Arguably pensions, too. Although I don't know of pensions that invest in startups, it wouldn't surprise me to find out there are some given the market these days.
I would also argue that corporate investing arms tick this box. It's "other people's money" twice removed.
In fact, the degree to which you're betting other people's money is probably the rubric here. Angels are investing their money (usually -- crowd funding has made this murkier). VC's are betting an LP's money, and if they fail to return value they will have a hard time raising another fund and will eventually "die". (VCs are the real zombies in the startup ecosystem!) Other entities are further away from the money and the consequences they will feel if the investment doesn't pay off.
I'd also look at motivation. This is another area where governments and corporate investing often fail. Governments are usually motivated in ways that aren't aligned with the startup world, and invest money in ways that seem irrational (at least to a startup) as a result. Corporate investing arms are often treating their investments as an extension of corporate development as well as a way to get an option on ideas that either formally spin out of the company or that people leave the company to start. All of these are subject to distortions that pull them away from focusing solely on chance of success.
I don't think anyone limited it to angels. And governments do investing all the time, they just don't always call it that. Solyndra and 38 Studios are two notable failures, for instance.
Governments also invest indirectly through big contracts, hard to come by so. SpaceX and NASA come to mind as one example, also an exception at the same time
The internet was fine before adtech and data hoarders. I don't know why you think this is the fault of the government. New things pop up and we need regulations to protect citizens.
I can't come up with counter arguments to your post that you would not dismiss. That doesn't mean you're right, it means I'm bad at coming up with high quality counter arguments.
It won't help if you ignore their existence, just like you're ignoring the existence of counter-arguments to this guy's talk, many in this very thread.
Since Vorbis, we've all worked to make the codec code as restriction free as possible because we need wide deployment for success. It's more important for a royalty-free codec to win than for these codebases to be copyleft. Once AV1 is the default solution, we can start worrying about software licenses :)
The complaint usually comes in due to an interpretation of "free."
The author includes RMS' opinion, which is true for this particular piece of software, though in many cases it's a warranted complaint. It gets into a political argument usually, but it boils down to this argument: "If I don't require copyleft, then I can't always guarantee that users of my code will get all the freedoms I provided to them."
You don't need an explicit essay on that comparison. Morever it's not vs Copyleft, but why copyleft is generally material to the purpose of Free Software.
In the linked entry Stallman primarily explains what is understood as Free Software. The comparison with Open Source merely serves as a device to illustrate the nuances in a more relatable way.
>Another misunderstanding of “open source” is the idea that it means “not using the GNU GPL.” This tends to accompany another misunderstanding that “free software” means “GPL-covered software.” These are both mistaken, since the GNU GPL qualifies as an open source license and most of the open source licenses qualify as free software licenses. There are many free software licenses aside from the GNU GPL.
I find that distinction very much of interest, and sure enough, RMS also has an explicit text available which deals with that matter more directly [0].
While free software protects the freedoms of the user only, copyleft software protects the freedoms of the developer as well. Both types of software are ethical (as mentioned in [1]), so it comes down to personal choice of the original author, who can use it as a tool to ensure their goals.
I don't understand how can someone argue "your licence is too free, you should make it more restrictive so fewer people can use your software", but what do I know
The choice makes no difference to who can use this version of this software, but copyleft protects users from future derivatives getting locked away in exchange for forbidding proprietary derivatives altogether.
In the case of popularising a video codec the rise of some proprietary derivative seems an acceptable risk but for some random program what's the upside?
IIRC, "public domain" means different things in different countries, and can make it hard to enforce as a software license. See https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain
A BSD-style license is probably the closest to public domain while still being easy to read/understand.
Copyleft does not restrict "use," only distribution. In the case of VLC, the only people who would be restricted are people who want to make proprietary versions of it, and I can see why VideoLAN aren't too concerned about these "users."
I take issue with BSD/MIT because of situations like the PS4. Sony took FreeBSD, heavily modified and improved it to make it into the OS for their new console, and upstreamed (afaik) absolutely nothing, nor did they donate a cent. They were perfectly within their rights to do this due to the license, but holy shit it was a dickish move.
Linux would not be in such a strong position, IMO, if they were not GPL. So many companies have been forced to reluctantly release things like drivers for their hardware because they wanted to leverage the power of linux in their products. BSDs will never get contributions like that.
For video decoders though, contributions are less important and so I think BSD is a good idea. We desperately need AV1 to succeed, and that means everyone and their dog using it.
Well, yes. I did say they followed the license. I think it's a bad license for an OS because it doesn't encourage/require bad community members to open their source. Companies like Sony have no excuse for not upstreaming their improvements. They didn't because they weren't required to.
I think it's a good licence for an OS or for any software because it gets more products pushed out there which all in all gives society more stuff to play with, which is kind of the point of writing free software, at least for me.
Since they wrote software under a permissive license, they're explicitly giving anyone permission to do that. I would therefore assume that they're okay with it.
I'm not okay with it, so if I write something I default to licensing it under the GPL (and I recommend doing the same), but my opinions aren't universal.
When Apache board members were busy defending the fiasco that is OpenOffice a couple of years back one of the give away claims they made was that their big contributors abandoned the project because LibreOffice used code from it under the terms of the license and didn't give back.
Not being required to give back being the entire point of Apache's licensing versus LibreOffice.
They (board members) basically refused to make any connection between this obvious hypocrisy and the failure of their project.
Yes, it does, but I think that's bad. Any large company which takes freely available code and builds a commercial product with it without either upstreaming improvements or making significant donations is bad. Seriously, contribute or get out and write your own damn code. In my opinion.
Has everyone forgotten Heartbleed? Y'all are defending behaviour which got us all in that mess.
> Really? People are going to complain because a licence is too free? ...
Software licenses exist to balance the compromise between "user freedom" and "vendor freedom".
In this context, speaking about "freedom" in general ('too free') doesn't make too much sense.
A definition of "free" only meaning "no contractual restrictions" is an overly simplified one, which doesn't recognize the existence of the compromise.
BTW, this distinction is by no means specific to software - think "employer's freedom" vs "employee's freedom".
I look at it as a trade-off between short-term freedom and long-term freedom.
BSD gives more short-term freedom. GPL trades some short-term freedom to attempt to better preserve long-term freedom.
To me that trade is a reasonable strategy, but I also think BSD has a hidden(?) benefit on a different front in the battle for openness. If you have a libre implementation of something but nobody uses it, it's not much use. If the availability of BSD-licensed code induces a corporation to use that instead of developing their own proprietary technology, it might be a net win, especially if that big corporation has a lot of influence over users.
What we want here are more users of the AV1 codec. As such, an implementation that doesn't suck that anyone can use and MIGHT want to contribute fixes/optimizations upstream so they don't have to carry them on their own is a more of a net win than trying to use a specific implementation of that decoder library as a club to open up other software that happens to use it.
