Linux man-pages project maintenance [LWN.net]
lwn.net

From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>

Hi all,

As you know, I’ve been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I’ve been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I’d welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

Have a lovely day! Alex

  • lud@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 months ago

    some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.

    What is wrong with charging for your services?

    Open source licences aren’t meant to make it impossible to earn money or anything. As long as companies comply with the licences I don’t see anything wrong with it.

    If a licence wants to make it impossible to earn money they should put that in the actual licence.

    • starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev
      4·
      2 months ago

      Nothing. The context of this comment thread is “fuck corporations” and then proposing AGPL to solve that. I am merely pointing out that if their goal is to have a non-commercial license then AGPL doesn’t solve that, which is why i mention they can charge for their services with AGPL.

        • starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev
          1·
          2 months ago

          No. I said even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license [by making the open sourced code unusable without the backend code or some other means outside of scope of this conversation] then they can charge for it.

          The malicous part is in brackets in the above paragraph. The license is an OSI approved license that allows commercialization, it would be stupid for me to call that malicious.

          • lud@lemm.ee
            1·
            2 months ago

            Yes, but how is it malicious to comply with the license? If the license doesn’t require the code to be usable without a backend they have fully complied. Does the license even require usable code at all?

            As long as they give the source code they are required to give I don’t see any problem with it.

            • starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev
              1·
              2 months ago

              The difference is that commercialization is inherent with a free (libre) open source license. Whereas going against the intent, but still legally gray area, is imo malicious compliance because it circumvents what the license was intended to solve in the first place.

              But that’s all i really care to add to this convo, since my initial comment my intent was just to say that the AGPLv3 license does not stop corporations from getting free stuff and being able to charge for it-- especially documentation. Have a good one