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FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#41

Post by atq2119 »

James_K wrote: post #33
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire point of this license is to prevent forks of software. If that was the case, it would be a different license. The point of the license is to enable forks, but with some restrictions. There are many (once) Open Source software projects where the rights holder at one point made decisions that required a full community (or even commercial fork). The license does not want to take that opportunity away. From…

I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs*, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. Had thi…

If you follow the link to the actual license, it does list done explicitly permitted uses. So yes, it does seem that you can fork it and do something useful with the fork.

That something useful is restricted, which is the point of the license.

I think the intention here is reasonable and honest as presented by the big list. Whether the actual legal language matches that intention - who knows. I'm worried that it might not but IANAL.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#42

Post by mcny »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #38
James_K wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs*, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. Had thi…

> My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. The answer is a bit of yes, and a bit of no. If the project is actively main…

What are your thoughts on AGPL? Is it not good enough? Do you think (lets say it out loud because we all know what we are talking about) Amazon Web Services will have advantage over you if you picked AGPL as your license?

At the end of the day, I think your sales team has to earn its salary. It can't just phone it in like (I assume) Microsoft sales does with Microsoft SQL Server. Why isn't AGPL good enough?

Genuinely asking, what change does it need to make it better?

Edit: previously on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34768668

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#43

Post by bentlegen »

James_K wrote: post #33
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire point of this license is to prevent forks of software. If that was the case, it would be a different license. The point of the license is to enable forks, but with some restrictions. There are many (once) Open Source software projects where the rights holder at one point made decisions that required a full community (or even commercial fork). The license does not want to take that opportunity away. From…

I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs*, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. Had thi…

> My interpretation of this license is that it's effectively saying: "you can't do anything with this while we're working on it".

I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors.

The license does not prevent you from the former. You could fork it and do what you want with it to monitor your own non-competing software.

And if your goal is the latter – to fork the project to compete with the original authors – why do you feel you should be allowed to do that? Sentry is developed by employees on its payroll, not from community contributions (with a caveat that there are many parts that are fully permissive OSS, licensed under Apache 2 or MIT, and those projects do have some community contributions). And yes, the license is meant to discourage this competing use – for 2 years.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#44

Post by mst »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #32
phkahler wrote: post #30

Please stop using the Apache licenses. License compatibility is too important. Use MIT (my preference) or BSD if you want a "permissive" one and GPL or LGPL otherwise (v3+ preferred). Anything else is just making non-reusable code. Apache is the same org that actively harms one of the highest visibility open source projects by keeping "Open Office" around. Their licenses are similarly unwelcome IMO.

> GPL or LGPL otherwise (v3+ preferred). I'm confused about your concern then if v3+ is preferred. Apache 2 is compatible with the GPL 3 family of licenses, it's just not compatible with the GPL 2 family of licenses. The only incompatibility of Apache 2 are GPLv2 licenses, but so is GPL 3. Apache 2 has some benefits to the user over MIT, but the GPL incompatibility is why there are two flavors of FSL.

This sort of discussion is what leads me to be fond of license disjunctions - perl's use of Artistic|GPL being the one I'm most familiar with.

The idea being that "you may use this software under the terms of ${license} or under the terms of the GPL" means there's absolutely no question as to GPL compatibility for the people who value that, and you can pick the value of $license to taste (I use the same license as perl for CPAN releases, but for other languages using whichever is the most popular permissive license you like in that ecosystem is likely a good answer).

I note downthread you have reasons why you can't do that with the GPL, and it might be worth having an explanation of that written up somewhere findable given that honestly hadn't occurred to me so I may not be the only one, but I figure disjunctions are still worth mentioning as a general tool even if not applicable in your case.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#45

Post by layer8 »

James_K wrote: post #37
stavros wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes it especially easy to do so by simply pushing small incompatible changes on a two-year schedule. What does that achieve? You can just use the two-year-old copy of the code.

I suppose not much. So the licence does succeed in forcing software to go open source after two years, but before that, it still effectively forces the maintainers of forks to put in an equal amount of effort to the holder of the licence. This makes a fork much harder since it would require a development team equal in size to the official one two years to bring it up to date.

