Htmx changes license to Zero-Clause BSD

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/commit/e16f1865a494b6281f8a44ed0db5338e718b3f07

by jicea • 3 years ago

213 112 3 years ago

samsquire2• 3 years ago

I use the zero clause licence for my all my work because it just removes all the overhead of using my code.

I think (please correct my understanding) zero clause BSD can be embedded in a GPL project too, it just becomes one-way included, subsumed into the GPL project and then under the GPL licence. (Relicenced)

Could the author of HTMX explain their reasoning for changing the licence? I am curious?

stavros• 3 years ago

IANAL, but yep, that sounds about right, the more restrictive license then applies. Of course, anyone can use the original, BSD copy of the code, without the restrictions.

samsquire2• 3 years ago

I would have hope that anybody who uses your code doesn't want to keep it a secret, because it would be good if people use the same common base code and changes can benefit everyone.

Since there's no requirement to credit a zero clause licenced BSD code, someone who receives the BSD code compiled might not know it's included but that's the risk I'm taking.

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

It was mainly as a joke, but I wanted to remove the attribution clauses, they just seemed dumb for a single-file javascript library that was probably going to be minimized anyway, where are you supposed to stick the license?

skybrian• 3 years ago

Some companies are careful to include all the libraries' licenses when minimizing JavaScript code. There are tools to do it. But it seems wasteful, so it's great that you removed the requirement.

zvr3• 3 years ago

Thank you for this!

It lifts a significant burden for people/projects/organizations who want to release software while complying with all license obligations.

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

background:

- over the weekend I started making the @htmx_org twitter account increasingly corporate looking

- started talking a lot about MSFT, implying they were interested in htmx

- someone asked if MSFT was going to buy htmx: https://fxtwitter.com/htmx_org/status/1746656784088228204

- i then put up a post about changing the htmx license, implying i was going to restrict it due to MSFT interest: https://fxtwitter.com/htmx_org/status/1746736273728094323

- I then made is 0BSD instead of 2BSD: https://fxtwitter.com/htmx_org/status/1746880860723544211

- I then posted the "offer" i got from MSFT (some credit card thing) https://fxtwitter.com/htmx_org/status/1746895016256328079

- And explained how there were no lies involved in the ruse: https://fxtwitter.com/htmx_org/status/1746924827641102719

the reason i did all this is for the lols

saghm3• 3 years ago

- I then posted the "offer" i got from MSFT (some credit card thing) https://fxtwitter.com/htmx_org/status/1746895016256328079

Know your worth; don't sell out for anything under 20% cash back at Bed, Bath & Beyond!

internet101010• 3 years ago

Only applicable to private label items.

kamikaz1k• 3 years ago

what does the fx in fxtwitter.com mean?

aatd86• 3 years ago

Fix twitter...

Just kidding... Foreign exchange....

Kidding again... I don't actually know.

nouryqt• 3 years ago

Fix, it's mostly used for having embeds work again in discord and such

https://github.com/FixTweet/FxTwitter

disintegrator• 3 years ago

https://github.com/FixTweet/FxTwitter

softinio• 3 years ago

I was wondering same .... found this:

https://docs.fxtwitter.com/en/latest/index.html#

geek_at• 3 years ago

since the WHOIS states it's DNS servers are hosted by cloudflare (twitter is hosted by twtrdns.net) it seems to be a "fuck x - twitter.com" forwarding domain. Maybe also with some tracking to see how many people clicked the link but that's just speculation

isoprophlex• 3 years ago

Absolute madman

Should have gone for the "do whatever the fuck you want" license though

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

i went to berkeley so i have a soft spot for BSD (even though BSD0 technically isn't derived from BSD)

bruh2• 3 years ago

I love your spirit. Actually funny

purple_ferret• 3 years ago

Your lack of professional seriousness is truly astounding.

