FOSS Post

The Fair Code site doesn't really explain how it works, but the Commons Clause site[1] has an FAQ.

I agree about the problem: it's hard to run a business supporting a project if a competitor can come along and resell their code without any compensation.

The commons clause says a company can't sell "a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software."

I like the idea that a company could create a plugin that works with existing open source software and then sell that. I like the idea of creating a framework that lots of people can add plugins for, because I could make my living offering a few handy plugins for it and I don't have a problem if others are also making a living selling their own plugins. In principle, it makes a lot of sense.

I'm not clear if it's kosher for me to write product X that's using a lot of Apache licensed software, but to which I've added the Commons Clause.

And it generally seems problematic... Suppose a company sinks a decent amount of effort into some widgets they add to a commons clause licensed software, but only 10% of customers really use the widgets. Are they in violation of the license?

[1]: https://commonsclause.com/

[2]: https://fosspost.org/fair-code-open-source/

Hi there. I am the author of the Register article that you quote:

> this was language The Register used in an article

So, in response to that, I'd like to point out a few things.

1. This is, I feel, now widely and well-established language in this discussion. For example, note its use in the comments to this article about the discontinuation of CentOS Linux three years ago: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

2. Others are using it in the context of this story; for example, here: https://fosspost.org/red-hat-is-shooting-itself-in-the-foot-again/

3. The direct personal reason that I used the phrase "a bunch of freeloaders" is that this is a Douglas Adams quotation, or rather, paraphrase. I am not an especially big name, but those who do know my name may recognise it: I was once the president of ZZ 9 Plural Z alpha, the official Douglas Adams appreciation society. I was interviewed quite widely in media around the world at the time that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film came out. I used the phrase in order to refer to the Douglas Adams line about "a taxi service for a bunch of degenerate freeloaders." For reasons which I trust are obvious I removed the adjective.

> Really losing my faith in the accuracy of HN if such a huge thread is full of misinformation.

What is the point of dubbing yourself the arbiter of the moral high ground and spreading mis-information in the very next breath?

I am less puzzled by you spreading misinformation than I am by the fact you have this outrage at the very thing you are doing and don't hesitate to attack the character of people you disagree with.

> A number of these patches they submitted to the kernel were indeed successfully merged to the Linux kernel tree.

It turns out the researchers DID allow the bad faith commits to be merged and that is a big problem that is still being unwound.

https://fosspost.org/researchers-secretly-tried-to-add-vulnerabilities-to-linux-kernel/

> Audacity is an indispensable utility. It’s great to see it and other “real” software on the web.

It's been a very long time since I used it, but didn't Audacity turn evil, add a bunch of networking code it never needed before, and start spying on people? (https://fosspost.org/audacity-is-now-a-spyware/). I remember people reverting to older "safe" versions.

I guess that doesn't much matter for this web app since it's collecting your IP and data by design (their privacy policy seems very vague and handwavy), but for the desktop app it seemed like kind of a big deal at the time.

The market SuSE is in is not "server or desktop installs", it is "support contracts/subscriptions for server or desktop installs", and they have to have a non-negligible share of that market, given that Wikipedia claims they have 1400 employees, which is more than 10% of Red Hat's number.

There is some more data in this article:
https://fosspost.org/analytics/insights-on-redhat-suse-the-major-linux-companies

Interestingly it claims 750 employees for SuSE in 2016; perhaps the business entity sold today includes some departments that were elsewhere in the org-chart in 2016?

Chinese state surveillance and state censorship is terrible. But - US', and int'l corporations' mass surveillance, and censorship, is way up there in the "degree of evil".

Please encourage your tech-savvy friends to use safer applications, like Signal for messaging - not WhatsApp; and FOSS alternatives to Zoom, e.g.:

https://fosspost.org/alternative-software/end-users/zoom-alternatives

no less importantly - try to ween them off of GMail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook365 or Apple mail.