Open Source Weekly #9 - Choosing the right Open Source license

Wed, Apr 22, 2020

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well 🙏

Did you know

Which license to choose for my software project?
There are a LOT of existing software licenses. Like everywhere where there are too many choices it leads to decision paralysis. Fortunately, your humble servant is here to save you time and allow you to do the thing that matters: working on your project.

The first question you have to ask yourself: Do I want the license to be viral? (not sure what it means? Read issue 1 and issue 2)

Yes

For a library or a client side application (like a mobile app or a CLI program): GPL 3.0
For server software: AGPL 3.0

Use the Apache 2.0 license

And that’s all, really. There are a lot of other licenses but in my experience it’s not worth the time to investigate them all. The licenses above have our back covered regarding patents, contributions and trademark.

Announce

I’m about to release the new version of my open source project Bloom (encrypted Notes, Calendar, Contacts, Files…) which will feature end-to-end encryption. Before that I’m looking for feedback on the cryptographic design, so if you are a cryptography / security enthusiast you are welcome to join the discussion
on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/...
on Stack Exchange:
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/80186/...

on Hacker New:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945405

That being said, enjoy your weekly shot of open source :)

Project of the community

Leantime
"Leantime is a lean project management system for innovators. Designed to help you manage your projects from ideation to delivery."

Projects

LuLu (CC BY-NC 4.0)
LuLu is the free macOS firewall, by the renowned Objective-See

Monolith (Public Domain)
CLI tool for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file

Chatwoot (MIT)
A simple and elegant live chat software. An open source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk...

nnn (BSD 2-Clause "Simplified")
nnn is a full-featured terminal file manager. It's tiny and nearly 0-config with an incredible performance.

xsv (Public Domain)
xsv is a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files. Commands should be simple, fast and composable.

falcon (MIT)
Falcon is a free, open-source SQL editor with inline data visualization. It currently supports connecting to RedShift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Impala, MS SQL, Oracle, SQLite and more.
Looks great for Business Intelligence or data exploration.

panther (AGPL 3.0)
Panther is a platform for detecting threats with log data, improving cloud security posture, and conducting investigations.
An open source alternative to Splunk.

Hardware

Meshtastic
"Meshtastic is a project that lets you use inexpensive ($30 ish) GPS radios as an extensible, super long battery life mesh communicator. These radios are great for hiking, skiing, paragliding - essentially any hobby where you don’t have reliable internet access."

Mesh networks are really fascinating me as a way to build a low-tech / emergency internet network so I’m really looking forward to this project 🚀

Articles

CLI: improved
Do you find that the command line is a cold and unpleasant place? Maybe it’s because you have not yet discovered all the new tools that were developed to replace the old Unix ones.
Here is a collection of tools to add color to your (CLI) life 🎉

Badger vs LMDB vs BoltDB: Benchmarking key-value databases in Go
I don’t want to re-launch the usual war of programming languages, but as this write-up about badger an embedded key-value database demonstrates, Go can achieve extreme performance.

Open Source Cloud Gaming with WebRTC
I’m really not in favor of gaming as a service, but on the technical side this write-up is really good!

Introducing Sidekick - A High Performance Load Balancer
Sidekick is an Open Source load balancer. But not your usual centralized load balancer, Sidekick was designed to be embarked directly with the clients, as a sidecar. A really cool write-up about an unusual way to do load-balancing.

Moving efficiently in the CLI
This may be the most concentrated piece of knowledge I’ve read this year.

How Open Source is done at Google

Book

The Architecture of Open Source Applications, a lot of authors / contributors

The Architecture of Open Source Applications is this kind of precious gem published once in a decade. It’s a collection (2 volumes, ~25 chapters each) of technical write-ups describing in detail how renowned open source applications (like Git, Hadoop, LLVM, Nginx…) work.

Also, they walk the talk: "This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. [...] All royalties from sales of these books will be donated to Amnesty International."
So if you are looking for a good technical book, I can’t recommend this one enough.

Stay safe ✌️
Sylvain