- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
Forgejo is changing its license to a Copyleft license. This blog post will try to bring clarity about the impact to you, explain the motivation behind this change and answer some questions you might have.
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Developers who choose to publish their work under a copyleft license are excluded from participating in software that is published under a permissive license. That is at the opposite of the core values of the Forgejo project and in June 2023 it was decided to also accept copylefted contributions. A year later, in August 2024, the first pull request to take advantage of this opportunity was proposed and merged.
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Forgejo versions starting from v9.0 are now released under the GPL v3+ and earlier Forgejo versions, including v8.0 and v7.0 patch releases remain under the MIT license.
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TLDR; from MIT to GPL.
always a pleasure to see big projects going full copyleft amidst the recent influx of projects sadly going source-available
this is the main reason not to sign a CLA (edit: both the aforementioned projects seem to adopt CLAs, though it seems that they aren’t hostile and are especially pro-copyleft. see this amazing correction by @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone for context). you should not let a third-party use your copyright to restrict user freedom in the future because they swear “they ❤️ open source” now, and would never use your code to only their own benefit.
Unless you’re selling the software or licenses to it, I don’t really see a reason not to go copyleft. I mean, think about it. If someone tries to make your thing but better, they have to release the modifications, so you can grab it for yourself and suddenly you’re at the same level. If they piggyback off your work, you can piggyback off theirs, and you have the advantage of being the original. Correct me if I’m wrong.
It makes just as much sense if you’re selling it!
Does it? proceeds to compile paid software and release a free package for it
You can do that with permissively licensed software too. Except with those, the party distributing their repackaged version doesn’t have to distribute source code alongside it. A lot of companies avoid copyleft software because they don’t want to or cannot deal with stricter licensing terms. If you’re a company creating commercial software which you intend to sell, you don’t want to use any GPL code, because you want to keep your software closed source to avoid exactly what you described from happening.
This can be exploited by primarily licensing your open source code using strong copyleft (like the AGPLv3) while selling commercial licenses to businesses that don’t want to comply with the AGPL and are willing to pay up. Qt is able to successfully use this even with weaker copyleft (LGPLv3) because it’s used a lot in embedded systems (like smart cars) which cannot comply with the LGPLv3’s anti-tivoization clause.
This means copyleft licenses can make it easier to profit if you’re the author of the code, but of course third parties can more easily profit from permissive licenses.
Torrenting has existed for a long time, yet people still buy software. There is a lot more to software distribution than traditional product sale.
You want to have frequent fixes, compatibility with modern tools, new features and a trustworthy distribution pipeline. These are all things people and corps are willing to pay for in FOSS software.
there’s certainly a camp in FOSS that considers “whatever you like including commercial activity” to be the one true valid version of “free software”
like… if someone wants to take an MIT project, add a bunch of extra features to it keeping some available only with payment, and contribute back bug fixes and some minor features etc, i wouldn’t necessarily say that’s harming the project and this is overall a good thing? it gets the original project more attention
like it’s perhaps a little unfair, but if the goal is quality and scope of the original project - or even broader of the goal is simply to have technology AVAILABLE even if it is with a few - then that goal has been met more with an MIT-like license than it would be with a copyleft license
So, for the slow people in the back… (me)
Copyleft = permanently open source? Ie, you can’t take the open source code/project and make it closed source? (or build a new closed project off of it?)
Or am I misunderstanding?
Yep, that’s the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they’d need the permission of all of the copyright holders who’ve contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.
AGPLv3 is not anti-business or anti-money. It’s saying if you want to use the code in a closed source project you need to pay the copyright holder
The copyright holder is the original author, not a maintainer or someone who forked a project and renamed it.
That’s why the #1 thing mentioned in copyleft licenses is you can’t alter the copyright notice and declare yourself the original author
AGPLv3 is a good license to choose. All the other licenses are naive and do not combat closed source projects and the slave worker that keeps our projects unfunded
Copyleft means: “if you modify the program and share it, you also have to include the source code for your modifications.”
The owner of the copyright (usually the developers or their employer) can still change the license later.
This URL might help you (I see it linked from the URL of this post): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
If it doesn’t, I suggest looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
“Copyleft licenses do not only benefit the developers. They also guarantee freedoms to users of the software. They reduce the risk of exploitive business practices, like creating a modified version of Forgejo with less freedoms to the users, which could ultimately trap users in a vendor lock-in.”
