Pinboard (jm)

Software Licenses and Workers' Rights · Agent IO

jm — 2026-04-07T11:26:40+00:00

Huh, this is a thought-provoking blog post about OSS licensing.

It is observably and objectively bad for society when investors own closed-source software. That starts by being bad for tech workers, creators lose the right to the value that they create, and users are still harmed because they don’t get the protection from spying and abuse that open source promised them. [...] The open source movement is a ladder that leans on the wall of users’ rights. We’ve spent forty years climbing that ladder. Where are we now? Our world is controlled by moguls who’ve built empires using open source software that they’ve locked behind proprietary barriers. Those empires exploit workers and harm the users that the open source movement was supposed to protect. Our ladder is leaning on the wrong wall.

No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet

jm — 2026-03-05T09:37:50+00:00

a good bit of OSS drama. The maintainers of the "chardet" library claim to have "clean room" reimplemented its code using an LLM, to relicense from LGPL to MIT. Of course that is now how this works (an LLM is not capable of "clean room", nor is its output copyrightable). Mark Pilgrim, as the code's original author, is not happy either....

Introducing the Forklift Certified License

jm — 2025-09-21T10:29:14+00:00

This has some good points:

Look, it’s starting to be pretty damn obvious that “Free Software” and """Open-Source""" are no longer the kinda hippie shit we thought them to be back when they’d give you Linux distros CDs with magazines about computer touching. The Free Software Foundation has been sliding into irrelevance more and more by entirely failing to address its big Creepy Uncle problem. Open-Source has turned into a form of unpaid internship to be hired to make shitty apps that bring more surveillance and ads to our world.

Ouch....

The Anti-Capitalist Software License

jm — 2025-02-27T17:23:16+00:00

Here it is in full:

ANTI-CAPITALIST SOFTWARE LICENSE (v 1.4)

This is anti-capitalist software, released for free use by individuals and organizations that do not operate by capitalist principles.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person or organization (the "User") obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to use, copy, modify, merge, distribute, and/or sell copies of the Software, subject to the following conditions:

1. The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or modified versions of the Software.

2. The User is one of the following:
a. An individual person, laboring for themselves
b. A non-profit organization
c. An educational institution
d. An organization that seeks shared profit for all of its members, and allows non-members to set the cost of their labor

3. If the User is an organization with owners, then all owners are workers and all workers are owners with equal equity and/or equal vote.

4. If the User is an organization, then the User is not law enforcement or military, or working for or under either.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This is fun because it would make esr's head explode.

Treeware

jm — 2020-03-23T11:59:06+00:00

'a style of software distribution similar to Postcardware, distributed by the author on the condition that users buy the author a tree.'

Sketchfab Launches Public Domain Dedication for 3D Cultural Heritage

jm — 2020-02-27T10:36:21+00:00

This is awesome!

We are pleased to announce that cultural organisations using Sketchfab can now dedicate their 3D scans and models to the Public Domain using the Creative Commons (CC) 0 Public Domain Dedication. This newly supported dedication allows museums and similar organisations to share their 3D data more openly, adding amazing 3D models to the Public Domain, many for the first time. This update also makes it even easier for 3D creators to download and reuse, re-imagine, and remix incredible ancient and modern artifacts, objects, and scenes. We are equally proud to make this announcement in collaboration with 27 cultural organisations from 13 different countries. We are especially happy to welcome the Smithsonian Institution to Sketchfab as part of this initiative. The Smithsonian has uploaded their first official 3D models to Sketchfab as part of their newly launched open access program.

Climate Strike Software License

jm — 2020-01-28T13:09:51+00:00

The key bit:

The Software may not be used in applications and services that are used for or aid in the exploration, extraction, refinement, processing, or transportation of fossil fuels. The Software may not be used by companies that rely on fossil fuel extraction as their primary means of revenue. This includes but is not limited to the companies listed at https://climatestrike.software/blacklist

