[HN Gopher] Mold linker may switch to a source-available license
___________________________________________________________________
Mold linker may switch to a source-available license
Author : MForster
Score : 170 points
Date : 2022-11-13 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| secondcoming wrote:
| He could try putting ASCII-art adverts in the output
| adrr wrote:
| So is this a copyright agreement or a EULA? Copyright agreements
| only cover distribution and if you something internally, it
| doesn't cover your usage. Only if you distribute the code does it
| come into play.
| rpdillon wrote:
| IANAL.
|
| Copyright covers four rights, one of them being distribution.
| It also covers creating derivative works, copying, and public
| performance. Many licenses based on copyright put restrictions
| on use; indeed, the BSL (the same license the author is
| thinking of moving to) does exactly this.
|
| In the case of the GPL, you only need to provide source code to
| those you distribute the software to; that may be what you're
| thinking of with respect to distribution, but that's more an
| artifact of the GPL (and its goals) than copyright.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Given the horrible performance of the LLVM compiler and linker
| I'd think Apple or one of the other LLVM backers would jump at
| hiring/funding this guy. Making the LLVM compiler/linker faster
| should be a top priority given how important it is to developer
| UX and productivity.
| [deleted]
| wyldfire wrote:
| > Given the horrible performance of the LLVM compiler and
| linker
|
| lld is second only to mold in performance. Rui used to work on
| lld at Google. Apple has a significant investment in ld64 and
| probably doesn't want to abandon it.
| mshockwave wrote:
| > Apple has a significant investment in ld64 and probably
| doesn't want to abandon it.
|
| Yep, Facebook and a few people in Google are actually the
| primary contributors to LLD's MachO support
| bloudermilk wrote:
| Are there any examples of popular OSS projects using a non-
| commercial-only license?
| janober wrote:
| We at n8n (https://n8n.io/) have something similar (but not
| identical) with our Sustainable Use License. Here the blog-post
| where we talk about it some more:
| https://blog.n8n.io/announcing-new-sustainable-use-license/
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Sounds like an interesting licence, good luck!
| ddevault wrote:
| Non-commercial OSS projects is a contradiction in terms.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| The source can still be open even if you aren't permitted to
| run it for commerce.
| dist1ll wrote:
| That's referred to as "source-available" to distinguish it
| from free/libre software.
| nrook wrote:
| The AGPL is not a non-commercial license, but it essentially
| functions as one, as most companies aren't willing to comply
| with it. There are some projects that make their code available
| under the AGPL, and also let users pay to get access under a
| different license. Grafana is an example.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| rpdillon wrote:
| It's designed to maximize freedom overall, not freedom for
| one individual. There's some tension between those two
| goals.
|
| I think it's basically the software equivalent of the
| Paradox of Tolerance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
| [deleted]
| PetitSasquatch wrote:
| This is how it appears to me also.
|
| I suspect by 'free', GNU licenses aren't really referring
| to user-freedom more so source-code-freedom.
|
| It all depends on the developer's objectives, no doubt.
| cannam wrote:
| Source-code freedom is user freedom. It's effectively a
| sort of guarantee.
|
| The additional freedom that BSD licences provide is
| freedom for developers to do what they like, not anything
| to do with users.
|
| (The biggest practical advantage of a BSD licence for
| most developers is that if you use one when publishing
| your code while you work for a company, you yourself will
| still be able to reuse that code after you leave.)
| hedora wrote:
| GPL 3 has similar (in spirit and mechanism) usage
| restrictions as the AGPL.
|
| GPL3 cracks down on TiVo style lockdowns:
|
| Here is an encrypted binary and source code. No existing
| computer will run either without a secret key you cannot
| have.
|
| AGPL cracks down on Google style lockdowns:
|
| You can't have binaries or sources, but you can use this
| GPL software as long as you agree to a long and ever
| changing EULA that includes clauses for surveillance,
| binding arbitration and worse.
|
| BSD licenses are only freer for developers, not for end
| users. The F in FOSS refers to the users' freedoms, not the
| developer's / vendor's freedoms.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| How is the AGPL not free ?
| bbanyc wrote:
| Ghostscript used to have the most recent version under a non-
| commercial license (AFPL) and older versions relicensed to GPL,
| before they switched to AGPL only.
| rectang wrote:
| No, because excluding commercial users is a field-of-use
| restriction, and you're not FOSS if you only offer a license
| which imposes a field-of-use restriction. Which is fine! Just
| don't call it FOSS.
| ghaff wrote:
| Furthermore, it's really hard to define what non-commercial
| actually means. Creative Commons spent something like a
| decade trying to scope a reasonable definition and eventually
| ended up essentially punting. With a few exceptions like
| (arguably) secondary public education use, pretty much any
| non-trivial use has _some_ commercial component.
