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

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

#231

Post by orangeshark » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #186

arminiusreturns wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF can explain it better than I can. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html

> It drives me nuts how much people talk about OSS when they need to at least mention the difference between FOSS and OSS. Maybe because like you they find it hard to explain? According to your linked resources, it appears that everything except the Common Clause is FOSS. So, basically everything I've ever seen is FOSS.

> According to your linked resources, it appears that everything except the Common Clause is FOSS.

> So, basically everything I've ever seen is FOSS.

Correct. Free Software just puts more attention to the freedom part of software.

GNU has a nice diagram and some category definitions for software at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

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

#232

Post by dang » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #173

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…

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

Personal swipes and name-calling will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.

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

#233

Post by pdonis » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 11:29 PM UTC

zapita wrote: post #220

pdonis wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both Salvatore (Antirez) and Shai worked on their projects for years, with minimal support from the outside world, grew their community organically, and managed to build something useful for thousands of grateful developers. Later, they looked for ways to make a good living In other words, making a good living from the product was an afterthought. So they shouldn't be surprised that they're not getting as much valu…

> That's not to say that there aren't ways to monetize open source products, just that doing it as an afterthought isn't one of them. Says who? You are entitled to your opinion on the matter, but this is a very contested issue and your opinion is just one of many. If you’re going to argue that Redis and Elastic are “doing open-source monetization wrong”, maybe you should back up your claim with arguments. > If it's a…

> If you’re going to argue that Redis and Elastic are “doing open-source monetization wrong”, maybe you should back up your claim with arguments.

I did. Did you read my post?

> What do you propose as an alternative to what Elastic and Redis are doing?

As an alternative now? I'm not sure there is one. Their products are already out there being monetized by others.

As an alternative back when they started? They could have let everyone know that they were aiming to monetize their products as a business from the beginning. Then they would have been taking on for themselves the business risks that cloud providers, for example, took on by building infrastructure using their products and trying to sell it to users.

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

#234

Post by monster2control » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:21 AM UTC

After reading your post, your comments here, the Redislabs post and the entire Commons Clause and FAQ, I feel like you didn’t read either of them completely yourself before getting all doomsday about it.

Redislabs made a good point, cloud providers are making huge amounts of money off these products and often contribute little back. Take Linode and their Block Storage service for example. They use Ceph, but contribute nothing to the Ceph open source. Or QEMU, the entire basis of their business, and not a single commit from anyone there.

The Commons Clause addressed the AGPL question you ask in your comment.

Redislabs states the goal is not to close source redis core, that will remain free forever, and that the use of the priority modules will be free for most use cases, but when companies makes money from packaging it all up as a service, they should have to pay a license fee, which seems completely fair.

I’ve worked for a large cloud providers and some small ones, it’s pretty common at these places to not care what the License is because as long as it’s running on a server, it doesn’t matter. And selling service based off them, just means profits without giving back in most cases.

The final point of the Commons Clause says very clearly that this was not meant to be slapped on every OSS license and that it’s not a final solution but meant to spark conversation.

In that way, it’s working exactly as intended.

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

#235

Post by halbritt » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

zapita wrote: post #196

halbritt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Redi…

> 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 I think that's very unfair. Both Redis and ElasticSearch are definitely grassroots projects - both Salvatore (Antirez) and Shai worked on their projects for years, with minimal support from the outside world, grew their community organically, and…

We may disagree as to whether they are or are not "grass roots" which is subjective in any case. Both Elastic and Redis Labs were formed relatively early on and are the primary contributors to both projects. There's not a great diversity of contributors as there are on other projects.

That said, I never made the argument that their business efforts were a bad thing nor opposed to community efforts, though certainly others have in this context.

Personally, I believe that both commercial entities are entitled to compensation. One of the points that I was attempting to make is that AWS nearly killed their respective businesses by reselling the product of their efforts while making no contribution back to either project.

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

#236

Post by chriswarbo » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 11:33 AM UTC

quadrangle wrote: post #165

servilio wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No license can work where it isn't used, AGPL included. Redis has been licensed under BSD 3-clause since at least version 2.2[1]. [1] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/2.2/COPYING

I think the point is that there had been separate modules that were AGPL but still being used…?

Looks like it, according to https://redislabs.com/blog/why-redis-labs-modules-are-agpl

> We wanted to keep our modules open source, so that everyone can freely use them, enhance them and fix issues. On the other hand, we are a commercial entity that invests a lot of time, effort and money developing these modules and verifying they can work under extreme deployment conditions. Therefore, we wanted to make sure no one else can resell them for commercial purposes.

That last sentence is key: it shows the preamble to be a smokescreen, since they're explicitly stating that they're against the literal number 1 criterion of open source (as per https://opensource.org/osd ):

> 1. Free Redistribution

> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

This condition appears before any related to source code. In other words, RedisLabs are pulling the classic "we want our software to be proprietary, but we also want other people to fix our bugs for free" (see also "Shared Source" and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software ).

They thought releasing under the AGPL would strike that balance, but it turns out it didn't so they've now gone to a proprietary license like they always wanted.

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

#237

Post by rmc » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 11:34 AM UTC

kup0 wrote: post #77

Regardless of whether or not it is harmful to open source, I find the choice to use two words beginning with C (thus CC as an acronym) flawed, as that abbreviation is typically used to refer to Creative Commons, and Commons Clause and Creative Commons sound quite similar too since they both use the word Commons. I would hope this was not an intentional choice to sow confusion. Edit: obvious spelling error :)

And since Creative Commons have a non-commerical licence, which is similar in aim to this. Plenty understand that as "CC-NC"

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

#238

Post by rmc » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 11:40 AM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #167

sebazzz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't read anything about their intentions yet. Have they addressed this confusion?

It's been asked several times to him on this topic, and quite frankly, he's had ample time to respond to someone.

Sometimes you can tell what someone means by what they don't say, especially if saying the thing is embarrassing/bad for them.

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

#239

Post by jakobegger » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:45 PM UTC

A common fear with Open Source software is "What if someone takes my work and profits from it?". But in my opinion, that's the point of Open Source! If you don't want others to profit from your code, make it proprietary!

But any attempt to make software open source, but still make sure that I get licensing fees or whatnot if someone makes a profit from it, is in my opinion seriously misguided.

With Open Source, our business model should be that lots of people work together to build an ecosystem; no-one profits directly from selling the code, but everyone profits from using the code. Some people contribute to the project because they offer consulting services, some people profit because they use it for their job, etc.

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

#240

Post by arminiusreturns » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 3:47 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #186

arminiusreturns wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF can explain it better than I can. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html

> It drives me nuts how much people talk about OSS when they need to at least mention the difference between FOSS and OSS. Maybe because like you they find it hard to explain? According to your linked resources, it appears that everything except the Common Clause is FOSS. So, basically everything I've ever seen is FOSS.

That's a little bit of a cheap shot, I just wanted to give you a good resource for digging into licenses.

Due to bsd and MIT allowing tivoization, those are the two non-foss licenses in that list in my opinion. I try to always use gplv3 when I can, but apache 2+ is acceptable to me.