I upvoted you, so if you want to try again, see if it changed.
scottalanmiller
Posts
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moderated? your post is queued for approval. -
I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final productIn terms of code, what's running in a web browser is a separate piece of code from what is running on the server. The two are independent. They might be made by the same person, at the same time, meant to work together, but they are independent. Each one is a different code base, different application, running on different machines. They talk to each other through a communications API (using HTTP in most cases.)
What goes out to the browser is getting distributed and is always open (meaning readable by the end user.) You cannot have secrets in that code, because it is not compiled or secret, it's wide open and always visible. So while you can have different licenses involved, you can't keep anything there secret. So that GPL can be viral in that code base should never have an impact on you and no one in the real world cares about it.
On the server side, you have different code. Likely in a different language, runtime, and likely even architecture. That code is never distributed because it's not display code.
If you think of it in terms of ancient client/server apps from the 1980s... if you have data in a database and you make apps that run on desktops that talk to it, and you license those apps under the GPL, that would never imply that because they talked to the database that that database is now GPL'd too.
If the GPL worked that way, you'd have problems because you'd have a situation where end users, buying software with never having seen code or even knowing what it was, would be forcibly making every product on earth GPL'd by nature of installing them and using them together. It just can't work that way or else installing LibreOffice on Windows would make Windows GPL'd.
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Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam@JaredBusch said in Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam:
@scottalanmiller said in Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam:
@cregox said in Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam:
Sorry if I cite them a lot, but I really love the job being done there.
Aren't you a dev there? They list your avatar on their dev list.
No they donβt. You misread that page
Yeah, someone sent that to me and I didn't read it closely enough. I apologize.
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I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final product@boson_96 said in I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final product:
@scottalanmiller Thanks for all your help, you have cleared a lot of my doubts.
Are you planning to actually use NodeBB inside or as a base for your larger application?
The main product would be a marketplace platform where users would buy and sell services. Since they would be logged into the website, I also want a forum for them to interact with each other and have discussions. Based on how helpful they are to other users, they will accumulate karma/reputation. That karma would in turn be shown alongside their service listings on the platform, which will help them gain new customers for their services. Would such a system require the forum to be 'coupled' with the rest of the program?
It would not. You could couple it, of course, but there's no need to and it would not be natural to. If you do things like communicating through files, sockets, networking, or databases that's not coupling.
The natural ways to handle this would be to have either NodeBB authenticate users by calling your new system's API or vice versa. That's just the same as being any end user, you don't even have to modify code.
Unless you are trying to build the marketplace on top of nodeBB, which feels quite awkward as an approach, NodeBB and your marketplace will be two applications that run side by side and share some data. This is totally normal and you aren't the only one using NodeBB as a forum for a product where there is some data passing back and forth.
Any easy way to think of it is... when you open up your IDE, are you forking NodeBB to make your marketplace? Or are you building your own software, and running NodeBB as well?
And even if you are writing both in the same language, with the same tools, and put the files in the same repo, that doesn't make it coupled. It's just that unless you are, you can be quite confident that they are not.
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Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam@cregox said in Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam:
say since they were invented, emails have added some support for html, 1 point for that, and spam protection gets 2 full points. maintenance (it still works, it's still unique) gets 4 points. what else? i can't see any more meaningful standards. 7 points... not sure out of how many total yet.
None of that is email, though. They are extra systems that manage the email experience, but email itself hasn't changed. It's still just the SMTP messages being passed back and forth.
This makes it seem like email is evolving, but it isn't. The use of email is evolving, but that's different. Like my hammer examples.... people used to use a hammer one way when it was first released, now people use it in other ways. Same hammer. An email system from 1994 will be indistinguishable from one today to the end user, because all of the advancements you are perceiving as email are outside of the email portion and are like presentation layer or how end users use it or whatever.
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I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final product@gotwf said in I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final product:
Good stuff. Thorough. Yet, despite your elocution, the GPL still instills fear, real or imagined, of legal repercussions. So we need to cover our arses in the due diligence department.
It should not. This has been the industry standard for decades. It's so clear and easy to deal with and textbook development basics that it should not instill fear nor should you need an attorney. It's meant specifically so that you'd never feel fear or need an attorney. It's been around for forever and should be understood by everyone doing development because it's so common and you use it every day whether you know it or not. It's built into Windows all over the place, into Mac all over the place, everywhere.
CYA is always good, but there is a point where it's way over the top. The GPL is the best known license out there. If this causes concern, every other license would cause more concern because it's less common and less obvious. The cost of an attorney to look over every bit of code or every new use case would simply make making software impossible - both because it would make it slow, and because it would make it costly.
As a developer, knowing when you are extending someone's code and when you are simply operating their code as an end user, is something ultimately you have to know and track and a lawyer can only repeat back to you what you are telling them. So a lawyer would only be good as your own interpretation of the use. If you know your code, you don't need a lawyer, if you don't, your lawyer can't help.
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How to Upgrade from v1.13.3 to v1.14.0?Does Heroku only deploy by pushing to it? I don't use Heroku because I'm not made of money, lol, can't afford it's insane costs. So I'm not familiar.
Normal NodeBB deployment you just git clone and done.
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I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final productThe real question is.... why are we worried about the GPL that is designed and has been proved and well known for decades to ensure that the OP is safe to do what they want here - that's it's point... but ignoring the non-GPL MongoDB license that does NOT provide for commercial use?
It's not the GPL license here that is viral or scary. The GPL doesn't even come into effect in the situation described.
But MongoDB when used under normal conditions has a EULA that says anything using it is open source. So using NodeBB is of zero concern, but using MongoDB is a huge risk here and will easily get used "by accident" if it is installed.
There are ways to buy commercial use licenses, but you have to be aware of it. The GPL concern is really just 20 year old Microsoft FUD that they tried to use to scare people in the ear before they embraced open source and that has been long ago torn apart as being ridiculous. But the new, aggressive MongoDB use rights that are not related to MongoDB's code is the real concern and will almost certainly cause all or more problems than the OP is talking about and isn't even being discussed.
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Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam@cregox said in Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam:
you don't need to attack me EVERYTIME you see it wrong. or even if you feel you're not doing it enough times, i'm telling you very clearly now: it's beyond too much.
I didn't attack you. I was simply explaining why we weren't seeing these generation leaps that you were claiming (which you referred to as forks, remember, which is a totally different thing than you are explaining now) because under the hood, no real change was happening. That the changing of perception or interface outside of the product isn't the same as changing the product, or changing how it is used (using a hammer to remove nails instead of pounding them doesn't change the hammer itself) so when you act like we should just know that there is a new generation why we are lost and aren't following your logic.
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Is there any way to use this with an existing userbase?@rob-brown said in Is there any way to use this with an existing userbase?:
If I simply implement the other side of it (i.e. make my app "pretend to be wordpress") should that do the trick? Any major gotchas I'm not thinking of?
YES! If you can get your app to act the same as WordPress here, then NodeBB could talk to it without any further ado. That would be a great approach.
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Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam@cregox said in Unable to post, Akismet says my post is spam:
good luck calling my attention to write to you next time, if that's a deep dark wish of yours.
No, I have no wish that you post anything. You've not posted anything honest or helpful, but only misleading, self serving vitriol. Attempting to undermine NodeBB and its users for some sort of self gratification. If we can't convince you to be at least honest, let alone helpful and valuable, then the next best thing is not getting responses. As you clearly don't care to learn and improve, I have no desire that you even read my responses.
I respond only so that others who may stumble here can never have an excuse to believe what you write due to a lack of rebuttal and explanation.
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I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final product@julian said in I have a query regarding the GPLv3 license of NodeBB and commercializing my final product:
Eh? What's cockroachDB, can it survive a nuclear blast?
Thanks for the recomendations, we'll consider them
I think that that's the reference, yes. It's a NoSQL database that is PostgreSQL API compatible. It's open source and free. It's definitely not as fast as PostgreSQL, but it has a great web GUI and is a "drop in" for PostgreSQL but with different behaviour characteristics. So PostgreSQL will be way better for normal NodeBB deployments, but if someone wants a geographically diversified server farm, CockroachDB will do that using NoSQL mechanisms behind the scenes. it's pretty cool.
Cockroach Labs, the company building CockroachDB
CockroachDB is a distributed database with standard SQL for cloud applications. CockroachDB powers companies like Comcast, Lush, and Bose.
(www.cockroachlabs.com)
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moderated? your post is queued for approval.@cregox said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:
more importantly, this tells me i'm really, really not welcomed.
The function of downvoting is to mark a post as bad in some way. Whether malicious, spam, inaccurate, etc. It's a feedback mechanism both for you to understand when what you are posting is being seen as unhelpful or incorrect or that your behaviour is seen in a negative light. But more importantly, it's a mechanism to show others when they look at your posts that other community members have flagged them as unhelpful or misleading or whatever. It's a big ambiguous in specifics, but simple in practice. It's an important mechanism because, just like how upvotes help to designate which posts are specifically useful or good, it helps those quickly going over threads to see which are harmful or bad.
Upvotes offset downvotes. So for downvotes to become a problem requires there to not only be a certain threshold of negative feedback, but also a lack of positive feedback. Just being controversial itself, or inconsistent, doesn't cause an issue. Continuously posting negatively, however, will quickly get you a strong negative score.
It's not something you should be surprised about, given that you've been given a lot of feedback through multiple channels to help you course correct what you were posting and saying and people trying to show you how to post in a more positive manner. You shouldn't be surprised that even after the threshold was adjusted to make it easier for you post, that continuing to not fix your posting style, would eventually lead to the same result.
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Some questions@cregox said in Some questions :
to answer the question from another perspective: nodebb ain't really free, imho.
"Not free" implies that you have to pay for it. Which is 100% untrue. It's free, in every conceivable way. This is a fact, it's absolute. There is no artefact of it that isn't free.
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moderated? your post is queued for approval.@cregox said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:
funny enough, i think you were the only one to even give me any positive votes, even if out of pity.
Negative feedback is only valuable when positive feedback is given, too. I'm not a supporter of "negative votes", I'm a supporter of "votes". Both are valuable, either on its own becomes only a popularity contest.
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Some questions@cregox said in Some questions :
is it now clear for you at least?
It's clear that after being called out that you claimed to have meant something wholly different than what you said. You want free hosting and/or support and not that NodeBB wasn't free.
Which is what we expected to be the backpeddle, but doesn't change the fact that your claim was completely false. And I don't know that we can prove that hosting NodeBB isn't free, it's just not free from NodeBB. But it can be free, if someone wants to provide it.
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moderated? your post is queued for approval.@cregox said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:
if 2 members get triggered and enter in a loop, like it just happened with me (it was always 2 down votes), then i'm suddenly and quickly "banned".
Only if NO ONE up votes. So it's working correctly. Post only negative things and what exactly would you want the system to do? You have thousands and thousands of readers on here, none of them are upvoting your posts. None. And upvotes happen like over 100:1 compared to downvotes for normal posting. So to end up in this situation takes some effort.
You like to say "echo chamber" as a response to "I don't like that people don't appreciate what I'm saying." To you, any feedback or criticism is an echo chamber. I think you misunderstand these mechanisms.
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Is there any way to use this with an existing userbase?@rob-brown said in Is there any way to use this with an existing userbase?:
(and there is basically zero budget for this... it is free work for local business that is struggling to stay afloat by upgrading their online presence before coronavirus lockdown kills them completely)
I totally get it. I run a similar community on all volunteer time and no budget. We actually existing pre-COVID to support businesses devastated by the local civil war, and then COVID hit to compound problems!
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moderated? your post is queued for approval.@gotwf said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:
@PitaJ said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:
@cregox your reputation is low because community members are downvoting your posts in other threads.
So the post queue is being activated. And the new user limiter.
There is no notification for when people downvote your posts. If you'd like that to change you can open an issue on GitHub
Not keen on this idea as it may well result in unintended consequences, e.g. "down vote wars".
Initially I wanted to know such details and wondered why such had been cloaked. I figured the devs must have had a good reason for it, as since we have upvote notifications I doubted it was an oversight. So I rolled with it. Experienced the NodeBB experience fer' a bit. Now I see the wisdom in maintaining some anonymity for down voters. It is rare I down vote but when I do I do so honestly as an effort to cue the poster that they may want to give further pause/analysis of their utterances. Alas, there are some petty people out there. Also trolls just looking to game the up/down vote system. No need to make it any more easier and/or amusing for them to escalate disagreements all out of proportion, mole hills becoming mountains, etc. Thus, I think anonymity for down votes is a good thing.
We had a bit of debate about that on ML and ML decided to go with non-anonymous down votes, but it was a bit of discussion and generally I'm more for anonymous votes. When you make down votes listed, it creates a massive barrier to meaningful feedback and empowers bad posting. You no longer use downvotes to "discourage" behaviour, but start to use them to "flag for moderation." Which is a very big difference.
It's important to see a general volume of voting. Is someone "generally good" but an individual post bad? Downvote wars typically require a lot of effort that is easy to catch by mods. But someone posting badly, consistently and lacking appreciated positive posts to offset them, are easily identified.
On ML, for example, with the huge traffic that we have and heated debates, the number of people who've gone negative (that aren't bots) is like three, in well over half a decade. Pretty much any valuable posting creates enough up votes that a few bad posts or threads have no real effect.
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Is there any way to use this with an existing userbase?@rob-brown said in Is there any way to use this with an existing userbase?:
@scottalanmiller It is easy enough for me to make my app (technically my client's app) support any standard API (if I have documentation of that API, anyway). I prefer to make changes to my app rather than trying to write a plugin for NodeBB, simply because it can probably take me forever to get up to speed on writing plugins for NodeBB.
Sure, I get that that is way easier. The problem is, the old app presumably has the data and NodeBB does not. So if to have both use the existing userbane, it needs to use the existing base of users. So while it is easier, by far, to have your app authenticate to NodeBB, that won't meet your stated (and reasonable) requirement/goal.