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

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

#111

Post by mavelikara »

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.

> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "extend existing open source projects".

I think s/he means Elastic's use of Lucene - https://lucene.apache.org/.

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

#112

Post by dbmikus »

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.

Elasticsearch uses Lucene for the actual inverted index DB systems. They then built a robust and updateable distributed system on top of it. By updateable, I mean that Lucene indexes are fixed at creation, and Elasticsearch coordinates multiple index versions to expose an updateable index system.

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

#113

Post by sheetjs »

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…

".docx is a bad example, because it was standardized"

This is not 100% correct. A large part of the format is standardized in ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500, but many details are implementation-dependent. Many of those details are covered under other specifications like [MS-DOCX] that are covered by a covenant not to sue, but other details are not covered and are therefore in murky legal territory.

[MS-DOCX] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/...

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

#114

Post by nostrebored »

pm90 wrote: post #91
sigstoat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices... it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.

Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them? I think Americans often ignore the reason behind the EU's deep concerns around privacy and regulation is simply because EU lawmakers have no other power over American corporations. Simply none. The most they can do is excessive financial penalties. They cannot jail Bezos. But what they can do, is impose an absurd financial penalty. Amazon will appeal. It w…

You can. You can supply your own keys if you think a company is insane enough to tank its multi billion dollar platform to steal your product.

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

#115

Post by hendzen »

karmakaze wrote: post #104

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 so…

Mongodb already used AGPL prior to switching to the SSPL...

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

#116

Post by bratao »

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.

I guess it was referring to the fact ElasticSearch is build on top on Lucene

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

#117

Post by adamson »

ForHackernews wrote: post #94
adamson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that hard to understand. To some degree, Amazon's behavior is exploiting an idealism that has given us software such as Linux that we're all benefitting from today, and it's easy to see why a starry-eyed engineer would want to carry on that legacy and create a project such as Redis with a permissive license. What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to…

> an idealism that has given us software such as Linux No, Linux is GPL licensed, it's not a naive permissive license.

Yes, but you’re still free to turn around and sell Linux as part of a SaaS offering as Amazon does. It saves you from someone surreptitiously forking your project and selling the fork without contributing back improvements to the public, but it doesn’t totally sidestep the issues in the article.

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

#118

Post by TAForObvReasons »

karmakaze wrote: post #104

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 so…

AGPL is vulnerable to certain workarounds in the same way that GPL was. The CC class of non-commercial licenses might be more applicable, but that may harm adoption.

EDIT: honestly not sure why this is so heavily downvoted (-7 as of the edit), the whole point of SSPL and other licenses is to address the "workarounds" that Amazon and others have discovered in AGPL

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

#119

Post by tolmasky »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #107
tolmasky wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it.

I think we're agreeing here: no one actually knows the boundaries of this. I'm simply not interested in being the guinea pig of where the line is of "the services that base on it". In my experience the actual deciding factor for this is when you become successful enough and worthwhile to sue. Then it's up to some judge in Texas to decide whether my service is "based on" this technology? I mean, I can't run my services at all without Linux -- I think they'd have a really good argument that my entire business is "based on it". You and I may see how this is silly, that's not sufficient for making me feel safe in a legal environment that currently rewards patent trolls for example.

> It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early...

If we're in "warrant territory" of explicitly stating up front every possible "OK use case" to make the user feel safe, then its either going to have so many allowable use cases as to be self-defeating, or not possibly able to predict really exciting unexpected uses and rule itself out from those domains. At the absolute minimum, I'm going to start to actually have to read over the license with a lawyer now (as opposed to one common understanding of something like MIT), since I can't imagine a "one size fits all" of acceptable explicitly spelled out use cases when the whole point of these licenses is to carve out meaningful profit areas for the project itself - something that in my opinion is going to vary greatly project to project depending on the unique features it provides.

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

#120

Post by bonzini »

danShumway wrote: post #38

We have two contrasting terms that work perfectly well right now: Open Source, a set of licenses that allow users to run and modify software for personal or commercial purposes without your permission. 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 yo…

> Open Source, a set of licenses that allow users to run and modify software for personal or commercial purposes without your permission.

... And do not prohibit redistribution of the work or source-form derivatives.

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