Comment on FUTO Keyboard: The Discussion Behind A Cool Product

• mke@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Well, that’s wonderful to read!

  If you’re wondering what sort of issue being careless with licenses can cause, see the (in)famous case of Tivoization. GPL 3 was written partly to solve issues like this.

  The Free Software Foundation explicitly forbade tivoization in version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
  Wikipedia

  For a more recent example of how community/contributors and owner/company interest misalignment can make a huge mess, see the consequences of HashiCorp changing the Terraform license from MPL to BUSL. Relevant facts I’d like to note:

  • This caused a large split in the community and with HC (“drama”)
  • This was only possible due to their CLA (Contributor License Agreement) requirement for contributors.
  • This eventually resulted in the birth of OpenTofu, a fork of Terraform managed by the Linux Foundation.

  Or, for a lighter case:

  A while back I saw a project on GitHub licensed as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The developer was considering writing a guide for contributors, even though I’m pretty sure you can’t fork and modify it to open a PR (popular way to offer contributions), because that’d break the ND clause (sharing derivatives). Were people supposed to e-mail the developer with patches? Who knows! There are people into that, like the Linux Kernel folks.

  And finally, here’s what I thought was a very interesting take on what free means when talking about software licenses, touching upon obligations, rights and copyleft.

  source

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Thanks, I appreciate it. I’ll check it out.

    source