As we've said many times here, the normal community understanding on contribution licensing is inbound=outbound, which is to say that contributors agree for their contributions to be licensed under the project's existing licence.

In the case of copyleft licences, as the linked question says, this is actually a requirement of the licence. In the case of the permissive licences like MIT, however, it's just a community understanding. Unless the project required a CLA from you, you could make an argument that you never licensed your contributions to the project at all, but I'd expect it to be a hard, uphill business to convince a judge of that (indeed, as Bart points out (thank you, Bart!), given GitHub's embedding of in=out in their TOS, it will likely be next to impossible).

But the project is completely entitled to change to a proprietary licence, and unless you can convince a judge that you never agreed to licence your contributions, you have no right to demand they stop using your contribution. One of the many advantages of copyleft licensing is that, once contributions have been accepted, the project can no longer unilaterally relicense. The permissive licences don't give the same protection, and this is generally understood, so what they've done, though not nice, is neither unlawful nor unethical.

One thing you can do is to take the copy of the MIT-licensed source you've found, and make sure it's available from your website (or at least, not solely from your github account). You have every right to do that, and as the search engines pick it up, you may hope that their proprietary-licensed version is supplanted by the free version.

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A #DOScember surprise: fits on a single floppy, but has a network-capable package manager

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According to a report from The Register today, Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to OpenNebula, an open source cloud and edge computing platform. Beeks Group sells virtual private servers and bare metal servers to financial service providers. It still has some VMware VMs, but “the majority” of its machines are currently on OpenNebula, The Register reported. //

According to Beeks, OpenNebula has enabled the company to dedicate more of its 3,000 bare metal server fleet to client loads instead of to VM management, as it had to with VMware. With OpenNebula purportedly requiring less management overhead, Beeks is reporting a 200 percent increase in VM efficiency since it now has more VMs on each server.

Open source tool chooses to become more open than ever

The move comes just weeks after we reported that it wasn't strictly FOSS any more. At the time, the company claimed that this was just a mistake in how it packaged up its software, saying on Twitter:

It seems like a packaging bug was misunderstood as something more, and the team plans to resolve it. Bitwarden remains committed to the open source licensing model in place for years, along with retaining a fully featured free version for individual users.

This is the project site for Evergreen, highly-scalable software for libraries that helps library patrons find library materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials, no matter how large or complex the libraries.

Evergreen is open source software, licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later.

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that one in the corner

but no FOSS package ever dies

Oh yes they do - and have.

Nowadays, the bulk of FOSS is shoved into GitHub and will be available - for as long as GirHub bothers to run its servers[1].

Back in the day, Tarballs and Arc files were downloaded direct from the author's site and then you were expected to mirror it if it was important to you.

Then the Web was "discovered" by more and more people and for some reason the mirroring stopped and changed to just dropping in a link to "the" download location - and of course, we then learnt that URLs have a half-life.

As public version control servers came online - and people started to trust them - we saw materials on something safer than a personal site, or the pages of a company that vanished overnight (sometimes the entire company vanished, sometimes just the project)[2].

If you are lucky, the Internet Archive grabbed a copy and you can try one of the dead URLs there; patience can be required[4].

If you are really lucky, somebody has put a copy into GitHub[5] - although you can open yourself up to flames because your copy "doesn't compile for me"[6]

And what about the FOSS that is practically single-sourced by being published in that JavaScript compost heap? Was LeftPad() also available from GitLab? Some of it is handled properly (p5.js oooh, squiggly and probably safe from vanishing).

Of course, any FOSS that does fall through the cracks "is not important" - after all, all the Linux distros keep their own copies of source packages, "so we are not actually reliant on GitHub at all, Corner you fool."

Not important. Well, you never know. Literally, you never know, it has gone now.[7]

[1] Then we'll have to go back and pull the older version from SourceForge.

[2] As a few others did I like the old "Elegant" library & util from Philips Labs - good luck finding that, on the Philips site - or doing a web search for it available elsewhere[3]

[3] stop giving your projects names that are normal words!

