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It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

drewdevault.com

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Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#101

Post by BeetleB »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #73
BeetleB wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The term most people use for this is "source available". Calling it "open source" is misleading, and continuing to call it that after it's been pointed out to you is flatly dishonest. Given how every Reddit/HN thread I come across has an argument on whether it is appropriate to use open source in this context, I strongly disagree with the phrase "most people". In my experience, most people call it open source, and i…

There is a loud minority of people who disagree, mainly people who are wondering if in the future they can exploit open source community in a similar manner. The term "open source" is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative and has a clear, unambiguous meaning.

>There is a loud minority of people who disagree

The minority is those who insist on the OSI definition as the only appropriate way to use "open source".

>mainly people who are wondering if in the future they can exploit open source community in a similar manner.

The problem I'm seeing is the labeling of people who disagree about a single point (terminology) as bad actors (i.e. people who are bent on "exploiting"). As I mentioned in another comment, this is sadly a common path that ideological movements take - attributing intentions to others, and focusing on rooting out impure adherents.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#102

Post by slededit »

yebyen wrote: post #79
michaelt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An honest FOSS license + dual licensed for commercial would say "it's fine if you make money, and we don't need a cut... unless you've integrated our software AND you don't want your final product to be similarly open-source." I think the "problem" the commons clause is aimed at is where AWS starts selling managed deployments of your product, and they make $$$$ from your work without giving you a cut. And maybe your…

So, the model that AGPL was designed to combat, right? Under the AGPL, Amazon would be free to do that, as long as they released the code for their managed deployment systems. (This doesn't get you any money, but it saves you from the sense that your FOSS-work has been exploited by a commercial entity that doesn't give anything back, so long as it's actually enforceable.)

AGPL says nothing about monetization. It only says Amazon would have to open any modifications they made.

Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers it does not solve the problem of paying the people actually doing the work.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#103

Post by icebraining »

esotericn wrote: post #41
freehunter wrote: post #31

I agree that if you've labeled your software incorrectly as open source and you've been corrected, it should be re-labeled and the problem shouldn't be ignored. I will say, though, that personally I feel "free" software has a labelling problem. I'm not heavily engaged in the open-source movement, and a lot of the terms and wording and licensing confuses me to the point where I don't want to use it because I'm not sur…

If you want to provide the source to your software, you put the code on the Internet and you're done. You don't need to even choose a licence. That only comes in to play if you concern yourself with downstream users that care about licensing. It really only becomes complicated when you want to release it and _also_ monetise it or restrict its use. Licenses exist because of how this is ultimately at odds with how soft…

No, unlicensed code is the DRMed one - you're implicitly stating that you reserve the right to impose restrictions or sue any of your users.

CC0 or MIT actually releases them from those restrictions.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#104

Post by lodi »

gus_massa wrote: post #94
IggleSniggle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, “brownies with a sprinkling of horseshit” is extremely descriptive yet concise. I understand what this is faster than reading the recipe for what this thing is.

Using another analogy, it's like "vegan lasagna with meat". We all understand what it mean, but once you put some juicy meat there you can't call it vegan anymore.

I like that analogy even better. Adding some shit to a brownie ruins the brownie but doesn't take away it's "brownie-ness" in a sense. On the contrary, adding any amount of meat to a vegan lasagna instantly disqualifies it from being "vegan". There's an element of binary, black-and-white purity that "being vegan" and "being FOSS" have to have.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#105

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

BeetleB wrote: post #101
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a loud minority of people who disagree, mainly people who are wondering if in the future they can exploit open source community in a similar manner. The term "open source" is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative and has a clear, unambiguous meaning.

>There is a loud minority of people who disagree The minority is those who insist on the OSI definition as the only appropriate way to use "open source". >mainly people who are wondering if in the future they can exploit open source community in a similar manner. The problem I'm seeing is the labeling of people who disagree about a single point (terminology) as bad actors (i.e. people who are bent on "exploiting"). A…

>The minority is those who insist on the OSI definition as the only appropriate way to use "open source".

No, it's not. I actually ran a poll on my Mastodon account last night:

https://www.strawpoll.me/16741426/r

I followed up with many of the "something else" folks and most of the people I spoke to said that they were confused by the premise because free/open source are different things, and one had a strange and political definition of open source as "software which helps people", and none of them agreed that the Commons Clause qualified.

>The problem I'm seeing is the labeling of people who disagree about a single point (terminology) as bad actors (i.e. people who are bent on "exploiting").

These people might not be bad actors or have bad intent from the start. But if, upon being corrected, they don't change their course, then they are bad actors. They prey on people who don't understand software licensing, and who only know that open source is "good".

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#106

Post by icebraining »

thrower123 wrote: post #74
falcolas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider Microsoft Windows, or Oracle database to be open source software? Because the source code is viewable (albeit under an NDA). Open source does have a specific meaning, and twisting it like this does nobody any favors.

