Senior engineers teach you how to select Open Source protocols

Senior engineers teach you how to select Open Source protocols

Practice open source

Now open source is more than just a spirit, and many domestic and foreign companies have actually practiced it. Including FEX, more than 20 open-source products are supported by many front-end developers. The number of stars on GitHub is close to 3000. Therefore, we naturally face the issue of choosing open source protocols.

There are many Open-Source protocols on the market, at least over 100, but there are as many as 70 Open-Source protocols recognized by the Open Source Initiative Association.

Today, I will briefly introduce how Baidu FEX chooses the Open Source protocol. I believe this will be helpful for your selection of Open Source protocols.

WTFPL

"WTFPL" is short for "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License". Chinese can be translated into "What The Fuck Do You Want To Do '", is one of the "most pornographic and violent" open-source protocols. Although this protocol is not widely used, I would like to mention it because it is the most extreme open source protocol and has no Copyright or Copyleft concept at all.

What are Copyright and Copyleft?

Copyright (Copyright) is common in general commercial software, which means retaining all rights, which is not described here. Copyleft is a concept developed by the free software movement. It is an authorization method that uses the existing copyright system to challenge the system. Is its flag, that is, "C" in Copyright is changed from right to left.

The most common protocol for Copyleft is GPL. That is to say, if you use this open source code, the derivative works after the user's change must be released in the same way as authorized to give back to the society. This means that if commercial software uses such open source code and changes, the commercial value may fall. Copyleft is also a symbolic feature of many open-source protocols.

Six Common Open Source protocols

Knowing Copyright and Copyleft has a very important impact on the main open-source protocols. The following describes that most companies use only six open source protocols: LGPL, Mozilla, GPL, BSD, MIT, and Apache.

Paul Bagwell, a Ukrainian programmer, draws an analysis diagram to explain how to choose. It takes only two minutes to figure out the biggest difference between the six licenses. Instructor Ruan Yifeng translated the image into Chinese. I also chose this image here, and there is no need to explain it too much:

Case: How do we choose open source protocols?

We finally chose to use the BSD Protocol. The difference between it and the MIT protocol is whether to use your name for promotion. That is to say, if we use the MIT protocol, when someone else modifies our code, we can use FEX to promote it.

For individuals, it is a good opportunity to spread influence. But for an enterprise or organization, we think this may be a risk point. Someone may ask, why don't you use the GPL protocol? It is actually the difference between Copyleft and Copyright I mentioned above.

We believe that for users. His free choice is public copyright, which will help more front-end developers to use our open-source products. The more users, the more feedback they can give us, this helps us to discover and solve problems in the first time. It is also conducive to the Construction of FEX's "Technical ecology", making the long-term technological output more sustainable.

At present, we can receive more than 100 feedbacks from ISSUE on GitHub every day, which has a very important impact on the polishing of FEX products. WebUploader is a very typical case. From the open source to the present, its compatibility and uploading performance have been steadily improved, and it is now the first choice for image uploading by many companies in China.

I also hope that more and more companies will come to the open-source camp, so that open-source practices can truly benefit everyone.