Here, a person added GPL as a proposed alternative.

I somehow couldn’t bear the “self-scratch self-praise” top part of the post, but starting with
"But the balance is crucial" it was really interesting to read! Contrary to my initial fears, it’s not a self-praise post, but actually useful and talks about problems too.

Mike: rachel and i are no longer dating

rachel: mike that’s a horrible way of telling people we’re married

TL&DR: Rust is officially adopted, and thus no longer experimental.

It’s actually a mistake done in a hurry, according to a comment by the author of the post below.

Or bubblewrap. Though that requires more effort than “a bit of time” to do comprehensive isilation…

I get that you are feeling slint is not GPL, but I do not understand where that feeling comes from.

I think it’s because the for-profit nature of the company may not create an actual community of FOSS enthusiasts around it. So if something were to happen to the business side of Slint-the-company, there would not be a strong community with known leaders and vision to save the situation. It’s not like this is guaranteed for FOSS projects, but it’s much more likely there. Single-person FOSS projects are scary to me for this reason as well.

That is the biggest factor for me. (There are other important factors, too.)

Nice project!

Only somewhat related, but for myself personally, I’ve realized that the default UI for YouTube promotes doom scrolling as much as it possibly can. It seems to have a negative effect on my mental health and habits. So I live mostly without YouTube now, with only some occasional (once every few weeks), externally linked videos, that I usually download via yt-dlp or just quickly watch online. For online watching, I broke the page so bad with uBO that the page barely works, and there are no recommendations or after-you-finished-viewing transitions.

This approach seems to work well. I find YT to be a really dangerous place. In one phrase, “sweet death”.

Some projects managed to pull off a license change before

I think you’re right, the reality is not actually so black-and-white. With the GNU project indeed being a notable “exception” of sorts. And, while I can’t think of any single project that would change from GPL and still be alive, I think I’ve heard about at least attempts of doing so once, more than a decade ago, not too successful IIRC.

So to be a GPL project

But to answer the question… I’m not trying to say what is a GPL project. But sometimes I can tell when something isn’t [a GPL project], and Slint isn’t. It doesn’t revolve around copyleft and its ideology. Neither is MySQL. MariaDB is. MariaDB is easier to fork off MySQL than it would be off Slint though. Slint has much broader API, more evolving too I’d assume (but I don’t know).

So my recommendation on when to use or not use Slint would still hold. And I still insist that it’s factually correct to say that Slint is not a GPL project.

I think we can’t find an agreement on our angles on the topic so much that it’s simply not constructive to push the conversation further. I’m afraid that if I’ll try to say anything now, it’ll be a repetition of what was already written earlier.

In short, I see Slint as a not GPL project (but rather as a commercial project that happens for now to triple-license the code and includes GPL). I see GPL projects as fundamentally different to Slint, in a sense that, once you have enough external contributors, you simply cannot revert back and stop being a GPL project, whereas in Slint I see it as possible. I trust GPL projects and I know I can “lean” on them, whereas I’d advise to rely on Slint only if you have commercial entanglement that you want to keep.

I’d propose to agree to disagree.

I’m not sure if you’re reading my message well?

I’m saying that GPL-licensed *projects* protect themselves well. If you lean on a GPL project, it’s likely going to hold. Not disappear because of a commercial incentive. Non-copyleft projects tend to disappear if they become valuable to companies, such as IntelliJ’s Rust plugin, or BSD => MacOS.

Again if you’re developing a non-open-source project, Slint is fine. You’ll be bound to each other with mutual commercial interests.

Please check when posting if it’s a duplicate (it is).

Sorry for the late reply.

The royalty free license tries to get as close to MIT as we can while limiting the use on embedded…

I think I understand that perspective. But please also understand the other perspective: how a user has the right to see it, when they are not connected to the company.

If you are such a user, then you need open-source software for your daily life. And you use it. At the same time, you see:

• IntelliJ Idea taking its MIT-licensed Rust plugin and deciding that it’ll be more profitable for them to close-source it, so you won’t have it anymore. And of course nobody forked the plugin. The idea is clear, the company wants you to use Rust Rover.

• Apple’s OS, being historically based on 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD, and being the second-highest valued company in the world (!), is happily living with all and any of that MIT-licensed code, while BSD itself is stagnating. It’s not Apple’s fault of course, Apple is not a bad actor here. It’s just not very smart or future-proof to spend a lot of time binding yourself to a system that can easily turn into stagnation.

On the other hand, GPL-licensed projects protect themselves very well. When things don’t go well, you see successful foks (such as Forjeo, LibreOffice, MariaDB). When things go well, you just see it thriving (such as Linux, most userland software).

We try to make all of the terms as clear as possible. We rewrote the Slint licensing page several times,…

To answer this and to conclude, for me personally, it’s not about how to write something. It’s about what is written. The fact that Slint aims to be good for a for-profit company, does not and will never nullify that MIT contributions are re-licensed as GPL or proprietary. It will come up, and it’s fair when it does… as I see it, at least.

UPD: I’ve misread at first - apologies. Nevermind about commercial or not, this is of no interest to me. (See above.)

EDIT: I’ve misread at first - apologies. Nevermind.

EDIT: I’ve misread at first. Commercial or not doesn’t matter to me. I’m only interested here in whether it’s open-source as a project. That is, if it’s a sustainable open-source project.

Hey, first of all, thanks for for sharing and I do appreciate both Slint existing and you being able to do software that’s usable by both businesses and, to some extend, open-source projects! (The latter depends on whether you consider contributing to the underlying libraries as a requirement for development, and if you’re then fine with contributing with these MIT/non-MIT specifics.)

When you contribute to any MIT license project you are in the same situation

I would disagree here. If you’re speaking about any MIT project, then many of them would be simply MIT. You contribute like MIT and you can use the code as MIT. Slint is not licensed as MIT-0 though. It’s licensed as written here: https://github.com/slint-ui/slint?tab=readme-ov-file#license, and only your contributions are taken as MIT. This does set Slint apart.

It’s a fair model though, if the developers are sufficiently aware of the deal. And it’s a very sensible business model. I have nothing against it, and I only wish to make the exact deal more explicit. As you see around, I don’t think it’s 100% clear from the first glance.

Definitely! And as you said, you can use it with closed source projects as well (or GPLv3), and I have nothing against businesses doing UI toolkits as well. Have you read my last paragraph though?

Fair enough, thanks for the correction. I should be more careful with my wording. I think it’s “open-source”, but not an “open-source project”. In a sense that, they release the source code under a restrictive license, but they themselves will not have it this way and can stop publishing the code any time they want.

So they publish the source code under an OSI-approved license as you say, but they don’t develop it in an open manner and I think it’s fair to say that they are not an open-source project.

Something to keep in mind is that Slint is not an Open-Source project. If you’ll want to improve Slint you’ll have to give away your contribution under the MIT No Attribution License (MIT-0) license, yet if and when you’ll want to use Slint, you can get it as a paid or GPLv3 license.

In my mind this is more of a proprietary project closed development model (EDIT for correctness, see comment below). The development model is not around freedom and equal rights, with the project being able to stop giving you access under any open-source license whatsoever, all while continuing to use your contributions.

It’s not unfair. In fact, it might be a great project. Just not open-source as a project overall, if you care about this.