No, I'm well aware of what open-source is supposed to mean, as opposed to shared-source or whatever the proper term is for that type of arrangement. I just try to deal with the world as it is, and the damage has been done already to the popular meaning of the term. I don't have the energy or interest to tilt at this particular wind-mill, so at this point if somebody says something is open-source, unless I have prior…

Sure. And plenty of companies have stretched thin the definition of "free" or "unlimited". But that doesn't mean we have to accept that as OK.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#107

Post by TimJYoung »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #65
api wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Commons Clause might be clunky, but its an attempt to address the changes that have happened in the world since the late 1990s. For those who don't know, the FOSS revolution came about in the late 1990s and as a popular movement was largely fueled by concern over the extent to which Microsoft was dominating the PC and (then) PC-based server industries. MS was moving to embrace-extend-extinguish the web at the tim…

This version of events is so incredibly wrong. Free software started in the eighties over concerns about how proprietary software was being used. Embrace-extend-exstinquish was Microsoft's attack on a growing free software market, it had nothing to do with the web. The "free" in "free software" never referred to the price, and is not business strategy. It's used like in "free speech," and it refers to the free modifi…

Actually, he's 100% correct. The way that open source is used by very large tech companies today is way, way worse than anything MS ever did. MS never got a stranglehold on the network in the way that companies like Google have been able to do.

Back in the 90s, if you wanted to run Novell, UNIX, or Linux instead of WinNT Server, there was nobody stopping you and there were a lot of options. The same with Office suites: there were actual competitors to MS Office through most of the 90s. There is much less competition in many areas of commercial software today, and one of the primary reasons is that open source software has become a vehicle that large software companies use to drive competitors out of markets and solidify their positions in complementary markets. Yes, consumers benefit in the short term, but it allows these companies to build moats that make it very hard, or impossible, for future startup competitors to overcome. We all want to point our fingers at Oracle, MS, IBM, and say that they are the issue, but when every major player in the industry does the same thing, it starts to become more and more obvious that the problem may not be with the individual companies involved.

Also, public roads are a bad metaphor for software: there isn't a market for public roads, and software can always be innovated upon (as an aside, it drives me nuts when people declare something "solved", especially when the reason for doing so is ideological or political).

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#108

Post by barnson »

Blocking the sale or hosting of software is one thing; Commons Clause also blocks any "consulting/ support services related to the Software." That's way too broad; is a system that uses Redis "related to the Software"? It's also short-sighted: it limits the ecosystem's growth to the ability of one company to expand and take on "consulting/ support services."

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#109

Post by Bartweiss »

bunderbunder wrote: post #43
staticassertion wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't address your analogy since I think it's obviously quite different. Ultimately, people want to keep their code open, develop in the open, bring in contributors, make it easy to adopt and audit their code, etc. They also want to eat and have a home. The extreme hostility I've seen over the years to every OSS project that tries some new way of monetizing is just absurd and damaging to the concept. > "Hey, you ca…

So, here's the key text of the Commons Clause: Without limiting other conditions in the License, the grant of rights under the License will not include, and the License does not grant to you, the right to Sell the Software. > Ultimately, people want to keep their code open, develop in the open, bring in contributors, make it easy to adopt and audit their code, etc. The Commons Clause doesn't really change any of that…

> they get to sell the software, but nobody else does... what you're saying is, you want other people to contribute code, and you want to be able to benefit financially from those contributions, but you expect it to be a one-way street.

It seems like a lot of the positive responses to the Commons Clause have missed or skipped past this entire concern.

People are understandably touchy about "AWS profits off this free code", and understandably concerned that "just make it AGPL" will scare away some big players but not actually keep the developers solvent.

But the Commons Clause isn't at all reducible to "pay us if you profit from selling our code". A clause like that might not be FOSS either, but I think there'd be a lot less anger over it. (Especially if it wasn't achieved by taking a FOSS license and adding on a misleadingly-named "...but not really" clause.) Instead, the Commons Clause restricts sale rights to one entity, leaving the software with a clear 'owner'. And that's what people are mad about: it turns an entire development community into a farm team for one license holder.

"Pay if you profit" has real potential, and as you say has been achieved in the past via dual licensing. It allows for ecosystems where free code is included in and extended from multiple paid projects, and while the code originator might be guaranteed revenue they aren't in control of the project. That's vastly preferable to the you-work-for-us structure of the Commons Clause.

I think the conversation has been undermined by the way the Commons Clause FAQ and authors have skipped across that nuance to say "GPL doesn't suffice here, therefore Commons Clause!" We'll all be better off if we don't let the middle ground stay excluded from the discussion.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#110

Post by esotericn »

icebraining wrote: post #103
esotericn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to provide the source to your software, you put the code on the Internet and you're done. You don't need to even choose a licence. That only comes in to play if you concern yourself with downstream users that care about licensing. It really only becomes complicated when you want to release it and _also_ monetise it or restrict its use. Licenses exist because of how this is ultimately at odds with how soft…

No, unlicensed code is the DRMed one - you're implicitly stating that you reserve the right to impose restrictions or sue any of your users. CC0 or MIT actually releases them from those restrictions.

When you walk by me in the street, you're implicitly reserving the right to throw me in to oncoming traffic.

In reality, despite being strictly possible, this barely ever occurs in practice. I don't think it's fair to use the term "implicit" in that way.

No-one is suggesting that you write your startup's infrastructure based on random bits of code, that's obviously a bad idea.

I'd basically consider 'no licence' as equivalent to WTFPL. It scares off big companies. That's probably what you want anyway. If anyone cares enough they'll ask you to relicense it.

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