Delighted to see that this site is still alive.
I''d like to hear your opinions about my take on libre licences:
https://git.lbfalvy.com/Orchid/...

Immediately above that title is the CLA which is also different from a conventional CLA in that it allows contributors to retain ownership of their work so that the noncommercial free licence can receive the typical protections of copyleft.

Dammit, I sell my fork of orchid all the time. Cloud flare is using it to create reverse proxies.

I still will add networking to your system, mark my works.

@whimsical I had to fix a major conceptual problem in the macro system so I'm pretty much in the same place I thought I was at the end of September. I'll tell you when I think it's worth trying.

I added a native "record" type this time around which is backed by a hashmap from interned string, both because it's faster and because it's wayy easier to use from native code than the shitty lazy key-value-list dictionaries the old system required.

> grant me (the owner of the project) a permanent, unrestricted license to use, modify, distribute and relicense your contribution under any terms I see fit.

This feels like it defeats the entire purpose of open source. This is why I hate CLAs in general. I could never contribute to a project that has one of these.

@djsumdog what is in your opinion an acceptable way for an open-source project to make money?
what is an acceptable way to make money using an existing open-source project?

Firstly, custom licenses are cringe. If you can't find a known license that does what you want, then you should stop and consider why what you're doing isn't already covered.

Secondly, if you're not a lawyer or at least someone with strong experience dealing with the intricacies of software licensing, then you shouldn't be writing your own license. Based on the casual tone and vagueness of your license, not to mention the complete lack of any waiver of warranty, not even the standard blurb, I'm guessing you are neither.

Thirdly, and getting to the meat of the issue, it's not libre, free as in freedom, if the entire point is to restrict how the software can be used and who can use it.

Lastly, asking how to make money from open source is missing the entire point. Open source is about protecting user freedom, not developer profits. If you want to make money, then be honest from the start and just sell proprietary software instead of trying to piggy back off OSS.

@NotJeckel Your points about custom licenses are valid, I definitely need a waiver and eventually advice from a lawyer, although that's expensive.

however, I don't think we can talk about user freedom without talking about development funding. Users and software don't exist in a vacuum. Problems need fixing, new standards need to be adopted, not to even talk about evolving use cases. I didn't make it proprietary because I don't want it to be proprietary. It's free for noncommercial use with copyleft protection.

User freedom as such is actually not even something I care about, I don't mention it in either file. I care about noncommercial use freedom. Amazon and Microsoft should not be free to trample over free software. Commercial use should be commercialized, and free use should be free.

@NotJeckel As for custom licences being cringe:

Everything that's commonplace today was at some point unusual. Kill the part of you that cringes, learn to engage with new ideas in good faith.

But also, this isn't even unusual. In the past 5 years, a variety of initiatives branched off the open-source movement to develop new licences that address the now acute open source funding problem. This isn't a brand new idea, it's just my take on an ongoing discussion.

Booeeeh, Orchid repository not updated for 11 months! I want to work on the networking and afaik you made some changes that will affect that. Better module system right?

@retoor I moved it off Github. I'll update the Github repo with a link and archive it. This repo is now the authoritative source for new versions.

@lorentz ah yeah, I had the old github repository. Your system is almost as cool as molodetz.

I'm sure it won't get that far, but i fantasize to make a webdav server in orchid what would be cool because of the lack of decent webdav servers. My own webdav server at this moment is the best one I know, better than nginx. It's also written in C, but it's more compliant to webdav RFC than nginx, also better compatible with clients. Only thing it lacks is user quota's. Quota is a number you have to maintain all the time to keep it performant. You can't recalculate the used quota every time based on files, also because the files are not always stored on the server itself. I can't just stat() them.

@retoor I wouldn't call it a system, it's just a gitea container behind Caddy. The services on this host are mostly independent utilities.

If you don't care about user freedom, then why even mention libre/OSS since user freedom is the entire point of the movement?

Custom licenses are cringe because they are almost always created by people with little to no knowledge or experience of how to properly create a license. It's the same reason it's cringe to roll your own cryptography library; if you don't have the expertise then you shouldn't be doing it.

If you don't want companies using your software, then a custom license will definitely solve that as no company is going to take on the legal risk of a random person's personally created license. However, you're also going to lose many OSS non-commercial users for the same reason.

