this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy

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[–] cm0002 33 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] grue 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Permissively-licensed stuff (e.g. MIT, BSD) still has that risk. What you really want is copyleft (e.g. GPL) specifically, not just FOSS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can change the license at any point. You just can't make people change the license of past copies

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

gpl prevents you from doing that fyi

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

doesnt it require any modified versions of the code be shared, preventing a change to a non-copyleft liscence?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

The execs don't know wtf VBA is. Those are the middle managers, at best.