)