One of the primary reasons we've gone with React/NextJS coupled with MongoDB and Kubernetes over HTMX

sgift• 3 years ago

Talks about lack of professional seriousness. Goes with MongoDB. Sometimes reality writes the best jokes.

notfed• 3 years ago

Poe would like a word with you.

markski4• 3 years ago

you chose your stack by weighing the professionalism of the twitter account?

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

That's a great option, many people choose it!

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

OK, I'll respond in a bit more detail to this, now that it's closer to the top. I'll assume you are being serious as well (always hard to tell online.)

I understand where you are coming from, the @htmx_org twitter account is very silly. This can be a big turn off to some developers and companies. On the other hand, I do have a fair number of serious essays on the htmx website (https://htmx.org/essays) and a free book that is also serious (https://hypermedia.systems).

I view twitter as a tool for getting the word out about htmx and, therefore, use it in that manner. I don't think that medium supports super-nuanced discussions (although I've had some.) I try to not be negative on it, and frequently link to my essays for more in-depth discussions. I also enjoy being funny and making people laugh.

And, while I can understand and sympathize with people who dislike the general vibe of my account, you can't argue with the success of this approach.

It has recently passed 27k stars on github:

https://star-history.com/#bigskysoftware/htmx&Date

And finished 2nd (!!!) in the js rising stars frameworks for 2023:

https://risingstars.js.org/2023/en#section-framework

Plus #10 overall. This is a library created by a one-person company that is trying to compete with the likes of Facebook, Google and Vercel when it comes to developer mindshare. While I would love to think it is the insightful essays, excellent coding ability and the quality of my book, there is no doubt that the twitter account has been a huge contributor to htmx's success.

giancarlostoro4• 3 years ago

the reason i did all this is for the lols

Do the lols while you still can, the Trust and Safety departments at major social media companies want to extinguish funny.

Everyone who does even a smidgen of memeing on the internet knows what happens when you post images of large spiders. People start talking about burning things down, like the entire building its inside of, etc. Someone posted a video where a little girl had one crawling on her hand, it was bigger than her face. I said "Girl get away from that spider, we have to set the house on fire" and the AI anti-funny overlords at Facebook deleted my comment, and gave me some sort of "strike" and then I appealed, and was auto denied.

Our favorite Sci-Fi dystopias coming soon, to a Trust and Safety social media site nightmare near you.

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already cancelled.

The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a shiposter is supposed to function: without mercy, without anxiety, without remorse.

All shiposting depends upon it.

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 3 years ago

Meanwhile someone was using my late brother's name and face(in a list of supposed "vaccine casualties". My brother died from heart failure after lifelong illness, age 39) to spread vile antivaxx/protrump stuff.

All reports denied. It was glaringly obvious she was a paid misinfo troll.

clwg• 3 years ago

bravo, what editor did you use to change the license file?

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

WebStorm

tgv• 3 years ago

Good for you, and the spirit of open software.

singron• 3 years ago

This made me wonder what the shortest open source license is, and it seems to be the Fair License: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_License

<Copyright Information>
Usage of the works is permitted provided that this instrument is retained with the works, so that any entity that uses the works is notified of this instrument.
DISCLAIMER: THE WORKS ARE WITHOUT WARRANTY.

EDIT: I would not use this license. I'm not sure how this got approved by the OSI, but I'm not a lawyer. Some of the email threads think the disclaimer is insufficient, and I'm not entirely sure that it confers all the expected rights since it only says "Usage" (copying, modification, distribution).

kotborealis• 3 years ago

"Don't ask me about it License" looks a bit shorter[0].

