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.

  • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
    ·
    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]
        ·
        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]
        ·
        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]
          ·
          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.