Sort out licensing situation about ds

[zkat]

Thanks for your response, Milan! I posted this proposal because I'm personally no longer interested in writing software that prioritizes maximal adoption, especially when that maximal adoption leads not only to exploitation of free labor from burnt-out maintainers, as well as to a liberal distribution policy that allows that software to be used by anyone for anything.

I appreciate your perspective and some time ago, I would've shared it myself. After starting down this path in recent months, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not willing to participate in that system anymore. If that makes me unqualified to participate in this project, I'm more than happy to step away and let the project succeed on its own terms.

[TejasQ]

Chiming in here to say I agree with your proposal, @zkat. Ultimately, to me, it's a question of how we define "success" of this project. Is it about adoption? Not to me in this case.

Instead, I'd consider entropic a success if we create something sustainable where maintainers can sleep peacefully at night, are compensated fairly, and can flourish doing what they love without expectation or unfair demand, while providing a high quality solution. A recursive chain of reward.

I'd consider it a great success if entropic modeled healthy, sustainable open-source development and enabled others to follow suit – federated on all levels, and I believe that the Parity license will help that happen.

Thanks for this proposal. It's delicious food for thought.

[zkat]

Update: I had the chance to sit down with @kemitchell last night and he introduced me to the idea of cross-licensing collaboratives -- a way to have a democratic organization that's still able to do a lot of things like granting licenses, but doesn't require the overhead of establishing a corporation or foundation. Check it out: https://xlcollaborative.com/

I am thinking of updating my licensing proposal such that this becomes our "governance" model, at least for the client.

[zkat]

fwiw, I'm not sure I'm willing to keep writing permissively-licensed software. Not to try and strongarm anything, but that's just where I am, these days.

[degrammer]

@zkat I'm not an Open Source expert, since you're the author of this project, I trust your judgment and you have valid points here! let's make sure this project goes beyond that.
I really like what @TejasQ is saying, that would be ideal, hopefully a reality: "A recursive chain of reward".
Also it's fair, since you're putting a lot of effort from your free time, time you can invest in other things.
I'm hoping this can setup a precedent here and who's better than you for accomplish such thing :) ?

[zkat]

Gonna /cc @TejasQ, @Vengarioth, and @degrammer, since y'all are the only ones besides me who've landed code in this repo and I would like your approval for this licensing change. Also @MilanLoveless since there's a PR he was intending to land into this repo.

[MilanLoveless]

@zkat I've had quite a while to think about this and ultimately it is important to me that this project have as wide an audience as possible and to this end we should keep the Apache 2.0 licensing. As it is a package manager I feel that this is particularly crucial for the success of this project.
The efforts of the License Zero project are important to the health of community driven software development. I just don't feel it's appropriate here.

[workingjubilee]

I do not even think one is necessarily sacrificing adoption. It might be different if Entropic was pure library, or a programming language, or so on, but... applications are different. If memory serves, the premiere package managers of the world, in terms of installation and use, are... hmm....

Windows Update and the Google Play Store.

...Yes, they primarily service the end user, rather than programmers and the software industry, but the tech industry has a bit more money than I do right now and cheerfully throws stuff on AWS.

[zkat]

Update: I intend to write up an RFC soon that will implement this.