open source for enterprise is often more about trust and transparency than "freedom". Source avaliable has most advantages of FOSS without the legal and monetization issues.
There is this blind trust in open source model taken to a unhealthy or misguided extreme in a lot of online discussion.
A two year delay is pretty reasonable and liberal. It allow costumers that dont want to accept the new licence able to continue as-is by simply following an older version.
I've written this above and it's a point I don't see very many people make in this discussion, but you're locking yourself into an ecosystem that has a monopoly on hosting as a service. That damages you as a customer because you no longer have choice about what service you go to for hosting. You're left with either hosting it yourself or going with the only vendor who's allowed to. That's not a great experience.
It's not a hard thought experiment. Just imagine this license applied to whatever database you're used to spinning up in the cloud on whatever provider you want. If that one provider doesn't have the plan you're looking for, you're forced to take on the work of hosting it yourself because no one is allowed to do that for you and let you pay them because the license forbids it.
But thats not a discussion about free or not free software. That's a discussion about interoperability, standards and vendor lock-in.
Free software encurrage interoperability to a degree, but interoperability and free software are very separate things.
And hosting providers are not evil or bad for making highly coupled systems. Its a valuable service companies gladly pay for, and a compromise developers need to calculate in their plans.
That seems fine to me? If I want them to host it then I don't care a lot about the license, and my escape hatch of self-hosting is quite good. I don't think self hosting is a big burden.
And competitors can still host a mildly older version freely, so that prevents long term lock-in even if I ignore self hosting.
So the main company still has to compete to keep business, which is good for everyone, but they keep some control over the hosting business, which means they're less likely to get crushed and stop updating. I think it sounds good overall.
OK, but how do these concerns apply specifically to self-hosted dev tools such as Liquibase? Why do you object to FSL for this specific type of software, which has a different usage pattern than a database server?
I was specifically replying to the GP, who commented about concerns of "locking yourself into an ecosystem that has a monopoly on hosting as a service". I wanted to know why that specific concern is an issue for GP, in the context of software like Liquibase which isn't even hosted in the first place. Your reply does not address that in any way.
> That license restricts what you can do with the software due to a business interest of the author.
Yes, it restricts you from offering a competing hosted service. Do you offer a competing hosted service to Liquibase using Liquibase's source code? Is this something you ever would conceivably do? If not, how does this restriction affect your life in any way?
> I wanted to know why that specific concern is an issue for GP
That's exactly what my comment is addressing! People advocating for Free Software don't usually advocate that _only_ the software they use should be free; they advocate for the freedom of all users.
> I never claimed it was Free Software.
You did not, indeed. Sorry if my wording gave the impression I was trying to put claims in your post. That phrase is an answer to this question from you:
> Why do you object to FSL for this specific type of software
We object to it because it makes the software proprietary rather than free.
OK, so you care about freedom. And yet you tell other people how they should license their software projects, even when you aren't involved in those projects in any way, and their license choices don't impact you in any way. And you tell people what software they should and shouldn't use purely on subjective philosophical grounds.
Personally I call that something other than promoting freedom. Quite the opposite.
> you tell people what software they should and shouldn't use
Please, there's no point in arguing like that. There's no need to mischaracterize or reword what another user is saying.
I don't think we'll get much further in this discussion if you consider yourself a fan of the FSL, a proprietary license. Your time will be better spent replying to other people.
> > you tell people what software they should and shouldn't use
> There's no need to mischaracterize or reword what another user is saying.
You directly linked to a post by RMS which says things like "When you use proprietary programs or SaaSS, first of all you do wrong to yourself, because it gives some entity unjust power over you. For your own sake, you should escape." Among many other examples in that post, and countless other FSF posts, telling people not to use non-Free Software. This is not a mischaracterization.
Granted, these are RMS's statements, not yours. But I assumed that since you linked to that post and are espousing similar concepts, you are endorsing its contents and hold the same views. If that is not the case, my apologies. But perhaps you could clarify whether or not you think RMS is correct to tell people not to use non-Free software?
> if you consider yourself a fan of the FSL
I live in a free society and can be a fan of whatever license I want -- meaning, I can express free will in how I select what software I use, and how I license software that I create. That is freedom. I am not trying to dictate what software or licenses you use, because I respect your freedom to do the same.
If you base your opinions on compromises and always making tradeoffs on your core values, you've lost your direction.
What do we do now?
> It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses
Nope. "Free" has specific meaning in this context, this qualifier doesn't apply here. It's the whole point. If you believe it applies, you've fundamentally misunderstood the free software definition and what's at stake for the free software movement.
More specifically, the qualifier is not relative to a specific entity and what freedom it actually needs / uses at some given point in time.
I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.
To go further with the comparison, there's nothing in being against compromising on the freedom of the press that's blindness or being black and white (or maybe it's being black and white, but I can't see how it would be wrong).