Who’s using your face? The ugly truth about facial recognition

jm — 2019-04-19T12:33:04+00:00

In order to feed this hungry system, a plethora of face repositories — such as IJB-C — have sprung up, containing images manually culled and bound together from sources as varied as university campuses, town squares, markets, cafés, mugshots and social-media sites such as Flickr, Instagram and YouTube. To understand what these faces have been helping to build, the FT worked with Adam Harvey, the researcher who first spotted Jillian York’s face in IJB-C. An American based in Berlin, he has spent years amassing more than 300 face datasets and has identified some 5,000 academic papers that cite them. The images, we found, are used to train and benchmark algorithms that serve a variety of biometric-related purposes — recognising faces at passport control, crowd surveillance, automated driving, robotics, even emotion analysis for advertising. They have been cited in papers by commercial companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, SenseTime and IBM, as well as by academics around the world, from Japan to the United Arab Emirates and Israel. “We’ve seen facial recognition shifting in purpose,” says Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the EFF, who was shocked to discover that his own colleagues’ faces were in the Iarpa database. “It was originally being used for identification purposes . . . Now somebody’s face is used as a tracking number to watch them as they move across locations on video, which is a huge shift. [Researchers] don’t have to pay people for consent, they don’t have to find models, no firm has to pay to collect it, everyone gets it for free.”

The end of open: BBC blocks its podcasts on Google

jm — 2019-03-25T12:59:09+00:00

Talking to Podnews, a BBC spokesperson said that Google is required to sign a licence to link to their podcasts; and that the Distribution Policy also requires Google to supply user data to the BBC. There has been a “consultation with Google”, and the BBC “has no choice but to stop Google from making podcasts available via Google products.”

Do not fall into Oracle's Java 11 trap

jm — 2018-09-26T15:29:06+00:00

The key part of the terms is as follows: You may not: use the Programs for any data processing or any commercial, production, or internal business purposes other than developing, testing, prototyping, and demonstrating your Application; The trap is as follows: Download Oracle JDK (because that is what you've always done, and it is what the web-search tells you); Use it in production (because you didn't realise the license changed); Get a nasty phone call from Oracle's license enforcement teams demanding lots of money In other words, Oracle can rely on inertia from Java developers to cause them to download the wrong (commercial) release of Java. Unless you read the text/warnings/legalese very carefully you might not even realise Oracle JDK is now commercial, and that you are therefore liable to pay Oracle for Java.

Nosferatu is only viewable today due to piracy

jm — 2018-08-14T10:16:39+00:00

'In 1922 a German court ordered all prints and negatives of Nosferatu destroyed following a copyright dispute with the widow of Bram Stoker. The film only exists today because of piracy. One copy survived and somehow found it's way to America, where Dracula was already in the public domain. That's it. That's the only reason you've ever seen the granddaddy of all horror movies.'

Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code

jm — 2017-09-25T09:33:52+00:00

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.

The React license for founders and CTOs – James Ide – Medium

jm — 2017-09-11T10:23:09+00:00

Decent explanation of _why_ Facebook came up with the BSD+Patents license: "Facebook’s patent grant is about sharing its code while preserving its ability to defend itself against patent lawsuits."

The difficulty of open sourcing code at Facebook, including React in 2013, was one of the reasons the company’s open-source contributions used to be a fraction of what they are today. It didn’t use to have a strong reputation as an open-source contributor to front-end technologies. Facebook wanted to open source code, though; when it grew communities for projects like React, core contributors emerged to help out and interview candidates often cited React and other Facebook open source as one of the reasons they were interested in applying. People at Facebook wanted to make it easier to open source code and not worry as much about patents. Facebook’s solution was the Facebook BSD+Patents license.

[LEGAL-303] ASF, RocksDB, and Facebook's BSD+patent grant licensing

jm — 2017-07-17T10:29:51+00:00

Facebook's licensing includes a "nuclear option" if a user acts in a way interpreted by Facebook as competing with them; the ASF has marked the license as "Category-X", and may not be included in Apache projects as a result. Looks like RocksDB are going to relicense as dual GPLv2/ASL2 to clear this up, but React.js has not shown any plans to do so yet

Science didn't understand my kids' rare disease until I decided to study it - YouTube

jm — 2017-06-16T09:54:15+00:00

via Kevin Lyda: 'Sharon Terry essentially invented and promoted something akin to the GPL but for medical research. Here's a bunch of data and research and you can use it if you contribute back what you discover to everyone else.'

Ireland’s Content Pool

jm — 2017-04-25T10:10:08+00:00

Bring your content to life with our free resource for positive tourism related purposes. Our image, video and copy collections show people, landscapes and the Irish lifestyle across a range of experiences including festivals, activities, cities, rural life and food.

Interesting idea -- but the licensing terms aren't 100% clear. This would have been much easier if it was just CC licensed!

