Author: Dirk Riehle
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How open source licenses increase or curtail reach of the software
Relicensing from a permissive to a copyleft license curtails the potential reach of the open-source software, while relicensing from a copyleft to a permissive license increases its potential reach. In the abstract, this is easy to see: Having less requirements on the use of the software allows more uses and hence increases reach. The confusion,…
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What about skipping the “open source” part in commercial open source?
GitButler, a budding better git client, just announced that it is making its source code available under the Functional Source License (FSL), a source-available/non-compete license. In a tweet, GitButler states that this is open-source software. Previous attempts at calling competition-curbing licenses open source licenses failed, and I expect it won’t be different here. What’s new…
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A systematic literature review of pre-requirements specification traceability [RE Journal]
Abstract Requirements traceability (RT) is the ability to link requirements to other software development artifacts. In pre-requirements (pre-RS) traceability, requirements are linked to their origin, such as interviews with stakeholders, meeting protocols, or legacy systems. Compared with post-RS traceability, which links requirements to source code and other later artifacts, pre-RS traceability has seen much less…
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Is isEven() a bad function to have?
Someone on Twitter got all exasperated that there is an isEven() function in Javascript to compute whether a number is an even number. After all it is equivalent to the simple expression of ((n % 2) == 0); why would they not use this? Well, already this simple example contains most of what you need…
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You just don’t understand (open source edition)
Listening to open source developers complaining about companies not donating money and then getting ignored by said companies reminds me of a quarreling couple, where one side has a lot to say and the other side is just silent. Let me turn this silence into statements a company would make. Let’s go! Open source developer:…