| Grimburger wrote:
| > you're not FOSS
|
| > don't call it FOSS
|
| The grandparent comment clearly said OSS.
| detaro wrote:
| Their statement is just as true if you insert "OSS" instead
| of "FOSS".
| ekidd wrote:
| Technically, both the original Open Source Definition
| https://opensource.org/osd and the older Free Software
| Definition https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
| sw.html.en#translations both explicitly require the ability to
| use programs in a commercial context.
|
| In the case of the Free Software Definition, this makes perfect
| sense: the FSF wants people to have certain freedoms at work,
| as well as freedom in their personal lives.
|
| The other challenge is that turning an open source project into
| a proprietary project isn't as simple as changing the license
| and asking for money. You need to build an entire business from
| scratch, and learn to close sales somehow (or sell to
| consumers). This will take up at least half your time.
| djur wrote:
| By definition there aren't any, but MAME used to be distributed
| under such a license. I think Debian in particular has been
| pretty successful at exerting pressure to either relicense or
| replace software with non-commercial restrictions.
| runfaster2000 wrote:
| Do you have an example of that? That is really interesting.
| syrrim wrote:
| A better link might the google doc explaining in detail:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54s...
|
| >A major obstacle in getting financial support is most companies
| don't have an internal process to start funding an open-source
| project. If they need to buy a license, that's fine, that's part
| of their usual business. But supporting (or giving money away to)
| "free" software is almost impossible. It raises too many
| questions at every level of management. What is the accounting
| item it should be categorized to? Is there any legal implication?
| Who can approve it in the first place? And last but not least,
| why do they have to do it if it's available for free?
|
| I would think you could work around many of these problems
| without going source-available. You could simply sell licenses to
| people despite already handing out an open source license for
| free (the sqlite approach iirc). Since the project is apparently
| otherwise AGPL licensed, I would think businesses would be quite
| open to receiving a normal commercial license instead. To sweeten
| the deal further, you could come up with some list of enterprise
| features that would be uniquely available in the commercial
| variant.
|
| As a risk of using the BSL, I would cite the danger of the
| project becoming less popular among average developers, an effect
| that might compound in the long term ultimately killing the
| project. I don't personally use mold, so I don't know how strong
| this effect would be.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I think this is fine. The author has the right to do whatever
| they want with their own product. Bummer for me as I like this
| linker, but probably wouldn't use it if this change is made, as
| my small one person company wouldn't be able to pay.
|
| That said, I personally don't see it being successful if this is
| done, and my suspicion is it might even be forked so an open
| source version could remain. It sucks that they aren't making any
| money, but I don't think this type of project works in any model
| except open source anymore. I could be wrong and hope for the
| sake of the author that I am.
| devit wrote:
| They could make only the OSX version proprietary, which would not
| be a big issue since OSX users have already opted in to slavery.
| layer8 wrote:
| More projects should do this, if only for everyone to get a
| better picture about if and when this is viable.
| trurl wrote:
| I think one thing that would definitely help the mold project is
| to have a clearer price and licensing model. The only thing I can
| find is https://opencollective.com/mold-linker.
|
| It would be much easier to be able to go to my manager with that
| kind of information. Right now the conversation goes:
|
| "Hey, this linker could save us quite a bit of time on our
| enormous executable." "Okay, how much will it cost us?" "Well,
| there is this site where you can donate on a regular basis."
| steeve wrote:
| We (Zenly) would have absolutely paid for mold (should we have
| lived). Linking the app was 40s on a M1 Pro.
| hedora wrote:
| As a corporate open source developer, we would be forced to
| switch off mold immediately if we were using it, for at least two
| reasons:
|
| 1) Whether or not we could get finance to pay for a license, we
| would not be willing to force the rest of our community to pay.
|
| 2) What is a "user"? A developer seat? What if CI / CD has a
| public facing github queue? Are people submitting PRs users? Do
| end users of our service count?
|
| I'd strongly suggest a "call for pricing" model until you have
| good answers to the above. (Good == what the market will bear;
| figuring out will require you to initiate run ~ 100 customer
| calls).
|
| Also, why revert to GPL, not AGPL3 or Apache? GPL is a weird
| middle ground these days. "Some users get Freedom, but unlike
| with AGPL, Google, AWS and *aaS users get to pound sand. Also,
| unlike Apache, maybe we will patent troll you later."
|
| This stuff is hard. Good luck!
| googlryas wrote:
| Why would you need to switch off immediately? You can still use
| the version you're using in perpetuity with the license you
| agreed to.
|
| If the main developer died, would you feel the need to
| immediately switch off of it? Is anyone even tracking the
| liveliness of the developer in your org?
