From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>
Hi all,
As you know, I’ve been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I’ve been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I’d welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.
Have a lovely day! Alex
This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.
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In my opinion it’s criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.
Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it’s not perfect, it’s one of the better uses of my tax euros.
Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again
Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.
I hope it catches on!
I doubt it. It is basically equivalent to buying a proprietary software license for 1% of a revenue. I doubt any large business would be willing to spend that much on a single piece of software. And it would always be only one piece of software at a time.
Still better than being exploited
to be quite honest I don’t want to see any large business around my project unless they are paying. They are not my target audience, and I’m not writing to funnel money into their pockets
Then release your software under a license that forbids it.
I believe it’s 1% for access to the “entire post-open ecosystem”, rather than 1% per project which would be unreasonable. So you could use one or thousands of projects under the Post-open banner, but still pay 1%.
It will take years to develop the post-open ecosystem to be something worth spending that much on.
Why only “with sufficient revenue”? All commercial use should pay. Adding “with sufficient revenue” only makes it more difficult to enforce and introduces loopholes.
I’ve looked into this very briefly before and I think part of the reason is that tons of things we wouldn’t necessarily call commercial usage are considered commercial usage. This was in relation to favoring the non non-commercial usage Creative Commons licenses though. (The ones they call free culture licenses.)
Just, um, don’t invite that guy who helped out with the xz tools…
Everything needs to be slapped with the AGPL. Fuck corporate America
Creative Commons-BY-NC would be better.
Alright we should use that then
AGPL on documentation? What would that do?
AGPL doesn’t help. AGPL authors are explicitly pro-corporate use
I thought AGPL was the more restrictive version of GPL? Which license should we use so that corporates need to pay?
It is my understanding that the only difference applies to hosted software. For example, Lemmy is AGPL. If it were GPL, then a company could take the source code, modify it and host their own version without open sourcing their modifications. AGPL extends to freedoms of GPL to users of hosted software as well.
A real example of this would be truth social which is modified Mastodon and as AGPL those modifications are required to be open source as well.
AGPL is the most restrictive OSI approved license (of the commonly used ones), but it is still a free (libre) open source license. My understanding is just that the AGPL believes in the end-users rights to access to the open source needs to be maintained and therefore places some burden to make the source available if it it’s being run on a server.
In general, companies run away from anything AGPL, however, some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.
As far as documentation goes, you could license documentation under AGPL, and people could still charge for it. It would just need to be kept available for end-users which i don’t think is really a barrier to use for documentation.
some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.
What is wrong with charging for your services?
Open source licences aren’t meant to make it impossible to earn money or anything. As long as companies comply with the licences I don’t see anything wrong with it.
If a licence wants to make it impossible to earn money they should put that in the actual licence.
Nothing. The context of this comment thread is “fuck corporations” and then proposing AGPL to solve that. I am merely pointing out that if their goal is to have a non-commercial license then AGPL doesn’t solve that, which is why i mention they can charge for their services with AGPL.
You said it was malicious though.
No. I said even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license [by making the open sourced code unusable without the backend code or some other means outside of scope of this conversation] then they can charge for it.
The malicous part is in brackets in the above paragraph. The license is an OSI approved license that allows commercialization, it would be stupid for me to call that malicious.
Unfortunately it is still not enough. There have been many instances of people using these licenses and still corporations using their software without giving back, and developers being upset about it.
And unfortunately there are no popular licenses that limit that. I’ve seen a few here and there, but doesn’t seem to be a standard.
Things like this make me wish I was a tech CEO. I’d totally be the guy ensuring we give back to projects if I was.
That is part of why you’re not a tech CEO. You’re not supposed to have compassion! No investor would want that.
P.S. This is an attack on CEOs and investors, not on you :)
Unfortunately, people like this don’t become CEOs.
My old employer used to have people on staff just for technical writing. Some of that writing became the man pages you know, and some of it was ‘just’ documentation for commercial products - ID management and the like.
Then we sued IBM for breach of contract, and if you ask anyone about it they’ll parrot the IBM PR themes exactly, as their PR work was brutal. People in Usenet and Forums were very mean, and the company decided to stop offering much of the stuff that it was for free. It was very ‘f this’.
If man pages needed a volunteer to maintain, I know why ours tapered off.
I think its this site? https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
I don’t see any option to give money. So he does not accept donations from users like you and me and only asks for sponsorship?
An alternate website can be found here: https://linux.die.net/man/ However, I don’t know how much they differ.
Edit: What I don’t like with both of these sites is, that they are powered by Google. I would like to see an alternative engine, at least an option to set it up. That’s probably a reason why I never used it and actually wouldn’t want to support it.
You do realize that man pages don’t live on the internet? The kernel.org one is the offical project website, as far as I know, but the project itself is very much not for the web presense, but for the vastly useful documentation included on your distribution.
The few times I’ve needed to
man [app name]on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I’ve always been able to find what I need in the included docsI hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don’t think you need until
--helpdoesn’t cut ithonestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches
Back in the day with dial-up internet man pages, readmes and other included documentation was pretty much the only way to learn anything as www was in it’s very early stages. And still 'man ’ is way faster than trying to search the same information over the web. Today at the work I needed man page for setfacl (since I still don’t remember every command parameters) and I found out that WSL2 Debian on my office workstation does not have command ‘man’ out of the box and I was more than midly annoyed that I had to search for that.
Of course today it was just a alt+tab to browser, a new tab and a few seconds for results, which most likely consumed enough bandwidth that on dialup it would’ve taken several hours to download, but it was annoying enough that I’ll spend some time at monday to fix this on my laptop.
You do realize that man pages don’t live on the internet?
What part of my reply is this an answer to? I know we have our man pages offline. But the website here is online and they use Google as a search machine. My critique is using Google and not providing an alternative search machine setup.
I mean that the product made in here is not the website and I can well understand that the developer has no interest of spending time for it as it’s not beneficial to the actual project he’s been working with. And I can also understand that he doesn’t want to receive donations from individuals as that would bring in even more work to manage which is time spent off the project. A single sponsor with clearly agreed boundaries is far more simple to manage.
I see, it was a reply to me why he isn’t accepting donations from individuals. The given reason here makes sense.
It’s still useful though because you might hit it from a search engine while searching other stuff and you can also provide links to it when answering questions for people.
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He absolutely deserves it.
Quick, print them all out now before they’re gone!
Ahaha! It is already bad!
