Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Single vendor is the new proprietary

opensource.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 98 posts

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#61

Post by growse »

tensor wrote: post #48
paulgb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is not so much against proprietary software, as bait-and-switch tactics that present software as open source. > Anyone who truly thinks that software developed by a diverse set of actors working in an open collaboration is not better should just adopt the proprietary model. But they should be honest about it.

I don’t see how it’s bait and switch. You can still used and develop against the last open version. In fact, we’ve seen recent examples of that in Terraform and Redis. Open source does not mean you are entitled to all future improvements unless the license says you are, like the AGPL. Personally, I’m grateful these project made their source open for so long. The alternative would not be AGPL terraform, it would be co…

The bait and switch is the community and social elements, not the code.

Inviting the local community to come and improve your space that you opened up for everyone to exist in, and then suddenly locking the doors is both entirely legally justified and a crappy thing to do.

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#62

Post by gmueckl »

rglover wrote: post #36
linuxftw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, neither side needs to 'win' but people should understand the facts on ground when they adopt a project for their needs. "Open Source" isn't the full story, you need to consider the motivations or potential motivations of a project's backers. I think there's a real grievance to be had by projects that were formerly open source, solicited contributions from non-paid volunteers, and then change licensing models.…

> I think there's a real grievance to be had by projects that were formerly open source, solicited contributions from non-paid volunteers, and then change licensing models. I think that's the crux of the frustration and fair. But at the same time, the previous version before the license change can still be forked/the contributions are intact so is there a tangible loss or just an emotional one?

This can be a very real loss. Third party contributions are driven by specific needs. When the license changes too much, those third parties can either pay for a fork (with money/time investment) and improve their own modifications or get the enhancements in the upstream product without any improvements of their own. There is a middle ground with paid source code access, but I don't see a lot of commercial offerings do that.

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#63

Post by tcmart14 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #49
Pannoniae wrote: post #2

The author completely neglects the "non-open-source/open collaboration" quadrant as if it didn't exist. Best examples are games with easily accessible modding communities. While development is centralised and you definitely don't have any kind of open source licence, collaboration is generally open in terms of releasing mods to the game. They also bash the Commons Clause purely using the definition (zero mention on w…

Modding games seems like a legal grey area. Permission hasn't been granted, but also, game developers already have your money and they know a lot of players would be unhappy if they tried to stop the modding.

I wouldnt be surprised if most game studio didn't enjoy it/try to promote it in maybe indirect ways. Skyrim is an old game, great game, but an old game. However modding keeps it fresh and interesting and I would imagine it probably is a big reason why they still get sales on it. While it isn't a huge money maker any more, they are still selling copies just for people to play with the mods, extending the timeline of how much revenue the game will create over it's total lifetime.

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#64

Post by lolinder »

growse wrote: post #61
tensor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how it’s bait and switch. You can still used and develop against the last open version. In fact, we’ve seen recent examples of that in Terraform and Redis. Open source does not mean you are entitled to all future improvements unless the license says you are, like the AGPL. Personally, I’m grateful these project made their source open for so long. The alternative would not be AGPL terraform, it would be co…

The bait and switch is the community and social elements, not the code. Inviting the local community to come and improve your space that you opened up for everyone to exist in, and then suddenly locking the doors is both entirely legally justified and a crappy thing to do.

This analogy falls flat because it makes it sound like the community is locked out of the improvements they made to your space. But there's no scarcity here: once HashiCorp locked the doors all of the improvements that the community made were still there, and the community could and did organize a new space for continued improvements.

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#65

Post by lolinder »

tyingq wrote: post #57
tensor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how it’s bait and switch. You can still used and develop against the last open version. In fact, we’ve seen recent examples of that in Terraform and Redis. Open source does not mean you are entitled to all future improvements unless the license says you are, like the AGPL. Personally, I’m grateful these project made their source open for so long. The alternative would not be AGPL terraform, it would be co…

It probably feels like bait and switch for the folks that created or used lots of open source in the time period where there was less opportunity/temptation to move the license from GPL/BSD/MIT to something proprietary. In our minds, we attached some altruistic intent to those licenses. Things have changed now, of course.

Why do the actions of HashiCorp and company have any bearing whatsoever on your decision to release and use unrelated open source software?

