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

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

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 147 posts

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

#111

Post by icebraining »

stevenacreman wrote: post #11

People are upvoting the title because I guess they agree to some extent. It seems everyone starting an open source project nowadays needs to protect against the cloud providers. The topic on here about the new CI tool from the creator of Ansible also had an element of this. But I actually quite liked his solution. He gives everything away for free and the source is open. You just cannot profit from his work unless yo…

The question is not whether it works or not. This new alternative to open source may be great, we're just asking people to clearly distinguish their new model as such.

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

#112

Post by dragonwriter »

Bartweiss wrote: post #109
bunderbunder wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Pay if you profit" has real potential, and as you say has been achieved in the past via dual licensing.

But, often, that involved straight-out lying about a FOSS license, though, and presenting the dual license scheme as if it were the near-equivalent of Commons Clause. (E.g., the old MySQL GPL or commercial license scheme.)

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

#113

Post by caboteria »

BeetleB wrote: post #69
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #53

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.

>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…

I'll let the official Commons Clause website speak for me.

https://commonsclause.com/

> Is this “Open Source”? No.

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

#114

Post by hoaw »

icebraining wrote: post #87
hoaw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the license is presumably that they disagree with that definition. As far as I know a license can be OSI approved without containing patent grants, effectively making the code unusable for commercial purposes. There is also, again as far as I know, nothing stopping companies from using contracts to restrict the use of code in at least some OSI approved licenses. That said, I do think they should st…

A definition is not an opinion, it's an arbitrary mapping from a term to a description; you can't really disagree with it. You're free to use another definition for the same term, but if you don't make it extremely clear to you're departing from the most commonly used, don't be surprised if people treat you as any other sleazy salesperson. The patent grant is a red herring; they're copyright licenses, and judged as s…

> A definition is not an opinion, it's an arbitrary mapping from a term to a description; you can't really disagree with it.

How open something has to be, to be called open source is a matter of opinion, so is to some degree what open means in the context of open source. Otherwise they would have to call it "unconditional open source" but then a number of, if not most, licenses wouldn't qualify.

> The patent grant is a red herring; they're copyright licenses, and judged as so.

It isn't a red herring. I use it as an example to show that the openness in OSI approved licenses aren't absolute. Some licenses have other terms. They might for instance retain the moral rights of the author, try to avoid any liability or condition the distribution of software. If you can have those exceptions and still be considered open source I don't see an objective reason why you can't call software where the economic rights are retained open source as well (even though I can understand why people wouldn't want that).

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

#115

Post by Bartweiss »

kazagistar wrote: post #86
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…

> 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. Sure, I can get behind that but it has nothing to do with this article which is about non-OSS software trying to trick developers who might want to contribute to OSS into contributing to them instead using naming tricks and deceptive terminology.

The monetization rules in the Commons Clause are quite narrow (for instance, no consulting profits) and that might have annoyed a lot of people no matter how it was implemented.

But I don't think people would be anywhere near this upset if it had been announced as "we started with the text of the Apache License and made a new source-available non-commercial license, we're calling it Use No Resale or UNR for short".

Instead we got "Here's a clause that breaks a core tenant of FOSS, for adding to FOSS licenses, but in our FAQ we admit it's not open source. And it's initialism conflicts with the Creative Commons, and its first big application will be called Apache License + Commons Clause, because no one will ever abbreviate that to Apache + Commons and confuse it with the existing Apache Commons." Plus a huge pile of FUD by alluding to unexplained 'malicious contributors' and 'preventing project shutdowns' to justify its existence.

There are so many different unpleasant aspects to this rollout that I don't really understand how even proponents of the license can view the backlash as "just more anti-monetization hostility".

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

#116

Post by Bartweiss »

npr11 wrote: post #39

This post seemed aggressive and vague to me. I'm not even sure what problem the author has with these licenses. I _think_ the issue is confusing naming - which seems pretty solvable - and not a fundamental problem with "dual licensing" / "source available" / "commons clause" software? People can develop software out in the open and say "use it as it is, for free!", "use it as part of a new product, for free!", but al…

> I could make a product, you can use it for free, I will try to make money selling consulting services around the product (you can compete with me on that!) just don't sell the software.

I agree that even if it's not FOSS, this is a healthy and reasonable way to profit from software. Unfortunately, the Commons Clause explicitly forbids this healthy use.

“Sell” means...to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software), a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software

Imagine that you create new a new project greatly improving Commons Clause software, offer it for free, and offer paid consulting exclusively on your project, while refusing any work that involves consulting about the code you didn't write. That would still violate the license, which says that only the original license holder can do consulting on anything that's substantially derived from the core code. As written, there's no way at all to make money downstream from Commons Clause code, no matter how much value you add.

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

#117

Post by icebraining »

myWindoonn wrote: post #13

At least non-free licensing gives us an easy way to tell which software is not worth using. It's funny how these recent packages in the news all have FLOSS alternatives: * Mongo? Why not Pg? * GitLab? Why not Fossil? * Redis? Why not better architecture? * Vespene? Why not Nix tools? You may see each of these as flamebait. I see each of these as a discussion that, here on HN, usually ends in stalemate. What I'm sugge…

Redis is still pure FOSS (BSD licensed). Only the extra modules got the license change.

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

#118

Post by icebraining »

Klathmon wrote: post #80
detaro wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd personally prefer if the various proposals for these things picked their own term and filled that positively (e.g. one recent example used a label along the lines of "fair licensing"). Many projects have build on the foundation of these principles (E.g. Debian, where they originated, accepts only compliant software in the core distro) Many people feel quite strongly about things that can be perceived as corporate…

Like all good arguments, this one comes down to semantics! I'm not going to argue about what a word or phrase "should" mean, but I am going to say that I think the FOSS community could benefit from being more open to different views in this area. I think this is a case of dogmatism (that might not be the right word here, in this case i mean overly adhering to definitions) that is causing the entire community to be wo…

If the concept of the term "open source" changes, I feel nobody will be really impacted for the worse.

Of course it does. It dilutes the concept, making it less relevant and useful. Currently I know that I can sell something I make using open source libraries; tomorrow, I won't. At each dilution, the concept is rendered less useful and more irrelevant.

But what will happen is we will see more experimentation with monetization methods that don't rely on loopholes or technicalities in existing licenses to achieve the same thing in practice.

More experimentation is great, but that doesn't justify reusing the terminology to mean other things.

It's not even a good PR move, considering the (completely predictable) pushback. It's just silly.

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

#119

Post by hawski »

staticassertion wrote: post #5

I believe I'm in the minority when I say this. Ultimately, if I choose to, I will license my project however I want. If I want to restrict others from selling my product I will do so. Calling it Apache 2.0 + Common Clause makes sense, it's an extremely well known license and it's easier to start there and then say "but with some restrictions". That said, I do see the issue that people may use this software and not un…

Vegan + Protein supplement¹

Kosher + Fat supplement²

Good work/life balance + Long Weekend Clause³

¹ Chicken

² Pork fat

³ Work also on weekends

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

#120

Post by nqzero »

i'm sympathetic to (and in the same boat) as the developers that are considering "licenses" like this one. but i agree with the author that the language being used is fraudulent and the terms are one-sided (hence the quotes). i've made an attempt at coming up with a license that better bridges the gap between open and closed. my goals were:

* pay to use the software * assure developers that they can also monetize their work * assure users that prices won't change unpredictably

https://github.com/db4j/pupl/blob/master/PUPL.md

would love any feedback or alternative licenses that capture similar elements

Post reply on HN