Honestly I think it's fair. Really the only people affected by this change are people creating proprietary forks, everyone else benefits from this change.
I just wish there was a way to ensure that the company itself doesn't do a proprietary fork.
Simple. Don't have contribution agreements. Contributors maintain their copyright so as they can prevent relicensing. Mind, FSF requires copyright for their submissions (I believe), but they're, arguably, a "good actor" in this space.
But, if the code base becomes a patchwork of contributors, it can become difficult to relicense.
Definition of freedom has changed in cloud era. The idea behind GPL was, if you modify your code and distribute it, you need to contribute back the changes, with the wider goal of increasing the commons. All the legalese was just to make sure that the idea worked.
In the era of cloud, distribution needs to include distribution over wire, because so many apps are now run in the cloud. And that's why AGPL. It preserves the spirit of GPL in modern times.
Yes, this idea that you must “contribute back” is itself an infringement on privacy, and is why copyleft licenses are falling out of favor of things like MIT.
Not the OP, but here’s how I see it: freedom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Whether it’s in society or in software, real freedom comes with some responsibility. You can’t just take, take, take and expect the ecosystem to stay healthy. That’s not how any of this works.
Same thing applies to free software. If we actually care about keeping that world alive, there’s gotta be some duty baked in—some expectation to contribute back, or at least not strip-mine the commons and bounce.
MIT’s blown up mostly because the big players don’t need the broader free software community anymore. They’ve got the scale, the headcount, and the cash to build and maintain their own internal ecosystems. So from their POV, permissive licenses like MIT are perfect—no obligations, no copyleft, no friction.
But let’s not pretend that’s “freedom” in the idealistic sense. It’s freedom to extract, sure. Freedom to integrate and forget where it came from. For a lot of people on HN, that’s fine. But if you care about the sustainability of the broader ecosystem? Then yeah, we’ve got to talk about duty, not just rights.
If you are distributing an AGPL software as a derivative work, you must also distribute the source. You can make as many modifications for internal use and not distribute them, if you're not making a derivative work.
> They see this as bad, because they think you should be forced to publish your modifications to the software you use internally, even if you don’t want to.
This is incorrect. You are only forced to publish if you are creating derivative works. See how overleaf uses propietary git integration with AGPL overleaf.
That article makes a lot of dubious claims. The central claim is that by breaking links to the source code in development on your own machine with no one else using it, then you are breaking the license by not showing a notice offering the source to yourself.
This is typical of software developers trying to interpret law. Can you imagine someone explaining to a judge that they are suing for a breach of license terms under the circumstances. "So, you are saying he did not give himself access to the code on his laptop?"
Even if that nonsense was correct, there is a dead easy workaround. Run a server with the code on it bound to localhost and you then have your network server for all users interacting with the code (yourself!). Not needed, just an additional layer of proof the claim "it is impossible to comply" is false.
Edit: to add, I am also not impressed by the author's other blog posts, such as a moan about not having PRs for FOSS projects accepted for good reasons (if you dig down into it). Lots of other complaining and nonsense too.
I would think things like removing access to research which contained certain keywords could count, as well as things like ordering the removal of images of women and people of colour from military websites for example.
Words like “female” will flag scientific research grant applications for review and any found to be supporting diversity equity and inclusion face being cut
US universities are being punished for allowing free speech of individual members. The federal government is angling to get these groups to self-censor.
Peaceful protest against Israel's destruction of Gaza will get you in trouble.
Research all the anti-LGBTQ legislation at the federal and state levels.
Remember, after all, the 1st amendment covers not only freedom of speech, but also assembly, the press, no establishment of religion, and the ability to petition the government. All of these things have been attacked and will continue to be attacked.
Idaho Teacher ordered to remove “Everybody is welcome” sign in classroom as US government threatens to cut funding for orgs supporting inclusive ideologies (lgbt, “woke”)
It’d been going on for a while: they had embedded people at Twitter, Facebook, etc. to act as liaisons to “protect truth” on subjects such as the origins of Covid, hunter Biden’s laptop, the senility of a certain commander in chief, the discussion on males participating in women’s sports, etc. the movement went so far as preventing speakers with opposing views to speak at universities. The idea of safe spaces itself is about censorship of ideas.
That was just private citizens exercising their own free speech rights, even if you disagreed. Now we have the federal government punishing people with speech and beliefs the president and his cronies don't like. It's a whole different ballgame.
> That was just private citizens exercising their own free speech rights
It was just a 'coincidence' that the US government was putting serious monopoly investigations on every big tech and social media company at the same time it offered these censorship 'suggestions', I'm sure.
1. University funding cancellations because of disfavored but 1A protected protests
2. Attacks on law firms with disfavored clients.
3. Federal law suits against media like NBC, ABC, and investigations of NPR and others.
4. Increased arrest rate for “obstruction” by ICE of people protesting immigration enforcement.
5. Blanket bans on “DEI” speech and retaliation against organizations that promote DEI.
6. An executive Order mandating that schools teach “patriotic” content or lose funding.
7. Banning trans people from the military directly infringing their 1A protected rights to express their identity.
8. Take overs of institutions like the Kennedy Center for the Arts, dismissal of the Librarian of Congress, content regulation of the Smithsonian, take-downs of federal data and images related to disfavored speech.
