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Libxml2's "no security embargoes" policy

(lwn.net)
276 points jwilk | 3 comments | 25 Jun 25 19:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.686s | source
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kibwen ◴[25 Jun 25 22:01 UTC] No.44382195[source]▶
> Ariadne Conill, a long-time open-source contributor, observed that corporations using open source had responded with ""regulatory capture of the commons"" instead of contributing to the software they depend on.

I'm only half-joking when I say that one of the premier selling points of GPL over MIT in this day and age is that it explicitly deters these freeloading multibillion-dollar companies from depending on your software and making demands of your time.

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xxpor ◴[25 Jun 25 22:03 UTC] No.44382211[source]▶
Why bother open sourcing if you're not interested in getting people to use it?
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1. gizmo686 ◴[25 Jun 25 22:19 UTC] No.44382308[source]▶
A decent part of my job is open source. Our reason for doing it is simple: we would rather have people who are not us do the work instead of us.

On some of our projects this has been a great success. We have some strong outside contributors doing work on our project without us needing to pay them. In some cases, those contributors are from companies that are in direct competition with us.

On other projects we've open sourced, we've had people (including competitors) use, without anyone contributing back.

Guess which projects stay open source.

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2. OkayPhysicist ◴[25 Jun 25 22:43 UTC] No.44382456[source]▶
We have a solution to this. It's called the (L)GPL. If people would stop acting like asking for basic (zero cost) decency in exchange for their gift is tantamount to armed robbery, we could avoid this whole mess.
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3. ilc ◴[26 Jun 25 15:52 UTC] No.44388585[source]▶
The GPL doesn't do anything when the project is just used internally by another company.

They never trigger the distribution clauses, and they own the copyrights of all the work being done. So if you NEVER distribute binaries outside your company's walls. The GPL is a giant nothing, for most practical cases.

That's why we're starting to see the AGPL more now. But even then, for INTERNAL applications. It's still a nothing.

The GPL doesn't cure people being greedy. It just changes how they are allowed to be greedy.