Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
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Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
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This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
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- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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If they push AGPL, then the code is still open, it’s just explicitly copyleft. Any GPL license imposes serious restrictions on what the end user can do. AGPL further restricts what end users can do. Copyleft is similar but different from open source. Basically all they’re doing is leaving the code open to view but preventing anyone from money off of it.
Honestly for people like yourself this is exactly what you want for privacy software. Copyleft with commercial restrictions is basically the whole FSF vibe. This is much ado about nothing; previously the code was unlicensed on GitHub which is much more restrictive than AGPL.
My understanding is that they are only applying AGPL to the current version and going forward all versions will no longer be AGPL. However if they have accepted contributions that were not covered by an agreement to transfer copyright, this is illegal without obtaining explicit approval from all contributors.
No, I don't think you understand the free software movement at all. It has never been strictly noncommercial. Open source has never been a vow of poverty.
BY-NC-SA is considered non-free by everybody, including the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and even Creative Commons themselves.
https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/freeworks/
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
https://opensource.org/licenses/
Furthermore, Creative Commons strongly warns against using these licenses for software for this very reason.
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F
~I’m not sure why you brought up the CC license; unlicensed GitHub repos do not use that and, generally, it’s understood that CC licenses cover documentation only for the reasons you cited.~
I think you and I fundamentally disagree about the point of FSF. Open source is not a vow of poverty, you’re right; copyleft damn near is. Open source is an umbrella that covers both open and copyleft licenses. For the average business that wants to keep closed source code, copyleft modules are poison. I’ve handled the compliance process for both SMB and enterprise companies. Unless you’re someone like Red Hat, copyleft is basically noncommercial. AGPL, SSPL, and BSL are joke licenses that also present the exact same problems as copyleft albeit much worse for businesses to pick up. If you couldn’t tell, I don’t like copyleft code because I don’t think it’s okay to place restrictions on code beyond the basic litigation coverage things like the Apache 2.0 offer.
~As for what SN is doing, my read of that was the code would be AGPL moving forward. My understanding is that you don’t need contributor approval to apply it (depending on the original license; in the case of the unlicensed code they have full power) but you do need contributor approval to remove it. If you’re right and they’re going to drop it after applying it, they’re opening themselves up to litigation should someone choose to pursue it.~
Edit: just looked at the repo; they replaced the root AGPL with the CC license instead of, say, linking the CC license for docs and leaving AGPL in place. The individual packages don’t have licenses and the root code (eg scripts) don’t have one either. Ignore what I said about SN; they did everything wrong and it’s stressful to look at.