0: https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/dont...

hiccuphippo• 3 years ago

Is License golf a thing? ChatGPT reduces that from 205 to 130 bytes:

The works can be used as long as this instrument is kept alongside them to notify users. The works are provided without warranty.

zvr3• 3 years ago

If you want statistics about license texts, many years ago I had published a peer-reviewed article:

Zavras, Alexios. Twenty-five years of school? Analysis of Free and Open Source software license texts. Journal of Open Law, Technology & Society, [S.l.], v. 8, n. 1, p. 29-44, nov. 2016. ISSN 2666-8106. Available at: <https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/111>.

saghm3• 3 years ago

Is "zero-clause BSD" a joke, or is it considered a legitimate license? If the latter, does it actually differ from the MIT license in anything other than name?

sethops1• 3 years ago

It is approved by OSI[1]

[1] https://opensource.org/license/0bsd/

explodingcamera• 3 years ago

zero-clause BSD is essentially a modified MIT that doesn't even require attribution, so essentially a "public domain" like license.

kube-system2• 3 years ago

Presuming that 'MIT' was a typo: most BSD-licensed software doesn't use the original (4-clause) BSD license, most are under variants:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

saghm3• 3 years ago

No, it wasn't a typo; the 0-clause BSD looks pretty similar to the MIT license, and from a cursory reading, it appears that the clauses are what makes the BSD license different from the MIT license. I was wondering if my reading is correct or if I've missed something.

0x69420• 3 years ago

it eschews attribution, making it just about the closest thing to a public-domain dedication that still retains the appropriate verbiage to hold up to legal scrutiny

mminer237• 3 years ago

In the US, simply saying "I hereby dedicate this work to the public domain." is as an effective, if not more effective, way to do that as any license. These licenses are just for countries like Germany that basically make it illegal to sell, gift, or release a copyright at all.

MzHN• 3 years ago

There's also another OSI approved "zero" license called MIT-0

https://opensource.org/license/mit-0/

EasyMark• 3 years ago

always preferred east coast in the east/west coast war.

simonw• 3 years ago

I hadn't seen Zero-Clause BSD before: https://opensource.org/license/0bsd/

Note: Despite its name, Zero-Clause BSD is an alteration of the ISC license, and is not textually derived from licenses in the BSD family. Zero-Clause BSD was originally approved under the name “Free Public License 1.0.0”.

Anyone seen a good write-up of the tradeoffs for this license? I like how short and simple it is.

ameliaquining• 3 years ago

It's appropriate for software designed for use cases where an attribution requirement would be inconvenient or otherwise undesirable. For example, https://github.com/microsoft/tslib uses it, because that library is automatically included in any TypeScript program that uses downleveling, so if it had an attribution requirement then that requirement would apply to every program written in TypeScript, which nobody wants. (GCC and LLVM do something similar with their special runtime-library exceptions to the GPL and Apache License, respectively, but tslib lives in a separate repository from the rest of TypeScript and so could easily just get a separate license.)

zvr3• 3 years ago

It's a nice license when you don't want to burden users of your software with providing attribution. A typical use case is for stuff that will be included in many different projects, while not being a crucial part of it.

For example, all the code snippets in the Intel Software Developer Manuals (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...) are licensed under 0BSD, so that people can easily re-use them (with or without adapting them).

etoulas• 3 years ago

This is handy but might not classify as a "write-up".

https://www.tldrlegal.com/

theanonymousone• 3 years ago

Is there a license that requires (or encourages) contributing back the modifications, _but only if the upstream project is open source/non-commercial_?

zilti• 3 years ago

You'd have to dual license your code afaik, the way Qt did/does it

p8donald• 3 years ago

If I contribute code to an open source project under the BSD 2-Clause license and don't sign any contributor license agreement, can the maintainer relicense the code without getting my permission?

njharman• 3 years ago

Sure, anyone can do anything. It would be up to you (and hopefully a lawyer) to then sue them and let judge/jury decide. Or, convince authorities that some criminal law was violated and they should investigate.