| hedora wrote:
| Specifically for mold:
|
| It is a commodity (there are other linkers), and the main
| reason to use it is developer productivity. Using a fast,
| bitrotting and unsupported linker is worse than using a slow,
| up-to-date linker.
|
| We'd probably wait one release cycle to switch (maybe the
| replacement linker introduces bugs or something.)
|
| Having said that, there is a clear line from "linking is 5x
| faster" to $10-100K annual savings for the business, so I'd
| support paying a substantial license fee. (I do not hold the
| purse strings, so that doesn't matter in my current gig.)
| doorman2 wrote:
| Are there any out-of-the-box non-commercial licenses? I've wanted
| to do this too, but I'm too lazy to find an appropriate license.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Mongo, Graylog, and Elastic use the SSPL.
| ralmidani wrote:
| Lots of options here: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
| wmf wrote:
| https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0
|
| https://prosperitylicense.com/
| D13Fd wrote:
| I think this is totally fine, but they will need a better
| definition of what is and is not permissible. "Corporate" is a
| word that has many meanings. What about other entity types-sole
| proprietorships, partnerships? How about for-profit vs non-
| profit? Educational use? By students vs. schools themselves and
| faculty? Etc.
|
| If you start restricting things by type of use, you need an
| exceptionally thorough and clear license or you are going to wind
| up precluding many more people than you intend to.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The BSL (the proposed license) is fairly clear about this if
| you read the license. Most sole proprietorships and
| corporations of all types that make money or sell a product
| using it would have to pay. It's not clear that any of this is
| legally enforceable, though.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > It's not clear that any of this is legally enforceable,
| though.
|
| I'm pretty sure that it is legally enforceable in most
| jurisdictions, B2B contracts are almost always stronger/more
| binding than consumer ones (since that protections granted
| under consumer protection laws are gone, and there is a
| reasonable presumption that the parties have read and
| understand the contract). The blurrier part is for sole
| proprietorships, since it depends on whether their specific
| jurisdiction considers them as consumers under consumer
| protection laws (which uniformly weakens contracts to the
| extent that it does not comply with the guarantees for
| consumers).
|
| (Note that in most jurisdictions, most "copyright licenses"
| are considered as _contracts_. For example, multiple cases in
| French courts have resolved that GPL2 is considered a
| contract.)
|
| Also, the license text: https://mariadb.com/bsl11/
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| That's curious. In the UK a contract requires consideration
| and I can't see any here.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Contracts in the US also require consideration (IIRC from
| my intro biz law class). IANAL, but I think that the
| consideration is allowing you to use the IP (in exchange
| for your compliance with the license).
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| The software project gives the other party IP to use, and
| gets nothing in return. Might not even be told the other
| party is using their software.
|
| I don't think accepting a contract can qualify as
| consideration for that contract, as otherwise there would
| never be a need for consideration in any contract.
| zinekeller wrote:
| I'm not sure if English laws allows substitution, but
| technically in US law this contract indeed don't have a
| consideration. While mutual consideration makes it
| enforceable, the lack of it doesn't automatically make
| the contract void. You could argue that there's
| promissory estoppel:
|
| > Promissory estoppel/detrimental reliance: A contract
| without consideration is enforceable if the
| nonperformance of the promisor will cause injustice.
| Elements of promissory estoppel are (i) the promise has
| reasonable, foreseeable, and detrimental reliance on the
| promisor, and (ii) the enforcement of the promise is
| necessary to avoid injustice.
|
| In this case, you are nearly correct that the performance
| to honor the terms of the contract is essential, but
| technically not a consideration. (The IP code _is_
| consideration though.)
| orra wrote:
| FYI, consideration is required in English law, but not in
| Scots law.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| As others have pointed out, a lot of common law
| jurisdictions require that contracts have consideration
| from both parties. This is the key issue with non-
| permissive open-source licensing (and it's an issue with
| the GPL/AGPL too).
|
| Restrictive covenants on open source licenses might not be
| consideration, particularly because they apply to the IP
| licensed in the contract - something that the
| user/downloader of the software wouldn't have without the
| contract. In other words, you are giving them rights to use
| your IP in a few specific ways in exchange for nothing.
| They need to give up something of value that they wouldn't
| have otherwise had for it to undeniably be consideration.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| So if I work for a commercial company, but exclusively use
| the software for internal, non-sold activities is that ok? It
| is only when the software is used within a commercial product
| directly or is it anything that enable a commercial company
| to keep the lights running?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That's a decision for you (and your lawyer) to make after
| you read the license.
|
| They might have an argument against you if the software is
| at all part of your value chain.
| dark-star wrote:
| jessermeyer wrote:
| Deeply and needlessly cynical. rui tried to fund a high-value
| software infrastructure project on its own merit and it's not
| feasible long term. So a change is required.
|
| Hardly a bait and switch 'extortion'.