God, you absolutely love to see it. So called “permissive” licenses should be banned because of this.
“Freedom to restrict”
GitHub has long sought to discredit copyleft generally. Their various CEOs have often spoken loudly and negatively about copyleft, including their founder (and former CEO) devoting his OSCON keynote on attacking copyleft and the GPL. This trickled down from the top. We’ve personally observed various GitHub employees over the years arguing in many venues to convince projects to avoid copyleft; we’ve even seen a GitHub employee do this in a GitHub bug ticket directly.
You only need to know that corporations do not like copyleft to know it is good. The same goes with capitalists and wealth tax / inheritance tax.
It really applies to anything. Whenever you read of policy related arguments always look at the people complaining. Rule of thumb is it gives you a good idea of who the policy hurts the most. If it’s large companies or rich people complaining by and large it’s probably a good policy.
Exactly.
Wealth Tax
I am against any wealth tax. The revenue services for many governments are very focused on not blocking economic growth, and then periodically taking a reasonable amount of wealth.
In the end, only wealth can be taxed (things that aren’t physical can’t be seized and auctioned). However, I don’t want to be forced to let someone into my house to calculate how much stuff I have.
In general, I think it’s more reasonable to monitor wealth moving (and more so if wealth moves between people) rather than to force people to cooperate with monitoring wealth staying in the same place. I don’t want someone checking up on whether I own the same stock certificates or gold bars each year; that seems like an insult to my dignity.
Enforcement Complications
Distribution
I don’t think that focusing on people who already pay a disproportionate amount of tax will be very helpful. Rapidly changing what is taxed (wealth vs income) would probably be harmful, as people will probably have trouble adapting to significantly different policies. For example, we’d probably hear about people who happen to have inherited expensive houses being unable to pay thousands of dollars for tax bills, after thinking that they wouldn’t be affected by policy changes.
Avoidance
If there was a wealth tax and I was rich enough to spend a lot of time managing my money, I would just create a “charitable organization” that I and my family completely control, then have it pay people to do things I would want them to do anyway, and maybe even try to let the charity pay a high wage to its managers (such that I could be a manager and get the charity to pay for my yearly living expenses, directly or indirectly). I also might be able to get away with using a trust or charitable remainder trust to avoid being affected by a wealth tax.
I don’t know the degree to which tax exempt organizations affect my life, but I do know that trusts have a relevant affect on my life, since they are often used to own land, specifically by landlords of housing and by people who own land that is worth a lot of money. How they are dealt with would probably have to significantly change in order to accommodate a wealth tax.
Inheritance Tax
I’m not sure I’m against inheritance tax, but it might be an unnecessary complication. Treating inheritance like a gift from one person to another at the moment of their death might make things easier for everyone. The policies regarding gifts are relatively clear: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/gift-tax https://www.irs.gov/faqs/capital-gains-losses-and-sale-of-home/property-basis-sale-of-home-etc/property-basis-sale-of-home-etc
However, having separate inheritance law might also make things less painful for some people. If my assets suddenly gained or lost a large amount of value just before I died, I wouldn’t want that to justify taking more wealth from my heirs. Having a special way to value assets gained due to someone dying might be more reasonable than treating each receipt as a gift.
- Wealth tax does not block economic growth, rather the opposite, because it forces wealth to be reinvested to not lose too much value.
- You clearly need a lesson in proportional taxation if you think people would have their personal property appropriated.
- I do not give a fuck about you placing your dignity in ownership of material assets, that is a you problem.
- The top 10% pay less income taxes as a fraction of their income than the bottom 10%.
- Really, we should remove the capitalist class because they will fight back to the detriment of everyone else.
- I do not give a fuck about the IRS. I am not an American. My country actually has a wealth tax.
- You are repeating misinformation and capitalist propaganda with little understanding of what you are saying. Have you even reflected on what “the economy” really is? If you are a trickle-down Reaganomics-follower, you might want to get your brain checked.
I would give up my US citizenship if it were passed. It’s enough I live abroad and still pay taxes for my dividends. If you start taxing my investments directly, I’ll have to get a different passport
The US is the only country I know of that practises this.