Everything is a compromise. GPL versus MIT is a compromise either way. Both are more free than the other. So don't tell me there's such a thing as fully free and that nothing else matters.
> I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.
Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.
GPL and MIT fully fulfill the exigences of the free software definition, there's no compromise here.
Choosing between GPL and MIT may involve compromises, but we are talking about something else, you are moving the goalposts here.
(note: I kept updating my previous comment, probably while you were writing this, sorry for this)
(edit: ah, you noticed)
> Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.
Violating an NDA is a matter of law and contracts that can equally apply to software, it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.
If you are speaking about protecting one's source, then it's orthogonal (and probably also an important mechanism for) freedom of the press.
MIT gives less freedom to the user. GPL gives less freedom to the dev. I'm not moving goalposts, those are both very important and you can't maximize both.
> it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.
I would say the ability to run a competing business within two years is less fundamental than the ability to talk about what you saw at your former job.
Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.
No. Someone can use some MIT licensed software for any purpose and can strictly do anything with it that the GPL would allow.
Just as free.
However, I do agree that permissive licenses like the MIT allows someone to build proprietary software with the code, and the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result. That would be the reason why I wouldn't license my software under permissive license except for specific cases.
One could argue the MIT actually gives more freedom to the user: they can, with a MIT source code, build and distribute a proprietary derivative. Of course, this doesn't mean this additional freedom is desirable.
> Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.
Yeah, just like laws limit your freedom to run free software for any purpose. You, for instance, can't legally take /bin/ls with you to go kill someone even if its license itself doesn't explicitly forbid it. I'm pretty fine with this.
I have some feeling we do agree that freedom is never absolute and kinda argue past each others.
> the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result
That's the part I was talking about.
So I don't know why you started your post with "No."
> I'm pretty fine with this.
Cool. And I'm fine with some other restrictions. So we're agreeing that being fine with a restriction doesn't necessarily mean anyone has "lost the direction" of free software? And instead we can talk about the specific dangers of a restriction without reflexive rejection?
>> the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result
> That's the part I was talking about.
> So I don't know why you started your post with "No."
You are mixing two different users. FreeBSD user A enjoys software freedom. macOS user B doesn't. A and B are different people. And notably, the release of macOS didn't make FreeBSD disappear, so A still fully enjoys their freedom even though B doesn't with the downstream software (but could with the upstream software as well).
If you are mixing user A and user B, your mental model of this stuff is not clear and reasoning with it is going to be difficult and frustrating. And it makes you reach incorrect conclusions such as "permissive licenses are less free for the users than copyleft licenses".
> So we're agreeing that being fine with a restriction doesn't necessarily mean anyone has "lost the direction" of free software?
Laws are supposed to protect individual and collective freedom and interests. They do this by putting limits on what you could do that would prevent others from enjoying their own freedom.
(of course, I know we are far from this ideal; also laws aren't perfect and issues should be fought against - it's actually, in practice, a constant fight because different (groups of) people have different interests and priorities - but that's another concern and mixing concerns makes things hard to reason about)
License restrictions that compromise on software freedom are simply not comparable to whatever it takes to make a society work. They are not making a tradeoff for your own good as a user. They are benefiting the software provider at the cost of the user's freedom.
I'm not mixing up users A and B. Let me try phrasing it better. MIT does not give software freedom to all users of the code. A huge number of users get excluded in practice, far more users than this clause in the liquibase license.
> Laws are supposed to protect individual and collective freedom and interests. They do this by putting limits on what you could do that would prevent others from enjoying their own freedom.
I'm not sure where you're going with this when my example was NDAs. NDAs aren't there to protect freedoms, they only remove freedom. Laws enforce them, but in the same way that laws enforce license restrictions.
> Okay, I would agree more with this phrasing. That's the issue I have with permissive licenses.
So do you also see what I meant about both permissive and copyleft licenses giving up some freedoms? You can't have it all.
A restraint on running a particular type of business isn't great for software freedom, but if it's narrow and temporary I don't think it ruins the entire license. The gap in freedom is avoidable but also it's much smaller than the gaps you can't avoid.
For ongoing freedom, If I was choosing between plain MIT and a GPL clone that bans competiting companies but reverts to pure GPL after a couple years, I would pick the latter.
> So do you also see what I meant about both permissive and copyleft licenses giving up some freedoms? You can't have it all.
Not a fan of the framing but I get your point (of view).
> For ongoing freedom, If I was choosing between plain MIT and a GPL clone that bans competiting companies but reverts to pure GPL after a couple years, I would pick the latter.
Reasonable. I would find the 2 years delay unbearable and pick MIT, but I wouldn't enjoy doing so. It's fortunate I don't have to pick :-)
There is this blind trust in open source model taken to a unhealthy or misguided extreme in a lot of online discussion.
A two year delay is pretty reasonable and liberal. It allow costumers that dont want to accept the new licence able to continue as-is by simply following an older version.