Programming

21903 readers

423 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

UlrikHD@programming.dev

Another sign of Sourcegraph's uneventful death: Cody's body (github.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by QuazarOmega@lemy.lol to c/programming@programming.dev

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Cody, one of the first few decently good AI assistants that were well integrated into VSCode bit the dust just recently as the greedier and greedier Sourcegraph direction decided to switch to the completely Enterprise (read proprietary) "solution" Amp.

With this commit, another notable project by them goes down, first was their signature code search engine, now this, I just feel sorry for everybody who contributed and now will see pretty much all their efforts rendered meaningless, it was already apparent by how Sourcegraph approached Search sunsetting how much they care about open source, but I'd say this seals the deal even better if you needed insight into whether to trust them or not.

I think what's left by them that might be useful still is the zoekt library and a few other minor repos they have, but they're nothing compared to the impact of the other two.

Things like these make me question how we can just buy in to projects using non-copyleft licences, it's a time bomb, especially with corporate driven software and I see many developers fall into that trap, that in an endeavour for perceived simplicity, will choose Apache, MIT, Unlicense (pls not this one 🥲), or what have you and not care.
What people see as pragmatic in open source is really just a conclusion that comes from the point of view of the maker, rather than the community

top 2 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Whats so bad about Apache, MIT or Unlicense (which is essentially public domain) ?

If a company wants to monetize it, let them monetize it, if it fails, it still continues to be open source and can be used and developed by others. If they re-license it to something proprietary, fork it.

[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

I mean, if there are in fact many "people who contributed" then they should have no trouble forking the project at this point and continuing open source development of it. Their code and everything they contributed to is still open source. Nothing is being held hostage, no one is obligated to use the new proprietary closed-source version and the license they contributed under the terms of implies that it doesn't bother them that somebody else is using their contributions for their own internal purposes to create a proprietary version of it. That's explicitly allowed by the kinds of licenses they were using.

If there aren't many people who contributed then the problem is not the licenses, it's the fact that we depend way too much on people and companies donating development and maintenance effort to keep these projects afloat. The problem with donations is that they're not mandatory and if you try to make them mandatory then they're not a donation anymore. If it's no longer in the company's interest or economically justifiable to keep donating effort to the project then they won't. If the project can't survive that, then the license isn't the problem.