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What comes after open source

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: What comes after open source

#41

Post by coldpie »

Retra wrote: post #39
Townley wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unfortunately even more conflicted than that. I can't answer the question "If someone wants to take my crummy code and commercialize it, am I okay with that?" If it's a kid in his basement with an amazing idea, absolutely. I'll watch them ring the closing bell at the NASDAQ from my couch and feel nothing but pride. If it's Google or Amazon... maybe still yes, but less so? It'd depend on my subjective perception o…

You should probably just retain those rights then and encourage people to contact you for permission to use it commercially under a more specific license. No harm in mentioning that you'll probably allow people to use your work if they aren't in a position to pay for it or working for someone you don't like.

I would agree, but then it makes accepting outside contributions much trickier.

Re: What comes after open source

#42

Post by jchw »

steveklabnik wrote: post #17
jchw wrote: post #8

Very clever and well put. I have to let this one stew. That said, still in the camp of "nothing is wrong," I think. It is a tough pill to swallow that companies that build around open source software are fundamentally vulnerable, but perhaps it's time to swallow. Open Source has never been healthier even ignoring those contributions. If X manages to corner Y into a proprietary license, does open source win or lose? I…

I didn't really get into what aspects of production that developers are thinking about today in the post, because I didn't think it was necessary to make my point. My point is to get some people thinking about this, not decree exactly what I think the issue is. I do think that open source is working . The question is more of, who is it working for, and why? Could it be made to work for more people? Is it working in t…

Fair point: open source isn't really my day job. But, I do ask, what qualifies as an open source developer? I definitely work on open source, even if it's not my primary work. If you only count people who work for OSS companies specifically... Isn't that a bit selection-bias-y?

Re: What comes after open source

#43

Post by ndesaulniers »

An excellent essay that puts to words something I've been feeling of for a long time. Particularly:

"following the letter, but not the spirit,"

I'm unhappy with the GPL because companies do the bare minimum to comply, and sometimes make their forks difficult to even find.

And freedom to me means freedom to have propriety forks, because either your downstream fork plans to last as long as upstream, in which case diverging from upstream makes rebasing more and more costly over time (incentivising you to minimize that divergence as that's less work/cost in terms of maintainership), or you have a very shortlived product that won't be relevant for long.

And the point about paying developers to still contribute to upstream even when downstream has propriety bits is lost in a lot of people.

Re: What comes after open source

#44

Post by throwaway11992 »

> refusing to use a wifi connection on your laptop because there aren’t free drivers helps basically nobody

[citation needed]

What if the mild inconvenience encourages people to write a free driver or donate to the developers? It happens all the time.

> and only harms yourself

...or it encourages me to work on an alternative. I often contribute to GPL software. As a side effect, it really improved my skill and career.

Re: What comes after open source

#45

Post by zanny »

Townley wrote: post #16

I recently wrote a piece of software and wanted to make it open source. GitHub's helpful dropdown of license choices gave me more pause than I expected as I struggled to choose between MIT and GPL. "I definitely want someone to be able to modify, fork, and publish better versions of this code. Do I also want them to be able to commercially license their derivatives?" On one hand, this code was contributed to the publ…

> is a boon to creativity.

Its a boon for one generation of creatives, but then the buck stops there and you are right back to proprietary everything no creativity left for the masses such as on mobile platforms. Copyleft guarantees creativity for all who touch the software, not just the first developer to commercialize it.

> good for them!

Made this comment[1] that Steve even replied to a week ago, and imagine that whole discussion thread inspired this blog post, but its not really just "good for them".

> looking for a simple answer to the question

And have spent going on forty years at it, because there is no simple answer to escape the externalities of writing code. Either nobody uses your code and it doesn't matter, or somebody uses your code and it does matter. What you write, how you license it, how you distribute and produce it, will all matter if it gets used.

The fallacy is that the permissive community wants to see it used at any cost. To make the code matter, even if it has a negative impact - on the developer ecosystem, on the ecosystem it works in, or on society at large. But at the end of the day, FAANG is entirely built on top of both free and open source software, they represent combined the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of the free world, and you can't stay naive enough to think the code you give away is simply "so people will use it" as the be all and end all forever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19497949

Re: What comes after open source

#46

Post by derekp7 »

Townley wrote: post #16

I recently wrote a piece of software and wanted to make it open source. GitHub's helpful dropdown of license choices gave me more pause than I expected as I struggled to choose between MIT and GPL. "I definitely want someone to be able to modify, fork, and publish better versions of this code. Do I also want them to be able to commercially license their derivatives?" On one hand, this code was contributed to the publ…

My solution is to start of with GPLv3, then I can always relax it later if needed. If your project takes a lot of external contributions, you can always require that the contributions be licensed under a less restrictive license in case you need to relicense later.

The other thing is you can grant exceptions to people if they have an unanticipated need (i.e., mixing your code with other free software code with incompatible licenses).

Re: What comes after open source

#48

Post by jimmy1 »

osullivj wrote: post #36
paddy_m wrote: post #9

In response to the first quote "Today’s developers have never learned about this history" I agree. I would love to see more CS history classes. I know that star schema were a thing, and hierarchical databases were a thing, but I know nothing about them. I don't know what their failings were that led to dominance of RBDMSes. I'm very curious to know how similar they were to mongo or other current schemaless databases.…

Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry.

> Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry.

I agree that wheel reinvention is an issue that needs addressing but not to the extent as you describe (a "plague").

I also believe this comment misunderstands why it happens. As it stands today, it is a feature, not a bug. You don't see reinvention a lot in traditional engineering disciplines because you have something concrete and functional that takes years of research and hours of construction. Any hacker with a laptop can pick up a language and start building stuff. This ease of access is what creates the "wheel reinvention" situation, that and an endless amount of choices and a limited amount of discoverability of what is out there. Exposure to history and philosophy of software would do nothing to address that.

Finally, reinvention is seen as virtue in this industry, not a plague. To some degree, I agree: software is never complete. And even if you think so, the software built underneath your software may change, thus changing your software. Some level of reinvention may come with new considerations that were not considerations of the past.

Re: What comes after open source

#49

Post by steveklabnik »

fartcannon wrote: post #47

All these articles about licensing are starting to feel a lot like Microsoft's not-that-old 'Get The Facts' FUD campaign. Anyone else get the feeling they're being manipulated by a campaign?

I am unemployed, so I'm at my most free to talk right now :) So not these posts at least!

Re: What comes after open source

#50

Post by steveklabnik »

jchw wrote: post #42
steveklabnik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really get into what aspects of production that developers are thinking about today in the post, because I didn't think it was necessary to make my point. My point is to get some people thinking about this, not decree exactly what I think the issue is. I do think that open source is working . The question is more of, who is it working for, and why? Could it be made to work for more people? Is it working in t…

Fair point: open source isn't really my day job. But, I do ask, what qualifies as an open source developer? I definitely work on open source, even if it's not my primary work. If you only count people who work for OSS companies specifically... Isn't that a bit selection-bias-y?

I think that, in and of itself, is an interesting question!
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