Free Software Is a Failure(paritybit.ca)
7 points by gum_wobble | 6 comments
Blog essay by Jake Bauer arguing that the copyleft Free Software movement and the GPL fail at their stated goals and harm the broader FOSS ecosystem.
#software-licensing on Hacker News
18 stories tagged software-licensing, newest first.
A new model for open source: closed to pull requests, open to remix(ghuntley.com)
9 points by ghuntley | 5 comments
Geoffrey Huntley blog post proposing an open source model where projects reject pull requests but invite others to fork and remix the code.
OpenBSD Developers Reject Uutils Coreutils(news.lavx.hu)
23 points by pjmlp | 11 comments
News article reporting that OpenBSD developers rejected a port of the Rust-based uutils coreutils, citing licensing and compatibility concerns.
Get your Windows license refund(en.refund4freedom.org)
645 points by smartmic | 270 comments
Refund4Freedom campaign page explaining how to get a refund for the preinstalled Windows license on new laptops and listing its demands to vendors.
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion(consumerrights.wiki)
945 points by antipurist | 345 comments
Consumer Rights Wiki article on Microsoft's scheduled July 2026 conversion of perpetually licensed Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac into a view-only reduced functionality mode.
Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses(theverge.com)
446 points by robertkarl | 430 comments
News report that Microsoft is canceling internal Claude Code licenses, reportedly after AI tool spending exceeded its budget.
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft(writings.hongminhee.org)
541 points by dahlia | 539 comments
Blog essay arguing that AI-assisted clean-room reimplementation, as with chardet 7.0 relicensed from LGPL to MIT, may be legal but erodes the legitimacy of copyleft.
No right to relicense this project(github.com)
412 points by robin_reala | 271 comments
GitHub issue by Mark Pilgrim, original author of chardet, objecting that maintainers have no right to relicense the LGPL project in release 7.0.0.
Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite(tuananh.net)
361 points by tuananh | 355 comments
A blog post by Tuan-Anh Tran on using AI-assisted rewrites of code to relicense software away from GPL-family licenses.
JuiceSSH – Give me my pro features back(nproject.io)
376 points by jandeboevrie | 151 comments
A blog post complaining that the JuiceSSH Android SSH client no longer honors previously purchased pro features and describing how to get them back.
Bear is now source-available(herman.bearblog.dev)
497 points by neoromantique | 439 comments
Herman's blog post announcing that Bear blogging platform is moving from the MIT license to a source-available license after competitors forked the code.
I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)(code.mendhak.com)
762 points by ekiauhce | 546 comments
Blog post describing how the author mailed a letter to the address in the GPLv2 license notice and received a printed copy of the GPLv3 license in return.
Bitwarden SDK relicensed from proprietary to GPLv3(github.com)
927 points by ferbivore | 349 comments
A GitHub commit in Bitwarden's sdk-internal repository titled "Improve licensing language" changing most crates to be licensed under GPL or the Bitwarden SDK License.
Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks(arstechnica.com)
365 points by dangle1 | 271 comments
Ars Technica article reporting that Winamp deleted its GitHub source code repository after weeks of controversy over its restrictive license.
CockroachDB license change(cockroachlabs.com)
330 points by Cwizard | 367 comments
Cockroach Labs blog post announcing changes to CockroachDB's self-hosted offering and license model, with CockroachDB Enterprise changes arriving in November.
Redis adopts dual source-available licensing(redis.com)
340 points by pauldix | 547 comments
Redis blog post by CEO Rowan Trollope announcing that future Redis releases will move from BSD to dual source-available licensing (RSALv2 and SSPLv1).
Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes(gamerbraves.com)
545 points by agluszak | 140 comments
GamerBraves news article reporting that Unity quietly deleted its GitHub repository tracking Terms of Service changes and updated its license.
GitHub Copilot emits GPL code(codeium.com)
465 points by fortenforge | 300 comments
Codeium blog post arguing that GitHub Copilot reproduces GPL-licensed code while Codeium excludes non-permissive code from its training data.