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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Torrents are based on the idea that everyone using them pays for it with their bandwidth and hardware cost. Except for those leechers who don’t share.

    I’m paying more for my seedbox than for my usenet subscription. If I used my own hardware I’d pay with stress on my hardware, e.g. the disks aging and failing earlier because of seeding. The power consumption is also not negligeble, altough the server is also used for other purposes.

    With private trackers this idea of an equal exchange is more obvious because of ratio requirements.

    Edit: I’d say it’s similar to open source in that no single individual has to pay for it, but someone does have to, for it to exist. Most often with their (valuable) time and knowledge. If no one helps out and does their part (through money or time+knowledge), a project won’t survive for long. Same is true for torrents.










  • I understand what you mean. With Redis and many other database/cloud companies switching to source-available licenses, maybe the term source-available doesn’t have to have such negative connotations. Open-source is also divided in permissive and copyleft licenses (e.g. BSD and GPL), both have big implications on how it can be used.

    Redis and others see themselves forced to switch to a more restrictive license because of the big cloud providers, who sell services for others software, without contributing back. This change is not good, but it might be necessary. Just like GPL is more restrictive than MIT, but it’s necessary to force some company to actually give back instead of only taking.

    I personally don’t really dislike licenses which allow for the necessary freedoms of open-source after one or two years. It’s a compromise but secures the longevity of software beyond a companies success. It’s way better than proprietary code.


  • Yes, I’ve no problem with your position on copyright and many institutions do many bad things. My issue js with misuse of terms with a fixed meaning, i.e. open-source. Having different people use a single term in multiple ways makes it so much more difficult to understand each other and enables bad actors to rile people up against each other.

    A tame example is “stable” Linux distros, where "stable"can mean package versions stay the same (besides bug fixes), and then people come and say their Arch Linux never broke, so it too is “stable”.

    Why wouldn’t it be open-source. It’s right there in the name: the source is open.

    In the context of criticism of how copyright works I understand the above sentence, but using a well understood term differently still annoys me enough to write lengthy comments.

    PS: I do hope lemmy implements a way to add copyright notices to comments like it allows for setting the language of posts. It could be implemented in a less noisy way. People who don’t care about a license ignore it anyway, while people who do care would likely find it without much trouble.



  • If you want a share of their profit, how much is enough? Would it be a pay-what-you-want model, without any restrictions or how’d you define the minimum amount to stop them from donating 1$? A rate based on profits would be pretty much the same as charging a license fee based on a companies worth.

    I get why you want to force donations, but at the same time restrictions like that aren’t compatible with the FOSS freedoms. Like others said, dual-licensing or a source-available license is probably the closest you’ll get. It’s not a license I prefer, but it’s okay. For example I’d rather have a non-compete clause for two years than something being proprietary for eternity.