Licenses work because they are a known quantity. If a person sees MIT or GPL or CC, they know what they are getting and what legal risk they are taking on. They know their obligations and restrictions and that there is some amount of legal precedent behind them.

If a person sees a custom license, they have none of that and have to trust on faith that the person who wrote the license knew what they were doing. No person that cares about the legal aspects of licensing is going to bother with that, commercial or non-commercial. The people that will bother would do so even if there was no license other than the automatic "All rights reserved".

As you say, new licenses have been created to address the desired difference between commercial and non-commercial usage. Go use one of those licenses created by a university or company as they were probably created by someone that knows what they are doing and more importantly, people know those licenses.

@lorentz the best systems are a gitea behind caddy. Gitea4Life. Btw, a hard fork of gitea exists because gitea became commercial company or something but i can't remember the name. Also, i don't notice anything commercially annoying of gitea. Kinda like that a real company is backing it.

@lorentz I gonna add so much slop to your system, you'll drown in it.

@NotJeckel from all software licenses only one was a few times used in court. Almost all licenses are kind of bullshit / unproven. I researched this very deep for a while because I wanted to collaborate with @blindxfish on something. I would not care too much about license at all.

Nazi rust caused me to have no disk space left. What the fuck is it doing. I have a working server with example files, it compiled before. But now it did something else. Dammit.

@retoor I'm thinking about an AI policy. I'm not sure I want to ban AI-generated code outright, I'm morally opposed to it and just personally dislike it, but at the same time policies regarding the origin of code are unenforceable. I suppose if the quality is fine I couldn't really complain anyway.

@retoor Either way the main example of contemptible AI use in open-source is when people use it for the english part of the patch, i.e. justification and docs. If a real human takes responsibility for the patch and the quality is fine there isn't really an explicit reason to block it.

@lorentz If your base is good, AI will understand it will and will develop the same way as you did if well instructed (you force it to read certain files and so on). So, the difference is, you still are the main designer of the system, but extending the system with new stuff at a certain point becomes comfortable with AI. The only bottle neck that I am facing now, is that AI has a problem with Rust in general + the AI does not understand what are error messages of Rust or Orchid. It requires quite some fine tuning to extend this project with AI. But with some AI skills, it should be possible. I only don't know how big the Rust issues of the AI are. You'll see in the merge request :D (And no, I don't expect you to merge it, but at least get some inspiration for a socket implementation in the language when ever needed).

@lorentz Hmm, i do not get any output as well when i execute cargo orcx -- exec --proj ./examples/hello-world "src::main::main". Like literally nothing. Same for my networking module which compiles just fine. I don't get output on original and my branch: https://git.lbfalvy.com/retoor/...

It executes orcx very quickly so i thought, it doesn't compile or something and i ran it with build --release but no difference.

Are you sure the project is in a good state?

@retoor I'm sure it's not in a good state, but I'm also as sure as I can be that it's portable and should at the very least print "2" followed by a line break and flush to standard out. I'll test it on Linux tomorrow, though again, I'm quite sure it should be portable.

@retoor if you use --logs and --msg-logs (both go immediately after orcx, unfortunately Clap doesn't promote arguments) then it'll tell you how the conversation between the interpreter and the stdlib went, which is a lot of information but it's pretty useful in debugging deadlocks.

if it doesn't print anything and exits that's a whole other issue, it should _definitely_ not be doing that.

there's a small risk of deadlock because the interpreter and extensions communicate through messages which are async and there are a handful of places where I had to send a message from a destructor. I intend to replace these with a panicking destructor and a manually invoked async "dispose" function like I've done in "BorrowedExprStore" but that's for the (near) future.

it _shouldn't_ deadlock, destructors are guaranteed in Rust and Tokio also has a fair scheduling liveness guarantee to ensure that eventually the forked future will run, but this technique of forking from a destructor has been a major source of bugs in the past because it's literally impossible to tell when they actually run. Currently destructor safety is guaranteed by blocking on these loose references before exit and relying on Tokio's liveness guarantee for them to be freed quickly since nothing else is happening.

@lorentz I just tried again but cargo orcx -- exec --proj ./examples/hello-world "src::main::main" --logs --msg-logs. Just hangs. Also, you should always be on Linux.

I'll try on the server.