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I’m usually pretty ambivalent when a company decides to move to a license like BUSL. Sure it’s not “free” - but practically it only affects the likes of AWS from freeloading while making extraordinary profits. Especially true when a given company started the project. I understand why some hold strong feelings on the principles of OSS. My perspective is we’ll have fewer nice things if we allow the likes of AWS to cann…
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I see more of a shift to open core. Many large orgs just say no to viral licenses, and in choosing AGPL, you put blockers to adoption. Open core releases some of the project under permissive license, and keeps some private or under a permissions license. We are all still trying to figure out how we can have sustainable open source where people can be paid to work on it full time
The shift to open core was ten years ago. Open core failed and is being replaced with pseudo open source.
Do you have suggestions for alternative funding/support models? What is open core being replaced by from your perspective?
Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in a meaningful way? Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes…
That's not what AWS is doing. AWS is selling management services. The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says this is a significant value add.
I so very much wish that Datomic had been licensed this way.
Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in a meaningful way? Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes…
Engineers have to eat too. Nothing wrong with charging for support. I love passion projects as much as anyone, but there is a reason they are hobbies, and people need to keep a day job. Eventually it does get tiring to do support for free. Edit: Ok. I was talking OSS generally. I guess Redis is being bad actor if they are taking OSS work and running away with it to get the money, and not compensating the contributors…
I'd be more interested in the race to build a business model that works with open source and venture funding, myself. A grand unified theory of software goods funding, if you will.
Maybe we instead need a model where FOSS is not about profits for anybody, and is just a passion of love, from a large community of amateurs doing it for the technology and fun. Projects could still be funded by community users, but "venture funding"? That's how projects turn to shit.
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I think you'll find that the vast vast majority of us don't care about the whole "cannot be used for bezos yacht" problem when we contribute to free software. I contribute with no expectation of monitory gain and absolutely zero desire for some random foundation or company that's part or almost always created later to make any money. If some contributors want to make money become consultants the "amazon problem" isn'…
How do you make money?
Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in a meaningful way? Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes…
The best idea I've come up with is a license which only grants the rights to a natural person to use the software otherwise it is identical to the MIT, GPL or AGPL, whatever your cup of tea is. If you're a corporation then you need to buy a license.
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This is indeed interesting. The historically 'good' open source companies like Sun got bought but the ones that weren't like Oracle. The selling support model alone does not seem evolutionarily fit for the market. Now we have these VC-backed 'open source' companies that have a playbook wherein they appear open source at first. But when you dig deeper, you find that the heart of the thing is a closed binary. The inves…
Sun was mainly a hardware business; you bought their workstations and servers. And oh, they also had this unix-y thing that came with that. Later software did become a bit more important with Java and MySQL and all of that, but it was still primarily hardware company. I think it's pointless to even compare it to the Redis company; just about everything is different.
0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/