Both of which are hard and/or expensive. So most rely on public shame. Out them on social media and foment outrage.

colejohnson66• 3 years ago

In the US, generally no.

junon• 3 years ago

Yes, unless they change the copyright. You own the copyright to your code contribution. The license only states how the copyrighted code can be used.

logicprog4• 3 years ago

The state of software licenses makes me a bit sad. On the one hand we have open source licenses like the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses that give corporations free reign to enclose and exploit the software commons without any real limit or any requirement to give back to the things they are getting rich off of, and then on the other hand we have the GPL and LGPL licenses which are too aggressive and stringent, while also being somewhat vague — see for instance the almost superstitious fear companies have about using LGPL code even when it would probably be fine — which means that almost no one ends up using those licenses, because companies are too afraid to use software that is licensed under them (and therefore wouldn't be invested in them at all, which means they give back to those projects even less than they do for projects under open source licenses) and because even FLOSS developers just don't want to deal with the dependency headaches of using GPL code. Which in turn ironically means that, despite being designed to very aggressively protect and help the software commons, the GPL and LGPL licenses end up doing worse for the software commons then open source licenses do, in general, because no one uses them or invests in them in the first place, and of course there are going to be fewer contributions to the software commons from a license that is never used or invested in then there are going to be from a license that is widely used and deeply invested in but has fewer requirements, because it's a matter of percentages essentially. So in essence both licenses fail to do what at least I feel like they should ideally do, although for opposite reasons.

Ultimately, I think this stems from the fact that Open Source licenses were explicitly created by people who wanted to be friendly to corporations, and the GPL licenses were created by the FSF, who are essentially the vegans of software. So I think in the long run what we need is a free software movement that is detached from both the dogmatism and absolutism of the Free Software Foundation and the desire to suck up with corporations. A movement that perhaps sees itself as being a check on the balance of corporations in the software world, but in a more pragmatic way.

I think the sort of license a movement like that might produce might end up looking something like the MPL 2.0: it allows combined works that use the existing code in any way they want, while requiring changes or improvements to the existing code to be shared back to the community, so that there is a clear requirement to give back to the things you benefited from, without trying to also take away the things you or your team wrote themselves.

This is similar to the LGPL, but unlike that license the basic unit of separation is clearer: files. Original source code files and any files containing substantial portions of code copied from the original source code are considered part of the original work, and therefore something to which changes must be contributed back to the community, but anything outside those files can stay proprietary. This is a lot clearer and more flexible than the LGPL, meaning developers from FOSS and from corporations can use code under the without headaches, while still not allowing companies to just completely free ride on the things the software community makes, and we get to have both because unlike the LGPL the MPL is willing to sacrifice some stringency and control in return for those benefits.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't have particularly onerous source distribution requirements or requirements to distribute your own application as object code or provide some other way for users to swap out the version of the free software code that's being used, which likewise does sacrifice some FSF purity, but in return for a massive decrease in the complexity, onerousness, and annoyingness of the license requirements as a whole. So yeah, the MPL isn't perfect — maybe the ideal free software license would be the LGPL with just clearer specification of where the boundaries are between the LGPL code and the proprietary code, and no annoying object code or dynamic linking requirements — but it's a lot closer to where I think we need to move with licenses. I don't think zero clause open source licenses are the way.

jabl• 3 years ago

I like the MPL 2.0 and use it for some of my own software as it best seems to describe the outcome that I want (incorporate it into whatever you want, but please contribute improvements to the MPL licensed parts of the software back to upstream).

However, I also think it's fairly easy to circumvent for a hypothetical leech that just wants to use my code without contributing back any improvements. Namely just put the improvements into a separate proprietary file, and insert stubs in the MPL licensed file calling the proprietary code. Taking this argument to the extreme, one should use either something extremely permissive like 0BSD or then go full AGPLv3, as everything inbetween is to an extent possible to circumvent without too much trouble (GPL "condoms" and all that).

logicprog4• 3 years ago

However, I also think it's fairly easy to circumvent for a hypothetical leech that just wants to use my code without contributing back any improvements. Namely just put the improvements into a separate proprietary file, and insert stubs in the MPL licensed file calling the proprietary code.

