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The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

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Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#51

Post by djsumdog »

relaunched wrote: post #12

Let them do what they want; the open source community does not suffer fools. It's a dirty practice to build something open source and after a certain point, try to close it off. But, it's not unheard of. Any project can change their license, I believe Google did this with Android. Older versions will get forked and others will do with those forks what they choose. I'm hoping doing this would cause so much backlash th…

Google and Android is weirder. The base OS is still totally open source and based on a Linux kernel. But in order to distribute Android with Play/Gapps, you have to join the Open Handset Alliance. You're heavily restricted on what apps you can bundle and you CANNOT manufacture any Amazon Fire devices (or any Android devices that do not contain the Google base services).

The base is open, but what makes it useful is licensed, essentially making the free still crippled. I did a post about Android a while back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#52

Post by zzzcpan »

Maybe open source is just not keeping up with the real world, a few things could destroy it: lack of open source license choices restrictive enough and clear enough and enabling openness so much that most businesses can't profit in any significant way from software under those licenses; lack of standardized proprietary licenses for dual-licensed open source project; lack of standardized open source CLAs and CLA integration with popular software hubs.

Ultimately, though, open source has to incentivize independent creators and not big corporations. AGPL is somewhat successful here, because big corporations already ban its use internally, but it's far from addressing the problem. New restrictive licenses are needed.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#53

Post by jessaustin »

eahman06 wrote: post #33

No it won't. You know what will destroy open source? Lack of money to develop it.

I've seen this prediction on a regular basis since the mid-1990s. Usually the prediction hasn't included the qualifier "sometime after 2018". Would you like to add a qualifier to your statement?

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#54

Post by DannyBee »

djsumdog wrote: post #40

I wish there were more publications on how open source is really funded. Earlier Linux and BSD kernels were made by a combination of researchers, people with spare time, volunteers as well as big companies who paid people full time. We see much more of the latter. Intel has an entire OSS division in Portland, OR that writes most of the drives, works on Linux kernel patches, etc. Nintendo and Sony both use big parts o…

"What changed? Do developers no longer have the time to volunteer to work on this stuff? The desire? Is the demand for tech in The Valley/West Cost changing the dynamics of how much time people have to contribute. Were the earlier efforts way less commercial and new efforts moving much faster and requirement more maintenance/resources?

"

What's changed is that once open source started getting serious VC's, people believe they've created tons of value, and should be able to extract some of it (in reality, the model created most of the value, not them).

In the past, people were just relatively happy to be doing okay for themselves while created cool software.

Once you try to move to "value extraction", things become a lot thornier because you discover you aren't as important as you thought you were - your attempts to extract value fail. Usually, because it was not you who created the value, but the model.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#55

Post by kazinator »

It's just a "free-with-source for non-commercial use" distribution of certain modules that would otherwise be proprietary.

There is nothing to see here, folks; "free-with-source for non-commercial use" has been a thing in the proprietary world for decades. It's like "free trial" or "freemium" with source code.

It's a good thing for customers and would-be customers. Customers can track down bugs and security flaws if they have access to the code. Would-be customers can evaluate the product based not only performance of the executables but code quality.

It is a "better proprietary", in other words.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#56

Post by beat »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #13
marcinzm wrote: post #4

Another problematic aspect of this is that to me the Redis situation seems like a corporate grab of open source software after the fact. By that I mean, Redis Labs are not the creators of Redis. They are a consulting agency that then hired the creator of Redis. In other words, they only exist because the original Redis was not Commons Clause. Now they want to build a moat so others can't do what they did. Not a good…

"Now they want to build a moat so others can't do what they did." Do you mean to say "can't use their stuff for free, but can do what they did if they want", i.e. a moat to absolutely prevent others from stuff is usually in IP etc. whereas restrictive licensing means you need to 'write it yourself' if you want it. Despite the conflation of early Redis and the corporate Redis - almost all commercial projects that use…

It's not like this is exactly new, either. See MySQL, for example.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#57

Post by gregmac »

TimothyBJacobs wrote: post #48
snarfy wrote: post #29

I can see their side. GPL was called copyleft for a reason, a nod to copyright. It's a copyright restriction which limits redistribution to certain terms. Cloud providers do redistribute. It runs on their servers. They do not have to honor copyright restrictions. They can make proprietary modifications and keep them, and they do. They might be honoring the letter of the license, but certainly not the spirit of it.

Don't we have the AGPL for this purpose to require them to contribute back their proprietary changes. As others have pointed out, if this was only about the modifications they would have used AGPL. Instead, and giving the clauses about consulting, it seems more like they are concerned about money than the health of the ecosystem.

The Redis Labs modules were AGPL, they moved from that to Apache + Common Clause[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1032192721308594176

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#58

Post by geofft »

paganel wrote: post #38
Someone1234 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to stop using the term "fake news" it is more a meme at this point than constructive English. Even reading that statement and assuming the best intentions I can see why people would be upset/concerned. Redis has gone from Open Source to "Open Core" with some of the best modules now essentially paid for.

> People need to stop using the term "fake news" it is more a meme at this point than constructive English. Just yesterday the most powerful politician from my country (a EU and NATO member) said during a live interview on prime-time TV that George Soros had sent 4 men in order to assassinate him last year (spoiler alert: they didn't succeed, even though they had been checked-in at the local Hilton hotel). His right-…

But that's not "fake news." That's a politician lying. No journalists were involved. And there were no former, saner times when politicians did not lie.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#59

Post by paganel »

geofft wrote: post #58
paganel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People need to stop using the term "fake news" it is more a meme at this point than constructive English. Just yesterday the most powerful politician from my country (a EU and NATO member) said during a live interview on prime-time TV that George Soros had sent 4 men in order to assassinate him last year (spoiler alert: they didn't succeed, even though they had been checked-in at the local Hilton hotel). His right-…

But that's not "fake news." That's a politician lying. No journalists were involved. And there were no former, saner times when politicians did not lie.

Both journalists who took those interviews were definitely involved, as in they didn't call out the bullsh*t.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#60

Post by chriswarbo »

zzzcpan wrote: post #52

Maybe open source is just not keeping up with the real world, a few things could destroy it: lack of open source license choices restrictive enough and clear enough and enabling openness so much that most businesses can't profit in any significant way from software under those licenses; lack of standardized proprietary licenses for dual-licensed open source project; lack of standardized open source CLAs and CLA integ…

What do you mean by "restrictive" and "openness" here? In particular, how does business and profit affect this? Would it maybe help to distinguish between the goals of Free Software (user freedom) and Open Source (abundance of high quality, royalty free code)?

> AGPL is somewhat successful here, because big corporations already ban its use internally

The word "because" is confusing me here. As far as I'm aware, the goal of AGPL is the same as that of the GPL: protect the freedoms of users (specifically the FSF's "four freedoms"); the difference is that GPL considers "users" to be those who run the software and AGPL also considers those who interact with the software.

There's nothing about preventing business use; although I believe that in dual-licensed projects, the extra stipulations of the AGPL may boost the appeal of the alternative license. Is that what you were getting at?

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