My only real example is the one I mentioned above, because we are fucked over with this ticking timebomb of a system.
We have no libre software at all at work; all proprietary.
The only thing that isn’t would be the RHEL servers we have; which run some closed-source crap that hasn’t been supported in years.
Companies don’t care about libre, they care about a product that does the job it says it does and can be supported. FLOSS projects often don’t have the funds, or resources to provide support. So, while they may have an awesome software, the “no support” turns away just about all the companies away from using it; those that don’t have internal devs (which is a lot because of outsourcing).
Well, like you said, RedHat licenses a lot GPL code and offers enterprise support with a lot of success, so I’m not sure I accept the premise that support is the reason for a lack of quality code.
I am only speculating, I am sure there are other factors. Like development time.
FLOSS is great, but business want support and want it now. Lots of projects can’t give that and business need a scapegoat to blame when something goes wrong.
Those projects don’t cater to business so they don’t get business customers.
Of couse this example is not perfect; now that I think about it I know of one that wen’t under and did offer support. Sandstorm. They had a great product and offered support but no one did that and the company went bankrupt.
Which means (in the case of sandstorm) either it’s bad code, or a toxic license, right? the only other factors are the macroeconomics of IT, which are even harder to speculate on, the way I see it.
I still think there is something wrong with how you named the topic and then asked questions that are not directly based of the topic name. And also some of your examples are not really “irreplaceable programs” as you named them.
Are you gonna argue with every program like with Blender - yes maybe most of the " useful " parts will not be 100% GPL related because they use a coding language that is not GPL licensed but ffs how much levels deep do you want to check ?
If you are looking for an entirely GPL licensed OS with Desktop, browser, file manager and everything that only uses GPL license. Well that does not exist. And I think you can check that pretty easily on the internet. Not gonna try and tell you why it is not possible. Don’t feel in the mood to write essays today.
Just to clarify things I am not a Stallman fan nor to his ideology.
Blender not only has dependencies but core code licensed differently, it’s an interesting and unique exception. And I’m not sure if you’ve used blender recently, but without the apache and python licensed code, you can’t do much outside of making flat colored monkey heads with it.
Also, by not the topic, I was referring to proprietary software, because that’s a different argument, and it’ll muddy any productive discussion, because examples like .PSD and .XLSX formats being industry de-facto standards are easy to make and don’t really get us anywhere.
Sorry if I came off as antagonistic, I definitely needed to clarify.
Okay call me when you get any program which goes to the second category.
The closest you will get may be with programs part of the GNU project like GNU Octave … etc.
You understand that those qualifications aren’t arbitrary, right? The whole point of the discussion is to see if the more restrictive licensing is actually essential or meaningful outside of a small subset of ideological validation.
This is like looking for a sweet cake without sweeteners, like NONE of them. Theoretically it may be possible if your tongue is diseased and there are some special circumstances like specific temperature of the air and of the cake. But in the other 99.999% of the cases it is not possible. And yes it is just a stupid ideology ( actually it is really close to religion if you see how the community acts ).
Good morning! Refreshed and ready to contribute again.
It was alpha-ish, but by no means bad. They had cutting edge security and containerization.
IT was licensed under MIT.
Prolly it, they said in their blog that they had trouble business adopting it, so in reality they didn’t have a sales team as actually sell the service.
I don’t see any way where libre code (other than languages and services like Apache) is contributing to anything as pertaining to businesses, it seems to only be used in the enthusiast spectrum.
My understanding is that the source code must be available to the users. The users have all the freedoms from 0 to 3. I don’t know the legality of the concept of the user if a company writes GPL software and ships it to another company where employees use it. Do the employees have rights? I don’t know. I’d imagine the company definitely does. My understanding is that free software and open source software are two distinct movements with not much in common. The former is about the rights and the freedoms of the end user. The latter is about making software development better.
I think it is conceivable that a vendor is in a market where its customers choose to not exercise freedoms 2 and 3. It is unlikely though. For example, look at the idiots at gr security.
As a derivative work of the Linux kernel, grsecurity’s code is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. However, grsecurity is only distributed to paid subscribers, and its use requires agreement to a grsecurity Access Agreement which voids access to future versions if the code is redistributed. (Wikipedia)
Footnote: A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The reason for the Affero GPL3 was to combat the service loophole, whereby some companies were skirting GPL source distribution requirements.
If you read the original post, I plainly make the distinction between permissively licensed free software and copyleft/network protective free software.
@dot404 Openstack would be an excellent example of permissively licensed software used in industry. It’s licensed under Apache 2.0. I’ve added it to the list.
The entire modern web is node/other.JS, dual licensed databases, PHP, Ruby, etc. – it’s pretty much all permissive OSS.
The only exceptions seem to be proprietary all in one stacks and cloud services, but services are typically governed under use agreements rather than software licenses.
If we’re talking creative and business solutions, it’s virtually all proprietary, which is hiether here nor there, the distinction we’re trying to make is between Permissive and Restrictive OSS, which can both be considered ‘libre.’