This is the first essay in a four-part series about relicensing the JSHint software project. The process of relicensing JSHint took seven years. That’s far longer than anyone expected, but seeing this through wasn’t just a matter of endurance. As I worked with people around the world to move to the MIT Expat license, I regularly experienced how non-free licensing (even as seemingly trivial as “Good, not Evil”) poisons the well of free software.
You May Finally Use JSHint for Evil
JSHint is a software tool designed to help developers write JavaScript code. Since its creation in 2011, it has been encumbered by a license which includes the following clause: The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil. That stipulation disqualifies JSHint from the distinction of “free” software and “open source” software. Today, with a release 7 years in the making, we’re removing the clause. Support for Evil is a new feature but not a breaking change, so in keeping with Semantic Versioning, we’ve incremented JSHint’s minor version.
Reimagining OSS Licensing and Commercialization with Fair Source - Adam Jacob, System Initiative
How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon (LibrePlanet 2018 Keynote)
Several months ago, I gave the closing keynote address at LibrePlanet 2018. The talk was about the thing that scares me most about the future of free culture, free software, and peer production. A …
Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.
I Regret Migrating to Codeberg
A brief comment on Codeberg’s new terms, and why a free-software host deciding which projects are welcome worries me more than the bans themselves.
How open-source software took over the world | TechCrunch
It was just five years ago that there was an ample dose of skepticism from investors about the viability of open source as a business model. Fast-forward to today and we’ve witnessed the growing excitement in the space.
It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.
Invasion of The Ethical Licenses
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those guidelines became the Open Source Definition, and I announced Open Source to the world.
Deprecation Notice: MIT and BSD
it’s time to retire thirty-year-old academic licenses
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
It's time to pay the maintainers
Or, what Voltron can teach us about improving open source development.
Katerina Marchán (@zkat@toot.cat)
Open source maintainers of major projects (hi) are not ready to accept and talk about how the cultural insistence on permissive licensing is just straight up labor exploitation taking advantage of our addiction to popularity (also hi). We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.