That’s only if you care about the same additions that the original developers do. However, a fork is usually motivated by a disagreement on the trajectory. Or you don’t actually want to fork, but only want to monetize their work SaaS-style, which is exactly what the FSL is intended to prevent.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#46

Post by Symbiote »

antipurist wrote: post #31
frognumber wrote: post #16

It's very hard for me to take anything which starts with CatB seriously. It was very charismatic, beating up a strawman which didn't exist, and zero of it played out as expected. Eric Raymond is mostly gone, as everything he's touched has failed. Open-source has started to realize Richard was right about ethics, as the two movements have increasingly converged. Richard, for his part, is still marginalized, socially a…

Your comment, and this line in particular: > A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract. finally gave me an answer to the question that bothered me for a while: how do we reconcile the goal of making FOSS available for everyone to run/tinker with/distribute freely with the issue of corporatio…

That's a non-commercial licence, which is not FOSS.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#47

Post by MaxBarraclough »

antipurist wrote: post #31
frognumber wrote: post #16

It's very hard for me to take anything which starts with CatB seriously. It was very charismatic, beating up a strawman which didn't exist, and zero of it played out as expected. Eric Raymond is mostly gone, as everything he's touched has failed. Open-source has started to realize Richard was right about ethics, as the two movements have increasingly converged. Richard, for his part, is still marginalized, socially a…

Your comment, and this line in particular: > A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract. finally gave me an answer to the question that bothered me for a while: how do we reconcile the goal of making FOSS available for everyone to run/tinker with/distribute freely with the issue of corporatio…

This is contradictory.

> less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts

This gives the impression you support sticking to truly Free and Open Source software licences.

> the code is free for non-commercial use

A licence that explicitly forbids commercial use in this way is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence, by definition.

> I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice

The Business Source Licence (aka BSL, or sometimes BUSL for some reason) pretty much does this. [0] It is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence. (They're pretty upfront about this, which is good.)

[0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#osl

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#48

Post by growse »

The definition of "harmful free-riding" is not good, and its use to justify the license is problematic.

> Consequently, the common pool resource may be under-produced, overused, or degraded. Additionally, it has been shown that despite evidence that people tend to be cooperative by nature (a prosocial behaviour), the presence of free-riders causes cooperation to deteriorate, perpetuating the free-rider problem.”

Software doesn't wear out, or degrade through use. The analogies offered to other, physical common services are nonsensical.

Also, there's plenty of projects that are open source, have an enormous amount of usage, and don't suffer from this problem. The difference between these and projects which perceive they suffer from the "harmful freeloading" problem is not the license, it's a badly-thought-through business model.

If your business model relies on no-one else using your software to compete with you, don't open-source the software. Especially don't whine about it and then pretend to open source it. Just do proprietary.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#49

Post by mst »

fidotron wrote: post #6

While I am not entirely persuaded the specifics of this license are correct it does seem to be a potential improvement over the status quo and so it is good that it is being tried. With the economic situation how it is I think we will see a lot of these sorts of things shake out as our current direction is unsustainable.

It strikes me as "the least worst compromise license I've yet seen" and I mean that positively.

Re: FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

#50

Post by James_K »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #38
James_K wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs*, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. Had thi…

> My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. The answer is a bit of yes, and a bit of no. If the project is actively main…

> Xapian under a hypothetical FSL would long have been able to commercialize it.

I feel like you still aren't understanding what I'm saying here. Suppose a hypothetical version of the Xapian devs existed that were willing to use the FSL, but didn't because it didn't exist at the time. I could email those people, and ask "can you give me an Apache licensed version of your code from two years ago". They would then give me a copy of that code. The license is just a written expression of what a developer is willing to do. The existence of this licence doesn't actually change what devs are willing to do. It doesn't solve any problems. Anyone not using this license can still release old versions of their software under a different licence. Likewise anyone using the licence can always stop using it for future revisions of their software. It doesn't enable you to do anything, and it doesn't provide much of a guarantee to users.

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