| dark-star wrote:
| Well, maybe going all-in in building a "high-value software
| infrastructure project on [your] own" is not a good idea if
| you don't have any concrete plans for funding right from the
| start? Changing the license to a non-FOSS is basically the
| most knee-jerk reaction you can do in that case. Find a
| maintainer. Give the project to the community. Become a
| regular contributor in your own spare time instead of the
| main (and sole) developer.
|
| There are so many better ways to handle such a situation.
|
| If you replace "building software" with "building a road" (or
| some other similar real-world infrastructure project),
| everyone would agree that it's a self-made problem and that
| there are other ways out rather than just "from tomorrow on
| this will be a toll-road". You can turn the road over to your
| city/municipality. Or you could let other take over the
| maintenance. If the road is useful, there will be others. If
| it isn't, well, everyone moves on.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Changing the license ... Give the project to the
| community
|
| Wrong - this is a false dichotomy. "changing" license is
| not retroactive. Older releases are still available to the
| community and anybody can fork the project and carry on a
| new release train.
| zokier wrote:
| > Find a maintainer. Give the project to the community.
|
| The code is out there for the community to pick up if they
| wish; anyone can rise up as a maintainer.
|
| Besides, how does above help at all in the author getting
| paid?
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| You are 100% free to fork the last permissively licensed
| commit and maintain it yourself. Looking forward to seeing
| you put in some work with the same enthusiasm that you use
| to tell people how to run their projects.
| eropple wrote:
| _> Give the project to the community._
|
| Why? Did the community give to him? It certainly sounds
| like it hasn't. What obligations does one have to a
| community that doesn't give back?
|
| _> There are so many better ways to handle such a
| situation._
|
| Better for who? You? Or him?
|
| If open-source communities want open-source, they're going
| to need to come to grips with the need for people to eat,
| and to do that they are at minimum going to need to _pass
| the hat_. If they 're not going to do that, this happens,
| and telling somebody who isn't you what they should do for
| "the community when "the community" doesn't support them
| is, frankly, wrong verging on immoral.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I feel for the maintainer, but looking at the performance chart
| in the readme, I think any engineer will have a hard time getting
| their company to approve paying a license for such a small
| improvement over LLVM ld.
|
| My big-tech company and my team don't care that build time for a
| small part of our application is 5 minutes (not a clean build,
| that would be an hour), so I know they wouldn't pay to save 10
| seconds. And linking is not even all of the time to build your
| application.
|
| From a financial point of view, the fact that the author is in
| Singapore and has a goal of $10K a month doesn't help.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Yeah, businesses are often cheapskates, and a couple seconds'
| worth of speedup aren't worth any money, especially if you're
| removing 10-20 seconds from a multi-hour build pipeline running
| on dedicated build boxes.
| jessermeyer wrote:
| If an engineer at a FAANG company reduced their global link
| times by even 10% they'd be promoted into early retirement.
|
| Mold is an order of magnitude faster.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The guys that improved dependency download time by up to 80%
| at my company (Amazon) sure as hell are enjoying the 3% raise
| they got like everyone else.
|
| I agree with you that Mold is an order of magnitude faster
| than the competition (sometimes). However in that case the
| absolute value is more representative than the relative
| number. Your linking time going from 10 seconds to 1 or 2
| seconds is only a tiny improvement.
| liuliu wrote:
| Nobody only spent 10s on linking. For any reasonable sized
| binary (in the range of 100 to 200 MiB) it is somewhere
| around 50s to 60s before mold. People regularly links 1GiB
| binary for living during their development cycle. If you
| use small binary or primarily using Go, probably not the
| target audience of mold.
|
| Otherwise I actually agree mold is amazing but have limited
| commercialization potential unless author expands the scope
| (like RAD Game Tools) / take some VC money (much like
| Emerge Tools)
| jeffbee wrote:
| 10s is an extreme link time with lld. lld can link clang
| in 6s. Mold cuts that in half, but it's still true that
| you save 3s, not a minute.
| maccard wrote:
| I disagree. Our lld link times for the Linux build of our
| project is over 3 minutes, with LTO disabled.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Incredibly wrong take.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If that were true, the author would have retired, because
| they were a Google engineer when they wrote lld, which is
| bonkers fast compared to gold, Google's previous linker.
| Kukumber wrote:
| Very disappointing, that's a slap in the face to everyone who
| contributed
|
| If you wanted to monetize your project, you should have done it
| from the beginning with the proper license
|
| Getting exposure and contributions only just to change the terms
| is just disgusting
| trillic wrote:
| Guess he'll be slapping himself in the face...seeing as if you
| read the blog post you'd know that he can change the license
| because he wrote essentially all the code...
