So while today Fluxer is licensed as AGPLv3, tomorrow they can pull the rug and change the license, just like everyone else has been doing.
Isn’t that just a problem for contributors to worry about though?
Like, it’s not like they can remove (or change the license of) the code that’s already out there (their CLA says existing source code releases stay licensed as-is), nor does this affect forks. So I don’t really see the harm to the consumer.
any distributed version that includes your contribution remains properly licensed under the project license(s) that applied when you contributed.
They can’t retroactively close-source the older versions released under AGPL, but if it ever required a community fork to continue the last release of the GPL version, it would be a massive burden to maintain it, and could cause federation to break as the codebase diverges over time, which would create a rift in the community. You’d also have to hope that average users care enough about the license to jump ship to the GPL (probably now not as full-featured) version, otherwise the GPL version risks not being able to get enough funding to continue, or enough users to convince the larger communities to move over.
As a somewhat similar real world example, the pixel-art program Aseprite once used a FLOSS license, but it switched to a proprietary license at some point. The last GPL version was forked by the community, but it never got much traction, and is now massively behind the closed source version in features and userbase.
Like with most lisence concerns the avg idiot has no fucking idea what they are talking about and just think things are bad because they were told they were bad.
Yer entirely correct, as far as consumer and users are concerned it’s a fat fucking nothing burger.
And frankly while this is Lemmy and everyone here loves open source. In the real world the total of actual normal users that a community program like this is targeted at.
A grand total of fuck and all actually care. A closed source app is just as good as a open source one.
The onky thing that matters is management. And a open source app can be managed and ran like total dog shit just as much as a closed source one. Lisence also literally doesn’t fucking matter one bit.
Unless someone’s willing to step up fork the project and maintain it entirely on their own and build a whole new team.
Then it literally doesn’t fucking matter. The only thing that matters is there’s an option to fork. That’s literally it. Everything is might as well be people pissing in the wind and complaining about the taste.
Isn’t that just a problem for contributors to worry about though?
Like, it’s not like they can remove (or change the license of) the code that’s already out there (their CLA says existing source code releases stay licensed as-is), nor does this affect forks. So I don’t really see the harm to the consumer.
They can’t retroactively close-source the older versions released under AGPL, but if it ever required a community fork to continue the last release of the GPL version, it would be a massive burden to maintain it, and could cause federation to break as the codebase diverges over time, which would create a rift in the community. You’d also have to hope that average users care enough about the license to jump ship to the GPL (probably now not as full-featured) version, otherwise the GPL version risks not being able to get enough funding to continue, or enough users to convince the larger communities to move over.
As a somewhat similar real world example, the pixel-art program Aseprite once used a FLOSS license, but it switched to a proprietary license at some point. The last GPL version was forked by the community, but it never got much traction, and is now massively behind the closed source version in features and userbase.
Like with most lisence concerns the avg idiot has no fucking idea what they are talking about and just think things are bad because they were told they were bad.
Yer entirely correct, as far as consumer and users are concerned it’s a fat fucking nothing burger.
And frankly while this is Lemmy and everyone here loves open source. In the real world the total of actual normal users that a community program like this is targeted at.
A grand total of fuck and all actually care. A closed source app is just as good as a open source one.
The onky thing that matters is management. And a open source app can be managed and ran like total dog shit just as much as a closed source one. Lisence also literally doesn’t fucking matter one bit.
Unless someone’s willing to step up fork the project and maintain it entirely on their own and build a whole new team.
Then it literally doesn’t fucking matter. The only thing that matters is there’s an option to fork. That’s literally it. Everything is might as well be people pissing in the wind and complaining about the taste.