Our company committed to open sourcing all of our code (it's in the web3/blockchain space), and we had, and continue to have, spirited discussions about which parts we should maybe license differently, as they contain novel IP.
But my main question is: if your code is open-sourced, and the community contributed: fixes, features, actual new products - what gives you the right to close it? Are you going to go back and compensate every contributor? How can you justify revenue made on the backs of contributors.
Side note: if what Prusa is alleging about Chinese patents given for open-source code produced in the west, and then having international priority, is true, I think the UN (or whoever handles international patents) should look into that.
We can't control what goes on in China, but we can damn well make sure no Chines company makes money outside of China, with co-opted IP.
>if your code is open-sourced, and the community contributed: fixes, features, actual new products - what gives you the right to close it?
Typically you're not able to close source existing code, once it's open it's open. What you can do is make the changes going forward proprietary.
Depending on if you got a contributor-license-agreement you may not be able to close source the community contributions, but if the code was licensed under something non-viral like MIT or BSD you have as much right to close source it as literally anyone else does.
I guess I really don't understand the question. You have the rights as outlined in the license, people who contribute agree to those license terms.
There's a legal vs moral distinction there. Legally, you can generally relicense (or add licenses, at least) on permissively-licensed code, or you can force the issue by requiring a CLA that just makes you the owner of everything. However, a person could reasonably argue that you still are morally in the wrong for taking something given to you for free and charging for it.
Personally that's why if I'm going to contribute to open source I'm probably going to contribute to GPL/AGPL projects. I don't begrudge people who want to license their OSS code under something like the MIT or BSD licenses though.
I think that software developers are probably the kind of people who can know what deal their actually getting if anyone can.
> If you give me your recipe for chocolate cake, and I make a few changes to make it suit my tastes better, I have to give those changes to you and the community.
This is completely false. You can bake your cake with your secret recipe and eat it too.
If you give someone else your improved cake though, you have to give them the matching recipe.
Of course! Didn’t realize it would prove so controversial here on HN. Figured most everyone would already be familiar with her shtick, especially in context of discussion on open source hardware. But I should remind myself these wouldn’t be eternally relevant controversies if it were possible to reach a consensus.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be hearing much more from her. Last week on twitter she mentioned that she'd been told that basically she's making the government look bad (being too honest about some problems) and to stop posting. Haven't seen anything from her since.
While she does have some criticisms of the PRC, she’s also pretty rabidly pro-China, especially since COVID. I’m surprised they cracked down on her, she’s been a very staunch defender of China’s honor online and often her followers jump on the bandwagon against any anti-China person she argues with.
I've always seen her point-of-view as pretty balanced. I certainly wouldn't have considered her statements as "rabid" although she is, I think understandably, pro-China.
This isn't the first time she's had issues either. Her openness about her personal situation, her relationship with Kaidi, etc, certainly skirts what's allowed to be spoken about in public.
Hopefully she's able to continue her core work without unbearable compromise.
I've seen some of her conversations on twitter with people criticizing china have gotten extremely aggressive, with her on the pro-china, anti-west side. In her videos it's much more measured.
Unless you sign a CLA, if you contribute to a project, you own the copyright for your contribution. And the owner of the repo cannot re-license your contribution without you.
So the question is really whether you are fine contributing to a copyleft/permissive project.
On my end, as long as I keep my copyright (i.e. I don't have to sign a CLA), then that's fine for me. If anything, any contribution I make makes it harder for them to re-license their project :-).
No. Say you release your project "Foo" as open source (permissive) on project-foo.com. I cannot come and ask you to remove the sources from project-foo.com, and go to everybody who downloaded the code and ask them to delete it.
The version of Foo that you released as open source will always be open source. Now I can make a copy of Foo, use it in my proprietary software Bar, and ship Bar to customers without sharing the sources of Foo (but I need to share the license; all permissive licenses that I know require attribution). Foo is still open source on project-foo.com, I just don't distribute it with Bar.
I can modify Foo, and ship it to customers as a proprietary library (with attribution). My changes to Foo will be proprietary, but project-foo.com will still exist and will still be open source.
Now you own the copyright of Foo, so you can decide to start shipping it (and all new versions) as proprietary. But you can't ask me to delete the fork I made from your open source version, foo-fork.com. So that one will still be open source.