| Kukumber wrote:
| That's not the point, breaking trust, manipulation and
| betrayal are, if you don't care about that, then you should
| not complain when one random dude changes his popular library
| to spread a political malware [1]
|
| [1] - https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2022/03/sabot...
| sodality2 wrote:
| It is not a break of trust, maniupulation, or a betrayal. A
| FOSS license is not a guarantee or promise of perpetually
| working on a project, for free - in fact it is specifically
| never guaranteeing anything.
|
| You will always be able to use the version of Mold right
| before the license is switched.
| bb88 wrote:
| "It's even a bit ironic that I had been asked by several
| big-name companies when mold/macOS would become
| available, since they wanted to use it for their multi-
| billion-dollar businesses. But none of them gave me
| financial support."
|
| He's giving it away for free and then expects multi-billion
| dollar companies to pay for it. When they don't because they have
| no legal requirement, he feels gypped.
|
| This is kind of a dumb way to run your business.
| SergeAx wrote:
| They clearly have a need (macOS version), but won't pay
| literally the only person on the planet who will fulfull their
| need, why?
| bb88 wrote:
| License? Only one guy to handle the support? Dev is an
| Unknown quantity? Bad economy? Cost he's asking is too high?
| Cheaper for companies to build it themselves?
|
| I have a lot of questions about it too. But it's clear
| there's something wrong in his business model here.
| bccdee wrote:
| If he's going to keep doing the work, somebody has to pay for
| it. If a company wants him to keep doing the work, then they
| should provide funding in order to ensure that it happens.
| Otherwise, the company risks not actually getting the thing
| he's giving away for free, which is exactly what's happening.
|
| It's the tragedy of the commons. Someone, anyone, has to pay
| for maintenance in the park. If nobody donates, then either the
| park shuts down or the park has to start charging visitors, and
| free access disappears.
| hobofan wrote:
| They are anticipating a version of the software they want to
| use to become available (which would save them money) without
| contributing in any way towards it.
|
| This is kind of a dumb way to run your business.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| rectang wrote:
| Is the maintainer is the only copyright holder? If not, and other
| authors have contributed under the AGPL, the maintainer can't
| switch the license.
|
| EDIT: I found this in the linked blog post:
|
| > _I can change the license (or sublicense) because I wrote
| almost all the code myself, and all remaining patches to mold are
| licensed under the dual license of MIT /AGPL._
| suprjami wrote:
| Thanks, this was my first thought too.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think there is a prima facie case that nobody* cares about
| linker speed. bfd is a terrible linker written by weirdos and
| it's still the default linker on every mainstream Linux. You'd
| think that an organization like Canonical would benefit from
| faster builds, but they still use bfd. Not even gold, which has
| been available for 16 years. Definitely not lld, which has been
| around for 5 years. The amount of performance they are already
| leaving on the table is huge, so who would expect them to be
| suddenly interested in build performance?
|
| * for values of "nobody" excluding Google.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Games dev cared, at least up to the playstation 4. The Sony
| linker was much faster than the Microsoft one (plus built to an
| unreasonable QA bar) and that cut turnaround times for builds
| enough that it was worth developing against the playstation and
| testing against the xbox, which Sony considered a competitive
| advantage.
|
| Also people, at least those same users, had really strong views
| on bugs in linkers. If the game is broken because the linker
| trashed it, you've only worked that out after debugging through
| your own code and through the compiler output, by which point
| you're well past patient and understanding.
|
| Sadly for this project I consider linkers to be a fundamental
| design mistake. Or at least obsolete. Lowering to machine code
| before combining files wins you runtime overhead and
| implementation obfuscation in exchange for reduced memory
| consumption. Linking an intermediate form then writing machine
| code (in elf if you like) from that single blob is better. I'm
| pretty sure it can be done in lower memory overhead than
| linking machine code if you're so inclined.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > Linking an intermediate form then writing machine code (in
| elf if you like) from that single blob is better. I'm pretty
| sure it can be done in lower memory overhead than linking
| machine code if you're so inclined.
|
| do you mean its better for build performance or for the final
| output?
| rlpb wrote:
| > You'd think that an organization like Canonical would benefit
| from faster builds, but they still use bfd.
|
| In practice, switching this kind of thing isn't trivial. The
| edge cases fall out as build failures. See for example:
| https://wiki.debian.org/ToolChain/DSOLinking
| maccard wrote:
| That's just not true. Every c++ project I've worked on has
| cared about linker and compiler speed. Unfortunately I work in
| windows-land where we use MSVC, but stuff like [0] makes our
| lives so much easier.
|
| [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/faster-c-iteration-
| bu...