React’s license: necessary and open?

jm — 2016-11-01T12:00:18+00:00

Luis Villa: 'Is the React license elegant? No. Should you be worried about using it? Probably not. If anything, Facebook’s attempt to give users an explicit patent license should probably be seen as a good faith gesture that builds some confidence in their ecosystem. But yeah, don’t use it if your company intends to invest heavily in React and also sue Facebook over unrelated patents. That… would be dumb. :)'

Photographer Files $1 Billion Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain Images

jm — 2016-07-28T19:49:21+00:00

Massive, massive copyright fail by Alamy and Getty Images.

Since each violation of copyright in this case allows the plaintiff to seek damages up to $25,000, the statutory damages for Getty’s 18,755 violations amount to $468,875,000. But because the company was found to have violated the same copyright law within the past three years — in 2013, Daniel Morel was awarded $1.2 million in a suit against Getty, after the agency pulled his photos from Twitter and distributed them without permission to several major publications — Highsmith can elect to seek three times that amount: hence the $1 billion suit. “The economic damage that Ms. Highsmith has suffered includes, without limitation, any and all revenue received by the Defendants based on purported licenses sold for the Highsmith Photos. These funds represent money that Ms. Highsmith could have received had she attempted to monetize her photos through the Defendants,” the complaint states. “The injury to Ms. Highsmith’s reputation has been … severe,” it continues. “There is at least one example of a recipient of a threatening letter for use of a Highsmith Photo researching the issue and determining that Ms. Highsmith had made her photos freely available and free to use through the Library website. … Therefore, anyone who sees the Highsmith Photos and knows or learns of her gift to the Library could easily believe her to be a hypocrite.”

What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

jm — 2016-06-16T14:04:22+00:00

An old post about Y!'s acquisition of Summly, an iPhone app which uses NLP to summarise news stories. This is an excellent point about modern tech startups:

[Summly] licensed the core engine from another company. They are the quintessential bolt-on engineers, taking a Japanese bike engine, slapping together a badly constructed frame aligned solely by eyeballs, and laying down a marketing blitz. That's why the story sells. "You, too, can do it." But do you want to? [...] it's critical to keep tabs on the ratio known as "glue versus thought." Sure, both imply progress and both are necessary. But the former is eminently mundane, replaceable, and outsource-able. The latter is typically what gives a company its edge, what is generally regarded as a competitive advantage. So, what is Yahoo signaling to the world? "We value glue more than thought."

In Oracle v. Google, a Nerd Subculture Is on Trial

jm — 2016-05-13T14:26:51+00:00

“The G part stands for GNU?” Alsup asked in disbelief. “Yes,” said Schwartz on the stand. “That doesn’t make any sense,” said the 71-year-old Clinton appointee.

Zoë Keating on getting a shitty deal from Google's new Music Key licensing

jm — 2015-01-24T23:10:47+00:00

The Youtube music service was introduced to me as a win win and they don’t understand why I don’t see it that way. “We are trying to create a new revenue stream on top of the platform that exists today.” A lot of people in the music industry talk about Google as evil. I don’t think they are evil. I think they, like other tech companies, are just idealistic in a way that works best for them. I think this because I used to be one of them. The people who work at Google, Facebook, etc can’t imagine how everything they make is not, like, totally awesome. If it’s not awesome for you it’s because you just don’t understand it yet and you’ll come around. They can’t imagine scenarios outside their reality and that is how they inadvertently unleash things like the algorithmic cruelty of Facebook’s yearly review (which showed me a picture I had posted after a doctor told me my husband had 6-8 weeks to live).

Wiki Loves Monuments

jm — 2014-08-27T21:27:37+00:00

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest, organised by Wikimedia [...]. This year, the Wikimedia Ireland Community are running the competition for the very first time in Ireland. The contest is inspired by the successful 2010 pilot in the Netherlands which resulted in 12,500 freely licensed images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. It has grown substantially since its inception; in 2013 369,589 photographs were submitted by 11,943 participants from over 50 countries. Cultural heritage is an important part of the knowledge that Wikipedia collects and disseminates. An image is worth a thousand words, in any language and local enthusiasts can (re)discover the cultural, historical, or scientific significance of their neighbourhood. The Irish contest, focussing on Ireland’s national monuments, runs from August 23 - September 30. Follow our step-by-step guide to find out how you can take part.

Eircode

jm — 2014-04-28T12:51:06+00:00

'Location Codes for Irish Addresses'. Looks like, as expected, this will not have no-cost licensing terms; companies and non-profit orgs will all have to pay Capita Business Support Services Ireland for access. boo.