9. Revoking green cards because of 1A protected cards, denying visas, travel bans - all limiting what speech and associations are available to US citizens.
1. This isn't suppressing free speech. This is classic new deal government. I thought liberals liked that?
2. No one is obligated to work with you, or give you clearances if you're suspected of being against state interests.
3. I thought we were all for government crackdowns on corrupt corporations?
4. Many of these people are obstructionist.
5. DEI is discriminatory. I thought liberals were anti-discrimination?
6. More new deal government. Nothing improper here. You just lost the vote.
7. The military is not obligated to allow anyone to serve. It's a job, like any other. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences, pal.
8. Being selective of what you promote isn't suppression of speech. Is it suppression of speech when Confederate monuments are removed, or did you lose the vote?
9. Those are not citizens.
10. This is regulation to prevent anti-competitive behavior and harassment.
11. Not free speech. You're not obligated to be in a press room
TBH, seems like you care that you lost, not about freedom. Why should I give you any freedom when your goal is to deprive me of mine?
Mercedes Benz is already for example using KWin from KDE as Wayland compositor and likely many other open source components. So this sort of move is not without precedent.
It's a smart move to do so instead of switching to Android Auto and loosing control of one of the most important component of the experience of the car.
Still? It is the best and the most mature cross-platform toolkit. Among both open-source and proprietary ones. It is the default for embedded / industrial UIs and automotive. At least in Europe but I think many US companies like Autodesk also use Qt. Its programming paradigms are a bit outdated. However, it is quite performant and supports many 2D and 3D acceleration drivers / APIs.
Wow: I run KDE with Wayland on my PC, and given the instability I've experienced, I'm surprised it's suitable for a high-reliability environment like a car. I suppose that it being a more controlled environment may help, but even still, I wonder how stable it actually is.
They aren't using KDE for the car, just KWin. And KWin is a robust compositor - it will happily survive a horrible KDE crash and even let you restart the session (unlike Mutter) in many cases.
If you're only using a Wayland compositor to render a webview, you cut out a lot of the surface area that could potentially cause a crash.
Me too - its fine for me. You are probably holding it wrong 8)
My car (Seic MG4 - an EV) clearly has two lots of software. The reliable stuff that runs the "must work" stuff like driving controls and motors etc. and the other stuff that ought to work in an ideal world and I think that lot is on the Android tablet mid dashboard.
The other stuff even includes "lane assist" and other safety features because when I force re-boot the console they report as offline on the display behind the steering wheel, which I think is linked to the first system - the RTOS automotive jobbie.
I think SEIC (and I'm sure this is standard practice) have done a fairly decent job with the divvy up of responsibility between funky features and must work or death will ensure features. I'm an IT consultant and know when Android auto has crashed on my phone or car or both or the radio is on silent or there is dust in a USB port ...
Wayland vs X11 is not an issue in cars - whatever you get will either work always or be a bit of a mild distraction.
Cheers
Jon
PS I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. My car has nothing in common with the real Morris Garage. The MG marque is merely an affectation and I don't know why Seic really bothers.
The collaboration part is not that developed (but does exist based on Matrix as decentralized and end to end encrypted storage). That works very well is ticket extraction for hotels, train or flight + search for connection using public transport APIs.
Undo (where I'm CTO) has existed for longer than RR and its real benefit is that it scales to use cases where RR (for one reason or another) isn't a fit.
Technically:
* Doesn't need hardware performance counters - runs on more CPUs and on cloud systems (where performance counters are often blocked).
* Can attach and detach at any time - means you get to record just a subset of program execution that's interesting.
* You can our ship recording tech with your application and control it by API, so you can grab crash recordings on customer systems.
* Supports programs that share memory with non-recorded processes.
* Supports direct device access (e.g. DPDK).
* Accelerated debugging features - searching with recordings using parallel processing, accelerated conditional breakpoints a few thousand times faster than native GDB.
* We provide a stable, patched fork of GDB that we're occasionally told is more stable than the default.
For many people's use cases none of these really matter - they should use RR if they're not already.
But if you need any of these things then Undo can give you time travel debugging. In practice, it's usually big software organisations that we deal with because they have development pain and the extreme requirements we can match.
Undo has cool features like Live Recording that we don't have in rr.
They don't need access to the hardware PMU which is a big advantage in some situations.
They can handle accesses to shared memory in cases where rr can't.
https://undo.io/resources/undo-vs-rr/ is a good resource.
AFAIK it records multithreaded applications on multiple threads and CPU, rr records them on a single OS thread, AFAIK. Not sure about replay. Never used undo though, so not sure how much better it is.
rr does support multithreaded and multi-process applications, via, like Undo[1], allowing only a single thread to run at a time. (edit note - that's only about multithreading; Undo might have parallel multi-process recording)
Undo founder here. I just got a slack from one of our marketing team who is thrilled you appreciate their work. :-)
Our customers are top tier tech companies and our users are among the smartest engineers on the planet. I'm proud of our marketing, but no-one is going to spend a bunch of money with us just because of that.
