Clojurians Log v2

@borkdude I'm so glad you let me talk you in to coming! 😄

I'm looking forward to Dutch Clojure Days! If anyone is considering planning another conference, I'd love to talk to them.

Is it a relief or post trip blues? I imagine you missed your missus so that’s probably dominating and makes it an unfair question. I’ll leave it anyway 😅

It's more sleep deprived blues for the coming few days probably :)

Great colors!

Glad you got home safe -- and enjoyed the trip! I was amazed at how many international attendees there were this year!

Christoph persuaded me to come (and I'm glad he did!) and probably lots of others too so we could have a good conversation on dialects and tooling :)

(and we did!)

but yeah I did notice other people coming from Germany, Finland, even Australia. Crazy!

Estonia, Czechia, Poland...

The lack of European conferences is showing

I thought we'd had two Clojure conferences in Europe this year already?

that's true but we've been hungry for a while!

but you're right, looks like the momentum is coming back finally

The whole of the USA gets just one conference. You lot are spoiled:rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Could go for that!

Thanks for sharing, that was an interesting read. This touches on something I’ve thought about without making any real progress: How to make a SaaS application’s source code available without risking it getting charged for by someone else or otherwise undermining your business. Are there licenses that support this?

An example, MongoDB was AGPLv3 and changed to https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-license. There is the Polyform suite of licenses - https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ - Those are not OSI "approved" and considered "source available" licenses

https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw is another example, their license requires keeping the watermark on the canvas. From talking to them it seems to be working well for them and they haven’t gotten much backlash.

Reading the Polyform "Perimeter" license, it states under "Competition" that (emphasis mine): > If you use this software to market a product as a substitute for the functionality or value of the software, it competes with the software. A product may compete regardless how it is designed or deployed. For example, a product may compete even if it provides its functionality via any kind of interface (including services, libraries or plug-ins), even if it is ported to a different platform or programming language, and even if it is provided free of charge. This seems like something that is either very hard to enforce legally, or so broad that I can imagine two projects developed in isolation being able to make claims against each other according to this license. I am not a lawyer, and not very experienced in reading licenses, and appreciate being enlightened as to why I am reading it wrong. 😄

What I mean is, two products might be very similar because good ideas seldom appear only in one place. If company A accuses company B of competing with their product and says B has had access to A's source code (because it is source available under the Polyform Perimeter license), is it company A or B which has the burden of proof?

these terms sound like wishful thinking to me

While I like the idea of Polyform, I agree. I just wonder if that is actually the case, as they state the Polyform project is made by experienced lawyers. From the front page: > The PolyForm Project is a group of experienced licensing lawyers and technologists developing simple, standardized, plain-language software source code licenses.

One of the lawyers behind Polyform is https://writing.kemitchell.com/ it has some interesting posts, analyzing open source licenses, e.g. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-by-Line https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL

the idea of using the law in an asymmetric fashion against the state / corporations is the basis of copyleft. The fact that it remains untested is quite a decent proof of its efficacy. The targets are not (usually at least) small companies so all the lawyer words (from the credible lawyers) are there to introduce sufficient hesitation among the FANGsters. Though let's be real: the very concept of the rule of law is also very close to 🤡 🤡 these days.

To your question @mdiin... they test it in court. That's the only way that we find out, like Leibniz and Newton lol

Incidentally, I'm going to a workshop this week about https://www.zetk.in/ and I'm definitely going to share this article

@raymcdermott Of course, and I see your point about sounding scary enough that big corp lawyers think twice. My question regarding burden of proof is because I would hate to see this used in attempted hostile takeovers. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. 🤷 Actually now that I think about it, burden of proof cannot lie with either party, but would have to be a third party with full jurisdiction to see all code repositories of both sides of such a struggle.

The idea of the license is to protect the commons so anything that gums up mergers and acquisitions has to be a win

I have very little confidence in using licenses to improve the situation. The chance to sue a big company as an individual maintainer is as useful as an opportunity to compete in a Sumo basho as a lightweight.

Companies were very reluctant to adopt open source until they realised that there was a spigot of free labour. Time to somehow turn off that tap or make it non-potable for profit.

They have money we have the means of production