Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
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Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
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Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#2HN title guidelines[0]: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#3Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady.
I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative.
I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work, they need to pivot to something that does work.
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#4Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative. I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work,…
If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#5[deleted]
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#6So the TLDR; is don't trust any corporate open source that requires a CLA and don't contribute to those projects unless you are prepared to fork if the rug gets pulled.
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#7> By working on a project with a CLA, where you sign away your code, you're giving carte blanche for the company to take away your freedom to use their software.
Ok it's been a while so I don't remember the details or how it played out, but when Linux introduced a CoC, there were people who contributed to the kernel in the past that threatened to withdraw their code from the kernel, which would've been a nightmare to handle and clean up. How much power does a contributor have if my project is using a standard licence like GPL or BSD? Does the contributor hold any copyright over their code? Im not talking about rug pulls here, let's just say the contributor gets really mad at me for some reason.
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#8Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative. I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work,…
If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.
You could make it AGPL if you don’t want that.
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#9"Corporate Open Source" is many things. Look at how many companies are paying for membership on the Linux Foundation Board: Platinum costs $500k a year, gold is $100k a year, and silver is $5-20k based on size: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
#10Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative. I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work,…
If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.
It's why things like Captura no longer exist. You make something fantastic with an open source license, someone else renames it and sells it in app stores, and the people running the app stores go "the license allowed for this, we see nothing wrong".
It's well past time for getting rid of licenses that say "you can do what you like with this software", and replace them with licenses that allows you to sell as long as the original project gets a cut, without taking on any of the liability.
The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary.