Facebook licensed code is kicked out

In somewhat recent revelation about the pitfalls of infamous Facebook “BSD + Patents” license, FOSS developers becoming more acutely aware and alarmed about the consequences.

I won’t bother you with much details, as they are readily available elsewhere. I just want to point out that Facebook is hedging their open-source “exposure”. What they are effectively saying is “Go ahead and use our awesome stuff. But if we ever decide that you’re competing with us, we’ll yank your licence to use our frameworks so fast your shoes will fall off.” It doesn’t matter if someone has developed this code for you: you won’t be able to use it anyway.

That’s the essence. It is the original intention of the license behind ReactJS and a few other frameworks. And that’s why Apache Foundation has moved the license to Cat-X, prohibiting any of its projects to touch things like ReactJS. Facebook software is NOT compatible with the projects developed under widely accepted and respected ALv2.

Here’s the excerpt:

Facebook BSD+Patents license

The Facebook BSD+Patents license includes a specification of a PATENTS file that passes along risk to downstream consumers of our software imbalanced in favor of the licensor, not the licensee, thereby violating our Apache legal policy of being a universal donor. The terms of Facebook BSD+Patents license are not a subset of those found in the ALv2, and they cannot be sublicensed as Alv2.

These are the unintended consequences of meddling with well thought open-source software licenses. That is the beauty of open-source: if you trying to lock people in or out – they will move. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, how big you are, nor what your SJW position is. Developers will go, and the users will as well.

I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it yet. And that’s the damning and loud application of the golden rule!

Gab.ai was kicked from GooglePlay…

But who cares… All you need to do, is go the Gab’s website, and right there on the left side a link to where you can grab and install the .apk package for the mobile app

Make sure your phone’s settings allow to install applications from “Unknown sources” (I will let you figure out how to do it ;), and vu’a la. Enjoy!

 

Apache process (webinar)

A few days ago, I gave this talk about the Apache Software Foundation processes (however few of them are there) and how communities operate. If you are interested, there’s the recording of the webinar.

The slides are provided here

Enjoy 😉

Finally, I have moved away from Google!

As you might have noticed, my blog is no longer hosted on Blogger.com (actually Google).

I did it for two reasons:

1. I was planning on it for a long time because of somewhat mediocre functionality of the Blogger.
2. What was the last straw is the Google’s reaction to the intellectual argument of James Damore (if you aren’t familiar with the story, it means you probably were a part of the first Mars expedition). I cannot trust my content to a company that suppresses the free speech in full disregard to the individual rights, protected by the law of the land.

I made an effort to make sure that old URLs are working properly and redirect you to the new location. That should take care about cached searches and bookmarks. If you notice that something is missing – please let me know, so I can fix it ASAP.

Anyway, now I am here, check back soon for new articles!