Just like if you publish your code as MIT or BSD. It will still require attribution, and they still can't re-license it to something incompatible with the original license. Turns out that closed-source is compatible with MIT/BSD (still requiring attribution).
And the "closed-source" part will be only the new code added after your contribution, but the project itself will keep the open source license (so that you can fork it at the state it was when the authors decided to go closed-source).
I do not understand why people keep building in that space. Not only is it a niche market, but it can be completely decimated by Google/MS adding a feature to their interface.
Add to that the non-existing costs of switching between these offerings. I was using the Calendly free tier, and when a feature I wanted was moved off the free tier, it took me all of 30 minutes to move to zcal (most time spent fixing web site, and email signatures).
Perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Maybe there's a social aspect that escapes me, but I would love to hear from someone building in this space about their motivation and long term goals.
I'm part of the team that built neetoCal. Here is my take.
I 100% agree that the switching cost from Calendly is pretty low. There is very little stickiness. I agree that Google/MS adding this feature to their calendar will wipe out a huge portion of the market.
If we take this analogy that Google/MS can add feature X then it would be hard to build anything new. They are gaints and they can build anything.
However being a really big company also means that they might not be able to pay attention to the requirements of individuals. They needs to be in the game where millions of folks are using it.
You can see that in google form. It's simple and it works. Still typeform, jotform and neetoForm are thriving. That's because folks want more than what google form is offering currently.
Have you considered flat pricing for lifetime access? You can easily calculate the likely value a subscriber is going to provide over lifetime with discounted cashflows. Then you can ask for that money upfront. Do you think that will be a differentiator?
At this stage of the business we don't think we can do a good job of calculating the life time value of a customer. So currently we are not considering lifetime access.
IMHO this ban will never pass. The only law all these people are always sure to vote for is the one increasing their salary and benefits.
But beyond that, even if it passes, I expect so many violations that it'd be as if it didn't pass.
If we've learned anything in the last 6-7 years is that if there's no shame, law becomes less relevant. It's enough to look at some of of the current crop (and I'm doing my absolute best to prevent myself George from dropping Santos actual names here) to understand that the believe they're above any law.
We need a GDPR in the US. Yesterday. All the people who treat our private data as their own will stop and think twice if they face the chance of losing billions for breaking privacy laws.
And every data collection should be turned from opt-out to opt-in - by law.
1. Stuff them with truly horrible ideas.
2. Wait for public to scream.
3. Remove half of the horrible ideas (keeping the core crap, like no FOIAs, privacy violations etc.) hidden and spread amongst hundreds of subparagraphs.
4. Present this is as "fair compromise". Convince idiots from both sides of the aisle that this is good for national security.
5. Pass the law.
6. Profit?
Self custody is hard. And even professionals can make mistakes.
Most people don't think about it: they have a bank holding their "balance", a broker "holding" their stocks, an employer "holding" their salary, and maybe even a crypto exchange "holding" their tokens - until they don't.
Only when you get into the nitty-gritty of self custody, you understand it's a security hassle: you need to save a seed for crypto, or boxes of gold ingots, or precious art in special climate-controlled packaging etc.
People traded this insecurity, this chance of losing it all in one unfortunate event, for the warm comforts of having someone else custody your assets. But ask Greek people in 2008 (or Lebanese people now) how does it feel to come to a bank where you've had an account until yesterday, and find out there's no money to go around.
We're starting to see some strides being made into simplifying and securing crypto custody (MPD, Multi-sig etc.). But at its core, if you want to truly hold your asset, you will need to keep ahold of something (safe key, seed phrase, physical item etc.).
Makes even more sense if you treat it as a foreign hostile takeover.
A quick look at some of the funding sources for the $44b, and the distinct direction Twitter took post-acquisition suggest (to me at least - personal opinion) that Musk is promoting certain (alt-right) agendas. It could also be that the goal is to burn Twitter to the ground, as it has been touted by the US government as a “freedom tool”.
I can easily imagine Mohammed Bone Saw solving potential outcries of future heinous acts, by making sure there’s no outlet to discuss them.
It doesn't quite add up all the way to me, but almost; it looks like an act of sabotage.
The thought experiment is: if you wanted to destroy Twitter, what would you differently?
I mean you could do even worse, but... not if you didn't want to make it obvious. The "entitled born-rich manboy can't deal" is obviously a solid cover, because almost all of us already believe it!
