Ferk

If you are using a GPL library that is statically linked to code with a different license the result is one binary that has inside both GPL and other license code, which would not be allowed under the GPL terms, because it requires that the binaries that use the source code must have their source code available in full (including other source and modifications that are part of the same binary).

The only case in which you don't need to provide the source for GPL software is if you don't actually distribute the binary to customers.. private binaries do not have to be published with their source, as long as you never made the binaries public and never gave it to anyone else. Only when you give it to someone you need to provide the code.

This allows for a loophole in which if you are providing a service, then you can run the software privately in your private server without sharing the source code to the clients using the service, since they do not really run the server program although they indirectly benefit from its results. This is why the AGPL was created, since it has a clause to force also those offering services to make the source of the server available to the users of the service.

Yes. Did I deny that?

Can anyone confirm or deny if what I said is wrong?

I get downvoted for stating one advantage an AGPL fork would have, and yet nobody seems to be disagreeing with what I said... *shrugs* 🤷

But, whichever command I put in autostart.sh will run as if I run in terminal with the & sign. E.g: dunst & to run in the background.

Well, only if it's one single command, if you have multiple commands inside of the script, they will still run sequentially (the next command will only run after the previous one completely closes) unless you add & to them as well.

The difference is that dwm itself will not have to wait for the autostart.sh to complete before launching itself (thanks to it being run in the background with &)

However, autostart_blocking.sh (which isn't run with a &) will stop dwm from fully launching until the script completes.. I guess this is useful if you need certain things to be set up before dwm actually starts.. but it would potentially add a delay on dwm startup.

Potentially, using some sort of predictable hashing to get the same id across instances might also help in the detection of duplicate links so that they can be aggregated in a single place (sort of what was suggested at point 2 here).

I fear this could be too much of a breaking change though.

3. A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

This would be great.. also even if the "restore" part were not possible (yet?) I feel offering a way to extract your data might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL), reddit does allow you to download your data after all.

Personally, I don't think the problem is the risk of companies not contributing back... I honestly wouldn't mind if they don't contribute at all and instead they just use the community-developed GPL software as-is, without making any changes to it.

In my mind, the problem is that I cannot trust that a piece of non-copyleft software that's provided by a company actually does what I expect it should do, and does not have extra bits doing things I do not want it to do. Like the changes Google does in their Chrome version of Chromium, for example. It's much harder for me to trust any random Chromium fork than it would be a GPL licensed browser, because all Chromium forks can legally include changes without disclosing them openly, they don't even have to let you know if the binary actually matches the code.

If, for example, MacOS / Microsoft Windows include a copy of OpenSSL with the OS, how can I be sure they are not adding their own sort of malicious spice into it? Can I trust that the keys generated with it will be truly secure? How can I audit it?

At least with the GPL there's some level of legal accountability in that any change that is not openly shared would be illegal. But with MIT there are no legal barriers against malicious code, it's totally legal for companies to force feed me totally legal changes that I wouldn't want and/or that I might not even notice they are there.

developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like

What if they choose a license that limits the freedom from all other developers to improve that copy of the software? is allowing a developer to restrict further development actually good for the freedom of the developers? Because I would say no.

The spirit of the GPL is to give freedom to the developers and hackers (in the good sense of hacker). The chorus of the Free Software Song by Stallman is "you'll be free hackers, you'll be free".

the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide

"Your freedom ends when the freedom of others begins"

The only "freedom" the GPL restricts is the freedom to limit the freedom of other developers/hackers that want to edit the software you distribute. This is in the same spirit as having laws against slavery that restrict the "freedom" of people to take slaves.

Would a society that allows oppression (that has no laws against it) be more "free" than a society that does not allow oppression (with laws to guarantee the freedom of others is respected)?

It doesn’t even say “you should use the GPL”

That sounds a lot more confrontational and less diplomatic.

The ticket was actually indirectly asking it, by explaining the potential problems with non-copyleft. They just added "If you plan to carry on..." to introduce a compromise, which actually allowed for at least some minor change to be made, and made it clear that the different license is intentional and not just for lack of awareness (which would imply the devs have no intention on switching).

it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”

Somehow you added the "MUST" to this sentence, but not to the first one.. even though the github issue did not say they MUST, instead it even used the word "please" and appealed to having some deference to the GNU coreutils.

At least this issue managed to get a change through for clarity.. I don't think you would have gotten anything at all with the other approach.

Note that AGPL can take changes from MIT but MIT can't take changes that are purely AGPL without following the AGPL.

So, as far as I can understand, any improvements done to the AGPL version cannot be carried over to the MIT version (without very painful and careful re-implementation / re-engineering). That alone would be a big advantage to the hypothetical AGPL fork.

It would be a bit of a legal nightmare, since it's theoretically possible that, even without really knowing it, the same feature might be implemented the same way in both forks separately, and the MIT devs might have no sure way to prove they did not copy it. So this would be like walking on eggshells for them.

Thanks. I wasn't planning to go there anyway...

It's annoying how the title throws such a general open question and then they don't clarify this at all.. there isn't even a single match for "USA" or "America" in the whole article, you have to sort of guess.

Yes, although Ctrl-M would be the "Carriage Return" character (\r). For the "Line Feed" newline character (\n) the Control combination would be Ctrl-J. Both of them would normally produce a new line when you press them on most terminals.

That's why if you open in nano/vim a file with Windows style EOL (/r/n), you might see a strange ^M symbol at the end of each line.

To be more precise, it's the "EOT" (end of transmission) control character, the 4th symbol in ASCII, from the non-printable character area.