[Air-L] CDs and DVDs? + potentially inappropriate query

[David Banks]

On Fri, May 3, 2019 at 8:26 AM Charles M. Ess <c.m.ess at media.uio.no> wrote:

> (b) FLOSS - including ongoing development and distribution of software
> (beyond the usual suspects of Mozilla products, wikipedia, etc.) is / no
> longer of any significance?
>

It's not of significance in that it's become normalized and partially
subsumed -- just part of the normal process of production, for better or
worse.  However, open source licensing remains an active topic and
regularly generates controversies.  See the recent news surrounding the
Commons Clause proposals for Redis and the Amazon Elasticsearch fork.

I'd also dispute that MIT/Apache has 'won', copyleft remains an ongoing
concern, although perhaps restricted to a smaller group of enthusiasts.
The dominance of proprietary services like Github has led to a generation
of developers producing open source software without wanting to care about
licensing.  These licenses -- MIT and Apache, and even more noticably the
'WTFPL' -- form the 'path of least resistance' for said generation, until
they get bitten by the potential for co-option involved with them.

-- 
David Banks, Developer & Research Fellow (SHL)
<d.banks at sussex.ac.uk / shl.david.banks at gmail.com>