Yeah this is the work around that came to mind when I first read the MPL, and it's what I had in mind when I said it isn't perfect. I'm using it for a current game engine project I'm working on, and will probably use it for any of my other work moving forward, but I definitely think it isn't the end of license history — there is still a lot more improvement that could be made. I was just giving it as an example of what I think the correct direction is, in contrast to the current extremes. I think it's where more work on licenses should go.

mook• 3 years ago

I like MPL too (depending on context), but do be aware that (per section 10) Mozilla is allowed to ship new versions of the license and people can choose to use those new versions in place of the version you licensed under. This is not inherently bad — many projects are licensed under "GPL 3 or later", for example — but it's something to be aware of. See also CDDL, which is mostly MPL but Sun (and now Oracle) in place of Mozilla Foundation.

Guid_NewGuid• 3 years ago

I don't understand the view that MIT and Apache 2.0 make it possible for corporations to somehow destroy or enclose the commons. Code is code. It can't be destroyed, its cost of duplication is effectively zero. If I take some open source code, add my changes and distribute a paid, closed-source, version, nothing has been removed/lost.

Certainly they make it hard/impossible to build a business from Open Source code. Unfortunately in an economic system designed to maximise the reward for value capture at the cost of value creators this is a common problem. But I believe the answer to that is more communism, not more licenses with more convoluted requirements creating jobs for legal departments for shared code.

logicprog4• 3 years ago

I don't understand the view that MIT and Apache 2.0 make it possible for corporations to somehow destroy or enclose the commons. Code is code. It can't be destroyed, its cost of duplication is effectively zero. If I take some open source code, add my changes and distribute a paid, closed-source, version, nothing has been removed/lost.

You are technically correct in this, and technically speaking perhaps I should have put what I said in terms of the free rider problem, not necessarily enclosure of the commons, but two things: first, I do think what corporations do with open source software is to some degree more analogous to such an enclosure, since in a free rider problem we typically imagine a few or even very large number of lazy individuals just not paying for something, whereas in the enclosure of the commons it is the rich and large corporations benefiting from the work of more common folk, and the power dynamics of what happens in software look more like the latter than the former. Second, you're forgetting embrace, extend, extinguish, which very much does have the effect of destroying things by commercial cooption and absorbtion.

Certainly they make it hard/impossible to build a business from Open Source code. Unfortunately in an economic system designed to maximise the reward for value capture at the cost of value creators this is a common problem. But I believe the answer to that is more communism, not more licenses with more convoluted requirements creating jobs for legal departments for shared code.

I sort of view licenses that require contributing any improvements you've made to something back to the collective pool from which you got it as a form of communism, even if in this case it is embedded in and enforced by a capitalist system.

jbverschoor• 3 years ago

I'm curious, what exactly would a VC or MSFT want with htmx? Just talent? or the actual product/tech?

recursivedoubts9• 3 years ago

I don't think there's much VCs would want w/htmx: it's a really simple concept implemented in a single js file w/no moats or obvious market opportunities as far as i can tell, and I'm a one man shop. I think I got the calls because htmx trended on twitter a couple of times.

MSFT might want it because it's gotten a lot of attention lately (finished #2 in https://risingstars.js.org/2023/en#section-framework for 2023) and would give them a front-end library in the game w/ React, Vue, Svelte, etc. On the other hand, i've made the social media account pretty toxic/funny (same thing) for a big tech company and now the library is 0BSD, and htmx's agnosticism towards back end tech doesn't really dovetail w/ the Microsoft ethos.

gen220• 3 years ago

VCs have taken a few positions in FOSS recently [1][2]. I also don't understand the financial reasoning of investing in the companies, for what they are. My guess is that it's an option on having influence on relatively influential developers in the mid-to-later stages of their career.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/16/sequoia-backs-open-source-...

[2] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sequoia-open-source-fello...

alberth• 3 years ago

Public Domain

Does this effectively make htmx public domain?

Htmx changes license to Zero-Clause BSD

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