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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3!

I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines' page: undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass

Still, I'm very excited about this!

If anyone from the project reads this: Where is the appropriate place to request support for an additional GNU/Linux distribution? I would love to get GNU Guix running on this.

Edit: It seems that I have jumped the gun with my enthusiasm for this project. They will be selling proprietary re-licensed versions as a reward and require copyright assignment for contributions.

VirtKick, please reconsider your decision to require copyright assignment. I want my contributions to the free software community to remain free.

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Frankly, there are two mutually exclusive camps: free software and open source. I myself sympathize with free software (GPL) whereas RushPL with open source (MIT). Selling proprietary versions has never been the reason for CLA, though! We want to be able to re-release VirtKick under MIT (and automatically get rid of CLA) if we get funded, so businesses have no problems with it. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527999)

Selling proprietary versions has never been the reason for CLA, though! We want to be able to re-release VirtKick under MIT (and automatically get rid of CLA) if we get funded, so businesses have no problems with it.

So selling proprietary versions isn't your goal, but allowing the code to be used in proprietary versions is?

You're walking a very fine line here. One so thin I wouldn't fault anyone who said it doesn't even exist.

I didn't spot your question. The best way would be to contribute. :) We currently have virtkick-starter, a bunch of scripts that set everything up. You could try it out on Guix and improve if needed. https://github.com/virtkick/virtkick-starter

>The best way would be to contribute. :)

Of course, I was just wondering where a ticket could be created so that it's on the record as a feature request.

>We currently have virtkick-starter, a bunch of scripts that set everything up.

Perfect. I'll have a look. Thanks!

Edit: I think we have a misunderstanding. I would like to use VirtKick to provision Guix VMs, not just install VirtKick on Guix.

Oh, that's relatively easy at the moment. Put your distro in these two files. ISO will be autodownloaded by `virtkick-starter` script, and the distro will appear on VM create screen. It'll be configurable in the settings in a month, of course. http://goo.gl/u1LKwi http://goo.gl/j1j80f

> I want my contributions to the free software community to remain free.

And you don't feel that the AGPLv3 ensures that...? Or you mean "I don't want my contributions to be distributed under any other license"?

If you have a contributor assignment, the assignee can choose to release the changes under a proprietary license.

It's not our intention though, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527999

> If you have a contributor assignment, the assignee can choose to release the changes under a proprietary license.

Exactly! Hence my request for clarification (see above).

If more explanation is necessary: What davexunit is saying is that he wants his contributions to remain free. The AGPLv3 ensures that, even with copyright assignment. But what I guess davexunit really means is that he wants to be sure that all contributors, present and future, are locked into the AGPLv3 forever. I'm not saying the latter is wrong, I'm just saying you should call a spade a spade.

It doesn't ensure they remain free - a copyright assignment allows the contributions to be used as part of a proprietary release.

With a copyright assignment, the authors could take the entire project closed-source for future versions. You'd still be able to use older, AGPL-licensed versions, but perhaps not newer versions.

For programs like this, I see little benefit of AGPL over GPL, since the main use-case will be in-house deployments. I can't see how anyone would deploy something like this on the backend, where if you made an in house-fork with bug fixes to support your proprietary infrastructure, you'd have to publish the patches for the wider community. It seems like a big red flag to me.

If you are assigning them copyright, and they can sell proprietary licensed versions, then it's a pretty valid request...

Sorry for that. The hypervisor died, which results in errors like this. We use Bugsnag so we've got all the stacktraces - we'll handle distasters. :)

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