Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Commons Clause

redislabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 496 posts

Re: Commons Clause

#311

Post by rplnt »

another-cuppa wrote: post #274
tannhaeuser wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. There's the reflex (here and elsewhere) to dismiss reciprocal licenses such as GPL, AGPL as "uncool", pretentious, and show-stopping. Maybe it's time to reconsider in times of cloud oligopoles. Because why would you want your software become part of the lock-in strategy of a cloud provider.

It's really sad that the GPL has essentially "gone out of fashion". It's sad that developers would be driven merely by fashion rather than careful consideration. The fact that we have free software at all is largely thanks to the GNU and the GPL.

It's not just fashion. It's a question of "Do I want someone to use my software?", because with GPL the answer would be no for a lot of projects.

Re: Commons Clause

#312

Post by iKevinShah »

sincerely wrote: post #259
tokyodude wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because they give me a service for free? Or just because we're all in this together? I'm sure it depends on the examples you pick. I'm totally happy if people use my MITed code in a commerical product without reciprocating. I'm not writing it for them. I'm mostly writing it for myself. The payback is the joy I feel when others find it useful. I also feel joy by being part of the larger collection of people and compan…

How can you say “We’re all in this together” when youre donating your time and they use the fruits of that labor to profit off you

Key differentiation here is that the person is not donating time so that a company necessarily profits off that labor. OP is getting what they (OP) are expecting out of it (joy by being a part of larger collection of people that have given them so much free stuff)

Re: Commons Clause

#313

Post by merinowool »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #225
sgentle wrote: post #208

> Help! Companies are exploiting my open source software for profit! Uh, you told them they could. > Yeah, but they're doing it without contributing back! They're just taking what I wrote and building it into a proprietary product! You told them they could. > But how is it fair that they can make so much money off my code and I never see a cent? You. Told. Them. They. Could. Time and again I see the same sense of hel…

I agree. There's the reflex (here and elsewhere) to dismiss reciprocal licenses such as GPL, AGPL as "uncool", pretentious, and show-stopping. Maybe it's time to reconsider in times of cloud oligopoles. Because why would you want your software become part of the lock-in strategy of a cloud provider.

Kubernetes makes it easy, but there are few missing pieces - for example there is no load balancer that you can use with commodity dedicated servers (there is metallb, but it requires routing facilities most hosting providers don't offer).

Re: Commons Clause

#314

Post by pjc50 »

rplnt wrote: post #311
another-cuppa wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really sad that the GPL has essentially "gone out of fashion". It's sad that developers would be driven merely by fashion rather than careful consideration. The fact that we have free software at all is largely thanks to the GNU and the GPL.

It's not just fashion. It's a question of "Do I want someone to use my software?", because with GPL the answer would be no for a lot of projects.

Open-source or closed source projects?

As discussed upthread, avoiding being used in closed source projects is the entire purpose of the GPL.

Re: Commons Clause

#315

Post by Xylakant »

Boulth wrote: post #289
mful wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you willing to release your code, both in the sense of putting it out into the world and emancipating it from your ownership? Do you accept that your code could be renamed, rebranded, repackaged, rented, traded or sold? Would you be happy if your code made someone else rich, famous or successful while you saw no benefit at all? I suspect it's a lot easier to say "yes" to these questions when you're just startin…

Note that if you required CLAs that allowed license change you can change it later (e.g. OpenText did that). If you just accepted contributions you can't change the license without agreement from all contributors.

Depends on the license. You can just fork a MIT project and incorporate it in a project with a different license. The MIT licensed part would still be MIT licensed, but any newly written code not. Makes little to l no practical difference.

Re: Commons Clause

#316

Post by oblio »

thayne wrote: post #191
vmbrasseur wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Kevin. VM Brasseur from https://opensource.org here. It's disappointing to see FOSSA, which claims it exists to assist companies with open source management, publish and encourage use of a clause that very clearly removes projects from the pool of open source alternatives. To do so by using the word "Commons" in the title adds insult to injury and borders on wilful deception, removing software from the commons as…

> whatever problem it is that the Commons Clause is intended to address I'm pretty sure that problem is that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others have hosted Redis solutions, and even if they do contribute some code, they are undoubtedly making significant profit off of Redis, of which RedisLabs sees little if any. And since these companies have an oligopoly on cloud hosting, it is very difficult for RedisLabs to co…

> I'm curious what better solutions you would have suggested would be.

