Licensing and Openwashing
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Armin Ronacher ☛ FSL: A License For the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral
Sentry relicensed under a new license, called the Functional Source License (FSL). Like the BUSL it replaces, It's not an Open Source license by the OSI definition, but it comes with an irrevocable grant: after two years it turns into an Apache 2.0 licensed artifact (or MIT for the alternative form). It's the response to a lot of feedback we have received about our previous use of the BUSL. You can read all about the switch to FSL in the Announcement Blog Post. (You can also find my original thoughts on the use of the BUSL here.)
I believe this license to be closer to Open Source than what we had before.
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[Old] ESR ☛ The Cathedral and the Bazaar
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the ``cathedral'' model of most of the commercial world versus the ``bazaar'' model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'', suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
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Openwashing
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Kyle E Mitchell ☛ Toward PolyForm Shield Version 2
It’s been more than three years since PolyForm published its pair of licenses for developers looking to release broadly without enabling competitors to use their own work against them. Those forms—Shield and Perimeter—still represent the published state of their art, with coverage that others like Hashi and Sentry have missed or had to revise or FAQ for.
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