I’ve been told Hungary does, though I haven’t heard much about it until recently: https://www.uscisguide.com/dual-citizenship/u-s-dual-citizenship-and-taxes-with-hungary/
I’ve also been told South Africa and Eritrea do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if places like North Korea and Turkmenistan do too.
Somehow Hungary gets a score of 30/50 for taxation for 2024 from https://nomadcapitalist.com/nomad-passport-index/ (United States and South Africa and Eritrea get 10, North Korea and Turkmenistan get 20) but I’d be suspicious of anywhere with a lower rating than 30.
Wealth tax does not block economic growth, rather the opposite, because it forces wealth to be reinvested to not lose too much value.
Do you have a source for this? I see that “wealth taxes have failed in Europe”, and it seems that places with a wealth tax were mostly in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264290303-4-en
One example that caught my attention is Belgium, which introduced an “annual tax on securities accounts”, which suggests that they were taxing resources that were invested already.
I can imagine that it’s possible for government spending to produce more economic growth than would have happened without taxation, but the entire point of money is to have a multitude of people working towards prosperity in ways that can’t be predicted by state authorities, so if there are more taxes it seems likely that economic growth will be reduced.
Of course, an analysis would have to account for things like using resources from a wealth tax to make cheap/free healthcare available, which might then make people vastly more productive such that any negative effects of a wealth tax are neutralized. Also, providing an obviously higher quality of life might be worth some cost.
You clearly need a lesson in proportional taxation if you think people would have their personal property appropriated.
Is a car or shirt or house personal property? It seems things like that are seized in response to people not paying revenue services: https://home.treasury.gov/services/treasury-auctions https://www.treasury.gov/auctions/treasury/gp/index.html https://www.cwsmarketing.com/?p=36139 https://auctions.cwsmarketing.com/auctions/1-9DDP42/gp-dayton-nj-live-wsimulcast-august-21 https://auctions.cwsmarketing.com/lots/view/1-9DE12Y/wearing-apparel-riverside-ca
I do see that items had bids much higher than I’d expect, and they were being auctioned at the same time watches and jewellery and electric motorcycles and trailers, so I suspect any clothing was “luxury” in some way, or the auction was for more clothing than is documented with pictures.
I do not give a fuck about you placing your dignity in ownership of material assets, that is a you problem.
I reference “dignity” because it’s part of “the unshakeable foundation of the Republic of Poland”, and thinking about dignity seems like a good way to tell if something is a bad idea, and I probably wouldn’t feel like I had more dignity than 1 month ago if I was having my car or house seized because I hadn’t paid as much taxes as a revenue service thought I should. I expect that you will have more trouble implementing policies you like if you express that you’re disregarding dignity.
The top 10% pay less income taxes as a fraction of their income than the bottom 10%.
I expect that this is true.
Really, we should remove the capitalist class because they will fight back to the detriment of everyone else.
I’m certainly for social change, and people with entrenched interests will probably try to hamper it. However, other people might not want to cooperate with you if you remind them of the Soviet Union, and I expect that saying “we should remove the capitalist class” will do that.
I do not give a fuck about the IRS. I am not an American. My country actually has a wealth tax.
If you don’t care about the IRS, why are you talking about a wealth tax using English? I suspect that that the majority of people who speak English as well as you do are U.S. citizens, so I’d assume you were interested in speaking to U.S. citizens. Are you trying to talk to people in Europe / worldwide in a common language?
Who is the target audience for your messages? I’m interested in where/how you’re focusing your efforts.
You are repeating misinformation and capitalist propaganda with little understanding of what you are saying. Have you even reflected on what “the economy” really is? If you are a trickle-down Reaganomics-follower, you might want to get your brain checked.
What misinformation am I repeating? I wouldn’t have written a statement that I don’t think is true, so I suggest you point out anything you think is incorrect and explain your perspective, and maybe share a URL for some more interesting sources.
Note: I originally pressed “Reply” too early by mistake, so I edited this text. Originally I had only written “Is a car or shirt or house personal property?” and one URL.
The top 10% as a whole pays 71.22%, while the bottom 50% of taxpayers account for only 2.89% of all income taxes.
This is misinformation, because it paints a picture of the rich being hard done by.
