Hacker News

points by nickelpro 11 hours ago | 0 comments

If I publish my code under an open source license, you are free to take it and build any community around it you want.

If I keep my code proprietary, you are beholden to the shape of the community I dictate.

The license is first, it precedes, any notion about community.

I don’t disagree, but this ignores some of what we have learned about critical masses and network effects. If everyone can just take their own copy with no interaction, many won’t join the community and it may never reach a critical mass despite and because of its openness.

[–] nickelpro 10 hours ago

Of course, but any of those people making a copy of the code can be the ones to decide to build a community around it.

Fabrice Bellard doesn't need to personally administer to the ongoing development and community functions of QEMU or ffmpeg, it is sufficient that he released the code as open source, and others carry the torch from there.

And if people disagree about the form those communities take, they can split them as they see fit. As happened with libav and ffmpeg for a number of years. This too is fine, and is only possible because of the license.

[–] magicalist 10 hours ago

Seems like you aren't actually disagreeing at all?

First you're just disagreeing about the relative importance of "community" vs the license used. This does not seem like an important distinction, blog rhetorical structuring aside, since the value of each is really "it depends" (in the extreme, neither community or license matter if no one ever sees or hears of the code, for instance).

Second:

> If I publish my code under an open source license... If I keep my code proprietary...

That isn't even the distinction that the author is making. They're only talking about communities around open source code. They spell out the dichotomy quite explicitly:

> This is why I don't care as much anymore about a project being under a copyleft free software license or a non-copyleft free software license.

[–] nickelpro 5 hours ago

The author says:

> This has taken a backseat, as I now believe that there is something more important than license: community. The community around a software project is what dictates the values of the project. A strong copyleft license does still signal that the project cares about software freedom, but, by itself it is not enough.

I don't care about community at all, the license is the only thing that has any "signal" when comes to someone caring about software freedom. If you release all your code as GPL (or MIT, or Apache, etc), you care about software freedom. Nothing is more important than the license.

The list of bullet points the author then provides are completely irrelevant to "caring about software freedom".