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Have they considered funding from a software foundation?
| wmf wrote:
| What foundations provide funding? My understanding is that
| they're willing to manage funding that you provide.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html
| wmf wrote:
| Yikes, I wouldn't want to be the 501st project on that
| list.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > The new license would be something like individuals can use it
| for free but corporate users have to pay. mold started as my
| personal project, and I've been working on this full time for two
| years so far. I thought that I could earn a comfortable income if
| mold become popular, but unfortunately, I'm still losing my
| money. I think I need to take an action to make the project
| sustainable long term.
|
| This seems totally reasonable to me, honestly. Guess what,
| companies building your product on top of high-quality FOSS
| software? Turnabout is fair play. If we're going to rot our
| software infrastructure to it's soul by adding endless SaaS
| subscriptions to everything, then why shouldn't FOSS developers
| get in on the fun? This is the software dystopia we've created,
| where marginal-utility products get built on the backbreaking
| work of unpaid contributors. If they don't like it, they can fork
| the AGPL version or use a different linker.
|
| It's a very dog-eat-dog play, but realistically this is what our
| software industry has turned into. IMO, it's honorable to defend
| _both_ your individual users and FOSS community while also
| charging your corporate users for the support they expect.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In a way, shareware, public domain and demoware have won, after
| the FOSS hype cycle, as it appears to be the only way to secure
| a source of income, and not everything can be done via selling
| support.
| jabl wrote:
| Nah, FOSS is going stronger than ever. But just as before,
| it's the ones that are playing the 'commodify your
| complement' game that are winning, while those that think
| that FOSS by itself is a business model are struggling.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The buzzword "open source" was kinda designed to appeal as
| a business model, so F-less OSS is indeed struggling.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If big boys take out the funding from key projects, meaning
| stop paying their employees to contribute, everything would
| crumble.
|
| Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the
| products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS and
| hardware, closed source.
| jabl wrote:
| > If big boys take out the funding from key projects,
| meaning stop paying their employees to contribute,
| everything would crumble.
|
| What's your point? If Microsoft goes bankrupt, the MS
| ecosystem would crumble. And so on, ad infinitum. Nothing
| lasts forever. Since people aren't clairvoyant, they make
| an effort at evaluating risks vs benefits, and end up
| continuing to use both MS products and FOSS software.
|
| > Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the
| products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS
| and hardware, closed source.
|
| Yes, that's that whole 'commodify your complement' thing
| I mentioned. But so what? As long as those companies
| contribute free software that is useful, enjoy the ride.
| Maybe the current privacy-invading ad funded IT hegemons
| will fail one day and be replaced by something else, but
| at least whatever comes next will have a big pool of
| hopefully useful software to start building on top of.
| SEJeff wrote:
| You think so? I always saw it as Open Source won, and a
| huge part of it being how RMS is a bit of a repulsive
| individual even many Free Software proponents are disgusted
| by. I don't want to sling mud, but some of his stances are
| not good.
| dist1ll wrote:
| I feel conflicted.
|
| The FOSS label is an extremely powerful statement and draws in
| lots of users. To switch the license is very poor taste in my
| opinion, and not much different from a bait-and-switch.
|
| It should be a maintainers responsibility to be very clear
| about their goals for this project. I feel that they jumped the
| full-time gun too quickly, and now users will be paying for it
| googlryas wrote:
| The code he developed will still be licensed under the old
| license, just going forward new changes won't be. You can
| fork it right now and keep a FOSS version if you'd like.
|
| But it's not a bait and switch because we don't have a right
| to his future work under whatever license we like. Imagine
| the developer was hit by a bus right now, or became a
| cloistered monk. Same difference.
| [deleted]
| glitchc wrote:
| "Terms subject to change without notice."
|
| If commercial entities can do it, so can the FOSS community.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Not exactly, because the software already licensed under an
| old license (which is the only "terms" applicable here)
| will stay fine.
| glitchc wrote:
| No it won't. It will ne unsupported. Bugs and security
| vulnerabilities will accrue making it less and less
| valuable over time. It's filunny how the very people
| whose livelihood depends on perpetual software growth and
| maintenance are the first ones to claim FOSS is okay
| stuck at a particular function. Every company keeping
| their stack stuck on the permissive license is risking a
| log4j style event in the future.
| tomcam wrote:
| He tried something. He failed. Sometimes the license has to
| change even if we don't want it to. Having the project around
| in altered form is better than not having it at all.
| layer8 wrote:
| We shouldn't think of it as a bait-and-switch if nothing was
| promised. The license applies to the current version. It
| doesn't represent a commitment for future versions, and
| shouldn't be taken as such.
| dessant wrote:
| It's almost as if one is expected to keep sharing until their
| last day, without ever being entitled to change the terms of
| sharing.
| rektide wrote:
| Reasonable but death. Rather than become a part of the world,
| this immense value would be a mere glimmer, would not get
| adopted at any notable scale.
|
| It sucks. Whats happening now isnt fine. I wish so much the
| world could recognize value & merit & allocate some support for
| it.
