👽Dropped at birth from space to earth👽

👽she/they👽

  • 2 Posts
  • 116 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 20th, 2023
  • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Does anyone use jrnl for journal?English
    4·
    4 days ago

    It’s not a text editor in it’s own right, you can use it with nano. It’s simply a tool to help create and format journal entries. I’d assume you can set a directory they’re stored in, and then use the command from anywhere, but didn’t dig into the documentation just yet. It can also handle encrypting those entries if you choose.

    I dunno, maybe just let people have nice things? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Forgejo is now copyleft, just like GitEnglish
    31·
    3 months ago

    Would you not consider signing a CLA (without remuneration) if it binds a project to releasing your code under an OSI license? The only way they could have done better I think is by specifying AGPL instead. I’m not trying to argue that all CLAs are good here, but I don’t think that when they achieve the goals of the free software movement, they should be treated with suspicion or derision.

    Honestly, all of the recent light shone on CLAs is a great thing. But there are still valid reasons to maintain a unified copyright for a project. None of these projects would have been able to move to AGPL without having used a CLA for that purpose. It also allows enforcement of that license via things like litigation, because you can have one entity on the docket, instead of a thousand contributors all defending their copyright.

    I think the correct course of action isn’t to avoid signing one, but to force projects to commit to the social contract of open source in writing. I think there’s also a discussion that no one has earnestly talked about. A contributor license agreement is a contract between two parties, and under contract laws both parties must materially benefit. “I will get x, and you will get y”. This is known as consideration, and courts will nullify contracts that only benefit one of the parties. The only consideration I think there is to be found in most of the CLAs that have been brought up lately, is basically “your code will be merged into the project and released under it”. They don’t specify the continuation of open source, but it’s heavily implied by the aforementioned social contract. So when someone like RHEL goes and closes their source, they’ve essentially changed that contract to “you will sign over your copyright to us, and we will exploit your labour for profit”. That is not consideration, and it calls into question the validity of every single CLA signed. I genuinely think there’s grounds for every RHEL contributor that signed one to form a class and sue, and I would love to see FSF or EFF organising and supporting that sort of effort.

    Back to Element for a second though, as far as I can see, their new CLA is a valid contract, because it gives a right to the contributor, that their code will always be released under an OSI license. So if a successful suit was brought against someone like RHEL, or Hashicorp, we could see other projects scramble to repeat Element here. That would be, in my opinion, a very good thing for the free software movement.

  • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Forgejo is now copyleft, just like GitEnglish
    271·
    3 months ago

    Except both of the projects you just linked too have CLAs, which they updated on switching to AGPLv3. Both use them as a way to offer dual-licensing, so they can charge companies for an AGPL-exception by selling them a proprietary-licensed version, which then supports the FOSS-development. They both were also only able to change to AGPL because of already existing CLAs. At least in Element’s case though, they created a two-way commitment in their CLA:

    Now, CLAs come in all shapes and sizes: some good and some bad. It’s critical to understand that our reason for requiring one here is to give us the right to sell AGPL exceptions: not to “do a Hashicorp” and switch to a non-FOSS licence in future. We’ve made this clear in the wording of the CLA (using a similar approach to Signal’s CLA) by committing to distributing contributions as FOSS under an OSI-approved licence – many thanks to those who gave feedback on the original announcement to suggest this. You can find the final CLA wording here, derived from the well-respected Apache Software Foundation CLA.

    Here’s the specific text from the CLA:

    Element shall be entitled to make Your Contribution available under Element’s proprietary software licence, provided that Element shall also make Your Contribution available under the terms of an OSl-approved open-source license.

    I personally consider that a fairly reasonable term. Especially because they specified an OSI-approved license. Element are always going to be bound to that now. This is like the copyleft of contributor license agreements.