this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
436 points (97.8% liked)
Privacy
31974 readers
325 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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)
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.