|
| But all the rationalization in the world doesnt change the base
| truth that this plan would mean death.
| counttheforks wrote:
| What do you think will happen when there's no funding nor
| motivation to maintain the project? Death.
| spijdar wrote:
| I'm of a mind to agree with GP, but I also agree that lack
| of funding and motivation will kill the project.
|
| Unfortunately, to me this just means the project will
| probably die. If the author is feeling burnt out and losing
| money on it, I don't think trying to pivot to a commercial
| license will help, since as others have mentioned, I don't
| think many businesses _rely_ on mold specifically, and
| since the performance gap isn 't astronomical, many
| companies will just drop in lld and be done with it.
|
| At least, that seems likely to me. I guess we might find
| out?
| ketralnis wrote:
| > would not get adopted at any notable scale
|
| Sure, it doesn't sound like that's their goal
| smoldesu wrote:
| I mean, the alternative is that the lead developer runs out
| of money and just drops the project altogether. If they have
| an enterprising personality, I see no reason why they
| shouldn't chase this opportunity as an alternative to letting
| their project fall apart/get "adopted" by an abusive
| maintainer.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Potentially the other alternative would be a large tech
| company hires them to work on an open source mold full
| time.
| smoldesu wrote:
| That doesn't really end up going well either. There are
| many such cases where Red
| Hat/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Amazon buys up a sterling
| young FOSS developer and makes them spend the rest of
| their life fixing the issues for [PRODUCT] while their
| project becomes less-and-less relevant by the day (see:
| CUPS, Clang, Minix).
| nrabulinski wrote:
| How has cups or clang became less relevant?
| smoldesu wrote:
| CUPS is still great but mostly because it's initial
| implementation was so straightforward. It's existence
| today is mostly maintenance-mode with a priority for
| fixing Mac bugs, which is understandable but also
| occludes the possibility for future improvement or adding
| support for other platforms.
|
| Clang is still relevant because LLVM is great, but as a
| compiler it's mired in a great deal of political hangups
| and general pickiness. I don't write C++ for a living,
| but my experience using the GNU C tooling has been much
| smoother than Clang and Cmake.
|
| I'll admit that both of those projects aren't exactly
| dead, but it would be a shame if Microsoft/Google/Apple
| bought Mold and malformed it to their desires.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think the parent's point is that, if they weren't able to
| make money off it before, they almost certainly won't by
| slapping a more restrictive license on it.
| [deleted]
| homarp wrote:
| >if they weren't able to make money off it before
|
| just like MongoDB
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229013 and docker
| desktop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570 and
| Elastic Search
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25776657
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Nothing of a lot is a lot less than all of a little.
| delusional wrote:
| I don't see any personal issue with the author doing what
| they're doing. I think it's an implication of the current
| system that he has to.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _If they have an enterprising personality_
|
| In practice, this usually means, "Do they want to mostly
| give up coding and learn how to sell to corporations?" It's
| not necessarily a bad thing! Corporations have money and
| selling to them can be an interesting challenge.
|
| But it's not a thing that happens easily or automatically,
| unless you have a product which has achieved an
| extraordinary level of appeal to customers. It's hard work,
| and it doesn't necessarily leave time to code.
| [deleted]
| msla wrote:
| If this catches on, I expect a lot more people on Hacker News
| will suddenly have Grave Concerns about how Free those Copyleft
| licenses are.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That have always been clear from the beginning that is why
| you get everyone using GNU/Linux instead of the BSDs,
| although Apple and Sony enjoy using parts of them on their
| platforms.
| svnpenn wrote:
| I support this. I use this with some of my projects:
|
| https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0
| fefe23 wrote:
| I love mold and wish the author all the best, but I don't think
| this will work.
|
| First of all, the usual suspects who rip off high quality open
| source projects have been known to just create a fork if the
| license changes (see Amazon and Elasticsearch). If you do this,
| you have to have the right license from the start.
|
| Second I'm not sure the value proposition is great enough to
| warrant corporate payments. As awesome as mold and its
| performance savings are, I don't think they even register on the
| dashboard of corporations. Maybe a few companies selling build
| pipeline services could be persuaded, like Github and Gitlab, But
| for those I think it would make more sense to talk to them and
| get them to give money voluntarily.
|
| In my experience companies don't just give you money. They do it
| if they are acutely aware of a problem, like when OpenSSL turned
| out to be massively underfunded and lots of corporations realized
| they are dependent on it. I don't think any company is dependent
| enough on mold yet.
|
| I think the author should talk to the Linux foundation or the
| LLVM foundation and should get them to pay him a stipend or
| something. With this move he'll probably not help the situation
| much.
|
| Also AGPL is already pretty restrictive. Are you sure there are
| corporations ripping you off? Could it be that they just never
| even heard of mold?
