The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by cryptonector » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #89

mr_toad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporate grab of open source software Well then fork them. I mean it. ‘Licenses applied to previous versions cannot be revoked’ - https://commonsclause.com My understanding (IANAL), is that only new code can be subjected to new conditions/licenses. Old code can still be used under the old license.

Developer and volunteer time and attention is a finite resource though. Effort that was spent on open software that's now spent on proprietary software is less effort being spent on open source. Furthermore if you're now expending effort to fork something - in this case possibly many things - thats effort you're not spending on what used to be your higher priorities. Yes forking might in some cases be the only option…

Nothing is free. There is no entitlement to benefiting from someone else's investment in software. I don't see why future Redis development or whatever can't be taken proprietary.

Yes, you could make a license that precludes it, but if you insist on copyright assignment then you'll always get the right to re-license anyways.

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

#172

Post by DannyBee » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #101

DannyBee wrote: post #54

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…

"Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software. "

That is often true, but i guess i try to be pragmatic. I did not create the corporation or do all of that work to make that happen. Maybe people think this is easy, but it's not. it is a lot of work in most cases.

I also get paid plenty. Why should i care that someone else is getting paid more? None of this was ever about making significant amounts of money, and open source is almost certainly a bad model to achieve that for real. It tends to create lots of value and attempts to distribute that value usually destroy it.

I may be weird about this though. I have plenty of friends who have made hundreds of millions or billions building those corporations. I chose not to do that, and instead be happy with what i've got (and i've got plenty) and value different things.

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

#173

Post by opportune » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

foundry27 wrote: post #37

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…

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…

Get off your free speech soapbox, nobody is saying that this person has no right to discuss this idea, we are just saying it is a terrible idea. This is a ridiculous non-argument

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

#174

Post by floatboth » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

As a non-commercial user, I'm okay with using stuff that's for non-commercial use only.

The problem is when I want to, say, copy a few functions into my own project which I'm publishing under completely unrestricted terms (say, Unlicense). Or use as a dependency, etc.

So, I'd say it's okay-ish for "product-like" stuff, for user-facing applications. But please NEVER publish libraries everyone depends upon under these terms.

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

#175

Post by cryptonector » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

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…

Of course you can fight ideas. Happens all the time. Convincing the dogmatic is difficult or impossible, but not every idea is dogma to many or any people.

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

#176

Post by wemdyjreichert » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

Please, somebody fork redis.

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

#177

Post by smueller1234 » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #153

XiZhao wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Clause was drafted as a reactionary move to solve against specific bad behavior. I'm not entirely sure it's my place to call out these actors (I'll leave that to the users of the Clause), but our job was to open up an option that isn't quite "screw this, let's go full closed source". See the commons clause FAQ for answers to your other questions: https://commonsclause.com/

No, it's not bad behavior, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of open source economic models, and a desire to have your cake and eat it too. I will steal an argument from a friend who has been doing free software/open source for 30+ years now. Y'all created a bunch of open source software, it became valuable. Y'all think that you should get to extract some percentage of that value, and that others being able to do i…

Vaguely similar prior art, similar in motivation, similarly flawed, IMO: Monty's Business Source license.

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2016/08/applying-business-sou...

That received a lot of criticism from its community as well, but also from existing MariaDB Corp customers. I know because I worked for one at the time that was seriously considering stopping the level of collaboration we had. We were quite sad about that at the time and decided to not go that far but instead stopped giving additional funding to the extensions that we were interested in.

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

#178

Post by jahewson » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

XiZhao wrote: post #84

justinjlynn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fundamental issue with the clause is that it fundamentally changes the nature of the licences it infects. It is just as disingenuous to say "we're an Open Source plus Common Clause project (Apache + Common Clause)" as it is to say "We host Redis (we mean Redis + Proprietary add-ons we use under the AGPL from Redis Labs, that you can't have, which make us incompatible with Open Source Redis)". There's nothing new o…

I don't think the Clause is necessarily the most elegant end-all solution, but there are often broad business, timing and legal requirements that make it really hard to draft a full license to satisfy everyone. In fact, I'd love to see a v2 standalone license. One of the design constraints was size and readability. I think part of the goal here was to start with something extremely short-form. More broadly, the avera…

> More broadly, the average OSS license is far from robust.

This is pure FUD.

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

#179

Post by simonh » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:23 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #171

simonh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developer and volunteer time and attention is a finite resource though. Effort that was spent on open software that's now spent on proprietary software is less effort being spent on open source. Furthermore if you're now expending effort to fork something - in this case possibly many things - thats effort you're not spending on what used to be your higher priorities. Yes forking might in some cases be the only option…

Nothing is free. There is no entitlement to benefiting from someone else's investment in software. I don't see why future Redis development or whatever can't be taken proprietary. Yes, you could make a license that precludes it, but if you insist on copyright assignment then you'll always get the right to re-license anyways.

I understand nothing is free. Creators and owners can license their software however they please. Their freedom to do so is not what is under discussion here. The vast majority of the code I’ve ever written was proprietary, but I’m very proud of the roughly 10k lines that is open source. We’re just having a debate about pros, cons and possible consequences, which I think is perfectly reasonable and legitimate.

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

#180

Post by btilly » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

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…

There are lots of places where money comes from.

One is the following observation. Customers are usually willing to spend $X on a solution to their problem, but are relatively agnostic on how $X is divided up. So if customers are willing to pay about the same for Oracle on Sun, and for Oracle on Linux, but Linux is cheaper than Sun, then Oracle can (and did!) successfully charge more to run on Linux. The result is that it is in Oracle's interest to make the Linux solution available and preferred by any means necessary..including improving Linux.

The same logic applied to IBM contributing to Apache so that they could charge for Websphere. Or any other case where there is a required component of an overall solution.

The widespread recognition of this back in the late 1990s was why the open source movement so quickly got a lot of corporate sponsorship from big companies.