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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

#241

Post by Bartweiss »

XiZhao wrote: post #201
DannyBee wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many conditions of a project can change when it goes from being a small community to a business that supports billions of revenue with its software. Ultimately, the Clause is not meant to transition an open source project with the intention of staying open, it's to keep as much openness as possible when events happen that force a project to close certain things. I think a lot of the fear is that this will make a lot…

> Other things are forcing projects to close, and ignoring those forces and blaming it on evil investors and business people is not only disconnected from reality -- it's a really sad an un-empathetic view

Please, please clarify what those 'other things' are.

Both the Commons Clause FAQ and your comments here repeatedly imply this is about handling "specific bad behavior", "other things... forcing projects to close", and "the most predatory of use cases". But nowhere is there any clarity about what these dark forces are. What's 'predatory'? Are we talking about harassment by contributors? Extortion by lawsuit? Cloud hosting for a fee? Just contributors undercutting the business offerings?

The only motive explicitly clarified in the FAQ is the need to monetize, which is what Drew's piece challenged. In response there's this suggestion that the clause is actually defensive against some sort of attack by contributors and so it won't affect most people. In the comments here, you've said it's not your place to call out specific actors, but haven't given any example of what sort of behavior you mean.

It sounds like there's a real problem here, deeper than "we want to make money like RedisLabs", but this conversation is hopeless as long as that problem goes unstated. I don't think it's fair to say people are being un-empathetic to actual developers when no one can understand what situation we're supposed to be showing empathy about.

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

#242

Post by Bartweiss »

lovelearning wrote: post #132
mindcrime wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "bad behavior"? Was anybody doing anything that was prohibited by the terms of the previous license(s)? If not, then the real "problem" is that somebody made a bad choice w/r/t licensing. The solution is to switch to an existing license which has the desired terms, OR - as an absolute last resort - create a new license. Preferably the former, as the latter adds to license proliferation, creates confusion, contri…

This RedisLabs link explains the kind of bad behavior this clause aims to prevent. As I understand it, the bad guys here are cloud providers. [1]: https://redislabs.com/community/licences/

I agree that this seems like what the Commons Clause is intended for. But it looks to me like it just validates Drew's concerns?

The complaint here is "Redis is only making money for people who host and manage it, not people who develop it". The proposed solution looks to be "ensure these modules are making money for RedisLabs instead". RedisLabs wanted to profit from their work and stop others from doing so, so they adopted a not-OSS license.

Fine, but the framing of bad behavior and a threat to open source doesn't make much sense to me. It looks like exactly what Drew described; funding OSS development is tricky, but RedisLabs responded by giving up on doing OSS. Kevin's FAQ and comments in this thread imply some much darker bad behavior than that, with things like "predatory uses" and "forced to close". If it's just "AWS hosts Redis for a fee", that doesn't seem justified.

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

#243

Post by dragonwriter »

lovelearning wrote: post #132
mindcrime wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "bad behavior"? Was anybody doing anything that was prohibited by the terms of the previous license(s)? If not, then the real "problem" is that somebody made a bad choice w/r/t licensing. The solution is to switch to an existing license which has the desired terms, OR - as an absolute last resort - create a new license. Preferably the former, as the latter adds to license proliferation, creates confusion, contri…

This RedisLabs link explains the kind of bad behavior this clause aims to prevent. As I understand it, the bad guys here are cloud providers. [1]: https://redislabs.com/community/licences/

> However, today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings. Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to those open source projects.

The complaint seems to just be masking “Google, AWS, et al. don't give us, a competing cloud provider that took over a pre-existing open source project, money” beyond a smokescreen of misleading generalizations.

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

#244

Post by christefano »

AstralStorm wrote: post #138
codeflo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plus sign suggests an additional right, as a dual license would offer, instead, it removes rights from the Apache license. I don't think that's an accident because judging from the website, this seems to be a very serious attempt to put a positive spin on "look but don't touch" style proprietary licensing schemes. Fuck this.

In other words, it is no longer Apache license and it is NOT ALLOWED to use Apache Software Foundation trademark Apache. Call it Indian license or what not. This is unlike GPL which allows the use of the name as long as the clauses are not restrictive.

> Call it Indian license or what not.

Come on, really? I'm sure you could have picked a less offensive example than "Indian license".

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

#245

Post by ehnto »

pdonis wrote: post #213
ehnto wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. But the value those corporations are creating is embodied in much more than just the software. It's the whole infrastructure they build, which integrates the software into a complete solution that meets users' needs. > Why would I want to build a tool for corporate infrastructure if they take it and make million…

Certainly it's the sum of the parts that makes the business valuable. Some of those parts are free, but I guess I just don't understand why they should be in a business context. I am not a budding capitalist who is disappointed that I'm not getting a cut mind you. I just have no desire to contribute to commercial tools for free.

Back to the desire to work on OSS. I used to work on an OSS eCommerce platform for a living, and as an agency we would contribute back. The platform gives us work because it exists, we contribute back. But it's still all commercial software made for monetary gain. Its just tiring, and deters me from working on it after hours. I don't want my whole life to be about making other people money.

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

#246

Post by ehnto »

sipos wrote: post #128
ehnto wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This is true of everything. This isn't a problem with open source, it is a problem with society generally.

The rest of society doesn't give their "business cogs" away for free though. It just strikes me as odd that in a business context, there's the expectation that lots of the software will be free.

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

#247

Post by ehnto »

DannyBee wrote: post #172
ehnto wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not really an issue to me that someone else is making money, I understand I could come off as a budding capitalist who's mad they are missing out on their cut. But that's not the case. I have always felt OSS was an embodiment of human generosity, and it just seems that it's been commandeered by commercial interests. Passionate devs are happy to keep working on it anyway, because it's fun. Their efforts might have been better spent on more altruistic OSS projects, but that's not my decision to make, and I don't exactly lead by example.

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

#248

Post by christefano »

Bartweiss wrote: post #241
XiZhao wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many conditions of a project can change when it goes from being a small community to a business that supports billions of revenue with its software. Ultimately, the Clause is not meant to transition an open source project with the intention of staying open, it's to keep as much openness as possible when events happen that force a project to close certain things. I think a lot of the fear is that this will make a lot…

> Other things are forcing projects to close, and ignoring those forces and blaming it on evil investors and business people is not only disconnected from reality -- it's a really sad an un-empathetic view Please, please clarify what those 'other things' are. Both the Commons Clause FAQ and your comments here repeatedly imply this is about handling "specific bad behavior", "other things... forcing projects to close",…

> It sounds like there's a real problem here, deeper than "we want to make money like RedisLabs", but this conversation is hopeless as long as that problem goes unstated. I don't think it's fair to say people are being un-empathetic to actual developers when no one can understand what situation we're supposed to be showing empathy about.

This.

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