71–80 of 226 posts
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Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.
The companies ive seen try this receive an ungodly number of complaints about how theyre ruining open source.
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> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise. When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, an…
OSI is asleep at the wheel on this one IMHO https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensin... I wonder why aren't they standardizing an open source license that prevents hyperscale cloud monetization by someone other than the originators? Don't OSS communities hold the cards here? it's just a change to license.txt, broad OSS adoption and it's a very different type of cloud (picture nuclear mushroom clou…
I've read quite a bit from OSI stalwarts about why they take the positions they do, but I still don't understand them, and therefore shouldn't try to relate them.
If I had to make one criticism of the OSI mailing list reaction to both my License Zero Reciprocal License, which later became Parity, and also MongoDB's Server Side Public License, it's that takes almost invariably focused on who was proposing the license, and the business model they seemed to have in mind, and ignored the extent to which older licenses had provided substantially the same functionality, as the basis of similar business models, before the software-as-a-service shift. It wasn't clear whether that was relevant criticism or not, since the process wasn't clear to begin with, and notional clarifications from OSI staff and eventually the board only muddied the waters.
When literally anyone can object to a license, or block the approval process, for almost any reason, so long as they can phrase it in vague philosophical terms, then no new ideas in copyleft will ever get through. Even if those new ideas boil down to maintenance work on existing licenses now showing their age.
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Just use AGPL and suddenly the big boys won’t touch you! They can negotiate a special license just for them.
Dual licenses kind of defeat the one of the purposes of open source which is getting outside developers to contribute to your product. Why should I as an outside developer submit pull requests and be required to assign copyright to you so you can make money selling a proprietary license?
"This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free" I had to laugh at this one. Isn't this what many open source projects have been doing forever? Open Office, Chrome, Apache, etc. I could go on. Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. "It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive" So offering a fr…
> Many open source applications were designed to compete with a paid/proprietary counterpart. No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price. You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day. But part of being open source is providing source, letting the user decompile/recompile and modify…
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What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…
> people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?
People are imperfect, and organizations made of people are inherently imperfect. If you didn't allow yourself to use anything made by anyone who acted immorally, you wouldn't be allowed to use anything.
Should I not use Comcast for my internet if it's the only provider in my area? At a certain point the 'karma' associated with taking a hard-line on a company's ethics is no longer worth the inconvenience.
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Amazon, the third most valuable company on Earth and controlled by Earth's most wealthy human being, cloned an open-source project and then sold access to it. Of course that's allowed under the Apache license, but I'm sure Elastic never saw that one coming. So they tried to correct their mistake. Surely Amazon could afford to figure out a financial arrangement to continue using Elasticsearch, and surely that arrangem…
My problem is Elastic acts like the employees of that company are the only people that ever contributed code to their project. Being open source that's simply not true. What about all of the contributors to Elastic that are not employees. Why does Elastic own the monetization of other people's work?
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What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…
> Users on average refuse to pay for software / web apps Yes. And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. This "free to use for your personal data" model ensures that any potential competitor has a very high bar to entry, and it ensures that their product will always be inferior because of the lack of data that can make it better.
You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?
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So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no…
Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…
> people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?
Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in wha…
What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People compla…