| _dhruva wrote:
| > Maybe a few companies selling build pipeline services could
| be persuaded, like Github and Gitlab
|
| The problem is almost all CI/CD jobs use custom docker images
| bundled with distro provided compiler toolchains.
|
| Replacing linker in CI/CD jobs transparently is extremely
| hard/impossible/undesirable.
| secondcoming wrote:
| You can package it up yourself, put it in a private repo like
| JFrog, and build a new Docker image.
| fefe23 wrote:
| Excellent point, it might run counter to the idea of building
| exactly as if on that platform! Didn't think of that.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > First of all, the usual suspects who rip off high quality
| open source projects have been known to just create a fork if
| the license changes (see Amazon and Elasticsearch). If you do
| this, you have to have the right license from the start.
|
| It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is
| obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code, just
| because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine when
| someone became a licensee, you could say that old/existing
| licensees can continue to use the old terms. But new licensees
| can be obligated to use new terms.
|
| > I think the author should talk to the Linux foundation or the
| LLVM foundation and should get them to pay him a stipend or
| something. With this move he'll probably not help the situation
| much.
|
| I doubt either of those organizations would fund Rui's work
| here. But it might be interesting to try and combine efforts
| with some of the incremental-compile/link ideas in Rust, Zig,
| and C++.
|
| > Could it be that they just never even heard of mold?
|
| This is likely the case. Maybe it would make sense to advertise
| it at conferences like OSSNA or similar.
| leni536 wrote:
| > It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is
| obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code,
| just because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine
| when someone became a licensee, you could say that
| old/existing licensees can continue to use the old terms. But
| new licensees can be obligated to use new terms.
|
| Any old licensee that holds the source of the old code with
| the original AGPL license can distribute the code with the
| original license to anyone else. They have the license to do
| so.
|
| That is anyone can just press fork on github, and keep
| distributing all the AGPL versions with the original license.
| omoikane wrote:
| I wonder if AGPL is exactly the problem. There are certain
| large corporations that wouldn't touch anything with AGPL, and
| thus have little incentive to sponsor projects like mold
| because they see little benefit from it.
|
| Dropping AGPL might be a step in making friends with some
| corporations while losing some open source friends, but the
| latter don't pay the bills.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| He is specifically explaining that big companies are using
| his code. They are not afraid of AGPL but they just don't
| want to pay him
| fefe23 wrote:
| This argument may make superficial sense if you talk about a
| library, which is not the case here.
|
| The AGPL does not prevent Amazon from linking their
| proprietary code with mold. It prevents you from selling a
| linker service that is built on mold without giving people
| the source code to mold.
|
| My understanding of AGPL is that Amazon wouldn't even have to
| open source their service. So the license is not in the way
| of commercial exploitation.
|
| In fact, OP makes exactly that point, that he is thinking
| about needing a more restrictive license, not a less
| restrictive one.
| bb88 wrote:
| > My understanding of AGPL is that Amazon wouldn't even
| have to open source their service. So the license is not in
| the way of commercial exploitation.
|
| There's no linking exception in the AGPL. As Google says,
| the risk is clear. "The primary risk
| presented by AGPL is that any product or service
| that depends on AGPL-licensed code, or includes anything
| copied or derived from AGPL-licensed code, may be
| subject to the virality of the AGPL license. [1]"
|
| IANAL, but some will go further and say that merely looking
| at AGPL code would be enough to trigger the license, since
| at some point you could "derive" things from the AGPL'd
| code base which could then taint every other closed source
| SaaS project you work on.
|
| This could happen if you wrote an closed source alternative
| to the original AGPL'd project, and wondered how a
| particular algorithm was written, e.g.
|
| [1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using
| /agpl...
| bccdee wrote:
| Using mold to link your binaries is not the same as
| linking mold itself. GCC is GPL'ed, but things compiled
| with GCC are not.
| spijdar wrote:
| I think it's worth pointing out that regardless of what
| is true or not true, Google has spelled out _their_
| interpretation, and their explicit and (exact quote)
| "aggressively-broad ban" on use of AGPL software within
| Google.
|
| Beyond the legal implications of software, there are
| social ones too. I admit that I'm reluctant to use AGPL
| software when a differently licensed alternative is
| available, just out of a general stigma around it. I'm
| not _defending_ that stigma, far from it, but I think it
| 's fair to point it out, and point out that big
| corporations like Google are very, very allergic to AGPL
| (whether it's legally warranted or not)
| lights0123 wrote:
| As an example of a company that doesn't touch AGPL,
| Google's policy is to "maintain an aggressively-broad ban
| on all AGPL software": https://opensource.google/documentat
| ion/reference/using/agpl...
| berry_sortoro wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Related:
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54s...
|
| via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582179
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