Licensing: Facebook Responds to Licence Complaints, Cloud Native Open Source License Choices Analysed
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Facebook has announced that the React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js projects will be moving to the MIT license. This is, of course, a somewhat delayed reaction to the controversy over the "BSD+patent" license previously applied to those projects.
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Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.
This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.
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One of the most common questions regarding open source licensing today concerns trajectories. Specifically, what are the current directions of travel both for specific licenses as well as license types more broadly. Or put more simply, what licenses are projects using today, and how is that changing?
We’ve examined this data several times, most recently in this January look at the state of licensing based on Black Duck’s dataset. That data suggested major growth for permissive licenses, primarily at the expense of reciprocal alternatives. The Apache and MIT licenses, for example, were up 10% and 21% respectively, while the GPL was down 27%. All of this is on a relative share basis, of course: the “drop” doesn’t reflect relicensing of existing projects, but less usage relative to its peers.
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One such community with enough of a sample size to be relevant is the one currently forming around the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Founded in 2015 with the Kubernetes project as its first asset, the Foundation has added eleven more open source projects, all of which are licensed under the same Apache 2 license. But as a successful Foundation is only a part of the broader ecosystem, the real question is what are the licensing preferences of the Cloud Native projects and products outside of the CNCF itself.
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Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the influence of the CNCF itself, Apache strongly outperforms all other licenses, showing far greater relative adoption than it has in more generalized datasets such as the Black Duck survey. Overall in this dataset, approximately 64% of projects are covered by the Apache license. No other project has greater than a 12% share. The only other licenses above 10%, in fact, are the GPL at 12% and MIT at 11%. After that, the other projects are all 5% or less.
| today's howtos
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Games: Half-Life: C.A.G.E.D., Arcan 0.5.3, Wine Staging 2.17
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Half-Life: C.A.G.E.D. [Steam] is a mod from former Valve worker Cayle George, it's a short prison escape and it should be coming to Linux.
Mr George actually worked on Team Fortress 2 and Portal 2 during his time at Valve, but he's also worked for other notable developers on titles like Horizon Zero Dawn.
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Arcan, the open-source display server powered by a game engine, is out with a new release. Its Durden desktop environment has also been updated.
Arcan is a display server built off "the corpse of a game engine" and also integrates a multimedia framework and offers behavior controls via Lua. Arcan has been in development for a half-decade while its original code traces back more than a decade, as explained previously and has continued advancing since.
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It’s just about time for a new release of Arcan, and way past due for a new release of the reference desktop environment, Durden. Going through some of the visible changes on a ‘one-clip or screenshot per feature’ basis:
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NVIDIA, another big player in the gaming hardware and lifestyle space, released an Android-based portable gaming and entertainment console called the NVIDIA Shield that emphasized in-home streaming, and the Ouya console that Razer acquired (and discontinued) ran Android. But Razer decided to use Windows instead of Android on the Edge.
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Wine Staging 2.17 is another exciting release, which includes more Direct3D11 features which fixes issues with The Witcher 3, Overwatch and more.
As a reminder, Wine Staging is the testing area for future Wine development released, which will eventually be made into stable Wine releases.
| KDE: Plasma 5.11 in Kubuntu 17.10, Krita 3.3, Randa and Evolution of Plasma Mobile
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KDE kicked off the development of the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment a few months ago, and they've already published the Beta release, allowing users to get a first glimpse of what's coming in the final release next month.
Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team did a great job bringing the latest GNOME 3.26 desktop environment to the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, and it looks like the Kubuntu team also want to rebase the official flavor on the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment.
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Work on the next Krita 3.x point release has started, and a first Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Krita 3.3 version is now ready for public testing, giving us a glimpse of what's coming in the new release.
In the release announcement, Krita devs reveal the fact that they were forced to bump the version number from 3.2.x to 3.3.x because the upcoming Krita 3.3 release will be introducing some important changes for Windows platforms, such as support for the Windows 8 event API, thus supporting the n-trig pen in Surface laptops.
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So, back in Randa I was splitting my energies and attentions in many pieces. Some attention went to making pancakes and running the kitchen in the morning — which is stuff I take credit for, but it is really Grace, and Scarlett, and Thomas who did the heavy lifting, and Christian and Mario who make sure the whole thing can happen. And the attendees of the Randa meeting who pitch in for the dishes after lunch and dinner. The Randa meetings are more like a campground than a 5-star hotel, and we work together to make the experience enjoyable. So thanks to everyone who pitched in.
Part of a good sprint is keeping the attendees healthy and attentive — otherwise those 16-hour hacking days really get to you, in spite of the fresh Swiss air.
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You can read more of what the attendees in Randa achieved on planet KDE (e.g. kdenlive, snappy, kmymoney, marble, kube, Plasma mobile, kdepim, and kwin). I’d like to give a special shout out to Manuel, who taught me one gesture in Italian Sign Langauage — which is different from American or Dutch Sign Language, reminding me that there’s localization everywhere.
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Back around 2006, when the Plasma project was started by Aaron Seigo and a group of brave hackers (among which, yours truly) we wanted to create a user interface that is future-proof. We didn’t want to create something that would only run on desktop devices (or laptops), but a code-base that grows with us into whatever the future would bring. Mobile devices were already getting more powerful, but would usually run entirely different software than desktop devices. We wondered why. The Linux kernel served as a wonderful example. Linux runs on a wide range of devices, from super computers to embedded systems, you would set it up for the target system and it would run largely without code changes. Linux architecture is in fact convergent. Could we do something similar at the user interface level?
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