HFOSS hours meeting

This section of the blog post relates an event I went to on the 16th of January. I know that this is kind of late to discuss this event, but it occurred to me that if this counts as a meetup (one of our assignments), it should not only be mentioned in my journal, but in this blog as well. I know this is kind of low as far as motivations go, but anyways, let’s crack on. I’ll do my best to remember more than the few lines I wrote for my journal.

So about a couple weeks ago, I went to the HFOSS Hours meeting and surprise, there were actually people there this time (I went the day before by mistake). As you have (or will) probably understand reading this blog, I’m not – yet? – the develops-in-his-room-at-night kind of person. That’s why this blog mainly deals with official class work as well as reviewing basics of HFOSS, but not really with personal projects. So as you can imagine, HFOSS Hours seemed to me as some sort of a cult. I have about zero coding languages/framework/technology culture. That’s why most of the time I spent at this HFOSS hours meeting was spent wondering what people were actually talking about, like if they were talking a totally foreign language (spoiler alert, I’m French, so they actually were). I did not really feel comfortable participating in vigorous debates on topics I don’t know or don’t have strong opinions about. HFOSS hours also seemed to be a time where people share the personal projects they’re working on, which is interesting to me but can be hard to follow and even harder to participate in as I don’t really have any personal projects worthy of attention. Finally, Ben Goldberg spent a decent amount of time giving a talk about the Rust programming language, which was also of interest to me.

Reading about simple open source software licenses

Today I read the commentary and license text (either on FSF or OSI) for 5 software licenses :

the Original BSD license (BSD = Berkeley Software Distribution),
the modified BSD license,
the freeBSD licence,
the ISC license (ISC = Internet Systems Consortium),
the MIT expat license (MIT = Massachusets Institute of Technology).

From the original BSD to the freeBSD license, the legal text goes from 4 to 2 clauses. The two discarded clauses both deal with advertising and promotion. From what I understand from the commentary, one of these clauses was removed for compatibility purposes (with GNU GPL notably). This fact highlights that the broad term of open source license hides a more complex reality.

Then onto the ISC license, which is cousin to the University of Washington license. The UW license seems to lead to some interpretation problems, that’s why GNU doesn’t recommend using ISC, even if ISC state that they don’t have the same interpretation as UW. GNU states that ISC is similar to the freeBSD license, which could be used instead. Finally, the MIT expat license falls into the same category every 4 other licenses. The ISC and MIT expat licenses are very brief compared to the 3 previous ones, which are not that long either. They contain pretty much a single clause, as well as, like every other license, a stream of capitalized legal jargon at the end.

It’s fun to see that each commentary for these 5 licenses recommends using the Apache 2.0 license. The argument given by GNU for Apache 2.0 is that it blocks patent treachery.

These 5 licenses are all described as lax, permissive and non-copyleft free software license. Lax open source software licenses allow the distributed code to be read, modified, redistributed, and ran, with little requirements. Permissive licenses are opposed to copyleft licenses (another type of free software license), which enforces the license to derivative works. Proprietary work can accept permissively licensed works whereas it cannot include copyleft licensed work.