141–150 of 248 posts
Childhood is believing in free software, adulthood is knowing Microsoft was right. What kills open source software is greed, and very few people are immune from that.
1. A group of people go off and, without involving their communities at all, try to solve a problem they think they have.
2. They spring it on their communities suddenly and without warning
3. Negative reaction ensues.
4. People decry death of open source.
5. Author of clause bemoans on twitter that the reaction of community should have been collaborative problem solving (and "starting a conversation"), despite completely failing to attempt collaborative problem solving with their community.
Is that about right?
If so, this is a great object lesson in how not to do this.
If you want the reaction to be collaborative problem solving, engage people in collaborative problem solving.
If you want the reaction to be to your solution, present people a solution. But expect people to do precisely that!
This is like when people drop completely designed/implemented megabombs of stuff on OSS projects and then complain when there is pushback.
I’m new to the matter, but I do see in the Commons Clause an intent to manipulate and mislead. If the goal is to provide an option for companies who would otherwise take their software closed-source, why does that option have to sound super-duper open sourcy while not having terms recognizable as open source? I’m not even a rabid free software guy or anything, but just compare the name to the terms. There is no possible way that “Commons Clause” is not intended to be confused with, or somehow gain a positive spin that has nothing to do with its content from, CC or Apache Commons.
People who care about things like Creative Commons or about open source as anything more than “source available” will label this as “evil” or at best a marketing ploy.
Why does that suck? It seems GPLv3 is for the envious and MIT and Apache for the free.
The four “freedoms” are fake freedoms. There is only one freedom; freedom from coercion.
How can someone claim their GPL icense gives me those four freedoms but not others? If some freedoms are restricted then it’s not free (libre) s/w.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the AGPL point is to say that there is not a need for an anti-commercial license if the AGPL effectively stops the things you're aiming to restrict. AGPL isn't perfect, but obviously neither is a non-open, non-free anti-commerce clause.
AGPL didn't stop cloud hosting providers from offering hosted serviced with the Redis modules at issue, though, because either they weren't making modifications or they weren't deterred by the requirement to share. RedisLabs wants money, not sharing, from this kind of downstream use, so AGPL doesn't work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 bel…
Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software. It's hard to want to contribute to something like open source infrastructure tooling, when it's use case is purely commercial, for example. I imagine some also feel that it's setting an unrealistic value on digital products, at least I do. Why would I want to build a tool for corporate infrastructure if they take…
Amazon on the other hand...
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 grea…
Hi Kevin, Drew here. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate your response, but I find it frustratingly vauge. What kinds of bad things happen to open source projects that drive them to this? If you are fearful of open source becoming more closed, why are you promoting that very approach? Did you consider promoting alternatives like AGPL first? Before I see an option violating one of the four essential freedom…
I have no objection to owners taking a codebase proprietary. It doesn't change the fact that earlier versions stay open source and third parties (including the community) can still fork them if they want to. That's because have no objection to proprietary codebases to begin with, even though I appreciate open source, use open source, and prefer to make my code open source.
Open source is not an end for me, but a means to: a) establish/burnish the authors' reputations, b) benefit from third parties' contributions in-kind. Monetization is not so much dependent on whether a codebase is open source or proprietary, nor on its license, but on the codebase's value (to others) including the value of future development on that codebase.
Monetizing infrastructure software can be very difficult, especially when it is a commodity, but SQLite3 has succeeded at that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819950
There are several challenges here. One challenge is the name "Commons" is very misleading. It's not creating a commons, and it's also confusingly similar to the term "Creative Commons" which has been around for a really long time. Also, the Commons website says that the Commons license is not OSS "at least not by the official definition set forth by the OSD". Yet that is the official generally-accepted definition.
They really should've run the name by someone familiar with the copyright landscape.
Childhood is believing in free software, adulthood is knowing Microsoft was right. What kills open source software is greed, and very few people are immune from that.
Childhood is believing in free software, adulthood is knowing Microsoft was right. What kills open source software is greed, and very few people are immune from that.