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Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

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Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#61

Post by WorldWideWayne »

MoOmer wrote: post #41
duaneb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with that? Don't we want to encourage proprietary companies to host using open software?

The point would be to enforce the openness of changes to the source. If you go in and add some things, change the design etc. and pass it off as your own, someone can take the changes you've made and do the same. Not only that, but you're required, not just encouraged, to make public any changes, which may or may not be improvements.

Adding and changing things does not necessarily precipitate passing off the work as one's own. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's a big problem with that with the truly free licenses like MIT...so I'm wondering - what's the point?

Node.js has been super popular for the past few years and it's built from mostly MIT style licenses. It's so hot that Microsoft has made a big effort to make it usable and provide tools to work with it on Windows. Nobody that I know of has come along and taken this product, re-branded it and then pawned it as their own creation.

I understand that the point of the Affero license is to prevent "Tivoization" of a product, but it seems to come at the cost of not being able to attract a large base of developers to contribute to the project, since everyone would rather be working with more liberal licenses.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#62

Post by RushPL »

hbbio wrote: post #59

Without any judgement over the project and its quality, I would not call it "Self-hosted DO". Because DigitalOcean, basically, is a way to get VMs without self-hosting them!

(co-founder here) Of course your perspective on DigigalOcean is valid but we think of it simply as a good philosophy to deliver a VM to a user in a seamless, straightforward way - that's the part that we want achieve and let users to self-host. Essentially, you could build your own DigitalOcean using VirtKick. Does it make sense for you? Doesn't mean you should rush and start your own business .. you can run it privately for your own needs or for your company's needs.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#63

Post by duaneb »

MoOmer wrote: post #41
duaneb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with that? Don't we want to encourage proprietary companies to host using open software?

The point would be to enforce the openness of changes to the source. If you go in and add some things, change the design etc. and pass it off as your own, someone can take the changes you've made and do the same. Not only that, but you're required, not just encouraged, to make public any changes, which may or may not be improvements.

So if I'm trying to use this in my proprietary product, I can either a) use it and open up all my code, or b) use a better-licensed, MIT/BSD/APSL2-compatible code.

I also might point out, as a person working on a proprietary service, it's in our interest to contribute upstream. Who wants to maintain compatibility patches? It's in EVERYONE's best interest to have solid, open infrastructure used by everyone (yes, even evil closed companies like google)

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#64

Post by tesq »

duaneb wrote: post #36
davexunit wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtkick has a web application component, which makes the AGPL a great choice. Without the 'Affero' component, anyone could host a version of VirtKick with proprietary modifications.

What's wrong with that? Don't we want to encourage proprietary companies to host using open software?

The AGPL prevents no such thing, they are free to do so provided they follow the license the creators published the code with.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#65

Post by sciurus »

catern wrote: post #55

So what exactly is the advantage of using this layer over the existing libvirt ecosystem? If this is supposed to manage your VMs for you instead of you using the existing libvirt tools, I can see a number of disadvantages. * No virt-manager with SPICE, networking configuration, and other features * No virt-install for very easy creation of VMs, even straight from distro repository URLs * No virsh for command-line man…

As someone who has

  * used libvirt and the various tools you mentioned for managing VMs
  * used the libvirt API to help write vagrant-libvirt [0]
I feel that libvirt is a useful (albeit quirky) building block but not something you want to interact with directly. Those tools you mentioned aren't ones I'd generally recommend using. You want to have tools with a higher-level of abstraction that can bring in more functionality that is available in just libvirt and provide better interfaces on top of that combination. There's a reason the OpenStack project created Nova, Glance, Neutron, etc.

[0] https://github.com/pradels/vagrant-libvirt

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#66

Post by bjornsing »

davexunit wrote: post #7

This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines' page: undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass Still, I'm very excited about this! If anyone from the project reads this: Where is the appropriate place to request support for an additional GNU/Linux distribution? I would love to get GNU Guix runni…

> I want my contributions to the free software community to remain free.

And you don't feel that the AGPLv3 ensures that...? Or you mean "I don't want my contributions to be distributed under any other license"?

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#67

Post by richardwhiuk »

bjornsing wrote: post #66
davexunit wrote: post #7

This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines' page: undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass Still, I'm very excited about this! If anyone from the project reads this: Where is the appropriate place to request support for an additional GNU/Linux distribution? I would love to get GNU Guix runni…

> I want my contributions to the free software community to remain free. And you don't feel that the AGPLv3 ensures that...? Or you mean "I don't want my contributions to be distributed under any other license"?

If you have a contributor assignment, the assignee can choose to release the changes under a proprietary license.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#68

Post by mbreese »

bjornsing wrote: post #66
davexunit wrote: post #7

This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines' page: undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass Still, I'm very excited about this! If anyone from the project reads this: Where is the appropriate place to request support for an additional GNU/Linux distribution? I would love to get GNU Guix runni…

> I want my contributions to the free software community to remain free. And you don't feel that the AGPLv3 ensures that...? Or you mean "I don't want my contributions to be distributed under any other license"?

With a copyright assignment, the authors could take the entire project closed-source for future versions. You'd still be able to use older, AGPL-licensed versions, but perhaps not newer versions.

For programs like this, I see little benefit of AGPL over GPL, since the main use-case will be in-house deployments. I can't see how anyone would deploy something like this on the backend, where if you made an in house-fork with bug fixes to support your proprietary infrastructure, you'd have to publish the patches for the wider community. It seems like a big red flag to me.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#69

Post by conradk »

angersock wrote: post #42
Nowaker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our intention is that you share code back to the project if you modified it and added some new great features. :) If I'm not wrong, it only applies to the modified source code, and not the data/machines that you work with. http://stackoverflow.com/a/18406382/504845

So, as your link mentions...why not just use GPL? It's good enough for Linux.

AGPL means that if you modify VirtKick itself, you have to contribute these modifications back to the project. GPL does not enforce this for software run on a back end.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#70

Post by Nowaker »

catern wrote: post #55

So what exactly is the advantage of using this layer over the existing libvirt ecosystem? If this is supposed to manage your VMs for you instead of you using the existing libvirt tools, I can see a number of disadvantages. * No virt-manager with SPICE, networking configuration, and other features * No virt-install for very easy creation of VMs, even straight from distro repository URLs * No virsh for command-line man…

What one regards as a feature, other regard as misfeatures. If you like virt-manager, then VirtKick isn't really for you. We value a simple UI more than virt-manager, and REST API more than virsh. We don't say your way is wrong. It's just more difficult.

Existing libvirt clients, at least those that we know of, aren't super reliable though. libvirt stucks when there's too much happening on the HV, or denies jobs without even trying (e.g. when a pool has async jobs). A backend that schedules tasks for background execution is needed for that (and we have it), so even now we're not "just" a frontend for libvirt.

The use case is a very simple panel with zero virt knowledge needed to start.

Thanks for your comment.

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