Hacker News with Generative AI: Licensing

Microsoft Urges Businesses to Abandon Office Perpetual Licenses (microsoft.com)
As a leader of a small or medium-sized business, you may have invested in Microsoft Office years ago through a perpetual license or “on-premises” version to equip your team with essential productivity apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Broadcom raises minimum requirement for VMware licenses: from 16 to 72 cores (techzine.eu)
Broadcom is significantly increasing the minimum requirement for VMware licenses. According to VMware distributor Arrow, the minimum number of required cores per command line will increase from 16 to 72 as of April 10.
GPLv2 is not impressed by Git (thomas-huehn.com)
There is this strange little clause in the GNU General Public License, version 2 – but not version 3 – that pretty much everybody ignores. When distributing a modified program in source form,
VMware turns its back on small businesses: 72-core license policy backlash (systemadministration.net)
VMware by Broadcom has officially declared war on small and mid-sized businesses with the rollout of its new licensing policy, set to take effect this April.
Free Software Foundation rides to defend AGPLv3 against Neo4j license add-ons (theregister.com)
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) on Monday backed a lone developer's brave effort to overturn a pivotal court ruling that threatens to undermine the AGPLv3 – the foundation's GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.
Not Lonely at All (2009) (ma.tt)
Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software wrote a blog post called Getting Pretty Lonely and and says, among other things, “Whenever I am reminded that WordPress is GPL, my passion for it takes a bit of a dive. I’m more comfortable with the true freedom of liberally-licensed products.” More importantly, he says that “GPL stifles participation,” and implies the same for adoption.
"When you upload or input information through Firefox, you grant us a license" (mozilla.org)
Firefox is free and open source web browser software, built by a community of thousands from all over the world.
Why is no one talking about Mozilla's latest madness? (ycombinator.com)
As per the recent introduction of "Terms of Use" for Firefox which is covered by (almost) copyleft license, Mozilla now imposes following non-sense on it's users.
DOGE claims there are 227 unused VSCode licenses in DoL (twitter.com)
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
Author changes popular VSCode Material Theme license, threatens to sue (visualstudio.com)
So, uh, the guy who made the VS Code Material Theme is threatening everyone who uses it in their products. He seems to have forgotten it was originally licensed under the Apache License, 2.0.. He wiped the commit history to make it look like it was always his weird fake license.
Meta's Llama license is still not Open Source (opensource.org)
Open source projects could sell SBOM fragments (thomas-huehn.com)
Scanning source files for licensing information (because the package managers‘ metadata is insufficient) is a lot of work, and a lot of wasted effort, because only rarely do companies pool their resources.
What does it mean that MP3 is free? (idiallo.com)
The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without paying royalties. For software developers and audio enthusiasts, this might seem like a big deal. But, surprisingly, almost no one noticed. Why? Because the world of technology has changed so drastically that MP3's significance has faded into the background.
Feluda – A CLI tool to detect restrictive licenses in dependencies (crates.io)
Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red (theregister.com)
Only around one in ten Oracle Java customers are likely to stick around following costly licensing changes Big Red made to its development and runtime environments in January 2023, according to research.
Significant Risks in Using AI Models Governed by Llama License (shujisado.org)
Although it has already been explained that the Llama model and the Llama License (Llama Community License Agreement) do not, in any sense, qualify as Open Source, it bears noting that the Llama License contains several additional issues.
Sci-fi author Alan Dean Foster moves into gaming with Pomme studio deal Midworld (venturebeat.com)
Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Alan Dean Foster is moving into gaming in a multi-license deal with studio Pomme, starting with a game based on his classic Midworld novel.
Nokia Design Archive (aalto.fi)
Archive materials are subject to a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Please see HERE for attribution instructions.
FluentAssertions 8 has changed its license to a commercial model (github.com/fluentassertions)
Pluralsight unilaterally cancelling lifetime licenses (reddit.com)
“You know that lifetime license we gave you? Never mind.”
Campsite switches to Creative Commons Non-Commercial license (github.com/campsite)
This is an open source version of the Campsite app. This codebase is available as-is and is not actively maintained by the Campsite team. We will only consider pull requests and issues regarding self-hosting or critical fixes. The codebase is provided as a reference for those interested in learning how Campsite works. We welcome forks of this repository for use in non-commercial projects.
LLMs Are Directing Open Source Licensing (danb.me)
I’m often looking at the licensing of open source projects, either out of personal interest or while moderating posts to /r/opensource, and through this I’ve seen a recent trend of projects having something like this in their readme:
ScyllaDB – Why We're Moving to a Source Available License (scylladb.com)
ScyllaDB has decided to focus on a single release stream – ScyllaDB Enterprise. Starting with the ScyllaDB Enterprise 2025.1 release (ETA February 2025):
ScyllaDB moving to a source available license (scylladb.com)
ScyllaDB has decided to focus on a single release stream – ScyllaDB Enterprise. Starting with the ScyllaDB Enterprise 2025.1 release (ETA February 2025):
Arch Linux starts licensing PKGBUILDs (lwn.net)
Arch Linux is popular as a base for other Linux distributions; examples of Arch-derivatives include EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Parabola, and SteamOS.
Documind ripped our open source tool and swapped the license (ycombinator.com)
Saw a ShowHN post [0] today about an open source document extractor tool. I thought the workflow sounded pretty similar to our library, and only to realize it's a direct rip of Zerox [1].
Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs? (ycombinator.com)
I don't want my content to be harvested by LLMs; They are removing attribution, among other things. Otherwise, I'd like to stick as close as possible to the open source licenses (say MIT). Is there such a license out there? If not, anyone working on such a thing?
LICENSE.TXT [video] (youtube.com)
Codeberg Reconsidering OSI License Approval in Terms of Use (codeberg.org)
As of today, Codeberg's Terms of Use (ToU) require repository contents to be licensed under a license approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative (OSI), as stated in the following two clauses (bolding mine):
GoLic, injects license into source code files (github.com/AbsaOSS)
GoLic, injects license into source code files