this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It makes sense for government organizations, they use public money, therefore it should available to the public to do anything they want with it.
But I don't understand why small independent devs choose to use a license like this over the GPL.
Universities too 👍
Like Berkeley or the MIT
There's a meme image in this style, of a deadpan guy in the corner at a party, talking to noone, and the caption is his thoughts.
I'm that guy, and I'm thinking, "The license-filtering capabilities of AI code have made this debate pointless... unless we deal with Capitalism."
Why don't developers or developer organizations just keep licenses and rights to certain codes for themselves.
Keep the rights but freely make it available for everyone to use.
But if a company steps in to make anything proprietary, then you exercise your right to the intellectual property of your code and make a decision for yourself ... either agree and make money on it (because developers need to make a living as well) ... or refuse and with hold the right for certain groups, companies or corporations to use it (and if you do end up in court over it, chances are high that the developer will get money out of that too)
But… thats also just a license. Any use except for the creator necessitates a license of some sort or the release to the public domain.
Probably because it's a big hassle. But of course there are projects that work that way or similar. Some big open source projects like Magento have an open source core but sell an enterprise version with closed plugins.
Unreal has its source code freely available to use but when you sell enough stuff you have to pay.
And I have seen several developers offering their open source software for sale to companies that don't want to contribute back or don't want to open up their integration.
How specific can licenses really get? Would it be possible to update the license on a version update of an existing library to for instance specifically forbid Fortune 1000 companies from using it, but everyone else can? It would be amazing to see these places get their tech stacks ripped out from under them, although of course many would just illegally use the code and never tell
There's The Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL) which is even more strict. Software under the ACSL can only be used by individuals, nonprofits, educational institutions, and worker-owned companies.
There are "non commercial" licenses, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't do a "commercial only under these conditions" and the conditions only allow for solo developers and small teams and stuff like that. There are also people who do no-commercial-unless-you-pay-me.
The one thing you can't do afaik is change the license retroactively. So you could change it for all future versions but the versions you released under MIT or whatever will remain under that previous license.
They would just fork it at that version. Licenses aren't retroactive.
Yeah, but realistically these companies just pull new versions to overcome CVE blockers, and don't have the resources to fork and maintain
Thanks to the wonders of capitalism, a bunch of businesses that would have to yield to tyrannical open source devs and their goody-two-shoes mentality can pool their bargaining power and each pay a little to a benevolent clean room reimplementer of security fixes.
Or, they can vendor the library and ask Claude to fix it in-tree 🤷
You can relicense code. Though that doesn't mean that you can take anything away. You just open another avenue for people to use what you wrote and developed, and any old license still exists and retains validity; the way you can curtail rights is by not granting liberal terms on newly created code.
This is how macOS switched to zsh, and left all GNU code in it to rot.
It’s possible. “GPLv2+” code picked up the new terms when GPLv3 was released, and if GPLv4 is ever released, the v4 terms will also apply.
This is why the Linux kernel specifies GPLv2. Not v2+, only v2.
Real developers use the UNLICENSE
This is how I learn that one of my favorite programs that I use all the time, YT-DLP, is "UNLICENSED" and deliberately in the public domain. That's fucking rad.
I’m out of the loop Is this topical?
This meme is coming on 30 years old in terms of content.
I don't think it's topical in the sense of "this joke riffs on a current news cycle event," which is how I think of "topical humour". But it kind of is, in that this debate over licenses is ongoing since RMS invented the GPL.
Pretty typical. Apple has been doing this for a long time now.
MIT, Apache, or bust. I don't consider copy left true open source. I welcome the downvotes.