this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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You say that ironically, but in the early days of Google its motto was "Do No Evil" and it promoted non-intrusive advertising. There was this sense that Google was a company of engineers and that you could trust them.
(disclaimer: I didn't trust them.)
Google was a company of engineers that you could trust, however, like Boeing (which was another "Company of Engineers") they were slowly replaced by business execs who probably haven't written a line of code in their life (Save for maybe some VBA for some businessy excel spreadsheet)
This is why I love FOSS products. You get the advantage of using well engineered code, without the risk of that code falling into the hands of exploitive capitalists.
Permissively-licensed stuff (e.g. MIT, BSD) still has that risk. What you really want is copyleft (e.g. GPL) specifically, not just FOSS.
You can change the license at any point. You just can't make people change the license of past copies
gpl prevents you from doing that fyi
gpl does not prevent the owner from changing the licence later. (Unless it is also making use of someone else's gpl components.)
For example, Qt has a free version which is under the GPL; and a paid version which is not. So if you were making software with Qt, if you were using the free version, you'd be compelled to also release your product under GPL. But you could then later switch to a paid subscription and rerelease under some other licience if you wanted to.
Actually it doesn't
doesnt it require any modified versions of the code be shared, preventing a change to a non-copyleft liscence?
Not if the copyright owner changes the license. When you are the creator you can do what you please. With that being said you can not do that if the public writes code. That's why you see CLAs (contributor license agreement)
The execs don't know wtf VBA is. Those are the middle managers, at best.