Re: [autonomo.us] pumped

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 2:03 AM, Kuno Woudt <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 07/12/2013 03:13 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>> Second, and much more widely noted, is the preference of
>> (supposedly young, but I'm doubtful) web developers for permissive
>> licenses. If true, this would make a permissive license all the more
>> necessary to establish a standard, and hopefully contribute to
>> non-obscurity among developers.
>
> One possible reason (I've come to realize) for this is that a typical web
> application often depends on hundreds of third party libraries / modules
> [1], and no one wants to spend time figuring out if all of them have
> compatible licenses.
>
> After running "npm install" on pump.io, you will end up with up 107 third
> party modules in "node_modules".  It's just so much easier to pick a
> permissive license and not have to worry about the question whether your
> code is going to be derivative of any of those modules or have incompatible
> licenses.

This could in theory make using strong copyleft for applications (that
use many modules) advantageous -- if there were a strong copyleft that
was a universal receiver. Too bad it isn't that simple.

> If we want strong copyleft to be more popular with web developers one of the
> things we need to do is make sure this boundary is clear.  The license
> should only apply to the code the developer is shipping.  Third party
> libraries which are only mentioned in a machine-readable
> dependencies/requirements file and in import/require statements in the code
> should always be considered separate works.
>
> Fontana's copyleft-next has I think a good solution to this in version
> 0.3.0, see the "Derived Work" definition in the license text [2]. (Although
> that version still allows you to opt-out from this interpretation, which I
> think is a mistake :)

I've not looked closely enough to be sure, but I don't think there's
such an opt-out in the file-based experimental branch.

...

re various issues MJ raised, I agree many of those are frustrating.
But, seems to me if identi.ca and StatusNet were most startups, or a
Google product, they'd have been shut down completely long ago. I'm
happy to see Evan taking another swing for the federated social web
instead of all the other things he could be doing, and I'm totally
rooting for him.

Mike