I get that you are feeling slint is not GPL, but I do not understand where that feeling comes from.

I think it’s because the for-profit nature of the company may not create an actual community of FOSS enthusiasts around it. So if something were to happen to the business side of Slint-the-company, there would not be a strong community with known leaders and vision to save the situation. It’s not like this is guaranteed for FOSS projects, but it’s much more likely there. Single-person FOSS projects are scary to me for this reason as well.

That is the biggest factor for me. (There are other important factors, too.)

Nice project!

Only somewhat related, but for myself personally, I’ve realized that the default UI for YouTube promotes doom scrolling as much as it possibly can. It seems to have a negative effect on my mental health and habits. So I live mostly without YouTube now, with only some occasional (once every few weeks), externally linked videos, that I usually download via yt-dlp or just quickly watch online. For online watching, I broke the page so bad with uBO that the page barely works, and there are no recommendations or after-you-finished-viewing transitions.

This approach seems to work well. I find YT to be a really dangerous place. In one phrase, “sweet death”.

Some projects managed to pull off a license change before

I think you’re right, the reality is not actually so black-and-white. With the GNU project indeed being a notable “exception” of sorts. And, while I can’t think of any single project that would change from GPL and still be alive, I think I’ve heard about at least attempts of doing so once, more than a decade ago, not too successful IIRC.

So to be a GPL project

But to answer the question… I’m not trying to say what is a GPL project. But sometimes I can tell when something isn’t [a GPL project], and Slint isn’t. It doesn’t revolve around copyleft and its ideology. Neither is MySQL. MariaDB is. MariaDB is easier to fork off MySQL than it would be off Slint though. Slint has much broader API, more evolving too I’d assume (but I don’t know).

So my recommendation on when to use or not use Slint would still hold. And I still insist that it’s factually correct to say that Slint is not a GPL project.

I think we can’t find an agreement on our angles on the topic so much that it’s simply not constructive to push the conversation further. I’m afraid that if I’ll try to say anything now, it’ll be a repetition of what was already written earlier.

In short, I see Slint as a not GPL project (but rather as a commercial project that happens for now to triple-license the code and includes GPL). I see GPL projects as fundamentally different to Slint, in a sense that, once you have enough external contributors, you simply cannot revert back and stop being a GPL project, whereas in Slint I see it as possible. I trust GPL projects and I know I can “lean” on them, whereas I’d advise to rely on Slint only if you have commercial entanglement that you want to keep.

I’d propose to agree to disagree.

I’m not sure if you’re reading my message well?

I’m saying that GPL-licensed *projects* protect themselves well. If you lean on a GPL project, it’s likely going to hold. Not disappear because of a commercial incentive. Non-copyleft projects tend to disappear if they become valuable to companies, such as IntelliJ’s Rust plugin, or BSD => MacOS.

Again if you’re developing a non-open-source project, Slint is fine. You’ll be bound to each other with mutual commercial interests.

Please check when posting if it’s a duplicate (it is).

Sorry for the late reply.

The royalty free license tries to get as close to MIT as we can while limiting the use on embedded…

I think I understand that perspective. But please also understand the other perspective: how a user has the right to see it, when they are not connected to the company.

If you are such a user, then you need open-source software for your daily life. And you use it. At the same time, you see:

• IntelliJ Idea taking its MIT-licensed Rust plugin and deciding that it’ll be more profitable for them to close-source it, so you won’t have it anymore. And of course nobody forked the plugin. The idea is clear, the company wants you to use Rust Rover.

• Apple’s OS, being historically based on 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD, and being the second-highest valued company in the world (!), is happily living with all and any of that MIT-licensed code, while BSD itself is stagnating. It’s not Apple’s fault of course, Apple is not a bad actor here. It’s just not very smart or future-proof to spend a lot of time binding yourself to a system that can easily turn into stagnation.

On the other hand, GPL-licensed projects protect themselves very well. When things don’t go well, you see successful foks (such as Forjeo, LibreOffice, MariaDB). When things go well, you just see it thriving (such as Linux, most userland software).

We try to make all of the terms as clear as possible. We rewrote the Slint licensing page several times,…

To answer this and to conclude, for me personally, it’s not about how to write something. It’s about what is written. The fact that Slint aims to be good for a for-profit company, does not and will never nullify that MIT contributions are re-licensed as GPL or proprietary. It will come up, and it’s fair when it does… as I see it, at least.

I’ve found that the other replies don’t really express my personal take on this, so I’ll go ahead and write mine down.

First of all, and it’s important, people’s take on such topics is heavily dependent on the country they live in. It’s legitimately hard to imagine why you would want to break government rules hard and be a good person if you live somewhere in Norway. And it’s legitimately hard to imagine a world where you really trust your government and think that the current levels of censorship is actually good if you live in a dictatorship country.

With this in mind, a comfortable and universal level of censorship simply doesn’t exist.

I think the lack of Tor support is valid criticism if you’re in a dictatorship. Of course, DNS-based solutions are not good-enough for you. I hope you’ll find something that solves your problems. Unfortunately a simple Lemmy instance is not a solution for you.

