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The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

drewdevault.com

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

#61

Post by paganel »

JackFr wrote: post #42
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-…

I think you miss the point . Call a lie a lie, and don't trivialize it with the cute meme of the day.

> cute meme of the day.

I don't think I'm missing anything, I'm afraid "fake news" is here to stay, is what propaganda was back in the 1920s and '30s. Calling it a "lie" means that the person saying the lie and those "receiving" it would change their views once the lie is "exposed", but under the current media and political climate I'm afraid that won't happen anymore, i.e. people will keep believing the "fake news" no matter if it would get "exposed" or not.

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

#62

Post by hw_penfold »

Near as I can tell, there’s nothing in this agreement that prevents me from choosing another license model.

If I can choose to apply whichever license I want, then it would seem that The Commons Clause could only possibly harm those that choose it.

Anyway, there are plenty of unprofitable licenses out there, and the reality is, for all of them, if you’ve already given something away for free, once the cat’s out of the bag, you probably won’t make any money, even if your license doesn’t say you’re a bad person for even thinking about trying.

That said, The Commons Clause is probably fine for foundations, where lots of people are sharing an array of technologies, and not really asking for money. Meanwhile, it’s been several decades of HTTP over TCP/IP, and last time I checked, there isn’t a whole lot to lock down, and the real money is in adding reach to flip switches from the other side of a network connection. JSON isn’t going away, so, there really isn’t much to apply licenses to, in this area, without being silly.

But hey, databases, operating systems, desktop applications, peripheral drivers, all these things still happen, so I guess there’s stuff to license. But really all the fringe licenses mostly get applied to JavaScript frameworks, and by the time you actually read a JS library’s license, three other projects have replaced it, so why bother.

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

#63

Post by jwilk »

aequitas wrote: post #26
acjohnson55 wrote: post #11

For the Redis example, how does this apply to past versions of Redis? Are we going to see a MariaDB-like fork?

As explained by antirez[1] Redis itself wil remain BSD and his own modules will remain open source licensed. Only the modules developed by Redis Labs will have this clause. So no change for future or past versions of Redis. [1] http://antirez.com/news/120

On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818647

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

#65

Post by XiZhao »

Kevin Wang here. Thanks Drew for the thoughtful post.

I can accept that you might not appreciate my work on the Commons Clause, but I'm glad to see you acknowledge why funding OSS is so difficult.

I think it's okay to fear the world of open source becoming a bit more closed. I do too. Whether that's a better world or not is up to debate, but I certainly don't think so.

I think where we might disagree is what the greatest threat to "open-ness" is. Sometimes people do bad things to open source projects, and force them to go closed. The license choice will inevitably follow -- and when they do, they can choose to close the source entirely or choose a licensing scheme that makes it available.

Licensing follows intent, and I certainly don't think the Clause inspires people to close their source. But sometimes people need to change their license -- and I think it's unrealistic to say that this doesn't happen.

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

#66

Post by throwaway182706 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #6

This argument is theological in that it's arguing against an idea, labeling it heresy. His ideal 'solution' is to just fold it all up and try to forget it ever happened. But you can't fight ideas, ideas provide solutions to problems that people have and if you want people to stop rolling their own solutions, then the orthodoxy needs to make their solutions actually work for actual people, not just the faithful. Not e…

> Not every business can be Red Hat.

No, but they can try, https://tidelift.com is a good starting point.

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

#67

Post by halbritt »

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…

AWS started offering SaaS products based on open source software without contributing anything back to the original projects. Combined with that, and wholesale cloud adoption over the last decade, revenue streams for "enterprise" editions, services have dried up.

In the 90s and 2000s, OSS project were more grass roots efforts. In the past decade, there have been a series of primarily commercial OSS projects like Redis and ElasticSearch that have gained a fair bit of traction. They really aren't grass roots efforts, don't have a lot of volunteers, and have seen their business model gutted by AWS.

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

#68

Post by pvg »

An alarmist title, I know, but it’s true. If the Commons clause were to be adopted by all open source projects, they would cease to be open source1, and therefore the Commons clause is trying to destroy open source.

But it's not true, it's complete, self-admitted clickbait. An asteroid will destroy most life on Earth tomorrow. If a sufficiently large asteroid strikes Earth tomorrow. It's an overwrought premise leading to predictably overwrought handwringing.

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

#69

Post by da_chicken »

_jal wrote: post #45
foundry27 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t usually post here (more interested in the articles than the discourse over them), but this is something that really resonated with me. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of engineering. We don’t know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about…

> censoring the mere _idea_ Nobody is censoring anything, in either a precise or a fuzzy sense[1]. Conflating criticism and censorship is (a) a category error, (b) a really pernicious notion, and (c) confuses people and derails discourse. A core principle of free speech is that the answer to bad speech is more speech. Mislabeling criticism censorship attempts to delegitimize that answer, and thus paradoxically attack…

> [1] Insert private-citizens-cannot-censor distinction here beside an acknowledgment that the word is used informally with wider applicability.

That's not "usage" that's wider applicability, it's accuracy.

You are no less censored if your boss threatens your livelihood than if your government threatens your freedom or Twitter bans your account. Tyranny is tyranny, and censorship is censorship. No matter the cause for a voice to be excluded from public discourse, it's exclusion is censorship. The only distinction is that government censorship is explicitly illegal under the United States Constitution.

Nevertheless, the First Amendment is not a comprehensive definition of censorship nor is the Bill of Rights a complete expression of all human rights. If you want something that's closer to one of those, please refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1]. The concept of censorship as well as the ideals free expression, freedom and liberty extend well beyond the scope of a mere government law or institution.

No, not all censorship is illegal. The state can't make all censorship illegal because that power is too easily abused -- you yourself are discussing the difference between criticism and censorship right here. However, we should not mistake the wisdom of proscribing our government from acting as judge over free expression as a unique or defining characteristic of what it means to censor or silence another's right to free expression.

[1]: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

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

#70

Post by lmm »

jessaustin wrote: post #53
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?

How healthy is open source these days? There may be any number of lines of library code publicly available, but I've felt that the four freedoms are less and less available in software that I'm the end user of.
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