Article goes over the embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy that Microsoft and Google have used against open document and chat formats. There is speculation that Meta could do something similar by joining the Fediverse.

  • Albanian_Lil_Pump [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I thought open source software usually have a license that state any modifications to the source code must be open source as well?

    • GnastyGnuts [he/him]
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      edit-2
      1 year ago

      :jefferson jacksonsorryigetthesecrackersmixedup: "Now let them enforce it."

      EDIT: reading the wiki link to "embrace extend extinguish", it seems like Microsoft and other such companies basically just hid the additional developments they were making until it was too late.

      • PKMKII [none/use name]
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        1 year ago

        The linked article also makes it sound like they would purposely gum up the implementation of the open source standard which would slow down its development as to iron out the issues with the big players’ implementations. Which dovetails, slow down the open source standards development, then release your own with the bells and whistles that the open source standard couldn’t get around to implementing because it was too busy cleaning up your messes.

    • StellarTabi [none/use name]
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      1 year ago

      sometimes there's long roads around that, although newer types of GPL licenses often try to restrict those loopholes.

    • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      Depends on the specific license.

      BSD license is just about being credited somewhere, not really about keeping stuff open.

      GPL is about keeping stuff open, but has workaround in companies deploying stuff as software-as-service and closing off stuff that way, because technically they're not providing end users with the actual executable.

      There's other types too, but it's hard to get an easy comprehensive overview of this stuff.

        • Changeling [it/its]
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          1 year ago

          There have been attempts at licensing with leftist principles built in but many of them are unenforceable or at the very least haven’t stood up against litigation.

        • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
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          edit-2
          1 year ago

          that's why google has an internal memo to never use AGPL code.

          A lot of the tech people who are the types to aspire to work at a FAANG think AGPL is stupid because companies never want to use it so it's pointless to license code that way if you actually want it to be used. I think that's the mentality for people who keep code portfolios to get hired, instead of the type of open-source contributer who is passionate about FOSS and works as a bus driver or something.

          • Paradox5240 [he/him,any]
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, it always infuriates me whenever I see someone opening a pull request/issue with how this repo should use some “real” open source license like MIT instead of GPL/AGPL.

    • trompete [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      This is about open standards. You can implement a standard by writing your own software and not use free software (aka "open source" if you're a lib).