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#66

Post by dreadlordbone »

devdao wrote: post #55
Centigonal wrote: post #54

Single-vendor is not proprietary because I can fork VSCode and I can't fork Microsoft Word. Single-vendor open source is the balance some companies have found between sharing their software with the community and capturing the value of their employees' labor. It's less free than openly developed FOSS and more free than proprietary software. It's unrealistic to expect all software to be openly developed FOSS with toda…

You can't forkvscode...

Cursor is an AI first fork of VS Code

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#67

Post by doctor_eval »

outop wrote: post #40
Spivak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free software movement is for sure older than that but I can't find any verifiable source of "open source" being used in its current form earlier than the 90's.

No, because it's a name that was made up then to try to rebrand something that had already existed for decades, but which has a name that those guys didn't like.

My memory from the time was that the OSI was mostly about trying to characterise the various licenses that were floating around, and about legitimising the use of freeish software in industry.

Today the majority of free software that I use seems to be Apache/BSD/MIT - and GPL for Linux - but back in the 90s everyone seemed to make up their own “free” license, and there was a lot of confusion around GPL. My recollection is that OSI was trying to create some clarity around which licenses really were “free”, and which weren’t.

I was just a passive observer, I was not involved in any way, I wasn’t a fan of some of the players, and I even thought calling it OSI was pretentious - but nevertheless they made a dent in the universe by popularising the term “open source”. OSI was far more than a rebranding because it enabled us to speak about GPL - which imposes conditions on use - and free licenses like BSD in the same breath, while excluding what we now call “source available” licenses.

So despite my misgivings, I think the OSI deserves credit. They stood up and did something meaningful, and helped move the entire software industry forward.

Because of this, I think calling it a rebranding is totally unjustified and unfair.

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#68

Post by lolinder »

rglover wrote: post #23

> You should be on board if you want Open Source to win against proprietary software. But those companies are still doing what is, essentially, proprietary software: like the proprietary software companies of the 80s, they very much consider the software being produced as their exclusive property. They still intend to capture all the value that derives from it. And thanks to copyright aggregation or permissive licens…

From the OSI's old history page [0]:

> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. ... A month later ... the participants voted to promote the use of the term 'open source', and agreed to adopt with it the new rhetoric of pragmatism and market-friendliness that Raymond had been developing.

The entire point of Open Source as a concept was to be more flexible and business-friendly than Stallman's Free Software movement. It's both hilarious and frustrating to see people today treat the OSI licenses as some sort of divinely appointed canon of morally good options when the entire concept exists to get away from moralizing.

(I should clarify that I actually am more and more sympathetic to Stallman's vision, but I think that if we're going to moralize we should go all the way, not put a halo around the intensely and explicitly pragmatic open source principles.)

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#69

Post by RyanHamilton »

Spivak wrote: post #9
RyanHamilton wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSI isn't the software industry. It's sponsored by Google, amazon then ms via github in order of sponsor donations. It's financed by the hyperscalars. https://opensource.org/sponsors

This is such a crazy retelling of history that it's hard to take seriously. Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors -- namely Microsoft and Oracle, and to prevent people from imposing their will on users via software in a manner that users had no possible redress…

Please reread my post, I didn't mention anything historical. I never said who founded it nor who started it. Your arguing against a straw man argument you made up. I am saying today, OSI does not represent the software industry and that given sponsorship bias it's likely to represent the views of those companies that pay OSI.

Re: Single vendor is the new proprietary

#70

Post by skeledrew »

growse wrote: post #61
tensor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how it’s bait and switch. You can still used and develop against the last open version. In fact, we’ve seen recent examples of that in Terraform and Redis. Open source does not mean you are entitled to all future improvements unless the license says you are, like the AGPL. Personally, I’m grateful these project made their source open for so long. The alternative would not be AGPL terraform, it would be co…

The bait and switch is the community and social elements, not the code. Inviting the local community to come and improve your space that you opened up for everyone to exist in, and then suddenly locking the doors is both entirely legally justified and a crappy thing to do.

The term "bait and switch" infers intent as well though. The community was invited to come and improve the space, but then there's this group that unexpectedly starts to monopolize that space in a way that destroys its viability. So controls need to be put in place, or eventually the space has to be totally abandoned or shut down.
Post reply on HN