Dual licensing as commercial and AGPL.

Re: Commons Clause

#317

Post by dragonwriter »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #225
sgentle wrote: post #208

> Help! Companies are exploiting my open source software for profit! Uh, you told them they could. > Yeah, but they're doing it without contributing back! They're just taking what I wrote and building it into a proprietary product! You told them they could. > But how is it fair that they can make so much money off my code and I never see a cent? You. Told. Them. They. Could. Time and again I see the same sense of hel…

I agree. There's the reflex (here and elsewhere) to dismiss reciprocal licenses such as GPL, AGPL as "uncool", pretentious, and show-stopping. Maybe it's time to reconsider in times of cloud oligopoles. Because why would you want your software become part of the lock-in strategy of a cloud provider.

> There's the reflex (here and elsewhere) to dismiss reciprocal licenses such as GPL, AGPL as "uncool", pretentious, and show-stopping.

They aren't uncool, they just have terms that lots of people have good reasons not to want to deal with, and which many devs don't want to impose on downstream (in part because lots of people don't want to deal with them.)

Re: Commons Clause

#318

Post by inciampati »

carlmr wrote: post #302
tannhaeuser wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git is a good example. It's GPLv2, but that hasn't prevented it from being used to form a near-monopoly (github) for F/OSS, now bought by MS. Linux: used in the world's largest spynet (Android). Your joy and enthusiasm being taken advantage of for nefarious purposes.

>git is a good example. It's GPLv2 Is it a good example? I'm not very firm with licensing. As far as I understand it git is not a library or a programming language, which means that even if you use it commercially you're not really modifying or repackaging it in your software, so there's really no duties arising out of it even if you use it on your servers. Your software is just communicating with git. Please correct…

git is a both domain specific programming language and library of software routines that enable version control. Curious why you don't see it this way.

Re: Commons Clause

#319

Post by hashrate »

sciurus wrote: post #75
XiZhao wrote: post #58

Hi folks. Kevin from http://fossa.io here. I worked on bringing the Commons Clause to life ( https://commonsclause.com/ ) and led many of the project efforts here. Happy to answer questions here (or on Twitter @kevinverse). I wanted to write a blog post to set some context because the real story is a lot less salacious then "Redis just went proprietary", but here's a quick summary: 1/ No, Redis isn't proprietary. It'…

Who else can we expect to see adopting the Commons Clause?

IMO 100% of ventured backed Open Source project will adopt this licence.

Just to name a few :

- Elastic

- Docker

- CockRoachDB

This licence is a disguised "Oracle" intellectual property.

This what Oracle has been doing for years and bring them billions in revenue.

It ensure that one way or another you'll pay $$$ to the vendor of the tech.

Most of these companies quoted above are not profitable and are trying to find a way to be profitable.

With this licence it allows them to charge $$$ and to have full control over the IP for and become the sole allowed provider for consulting / support / training and basically anything that is related to this technology.

This is proprietary software with an "unlimited trial" edition and source code hosted on Github.

Re: Commons Clause

#320

Post by ginko »

krn wrote: post #267
sgentle wrote: post #208

> Help! Companies are exploiting my open source software for profit! Uh, you told them they could. > Yeah, but they're doing it without contributing back! They're just taking what I wrote and building it into a proprietary product! You told them they could. > But how is it fair that they can make so much money off my code and I never see a cent? You. Told. Them. They. Could. Time and again I see the same sense of hel…

I think, BSD / MIT / Apache should be used for open source libraries , and MPL / GPL / AGPL for open source products . This way, a developer can build a new product using open source libraries without sharing its source code, but he cannot repackage an existing open source product without sharing its modifications.

Yes, this is usually how I handled it in my (very few) OSS projects.
Post reply on HN