Top all-time · #1034
Bruce Perens
Personal blog · perens.com/blogprogrammingpolitics
Bruce Perens's personal blog at perens.com covers programming and politics. Since 2008, 63 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “Post-Open License: First Draft”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Bruce Perens's perens.com posts mainly on open source licensing, especially the Business Source License and GPL enforceability, as explanations of contested license questions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-contributory-infringement-risk-for-customers/6 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2017-11-23
- Post-Open License: First Draft5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-03-08
- Sorry, Ms. Ehmke, the “Hippocratic License” Can’t Work (2019)4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-01-05
- /2017/05/28/understanding-the-gpl-is-a-contract-court-case/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-06-15
- Bruce Perens: Invasion of the Ethical Licenses (2019)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-09
- Grsecurity: Potential contributory infringement and breach of contract risk3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-06-28
- Understanding the “GPL is a Contract” court case3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-06-04
- /2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-11-23
- /2020/10/06/post-open-source-license-early-draft/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-05
- Post Open Zero-Cost License 0.01, March 20242 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-01
What Hacker News says?
I think both are at fault. Amazon for provoking this and Elastic for over-reacting like this and totally break with the open source licensing, when that isn’t necessary to stop Amazon. They could do like MariaDB rather than follow MongoDB: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ Would be much more appropriate and alienate the open source community much less.
Comment linking /2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/
on “Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing”Submitted Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed as a story · 1318 points
HN discussionIf they just wanted to stop AWS they would just put the BSL on top of their previous license: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ That way Amazon couldn’t use their code to provide a SaaS until after 4 years and after that time it would be business as usual and be proper open source. The license they used now is forever non-opensource, which is a much larger change than what’s merited here I think.
Comment linking /2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/
on “Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing”Submitted Ham vs. Ham as Radio Amateurs Are in Conflict with ARRL as a story · 183 points
HN discussionGood explanation here: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ It’s from the day that the code is released under the license and the four years is the max under BSL (so that people know roughly what the “worst case scenario” it a BSL licensed software would be) but can be specified to be shorter by the one releasing code under it.
Comment linking /2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/
on “Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing”Submitted Bruce Perens: On Non-Judicical Punishment of Individuals as a story · 147 points
HN discussionI'm not a lawyer, but perhaps Facebook's BSD+Patent license is not even open source. It's tempting to consider the BSD license independent of the additional patent license. However, the OSI has not approved CC0 as being open source precisely because it expressly reserves patent rights [0]. In the OSI's justification, permissive MIT and BSD licenses may provide implicit patent license, so by themselves they are open…
Comment linking /blog/2017/05/28/understanding-the-gpl-is-a-contract-court-case/
on “Apache Foundation disallows use of the Facebook “BSD+Patent” license”Submitted Understanding the “GPL is a Contract” court case as a story · 130 points
HN discussionThis is just horrible, and must stop of course. No idea why they don't just take this to the courts, I thought that would be the primary function of such an organization. As a side note, it was interesting that the fourth comment on the article was by Bruce Perens [1], author of BusyBox and just a very productive and influential open source person. Glad to see him still active. :) [1] https://perens.com/about-bruce-…
Comment linking /about-bruce-perens/
on “DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster”Submitted Bruce Perens: Invasion of the Ethical Licenses (2019) as a story · 125 points
HN discussionSee Bruce Perens's explanation: < https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c... >. The short story: adding a penalty to an action that the GPL allows is a restriction of that action, and the GPL does not allow setting additional restrictions. This has not been tested in court, as far as I know.
Comment linking /2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-contributory-infringement-risk-for-customers/
on “Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder”Submitted Grsecurity: Potential contributory infringement and breach of contract risk as a story · 121 points
HN discussionThere's a strong case to be made that grsecurity is violating the GPL by doing that: https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c...
Comment linking /2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-contributory-infringement-risk-for-customers/
on “Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3”Submitted Bruce Perens Seeks Mandatory Award of Legal Fees vs. Open Source Security Inc as a story · 89 points
HN discussion> If I write a Linux kernel patch on a consulting project, I am absolutely not required to publish it. That would be a work for hire, and it is not the same thing as developing patches independently and distributing them with extra terms, because there is no distribution involved. > The GPL on the Linux kernel means that grsec can't distribute a new Linux kernel with their patches while withholding code. That's not…
Comment linking /2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-contributory-infringement-risk-for-customers/
on “Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm””Submitted A Cyber-Attack on an American City as a story · 70 points
HN discussionThat is Bruce Peren's Post-Open Source License: https://perens.com/2020/10/06/post-open-source-license-early... But POSL is at best a forlorn hope since it's playing the game that proprietary software companies are literally designed around winning: " They're charging 1% of revenue you say? Let me show you how our software is cheaper; just think of the savings! ".
Comment linking /2020/10/06/post-open-source-license-early-draft/
on “Professional maintainers: a wake-up call”Submitted The Empathy Gap, and Why Women Are Treated Badly in Open Source Communities as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThe BSL strikes a good balance there: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/ As it always resolves to an open source license after a set amount of time + is always free in many other ways.
Comment linking /2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/
on “The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code”Submitted Post-Open License: First Draft as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLike the BSL? The Business Source License: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/
Comment linking /2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/
on “The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code”Submitted Sorry, Ms. Ehmke, the “Hippocratic License” Can’t Work (2019) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionJust to be clear: I'm not trying to fight or argue with you here, I'm just trying to understand :-) > Sorry, IANAL. Open Source software is written in Poland with all the usual open source licences and it works so I'm sure at least in practice it's not a problem. But "in practice" is hardly sufficient :P > A lot of it is thanks to the fact that suing people is much less common here, so it never gets challanged. Also…
Comment linking /2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic-license-cant-work/
on “Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain”Submitted The Linux-Proof Processor that Nobody Wants as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Nothing more, nothing less. Well actually, 2 more things: distribute the modifications as well, and to use it without restrictions (Well that, plus making sure anybody who gets a copy gets the same rights). The latter of the two points happens to be the retroactively added freedom #0 in the FSF's definition of free software[0], which is also repeated in the GPL license text, IIRC somewhere at the top. The Open Sou…
Comment linking /2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licenses/
on “GCC: The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not do “bounty””Submitted Linux on HP Sceptre X360 with Intel IPU6 Non-UVC Camera as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBoth ESR and RMS have warned against such "ethical" licenses. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed... Bruce Perens has as well: https://perens.com/2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licens...
Comment linking /2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licenses/
on “GitHub blocked me and all my libraries”Submitted Bruce Perens: On Non-Judicical Punishment of Individuals as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFalse. In the application to software, Bruce Perrens most definitely did define ther term, based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the Free Software Foundation's Three Freedoms definition of Free Software, in June 1997: https://opensource.org/docs/osd https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines https://perens.com/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-so... The term was not previously used with regar…
Comment linking /2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-source/
on “Death of an open-source business model”Submitted Invasion of the Ethical Licenses – Bruce Perens as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