[4] not being able to find something is, in all practical terms, the same as the thing no longer existing at all. Take note when organising your backup copies...

[5] really must put my compiling copy of Elegant up on GitHub

[6] so maybe I won't put Elegant up, as I only have Makefiles for My Own Build System and am fed up telling people how to write build scripts for their favoured build tools. Seriously.

[7] "Important" is a relative term[8]. Maybe it is really important to you to generate an awful lot of Elegantly laid out syntax diagrams in the next day or you can't pay for Tiny Tim's new clutches, he is growing so fast nowadays, at least the one leg is.

[8] see so very many commentards "well, my PC is ok so this is a non-issue" and the response to same

[9] Footnotes FTW. Be more Pterry!

Minimise

Proprietary code goes unpublished – but no FOSS package ever dies. //

Proprietary code goes unpublished: if its host company dies, it probably dies with it the moment the servers are wiped.

Open source's default mode is life. The code is published, cloned, archived by default. It may be abandoned to lie dormant, like a tardigrade sitting out a drought in suspended animation, but drop the water of attention on it and it's back in the game. At least, that's the theory. //

Ledru started the project for very personal reasons: as a director at Mozilla, he was surrounded by Rust creators in an entirely managerial job, and he wanted to learn Rust. Reinventing coreutils, for him, was primarily fun; he learned the thinking behind the beginning of modern computing. Plus, it seemed to be something worth doing.

Last year, the package started to get a reputation for robustness, and was finding its way into production in some significant places. It had attracted hundreds of contributors, it had some performance advantages, and it has a more permissive license – MIT in place of GPL. You can do that if you re-invent. //

The real joy of this is that it's been so organic. One person's itch to learn and code found its salve in a project that few thought needed to be done. But in ten or 20 years' time, it will need to have been done. None of the reasons for this have any place in the proprietary, metrics-driven goal world of closed source.

The end result is that an essential and massively used set of tools from 50 years ago will be just as essential and just as used 50 years hence. To the many freedoms FOSS grants, we can add that of looking ahead as far as you can see and quietly start the business of evolution to fit.

There's a core utility for you. ®

Speak Freely is a 100% software-based VoIP phone originally written in 1991 by John Walker, founder of Autodesk, and Brian C. Wiles. Over the years since, other VoIP applications popped up, but Speak Freely was the first VoIP application (or Internet telephone) released to the public.

Microsoft has open-sourced another bit of computing history this week: The company teamed up with IBM to release the source code of 1988's MS-DOS 4.00, a version better known for its unpopularity, bugginess, and convoluted development history than its utility as a computer operating system.

The MS-DOS 4.00 code is available on Microsoft's MS-DOS GitHub page along with versions 1.25 and 2.0, which Microsoft open-sourced in cooperation with the Computer History Museum back in 2014. All open-source versions of DOS have been released under the MIT License. //

The publicly released version of MS-DOS 4.00 is known less for its new features than for its high memory usage; the 4.00 release could consume as much as 92KB of RAM, way up from the roughly 56KB used by MS-DOS 3.31, and the 4.01 release reduced this to about 86KB. The later MS-DOS 5.0 and 6.0 releases maxed out at 72 or 73KB, and even IBM's PC DOS 2000 only wanted around 64KB.

These RAM numbers would be rounding errors on any modern computer, but in the days when RAM was pricey, systems maxed out at 640KB, and virtual memory wasn't a thing, such a huge jump in system requirements was a big deal. //

Microsoft has open-sourced some other legacy code over the years, including those older MS-DOS versions, Word for Windows 1.1a, 1983-era GW-BASIC, and the original Windows File Manager. While most of these have been released in their original forms without any updates or changes, the Windows File Manager is actually actively maintained. It was initially just changed enough to run natively on modern 64-bit and Arm PCs running Windows 10 and 11, but it's been updated with new fixes and features as recently as March 2024.

git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space.

git-annex is designed for git users who love the command line. For everyone else, the git-annex assistant turns git-annex into an easy to use folder synchroniser.

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