Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses • Hacker News Board

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#101

Post by dhd415 » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

fergie wrote: post #51

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.

Right. I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects, surf on the goodwill of open source, and then turn around and complain when other companies use elasticsearch as open source. The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well fu…

>I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "extend existing open source projects". Elastic the company was founded by the creators of Elasticsearch and is the way that its authors and most of its contributors are rewarded with actual cash money.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#102

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #89

toomuchtodo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you’re not going hungry while one of the most valuable companies in the world doesn’t extract value from your work.

If someone gets into writing open source with the goal of making money off of it and gets pissed when others “extract value” from their work, that person never should have gotten into open source to begin with. In fact, for their own sake, they should probably get right the fuck out of open source pronto, because they are seriously missing all the points in spectacular fashion.

[deleted]

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#103

Post by ajross » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

zyx321 wrote: post #98

ajross wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you apply that logic to any reseller? The corner market shouldn't be able to tally how many apples it sold? That just doesn't seem like a consistent legal principle to me. Clearly if you allow someone to sell your product you are implicitly allowing them to record the fact that they did. There may be an antitrust argument here, but this data ownership thing seems like a non starter.

Unless it says "Sold by: Amazon.com", Amazon isn't party to the contract. DHL doesn't get to know what is in the package they deliver, so why should Amazon be entitled to that information?

You have a cite supporting that legal theory? Because the fact that it happened on their website using indexing in their database and (especially) that they took payment directly, seems like a pretty strong argument that they ARE a party to the contract.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#104

Post by karmakaze » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 8:53 PM UTC

The problem isn't really here. The problem is that everyone wants a permissive abusable license when AGPL would be just fine. If everyone here complaining just used AGPL then we wouldn't have this Amazon situation.

People want to have their cake and eat it too. They started with an MIT license because it gets more uptake then whine when the license terms are being followed.

But then it wouldn't be widely used. The solution to that is for everyone to use AGPL then the open-source playing field is level again.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#105

Post by Thorrez » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 8:54 PM UTC

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.

The article says that even a non-permissive license (such as GPL) won't stop Amazon from taking your code and running it as their own service.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#106

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 8:56 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #96

luckylion wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things you don't like with it. GPL is source available, then?

Some people have argued that, yes. I've even argued it occasionally in the past. The short justification given is that even though the GPL doesn't let you do everything, it still doesn't interfere with the 4 essential freedoms that Open Source guarantees. You may or may not agree with that justification. But the people arguing in favor of SSPL as an Open Source license are moving in the wrong direction. If TechCrunch…

> The short justification given is that even though the GPL doesn't let you do everything, it still doesn't interfere with the 4 essential freedoms that Open Source guarantees. You may or may not agree with that justification.

Wait, what? "Four essential freedoms" are part of FSF philosophy, not Open Source, and GPL is literally the canonical example of a license that guarantees and safeguards them. Many Open Source (not Free Software) licenses do not, in fact, guarantee these freedoms.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#107

Post by Drdrdrq » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

tolmasky wrote: post #82

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.

This is also incredibly worrying for the original goal of open source which was individual user's rights. I think it will be very difficult to make a license that cleanly allows me a personal user to change/use/distribute the source, but not a big business like Amazon. And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I us…

> And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I use for my real estate business or something.

Just to be clear, if you are referring to Commons Clause, you can freely use the software for real estate or whatever, you just can't sell the router itself, software itself, or offer paid consulting / support / hosting for the software (well you can, but you need to obtain a commercial license - which is fair enough, since you are making money off the software, not off you real estate business).

This is a common misconception about Commons Clause. You can use it for commercial purposes. Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it.

As for blogging example, the concern is imho not justified. Hybrid licenses need support of community as much as open source ones and such behaviour would be suicide. It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early... There aren't many projects using Commons Clause yet for example.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#108

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #36

webmaven wrote: post #3

> "It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs." Basically, there is no such thing as an "Open Source API". APIs are not software, and we've already seen the damage that treating APIs as software (for copyright purposes) can do. The proper abstraction f…

It's certainly an interesting point of view. Take something that's commercial, for example, like Microsoft's docx format. If Open Office/Libre Office implements support for docx, is it hijacking proprietary formats, and siphoning customers off of proprietary projects? (edit: as it has been pointed out, .docx is a bad example, because it was standardized, but the point stands, I believe.) I hate that this stuff hits H…

> It worries me that we're developing a culture where I as an individual must adhere to some moral framework when writing code, lest I violate some social open source norms. To me, this is deeply poisonous to the spirit of open source.

Every culture or community has norms, and many of those norms generalize to universal moral principles, like: participate fairly in a community, not exploit it.

"Spirit of Open Source" isn't something defined entirely in the phrase of "open source". It's an idea that gets defeated by actions of some larger players today, hence the outrage (and an opportunity to remind people yet again, that RMS was right about this).

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#109

Post by clarry » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.

> I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. > > If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license.

I want you to have the right to be an asshole, but I'd prefer it if you were not an asshole. I don't want to enforce my preferences through contracts, licenses, and law. I might still call you out if you're an asshole.

How hard is it to understand this worldview? A world of freedom, where people do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and not because they are given no other choice.

Re: Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

#110

Post by Drdrdrq » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

dhd415 wrote: post #101

fergie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects, surf on the goodwill of open source, and then turn around and complain when other companies use elasticsearch as open source. The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well fu…

>I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "extend existing open source projects". Elastic the company was founded by the creators of Elasticsearch and is the way that its authors and most of its contributors are rewarded with actual cash money.

They probably meant Lucene that ES is based on.