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47 lines
2.3 KiB
47 lines
2.3 KiB
4 years ago
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title = "Commented link: Open source licensing and why we're changing Plausible to the AGPL license"
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date = 2020-10-23
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["links", "licenses", "plausible", "agpl"]
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Plausible is a competitor for Google Analytics, without the need of exposing
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your visitors data to some company. And recently they [changed their license to
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AGPL](https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses), where they explain why.
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<!-- more -->
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But while I admit that I'm not a fan of the tone of "COMPANIES WILL STEAL YOUR
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CODE!", there is another point one must think: What if someone acts as a
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gateway of your project to some users? Will they ever know there is someone
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else working on it? What about improvements? Don't you want people using _your_
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product to get the best experience?
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Sure, you can ignore these problems and just don't care about what people do.
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What if a company takes your work and get some money from it? You don't care.
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Ok. But this gives me the impression that you don't care about what you did.
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You don't care about your product. If you don't care, why should I? Why should
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I care about you, in the first place?
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(Ok, I know: I'm being mean. Whatever.)
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But that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, I wrote some software. I like it. It
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solves my problem. I expect people to like it too. I just don't want a faceless
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entity to come around, pick my software, do some changes and lock their users
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into their system -- something that I, inadvertently, helped build. _I locked
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people into some product that they have no idea they could just move their data
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out of it_.
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"Not everybody can program, so who cares?" Yes, not everybody can pick whatever
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script in Python or Rust or C or Java I wrote and change to make it fit their
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needs -- heck, think about someone wanting to making a change in Firefox. But
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everybody knows someone that can program. They can ask that person to change
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that. They can _pay_ that person to change the program to fit their needs. But,
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for that, they need to have access to the code. If the faceless entity picks
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the code, makes changes, lock people and my license doesn't prevent them from
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doing it so, I'm part of the problem.
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No size fits all in software. We can fit a large number of people, but not all.
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But we can give the tools to let people make it fit their size.
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