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Freeriders in FOSS

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GNU
OSS
Legal
  • Confluent joins Redis and MongoDB in restricting its open source licensing for competitors
  • Confluent Creates New 'Open Source' License to Stop Cloud Poaching

    The problem is that such restrictions run afoul of the Open Source Definition used by the Open Source Initiative, the standards organization that decides which licenses qualify as open source. The restriction also means that any code covered by the license probably can't be used within any other open source project.

  • John Sullivan - "Who wants you to think nobody uses the AGPL and why" (FOSDEM, Brussels, Belgium)

    The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is an important tool for protecting user freedom on the network. Detractors have criticized it for being both too weak and too strong/demanding. In 2018, it was in the news more than ever. Are the interests of corporations that are afraid of their free code being turned into network services run by competitors starting to align with users losing their freedom to such services?

    Historically, the AGPL has been the target of criticism from entities that want to extinguish it. Some companies have banned it from their premises, sowed fear about how it operates, and propagated a myth that nobody is using it.

    Others claim that the AGPL is being used primarily by companies seeking to strong-arm downstream users into purchasing a proprietary version of the covered software -- by catching those users being out of compliance with the AGPL, and telling them that they must buy the software under a proprietary license to avoid being taken to court for copyright infringement.

    A third group of companies is now claiming that the AGPL doesn't go far enough to protect their software against being turned into services that deny users freedom -- though freedom may not be their primary concern.

    In fact, the AGPL is being used today by a variety of interesting and important projects, including ones started by governments, nonprofits, and even businesses. I'll highlight some illustrative examples. I'll also do my best to separate understandable concerns that people have about using the AGPL from attacks on user freedom masquerading as concerns, and see if there is any synergy between the concerns of the third group above and those of individual users.

    While not a full solution to the problems raised when users replace software running on their own machines with software running on someone else's machine, the AGPL is a tool that is being embraced and should be embraced even more.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.