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Meteor is now MIT licensed

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Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#21

Post by techiferous »

wavephorm wrote: post #13

I think they should've tried to commercialize it. There is a real lack of good, new development systems these days. If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better? Developers need to wake up, and realize that new, and substantially better systems can be built if they are willing to pay for t…

As a Rails developer, your comment baffles me. We are practically drowning in open-source Ruby gems, many that are very useful and of high quality.

> If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better?

The exact opposite of what you described happened with Ruby on Rails.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#22

Post by architgupta »

debergalis wrote: post #7
architgupta wrote: post #4

I think this is a great move. Longer term it'll be better for Meteor, the team and the community. Ruby on Rails would be fine as an analogy here. The monetization model might be different from directly licensing and selling the framework, but these guys are smart, they'll figure it out. I am quite impressed by this. The team listened to the feedback from the community. They weren't obligated to do so :-)

We got some amazingly specific and valuable feedback -- check some of the Meteor HN threads. MIT is going to be a big part of making Meteor available everywhere.

Doing that now. That gets me thinking. I'll deploy a weekend app with meteor.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#23

Post by zmmmmm »

Awesome - I was one of those highly critical of the original license, so let me be among the first in congratulating them on making this (quite major) change so quickly.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#24

Post by drewrv »

wavephorm wrote: post #13

I think they should've tried to commercialize it. There is a real lack of good, new development systems these days. If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better? Developers need to wake up, and realize that new, and substantially better systems can be built if they are willing to pay for t…

I do .net at my day job and it's awesome. Visual studio, c#, linq, etc are great when someone else is paying the costs.

But for my own startup, the costs just aren't worth it. Open source frameworks are good enough and good enough is what matters on a budget.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#25

Post by stcredzero »

tikhonj wrote: post #14
wavephorm wrote: post #13

I think they should've tried to commercialize it. There is a real lack of good, new development systems these days. If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better? Developers need to wake up, and realize that new, and substantially better systems can be built if they are willing to pay for t…

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones. If anything, too much work goes into open source development tools--certainly much more than in any other category! Just look at how much is accomplished--and how is easily--by various start-ups using open source technology. There are great web servers, web frameworks, libraries, programming languages, text…

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones

I'm curious about your specific frame of reference. Which tools do you have in mind? Have you also used Visual Studio, C#, and Linq as a point of comparison? (I have not, but they are mentioned favorably in these comments.)

A lot of people might cite Eclipse as a good development tool. The Java GUI library used to implement it was much lauded as well. However, it was not so much Open Source that drove its quality as the willingness of IBM to commoditize Java and Java development environments out from under Sun.

GCC was a going concern, but a lot of its development was funded by commercial firms that wanted fixes or extensions. Chromium and Firefox have certainly benefitted from outside funding.

From what I've seen, FOSS can often produce good back-end software but user-facing stuff is often lacking in a certain polish, unless there is commercial backing and paid professionals are contributors.

I've also read that the majority of FOSS projects become stagnant. I think of them as startups but for a different system of compensation. That's not good or bad. That's just the reality of how these things work.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#26

Post by techiferous »

zobzu wrote: post #10

Cool I can now use this in my closed source project without ever giving any change back! Hate this GPL that requires you to give back anything if you let others get your product.

GPL requires you to give back; MIT gives you the choice. Developers are by nature creative people. And humans are not incapable of altruism. Even with an MIT license, I expect a lot of community contributions to pour in.

In fact, I expect more community contributions to come in. MIT means (perhaps) a lower percentage of users will give back, but there will be a higher absolute number of users since the license is more permissive.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#28

Post by richcollins »

While reactivity is an interesting idea and possible incremental improvement, the huge win is in saving us from building UI. Why aren't there more frameworks like Cappuccino but with built in bindings to the DB?

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#29

Post by getsat »

zobzu wrote: post #10

Cool I can now use this in my closed source project without ever giving any change back! Hate this GPL that requires you to give back anything if you let others get your product.

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/233753/gpl-copy...

Permissive licenses are just fine (arguably, better).

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#30

Post by wavephorm »

prezjordan wrote: post #20
wavephorm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi-client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced. Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduce…

You seem to ignore the fact that open-source allows more people to use a product. When more people use it, more activity happens - which leads to evolution. Not sure how you can ignore the open-source software that rules the software development world.

More people using a product does not lead to innovation. It leads to more people using the same free product and not realizing how much better their tools could be if they were willing to pay for them.

Open source tools rule the world simply because they are free, and developers everywhere are unwilling to pay for better tools, which hold back innovation of better tools. Why would anyone build a substantially better development tool if nobody will buy it?

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