Category: 1. Software Industry
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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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Should open source projects denounce users who aren’t donating money?
Right now, the top blog post on the OpenCV website (an open source library for computer vision and machine learning) is about how Snap Inc. uses OpenCV in its products (and presumably makes a lot of money partly thanks to it) but does not donate at all to the project. The blog post promises to…
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Myopia: Is it a feature or a product?
A common mistake of inexperienced entrepreneurs is to confuse a feature with a product. The best recent illustrating example I can think of is the flashlight app: For a short moment in time, you could sell flashlight apps for mobile phones until Apple and Google came in, assimilated the flashlight function as a feature into…
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Will open source fix the public cloud vendor lock-in?
Over on Twi… what-shall-not-be-named, Kelsey Hightower argued that companies want on-premise back and that this is happening by on-premise product vendors copying cloud APIs in their products: It might just turn out that the cloud was the best way to research and design better ways of managing our systems, and thanks to the open source…