Some more background: the companies were engaged in fighting over regulations, and on a personal basis between the 2 CEOs. It went down to really childish levels at some point.
But one thing is undeniable: SBF (FTX CEO) was trying to weaponize US regulation against his biggest rival CZ (Binance CEO). CZ retaliated by selling the FTT token, exposed the fact FTX was over-leveraged, and took over.
This is, as the kids on Twitter say, the embodiment of the old "F#$k around, find out".
Along the way every FTX client who couldn't withdraw, and every crypto user losing value got screwed - but why should these 2 characters care? The space just became more centralized, and whatever smidge of trust was left after the Celsius debacle has evaporated.
For those not up to date on crypto people, SBF is Sam Bankman-Fried [1] and CZ is Changpeng Zhao [2]. I don't know why they insist on being called by their initials like they're some sort of ticker symbol.
The broader sense of acronym—the meaning of which includes terms pronounced as letters—is sometimes criticized, but it is the term's original meaning[1] and is in common use.Dictionary and style-guide editors are not in universal agreement on the naming for such abbreviations, and it is a matter of some dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced "as words", nor do these language authorities agree on the correct use of spacing, casing, and punctuation.
If there's one thing I really dislike about HN culture, it's the consistent derailing of a thread to "um, actually" someone on a semantics distinction that literally nobody has ever been confused by, or to shoehorn in new terminology that doesn't improve communication in any way.
Some of the most interesting things I've read have been digressions from the main point. Your observation is a case in point: We're now talking about HN culture instead of wild times in the crypto economy. Is this a derailment? Or a digression?
It all depends upon whether people perceive it to be something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity," a line right from the guidelines. In your case, the difference between initialisms and acronyms (if any, see another reply) does not, and I accept that. Sorry!
Because they think the people they're most similar to are respected old-school hackers (rms, jwz, etc.) instead of carnival hucksters like P. T. Barnum.
It’s common in many internet circles to refer to prominent people by their initials. Hackerdom has a long tradition of this: rms gls esr jwz et al. It also tends to happen in US federal politics for some reason (jfk rfk gwb fdr et al) but not to everyone.
There's a little bit of cargo-culting with the practice: I thought CZ was short for the Czech Republic. The only reason I know "SBF" is because the New Yorker obliged him in that William MacAskill piece.
At least the political ones (some) came about for clarification (JFK and RFK are both Kennedies, GWB is to distinguish from "Bush"). Others come from their names being long or hard to remember/pronounce/spell (I suspect this is what happened with AOC).
The Robert Caro books about Lyndon B Johnson detail his effort to force meme “LBJ” as a reference to him.
(Mostly in terms of insisting various communications employees use it in press releases and what not).
It seems he liked the iconography of it, especially in putting himself in similar company to FDR.
Both his daughters have the LBJ initials, his wife is mostly known as Lady Bird Johnson (a nickname that predates their relationship, but is not her given name)
Longer answer - from my prospective - I enjoyed the first book Path to Power the most, which revolves around LBJs early life up to becoming a US Representative. I thought it was very on par with the Power Broker. That an the Power Broker would probably be my first recommendation to an ambitious college kid who wants to know the real Politik of how the world works.
The next book Means of Assent was my least favorite of Caro’s books, but still highly enjoyable.
Master of the Senate and Passage of Power are both great. But sort of specific to LBJs spot in life. Great, but I’m not sure they sparked my thinking quite the way the Power Broker and Path to Power did.
The books are designed to be standalone-ish, so later volumes spend a fair bit of time repeating things from earlier books. Caro goes deep, deep into various shady acts and new scandals which were probably shocking and relevant in 1982 but less so four decades later.
Caro also touches on a lot of the same topics as The Power Broker, and the picture he paints of LBJ ends up sounding quite a lot like Robert Moses. Is it because all powerful men inevitably end up as bullying psychopaths, or does Caro have something of an axe to grind? 50/50, maybe.
FDR went by FDR because those were his initials and ehh, people do that sometimes. Have enough presidents and sooner or later you'll get a president who does it. JFK and LBJ did it as conscious homages to FDR. There is a book "In The Shadow of FDR" about post-WW2 US politics that mentions this.
And over-leveraged, for a brokerage, is a major problem. A brokerage is not a bank, and account-holders are not earning interest. Therefore if you are taking their funds and doing something else with them (a pre-requisite for insolvency, unless you are hacked) is a major red flag for illegality.
