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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

#71

Post by growse »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #67
geerlingguy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the philosophy of wanting to use open source and gain the community / benefits of it... but using a proprietary sales model. It just doesn't work, and once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" (whether or not you use that word), you've lost the whole concept of why most of us care about true open source. We can use it, we can learn fr…

> once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" Who does that? Certainly not us.

The entire justification of the existence of the license talks about the problem of the "harmful freeloaders".

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

#72

Post by James_K »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #59
James_K wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Just to be clear what happened at Xapian: a bunch of people built some software. It was open sourced under the GPL whic…

This is such a niche case it's not really worth talking about, but the original devs still released it under GPL. The FSL is literally just the Apache license in this case. So you aren't arguing for the FSL, just that the original devs should have used Apache instead of GPL. That's just your opinion. If there was a version of the FSL that converted to GPL after two years, you'd have the exact same issue. The FSL portion of the licence is not relevant as no one was ever interested in releasing Xapian under a closed licence for a limited amount of time.

This isn't really a rebuttal to my wider point that FSL doesn't do anything you couldn't without it. There's nothing stopping you from just releasing old versions under a different license anyway, and no real reason to commit to doing so specifically for the next two years.

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

#73

Post by bentlegen »

growse wrote: post #71
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" Who does that? Certainly not us.

The entire justification of the existence of the license talks about the problem of the "harmful freeloaders".

The people we're concerned about are not the hundreds of thousands of Sentry users, including those that self-host.

We're concerned about people who have taken the software for the purposes of competing directly against us, that hinders our ability to monetize the work. Monetizing the work helps us continue improving the software and distribute it for free use, benefitting those aforementioned real users (e.g. https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted).

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

#74

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

growse wrote: post #71
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once you start calling users of your software who contribute nothing back anything resembling "freeloader" Who does that? Certainly not us.

The entire justification of the existence of the license talks about the problem of the "harmful freeloaders".

> "harmful freeloaders".

The phrase you quoted "harmful freeloaders" does not appear in any of our texts. The word we used are "free-riders" and that does not refer to our users. Our users are free to use the software without contributions in any matter they want. What is not acceptable is to use it to run a competing SaaS business.

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

#75

Post by bentlegen »

growse wrote: post #70
joshuaissac wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your business model relies on no-one else using your software to compete with you, don't open-source the software. I think this is the point of the FSL. Businesses with the business model you described can use it instead of open sourcing the software, and the terms switch to an open source licence only after two years.

Sure, but then just do proprietary and then release the software under Apache. What's the actual point of the FSL?

Proprietary wouldn't allow for free, non-competing use of the software during the 2 year period. The FSL does.

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

#76

Post by icambron »

growse wrote: post #70
joshuaissac wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your business model relies on no-one else using your software to compete with you, don't open-source the software. I think this is the point of the FSL. Businesses with the business model you described can use it instead of open sourcing the software, and the terms switch to an open source licence only after two years.

Sure, but then just do proprietary and then release the software under Apache. What's the actual point of the FSL?

I wish the article had spelled this out a little better, but the reason many businesses have open source licenses for their software is to assuage their customers’ concerns about lock in and permanence (will your startup be around later? Will you jack up the price? Don’t worry, it’s open source). The downside, of course, is that it’s harder to sell stuff if it’s also available for free. I believe the theory here is that this license promises to open later to fix the lock in fear, but is closed now to create scarcity. So under its logic, it’s different from simply switching to Apache later because it’s the promise that’s doing the heavy lifting.

I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea, just that I think I understand the intended logic of it.

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

#77

Post by antipurist »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #47
antipurist wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implem…

You and Symbiote are technically correct, what I'm suggesting wouldn't match The Open Source Definition [1]. But being "correct" matters little to me, what matters is promotion of the idea & usage of free software.

> Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. [2]

I believe you'd agree that everything-as-a-service and tivoized products do not make users free, even if they technically don't violate the terms of FOSS-licensed code that they incorporate.

> The Business Source Licence

Yes, I've heard about that license, but I think it's mostly applicable when an already existing company decides to make its product more open, while I was thinking of the opposite — a group of independent contributors realizing "hey, we've made something big, let's protect our work (and potentially get rewarded for our efforts)" and creating a more formal entity around it.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd/ [2] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

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

#78

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

James_K wrote: post #72
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Just to be clear what happened at Xapian: a bunch of people built some software. It was open sourced under the GPL whic…

This is such a niche case it's not really worth talking about, but the original devs still released it under GPL. The FSL is literally just the Apache license in this case. So you aren't arguing for the FSL, just that the original devs should have used Apache instead of GPL. That's just your opinion. If there was a version of the FSL that converted to GPL after two years, you'd have the exact same issue. The FSL port…

> If there was a version of the FSL that converted to GPL after two years

That would not work to begin with, and I already explained elsewhere in this comment thread why.

Look, I understand that you do not subscribe to this argument, there is very little I can do to convince you otherwise. I'm coming out of a community that embraces permissive licenses. The FSL plays that tune with a twist that is the exclusivity period.

> There's nothing stopping you from just releasing old versions under a different license anyway, and no real reason to commit to doing so specifically for the next two years.

There are lots of things that can be done, many other licenses can be forged. But some of these are depending on the goodwill of a future actor. All of this seems worse.

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

#79

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

James_K wrote: post #58
vanviegen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone trying to develop open source with this will be stuck two years behind the official release and so it won't be worth trying. Only if you're a direct SaaS competitor. In that case, you'll have to diverge based on two year old code, which seems fair to me. (And you're always free to start your own project, if you want to compete...) > I don't get how it solves that freeloader problem either. Because freeloadin…

> Because freeloading competitors are stuck with two year old code, putting them at a disadvantage, or compelling then to invest in that old code (some of which might find its way into the original branch). This makes no sense though. If you don't want competition, why give your source away? If you do want competition, why put it at a disadvantage? That's why I am so negative about this license. It's just someone try…

> If you don't want competition, why give your source away?

Why not? I mean you're literally arguing against the business decision we are making. We believe in Open Source, we believe in funding Open Source, we are trying to find a balance that is possible to walk for a SaaS business. I'm surprised people generally take the binary view that "either Open Source with no protection or go proprietary completely".

> Also, I don't see what's to stop someone free-loading off a two-year-old copy of your work.

Nothing, you can do that!

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

#80

Post by bentlegen »

tedivm wrote: post #60
bentlegen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source you link does not contain the quotes you cite.

Sorry, fixed it.

It feels like you intentionally omitted his immediate follow-up to your quoted comment:

> > my theory about embrace/extend/extinguish seems to be as accurate as I thought.

> This is confused. Embrace/extend/extinguish means to initially participate in an open standard and then extend the standard in such a way that the non-extended version is sidelined.

I'd encourage people to read the entire thread rather than seize on the cherry-picked comment, additionally loaded with terminology like "they want to destroy open source", which doesn't appear in the original thread.

I can't speak for whit537, but I do work at Sentry, and I feel your comments about our intentions are disingenuous. We are open in that we feel the existing models don't fit our needs, and we're trying to evolve the language to make non-compete licenses more approachable and thus more mainstream. That doesn't mean an elimination of existing popular OSS licenses. We're even explicit in saying, "FSL is for SaaS businesses". That's pretty narrow, and probably excludes 99% of software.

Note that the FSL is developed in the public, and echoes the language I've used above[1]. But if you believe pursuing additional licensing mechanisms means we're destroying OSS, there is probably little I can do to disavow you of that notion.

[1] https://github.com/getsentry/fsl.software

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