Generally, if I’d advise something, I’d suggest to look at what the project actually aims to do, not at what you think it should be doing. E.g. visit https://join-lemmy.org/ and there it says:

Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking,…

Well, does it sound like a solution made for people in heavily censored environments? To me – not. If you want to present your case and incentivize the Lemmy devs to ADD another perspective or direction to the software that they’re spending time developing, prepare your case and argumentation well. Explain your situation (e.g. “I’ll be hung if I speak freely where I live”, or more relevant, “my country heavily DNS-censors 90% of the good existing Lemmy instances, I’m deprived of good information you have circling here”), propose some solutions or offer help. I don’t know really. It’s up to you. Good luck with your seach

I think/hope it was a joke.

But none that I’d like or find healthy, to be honest.

UPD: I’ve misread at first - apologies. Nevermind about commercial or not, this is of no interest to me. (See above.)

EDIT: I’ve misread at first - apologies. Nevermind.

I confirm, I’ve personally edited a post 3 times over until a day later I’ve understood what’s exactly happening: https://lemmy.ml/post/37434570

EDIT: I’ve misread at first. Commercial or not doesn’t matter to me. I’m only interested here in whether it’s open-source as a project. That is, if it’s a sustainable open-source project.

Hey, first of all, thanks for for sharing and I do appreciate both Slint existing and you being able to do software that’s usable by both businesses and, to some extend, open-source projects! (The latter depends on whether you consider contributing to the underlying libraries as a requirement for development, and if you’re then fine with contributing with these MIT/non-MIT specifics.)

When you contribute to any MIT license project you are in the same situation

I would disagree here. If you’re speaking about any MIT project, then many of them would be simply MIT. You contribute like MIT and you can use the code as MIT. Slint is not licensed as MIT-0 though. It’s licensed as written here: https://github.com/slint-ui/slint?tab=readme-ov-file#license, and only your contributions are taken as MIT. This does set Slint apart.

It’s a fair model though, if the developers are sufficiently aware of the deal. And it’s a very sensible business model. I have nothing against it, and I only wish to make the exact deal more explicit. As you see around, I don’t think it’s 100% clear from the first glance.

Definitely! And as you said, you can use it with closed source projects as well (or GPLv3), and I have nothing against businesses doing UI toolkits as well. Have you read my last paragraph though?

Fair enough, thanks for the correction. I should be more careful with my wording. I think it’s “open-source”, but not an “open-source project”. In a sense that, they release the source code under a restrictive license, but they themselves will not have it this way and can stop publishing the code any time they want.

So they publish the source code under an OSI-approved license as you say, but they don’t develop it in an open manner and I think it’s fair to say that they are not an open-source project.

Something to keep in mind is that Slint is not an Open-Source project. If you’ll want to improve Slint you’ll have to give away your contribution under the MIT No Attribution License (MIT-0) license, yet if and when you’ll want to use Slint, you can get it as a paid or GPLv3 license.

In my mind this is more of a proprietary project closed development model (EDIT for correctness, see comment below). The development model is not around freedom and equal rights, with the project being able to stop giving you access under any open-source license whatsoever, all while continuing to use your contributions.

It’s not unfair. In fact, it might be a great project. Just not open-source as a project overall, if you care about this.

You’re kind of proving my point right now, this comment and the downvotes above.

I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.

Oh, I forgot one thing on the downsides. The onboarding captcha-like thingy on the lemmy.ml instance is quite elaborate where you have to quote some text from a Communism book. Instances like Memes are rich with upvotes and glorification of Stalin and of the Soviet Union. While I do agree on many of the downsides of for-profit culture (as you can see in my comment above for example), here it’s just extreme levels in my opinion. I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.

That’s the other downside. I still use Lemmy as you see, but I felt it’s fair to share a negative point even if the overall conclusion is positive.

Good day! I’m here for around ~2 months.

• Something that I like better here, is the higher average level of thought put in the comments. Fewer dismissive one-liners, fever thoughts that seem to start and end within a single second. That does not go for all communities, but I’ve received some great help when I posted some questions, and posts where I shared info got valuable comments too. Reddit can also be good for this - but sometimes not exactly on par to the quality level.

• Another plus, and that’s obvious, Lemmy is a free platform where you know you won’t be cut away, or have to tolerate a bad UI with animations and opening treasure chests because the for-profit core of the business thinks it’ll sell well. (The legal goal of any Reddit emloyee is to maximize company’s profits. Not satisfy user’s needs. Only in the places where these two coincide you get something.)

• I miss certain specific communities.

• Also the feel of it sometimes: 9x% of all communities here are unofficial of course. And migrating your community here might be scary, of course, because the total number of Redditors is magnitudes higher (these redditors are not all in YOUR community, but the lizard brain is nevertheless afraid of such commitments).

• A bit of both, different and the same. I think the people and their motivations are a lil bit different, and you can feel it. But it’s still also people. Having their jobs, doing things for fun or out of boredom, etc etc. So also the same in a way.

Perhaps a wrapping thought. For my posts and comments personally, I’ve felt that communities here are larger than what I thought they would be based on numbers. You do get responses and help even in smaller communities. Maybe it’s a phenomena that for a smaller group, the noise levels are lower, so more people can survive the noise and continue reading besides “best of the month” filters. So they would go on and respond to something that would otherwise be filtered out as overwhelming.
Dunno.
Onboard and tell us how it feels later ;-)