GPLv2 being tested in US court

jm — 2014-02-18T10:07:50+00:00

The case is still ongoing, so one to watch.

Plaintiff wrote an XML parser and made it available as open source software under the GPLv2. Defendant acquired from another vendor software that included the code, and allegedly distributed that software to parties outside the organization. According to plaintiff, defendant did not comply with the conditions of the GPL, so plaintiff sued for copyright infringement. Defendants moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The court denied the motion.

Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB

jm — 2013-09-14T21:31:31+00:00

When we asked Sallner to quantify the scale of the migration he said, "They're moving it all. Everything they have. All of the MySQL servers are moving to MariaDB, as far as I understand." By moving to MariaDB, Google can free itself of any dependence on technology dictated by Oracle – a company whose motivations are unclear, and whose track record for working with the wider technology community is dicey, to say the least. Oracle has controlled MySQL since its acquisition of Sun in 2010, and the key InnoDB storage engine since it got ahold of Innobase in 2005. [...] We asked Cole why Google would shift from MySQL to MariaDB, and what the key technical differences between the systems were. "From my perspective, they're more or less equivalent other than if you look at specific features and how they implement them," Cole said, speaking in a personal capacity and not on behalf of Google. "Ideologically there are lots of differences."

So -- AWS, when will RDS offer MariaDB as an option?

"Clickwrap" licensing established as legal in Irish court

jm — 2013-04-26T08:49:20+00:00

"The evidence does establish that there is a practice in the airline and online travel agency sectors of contractually binding web users by click wrapping or browse wrapping, which practice is generally and regularly followed by the operators in those sectors. In reality, it is difficult to see how online trade could be carried on in the absence of those devices. As regards the third question which arises from the MSG decision, in this case it is whether the defendant was aware or is presumed to have been aware of the practice. The evidence before the Court, in my view, clearly demonstrates that the defendant was aware of the practice, it being a practice which is generally and regularly followed when making bookings with online travel agents and with airlines and which, in the words of the Court in the MSG case, may be regarded as being a consolidated practice. Accordingly, in my view, by application of Article 23(1)(c), the defendant is bound by the jurisdiction clause in the Terms of Use on the plaintiff’s website by its use, either through the medium of an automaton or a manual operator or a third party data provider, of the website.”

(via Rossa McMahon)

McGarr Solicitors' sternly-worded letter to Newspaper Licencing Ireland Ltd

jm — 2012-05-10T20:49:30+00:00

In response to a letter received by a charity, warning of dire penalties for 'reproducing copyright content without permission', since doing so 'is theft'. It gets better, since in correspondence they were then informed that “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website”. Looking forward to seeing how this one plays out...

A one-line software patent – and a fix

jm — 2012-04-04T14:31:39+00:00

Just another sad story of how software patenting made a standard useless. "I had once hoped that JBIG-KIT would help with the exchange of scanned documents on the Internet, facilitate online inter-library loans, and make paper archives more accessible to users all over the world. However, the impact was minimal: no web browser dared to directly support a standardized file format covered by 23 patents, the last of which expired today. About 25 years ago, large IT research organizations discovered standards as a gold mine, a vehicle to force users to buy patent licenses, not because the technology is any good, but because it is required for compatibility. This is achieved by writing the standards very carefully such that there is no way to come up with a compatible implementation that does not require a patent license, an art that has been greatly perfected since."

Canadian Universities Agree To Ridiculous Copyright Agreement That Says Emailing Hyperlinks Is Equal To Photocopying | Techdirt

jm — 2012-02-23T13:25:51+00:00

'The agreement reached last month with the licensing agency includes provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and surveillance of academic staff email.' wow, incredibly bad terms

ChessBase.com - Chess News - A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess (part two)

jm — 2012-01-04T22:07:43+00:00

An amazing article, via Nelson Minar -- careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering -- by many of the developers. 'Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.'

PSI License [PDF]

jm — 2011-06-28T21:40:34+00:00

the license under which the open data from various councils around Fingal and Dublin (see www.dublinked.ie) is being published

Rumor: Google “Disgusted” With Record Labels

jm — 2011-04-15T10:15:55+00:00

'Once again, Warner is the fly in the ointment, the same company that praises Spotify one day, renews their licenses for the rest of the world and then the next day doesn’t want to license them in the US.'

In Which She's Every Woman

jm — 2009-08-25T21:48:13+00:00

what it's like to have your photo used for stock images

A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]

jm — 2009-08-01T10:31:58+00:00

wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status