This seems like a bit of an over reaction to me, and I’m not really sure why you interpret things that way, but to each their own I guess. Every choice made, from what features to include via what language to write it in to the chosen license, will alienate someone. Luckily syncthing isn’t the only choice out there for you.
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Why does it seems like an overreaction? I contributed my time and recomended this product to plenty of people because ST represented something in which I strongly believed in. Suddenly, one day, there was a silent switch, and ST no longer stood for s philosophical stance which I strongly support, but rather moved to a strong copyleft.
How would you feel if you recomended something that stands for something you believe in, and then, one day, you notice it silently moved away to something quite opposite?
If the language changed it would still mostly be the same thing. If a feature is added and idsliked it can be ignored. If the ideals it represented and carried along change, that’s something that will offend those that put time and effor in promoting the product.
Had ST been strong copyright or strong copyleft (or propietary) I would not have looked into it further from the first moment. But it actually stood for something I believe in, a license I respected, goals with which I was identified, good software design, and a good implementation, so I pushed this to all my friends and families, praising it’s features and how good it was.
Suddenly, it does not stand for something I respect any more. It’s honestly a very, very sad moment, honestly, and it really strips the development team of any sort of trust (how do I know you won’t get rid of the privacy part of it silently tomorrow as well?).
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Geez, histrionic much?
I have no desire to get into the relative merits of MIT vs GPL but both have their strengths and weaknesses. What is ridiculous is arguing that GPL is somehow not compatible with free or open source software philosophy.
If you are so opposed to a GPL license, go back to the last MIT licensed commit and fork it.
I don’t really like too all this indie situation but I don’t understand what is so wrong with GPL. Why do you feel betrayed?
What “philosophical stance” was it that they used to stand for then?
Nor do I. What I’m critizicing is an silent, undiscussed sudden license change.
As I said before, I don’t want to get into discussion about why MIT is better that GPL. If you really need an example of a downside, then there’s the fact that GPL code can’t be submitted to the Mac App Store, which will hurt adoption amongst non-techies.
Because I put time and effort into promoting (as well as track a few bugs) a software that promoted values in which I believe, and now, suddenly, there’s a strong change of stance into very strong copyleft, with no announcement, no discussion, nothing.
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That doesn’t answer my question. Where on the website or in other official communication has the syncthing developers published an official “philosophical stance“?
Also:
Silently changing to a more restrictive license after having gained some momentum, is, IMHO, “funny business”.
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There was this pull request that everybody that contributed code accepted. There was not much discussion but it was not totally silent 
this is a real issue that should be fixed, maybe some dual license for compiled versions which allows to put them into a store?
I for one would like to let people know that (the switch to (*)) GPL is exactly what made me decide syncthing (I’m sorry, pulse) was worth to start investing time in.
I have been bitten too often by contributing code to bsd or mit licenced projects only to have some company fork the codebase and start a polished for-profit closed source version. Thereby using my code but not giving anything back.
The GPL licence is the only licence really protecting a project from this kind of behaviour. The apple store not accepting GPL software is a problem with the apple store, not with gpl software.
To Hobarrera I can only say: Try to think for yourself why you hate the GPL so much. Is it only because of the apple store inconvenience? Is it because people told you GPL was scary? Did you try to use GPL software in a closed source project and were bitten by the consequences?
The GPL licence is designed exactly to prevent what you say you hate: somebody sneakily changing the opennness of the code. (*) I did not know it was previously MIT licenced, but I did checkout the current licence before creating an account here and cloning the repository. Probably wouldn’t have bothered when it had been a MIT licence.
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Mozilla Public License v2 solves all of those issues jan, as well as being App Store compatible and compatible with GPLv2 only and LGPL code bases, something which the GPLv3 is completely incompatible with/
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I see two reasons for switching from more permissive license to a share-alike one:
- Personal offence
- Not being true to yourself about the goals
To confirm the first, we need to see the actual event that triggered the switch. A company selling the product with more features, a person who mocks the interface and gains more attention than developers, a company who uses you to do things for free for them to sell them, an economy that makes you insecure. There should be some event that triggered it.
The second is about the initial goal. People choose MIT license when they want other people to fork and reuse stuff. If you want money, fame or girlfriends - you need to choose the appropriate license. Of course, the girlfriend license is not open source. And the money license doesn’t mean that you’ll get the money. Copyright doesn’t grant you the fame automatically, either. So you may have your goals - that’s ok - but they are not related to open source software - they are about you. So, when you choose the license - you choose people like you, who share different interests and goals, but are of the same views on software. By changing license you are betraying them, and doing so is not an easy decision. Doing so means that your comfort zone and motivation is hurt, and you just want to be yourself. That’s a natural desire.
Not many people can handle the challenge of keeping things free from restrictions (not free as in alcoholic drink). It is immaturity of our human surveillance systems (to give everyone proper credit) and screwed up economy (that doesn’t allow to do good things for free). Thanks for trying, though.
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No, none of that. I prefer BSD/MIT because everybody’s free to do whatever they want with the code, instead of having a three-page document restrict them.
I believe that people ought to be educated to share, and should share because they want to, not because they’re being forced to.
Also, see this.
BSD or MIT licensed projects have also been bitten by someone taking code, modifying it, strapping the GPL onto it, and making it unusable for the original project. It’s ironic how often closed-source companies are criticized for locking in forked code, but it’s actually GPL projects that do this more often. (this actually happens frequently with driver code moved from *BSD to Linux, and then being tainted for BSD devs to get any improvements back).
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Everybody’s been bitten by something, and everyone has an opinion. Things are what they are, the reasons for the change were those given in my first reply above. At this point, it should be obvious that the main commercial interest was from Ind.ie. Can we stop with the betrayal bullshit, please?
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Hi everyone,
I can see that Jakob’s life is being more difficult by some of the changes that we’ve introduced as part of the Ind.ie stewardship and Pulse and I don’t want this to be the case. He doesn’t deserve it. He’s selflessly created something that I’m sure we can agree on holds great promise and shared it with the world.
I am talking to Jakob now to see what we can do to make sure that he doesn’t have to be burdened by this sort of negativity and so he can concentrate on what he does best: make awesome software.
I believe that that will be in all of our best interests.
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How would you go about that?
If I’ve noticed anything about FOSS projects, it’s that concerns about licensing end up dragging out a whole lot longer, especially if something which users perceive is a copyleft that’s too strong e.g. AGPL, GPLv3
Moving to something which gives a little more of a middle ground, like LGPLv3 or the Mozilla Public License v2 has put an end to these discussions rather quickly, since both sides are appeased.
Perhaps Jakob could look at that if he feels that this burden is becoming too much.
Hi Rodney, you can see how we handled it on this blog post announcing the Ind.ie fork of Pulse. Like most things, we took the path of least resistance. This way, Syncthing can continue down its own path and we can continue down ours; hopefully with both of our efforts complimenting each others’.
MPL is tl;dr for me - but the gist of it seems to be that MPL covered files must remain open source, but that it can be freely linked with proprietary code. Yes?
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