il titolo poteva anche essere "Apple weaponizes data protection".
<https://wtop.com/world/2018/10/apple-ceo-backs-privacy-laws-warns-of-data-w…>
BRUSSELS (AP) — The head of Apple on Wednesday endorsed tough privacy
laws for both Europe and the U.S. and renewed the technology giant’s
commitment to protecting personal data, which he warned was being
“weaponized” against users.
[...]
Cook warned that technology’s promise to drive breakthroughs that
benefit humanity is at risk of being overshadowed by the harm it can
cause by deepening division and spreading false information. He said the
trade in personal information “has exploded into a data industrial complex.”
“Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being
weaponized against us with military efficiency,”
“This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only
to enrich the companies that collect them,” he said. “This should make
us very uncomfortable. It should unsettle us.”
Cook’s appearance was one-up on his tech rivals and showed off his
company’s credentials in data privacy, which has become a weak point for
both Facebook and Google. That is facilitated also by the fact that
Apple makes most of its money by selling hardware like iPhones instead
of ads based on user data.
[..]
MongoDB has just announced
<https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license…>
an
immediate shift to its brand-new Server Side Public License (SSPL)
<https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license>. This
license is based on the AGPL, but adds some extra text to section 13 with,
it is claimed, this effect:
The SSPL builds on the spirit of the AGPL, but clarifies the condition for
providing open source software as a service. The license retains all of the
same freedoms that the open source community had with MongoDB under the
AGPL: freedom to use, review, modify and redistribute the software. The
only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization
attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software
that it uses to offer such service.
The license itself is more explicit about what software must be released in
this manner:
"Service Source Code" means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the
modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you
use to make the Program or modified version available as a service,
including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces,
application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software,
backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a
user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you
make available.
The affected code must not only be released, it must be made available
under the SSPL. This language, thus, extends the reach of the license
beyond any modifications that may have been made to MongoDB itself or to
anything that could conceivably be considered a derivative work;
https://lwn.net/Articles/768670/
L'articolo contiene un certo ammontare di FUD: l'obbligo di licenziare
sotto SSPL si applica solo ai software che gli utenti di MongoDB sviluppano
(e di cui dunque detengono il copyright) non a quelli che utilizzano (ad
esempio il kernel Linux, citato impropriamente nel articolo).
Contrariamente a quanto scritto questa licenza non sembra solo dettata da
avidità, ma da un effettivo desiderio di diffondere il software libero.
Personalmente non credo che colga il cuore del problema, ma trovo
interessante che diverse persone inizino a discutere i limiti della
reciprocità della GPL: va bene per chi crea cloni liberi di software
proprietario, come il progetto GNU.
Ma per chi vuole scivere software innovativo, non è abbastanza virale.
Giacomo