The bottom 50% pays an actual tax rate that is a higher percentage of their earnings than the top 50%. The richer you are, the more opportunity you have to reduce your tax burden. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-much-poor-actually-pay-taxes-probably-think
Your own numbers are an indicator of massive income disparity.
I think the tax system in the USA is designed to reward people who form corporations and then get people employed. People who are employed don’t have as much time to work on reforming institutions, so giving a tax break for employing people makes powerful people’s lives easier. In order to keep this process revenue neutral, earned income is taxed instead of taxing business as much. After extracting money from people’s labor (since labor is clearly necessary in order to create wealth), the remainder of budget needs is made up from whatever resources are easily available (which is currently the assets of rich people, since they have been given a lot of money to get people employed).
Yeah dude. The value of these corporations in inflated or neutral at best. Corporations pop up that are solely created to shelter or exploit to expand wealth.
It’s not actually higher:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
Top 1% pay 25.9% of their income to taxes, bottom 50% pay 3.3%
That doesn’t take into account non federal tax.
https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
This says it more explicitly.
using a more realistic definition of income that includes unrealized capital gains, they found that the same 25 Americans paid just 3.4 percent of their income in taxes during that period. If unrealized capital gains were included in these estimates, ITEP, too, would calculate a much lower effective tax rate for the rich
The (then) right-wing Norwegian government (left-wing by US standards ordered a study because they wanted to claim this. The results (source in Norwegian, use a translator) were the opposite of what they wanted.
For example: “the businesses used more money on their workers when the stock owners were subjected to higher wealth tax” (paraphrasing here).
Is a car or shirt or house personal property?
Yes.
I reference “dignity” because it’s part of “the unshakeable foundation of the Republic of Poland”
Yea, not sure I care about the right-wingers in Poland either.
cooperate with you if you remind them of the Soviet Union, and I expect that saying “we should remove the capitalist class” will do that.
Well, I think we should be honest about our intentions, unlike the capitalist class that tell you “brown people” or “the economy” is the reason they pay you slave wages.
What misinformation am I repeating? I wouldn’t have written a statement that I don’t think is true, so I suggest you point out anything you think is incorrect and explain your perspective, and maybe share a URL for some more interesting sources.
The part about seizing personal property to pay taxes, for instance. A progressive tax system can have bottom tiers paying no taxes. The right are those who impose high tax rates on the middle class and poor, in order to make them hate taxes.
I thought this was going to be fun satire.
You don’t really know how anything works if you think all this.
How do things work? I provided my perspective, partly so that I could refer to it later, so it would be enlightening to learn about yours.
Nah
Question is, do you know how much the tax revenue is in your area
Is that tax revenue transaction based or wealth based
Would taxing in your paradigm be reasonable or sustainable in the context of the government expenditures in your area?
FYI, I think that focusing on proportional representation electoral reform is the best way to increase respect to the inherent dignity of the person, and that to “choose a defining fight” is better than trying to focus on more than one thing.
I happen to be interested in tax policy, but I would prefer for the electoral system to improve before tax policies change.
See also !fairvote@lemmy.ca / https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12708609
So ironic how github is not open source and Github desktop is not on linux
I really need to migrate my shit from github.
I recently migrated from Github to Codeberg and it was super easy. You can also backup your code automatically from Codeberg to Github just in case.
Same. Couldn’t be happier about leaving GitHub.
Ever since I read this Article I have been wanting to delete my GitHub account and migrate over to another platform. I would give a summary but I’m incapable of doing so.
If this info is outdated or misinformation then please let me know.
So the OSS projects that have been closed due to Cease and Desist notices are actually still viewable !?
The entire network is nuked in those situations, there are no accessible forks left.
Well, I got to dream for a bit…
Forgejo appears to be a self hostable code sharing web platform like gitea or GitHub. I’ve used gitea for this. Is Forgejo better or what? There is also Gitlab which is way bloated.
Its a fork of gitea. It formed when gitea did something that the community didn’t like. I don’t remember the reasoning. But, I remember someone sending me a bunch of info about it in the past and it was enough for me to switch.
Thanks, I didn’t know about that. Gitea itself is a fork of Gogs though. Wheel of karma?
You can actually (for now) just replace gitea with forgejo while keeping all the files in place and it just works. Really easy then using docker, cause all it takes is changing the container image.
Thanks. I’ve run gitea without docker and it was fine. I’ll have to figure out docker someday though.
It worked from gitea when they went for profit or whatever
I wonder why they didn’t go with AGPL, which is made for server-based software like Forgejo.
From my understanding GPL does nothing to force hosting services to open their code as long as they don’t distribute builds.
As someone who worked at a business that transitioned to AGPL from a more permissive license, this is exactly right. Our software was almost always used in a SaaS setting, and so GPL provided little to no protection.
To take it further, even under the AGPL, businesses can simply zip up their code and send it to the AGPL’ed software owner, so companies are free to be as hostile as possible (and some are) while staying within the legal framework of the license.
simply zip up their code and send it to the AGPL’ed software owner
That seems good enough to me. No?
Sure, it would be nice to have the whole versioning system history, but even having the current version of the code makes it possible to do a code review. And modification too.
Self-Building and deployment might turn out to be harder, but that would just be about which side is having to put the effort of making something comprehensive.
Good enough? I mean it’s allowed. But it’s only good enough if a licensee decides your their goal is to make using the code they changed or added as hard as possible.
Usually, the code was obtained through a VCS like GitHub or Gitlab and could easily be re-contributed with comments and documentation in an easy-to-process manner (like a merge or pull request). I’d argue not completing the loop the same way the code was obtained is hostile. A code equivalent of taking the time (or not) to put their shopping carts in the designated spots.
Imagine the owner (original source code) making the source code available only via zip file, with no code comments or READMEs or developer documentation. When the tables are turned - very few would actually use the product or software.
It’s a spirit vs. letter of the law thing. Unfortunately we don’t exist in a social construct that rewards good faith actors over bad ones at the moment.
Or it could just be laziness.
In case you don’t want to put the effort into making a system into your organisation, to update code in a public-facing versioning system hosted setup, just tell someone to zip whatever you compiled and package it along with the rest of the stuff.
- Packaging the whole .git directory would make it significantly larger
- This method is bankruptcy-safe, as compared to hosting on the internet.
- Ideally, I would like there to be both, a zip (in case I don’t have an internet atm) and a link to the vcs
- Yes, the companies mostly don’t care enough and people doing it won’t think of it as being hostile, just as putting the least effort.
It seems there was a pre-existing agreement to use the GNU GPL with Forgejo, and it seems to me that the GNU AGPL is not compatible with the GNU GPL.
There is more discussion about that around https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/201
I’m assuming that there has been some resistance to using the GNU AGPL with Forgejo (it seems the discussions about licenses has been contentious), and the GNU GPL seems to have been discussed much more than the GNU AGPL. It was probably overwhelmingly likely that we would get Forgejo with the GNU GPL rather than the GNU AGPL. I would have preferred that the GNU AGPL was used instead, but I’m not going to worry about it much since I probably can’t change this situation for the better.
You’re right, seems like GPLv2 is incompatible with AGPL. GPLv3 includes extra clauses to allow it.
From the GNU Licensing page
Please note that the GNU AGPL is not compatible with GPLv2. It is also technically not compatible with GPLv3 in a strict sense: you cannot take code released under the GNU AGPL and convey or modify it however you like under the terms of GPLv3, or vice versa. However, you are allowed to combine separate modules or source files released under both of those licenses in a single project, which will provide many programmers with all the permission they need to make the programs they want. See section 13 of both licenses for details.
Exactly. They obviously didn’t research licensing enough.
Closed source projects need to pay for licensing. Or they will force you to work for them designing web forms and smartphone apps
Am i wrong?
This is gonna stop corporations from making a closed source ver of forgejo
permissive license
Definition?
TL;DR: A permissive license allows doing almost everything, including turning the code into proprietary products.
It means you don’t have to release the source code of your software if you use the source code of the open source project
deleted by creator
Permissive licenses permit a broader range of use compared to “copyleft” licenses.
“copyleft” here just being a cute way of being the opposite of copyright - instead of disallowing others from what they can do with “copyrighted” code, “copyleft” requires that they (upon request) share modifications to your code.
Permissive takes away this requirement to share your modifications. “copyleft” is considered more free and open source (FOSS), permissive is more business friendly.
