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Paying people to work on open source is good

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Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#121

Post by snowpid »

lolinder wrote: post #92
Ferret7446 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

As an alternative perspective—the government currently spends ridiculous amounts of money* on proprietary software, often having chosen the vendor before the bidding process even begins, shaping the RFP to suit only the chosen vendor. The resulting software produced in these contracts remains entirely proprietary even though it was paid for by taxpayer dollars, so the company that built it is effectively guaranteed a…

Which government? There are 194 countries in the world.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#122

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

benatkin wrote: post #79
sanderjd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a pretty good microcosm of the whole debate in this one sentence where you say: > It's not OSI approved because it isn't open source, ... > ... as the community defined it long ago, ... Yep, definitely! Nobody disagrees that the OSI defined this long ago. > ... and as it still makes sense for it to be defined. Maybe! But that's where the debate is. Is that the most sensible definition? Perhaps, even p…

The debate would be for a new meaning of the term open source , which has already been established. People can create a new meaning but it doesn't change the original meaning of it, which I like to call the true meaning . The license is far from being the only thing about open source. What makes open source what it is are its triumphs, such as the popularity of Linux and how many developers prefer open source tools a…

> popularity of Linux

You surely meant to say it's a triumph of Free Software? /s

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#123

Post by em-bee »

tzs wrote: post #110
em-bee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would you call a license that meets OSI's open source definition [1] but has not been OSI-approved? arrogant, as in: do you really believe that your project is so different that one of the existing approved licenses will not do? (addressed to the hypothetical project with such a license) i mean, i am with bruce perens who believes that we need to rethink licenses completely to address many problems that have…

> do you really believe that your project is so different that one of the existing approved licenses will not do? (addressed to the hypothetical project with such a license) Actually, I think it would be pretty easy to have a project for which none of the existing OSI approved licenses will do without even being all that different, ever since OSI approved AGPLv3. AGPLv3 contains a distribution requirement that trigge…

yes, it is easy to come up with a change that seems to make sense. but it is not at all easy to vet that change legally. and no: "we have talked to our lawyers about this" is not enough. your lawyers operate in your interest. they are not operating in the interest of the Free Software or Open Source definitions. the bar for a license that would be acceptable to OSI is much much higher. and my claim that it is not easy to come up with a new license is based on that.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#124

Post by palata »

lolinder wrote: post #71
benatkin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What "original community" are you referring to here? It's a big community with a wide range of perspectives, but not so big that it can't be understood. To me the original community was mostly over a decade or two. This is similar to other communities such as a burgeoning genre of music. Whatever it was, it was established long before the words "Business Source License" were uttered. The first date range that comes…

Again, though—you're fighting for the moral integrity of a term that was explicitly coined to try to buck the moralizing that was associated with the Free Software movement and make the new concept of Open Source more appealing to corporations. The BSL isn't the first sign of the bastardization of the ideal behind Linux. The bastardization started as soon as the OSI decided that they needed to appeal to corporations,…

> condemning the BSL

Are they "condemning" the BSL by saying "it is bad, don't use it", or are they just saying "BSL is not open source"?

Because my understanding is that BSL is not open source. Rather it is a commitment of becoming open source (GPLv2) at a point later (maximum 4 years). So BSL is effectively source available until GPLv2 is added. Which does not make BSL open source: GPLv2 is.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#125

Post by palata »

wslack wrote: post #114
palata wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article again. Twice. To me the point is really that he is fed up of people criticizing the people instead of the system. And there are interesting discussions to be had around that, e.g.: is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad? Instead, for some reason he just spends a whole section redefining concepts instead of just admitting that he may have used them wrong…

> is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad? I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation. re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking…

> re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.

A lot of those discussions are not about the definition of open source (but something closely related, like "does it suck that it is difficult to get a new open source license OSI-approved?" or "should the JSON license be OSI-approved?", etc).

But "open source" is defined, has been for a while, and those who disagree with the meaning and would like to merge "source available" and "open source" are just fighting a useless fight IMO.

And really, in the featured article, the author clearly says "I will redefine 'open source' so that I don't have to say that I was wrong in my toot and in my book". To me it's like if I tooted "my favourite color in the visible spectrum is microwave", got pissed at people telling me that "microwave" is not in the "visible spectrum", and wrote a whole definition section explaining why I can't accept that I was wrong.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#126

Post by lolinder »

snowpid wrote: post #121
lolinder wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an alternative perspective—the government currently spends ridiculous amounts of money* on proprietary software, often having chosen the vendor before the bidding process even begins, shaping the RFP to suit only the chosen vendor. The resulting software produced in these contracts remains entirely proprietary even though it was paid for by taxpayer dollars, so the company that built it is effectively guaranteed a…

Which government? There are 194 countries in the world.

The context from the GP comment already made it clear which government, I don't think we need to re-clarify which country we're talking about at every level of the conversation:

> We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#127

Post by snowpid »

lolinder wrote: post #126
snowpid wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which government? There are 194 countries in the world.

The context from the GP comment already made it clear which government, I don't think we need to re-clarify which country we're talking about at every level of the conversation: > We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.

Mentioning the American govt once doesn't make 'the goverment' instead the American government. This is specially discussions about such general topics and this particular case THE GOVERMENTs of france and Germany e.g. pay people to make open source.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#128

Post by franga2000 »

tzs wrote: post #110
em-bee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would you call a license that meets OSI's open source definition [1] but has not been OSI-approved? arrogant, as in: do you really believe that your project is so different that one of the existing approved licenses will not do? (addressed to the hypothetical project with such a license) i mean, i am with bruce perens who believes that we need to rethink licenses completely to address many problems that have…

> do you really believe that your project is so different that one of the existing approved licenses will not do? (addressed to the hypothetical project with such a license) Actually, I think it would be pretty easy to have a project for which none of the existing OSI approved licenses will do without even being all that different, ever since OSI approved AGPLv3. AGPLv3 contains a distribution requirement that trigge…

I love the AGPL, but even that has some holes. One classic case is a "backend service", which the user doesn't ever directly interact with, but is used by the application backend to provide the user service. Like if I modify an AGPL geocoding microservice, which is used by my backend to plan a trip to show the user, do I need to release the source? What if it's not displayed to the user at all and is just a small part of another calculation that is (like predicting bus arrival times)? What about an AGPL database or cache server? And if backend services don't count, are the users not interacting only with the reverse proxy and everything else is a backend service?

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#129

Post by acdha »

skybrian wrote: post #119
acdha wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about someone who’s been working in open source for decades, on pretty successful projects. He knew with absolute certainty that mentioning licensing will lead to pedantic rancor, and that’s unavoidable: there is literally no way to raise this topic in a way someone will not passionately disagree with, and that’s going to distract from the more important topic he wanted to discuss. For example: > But i…

I think you misunderstood “use restrictions.” I interpret it as “anyone can use the software built with this source code themselves.” The GPL and MIT license don’t have any use restrictions. (In the case of the GPL, there are restrictions on distribution, but that’s different.)

My freedom to use a GPL-licensed library does not include the ability to link it into a proprietary application:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic

Now, I suspect that what you had in mind was the kind of restrictions like “you can’t use this if you work for the military”, but that’s exactly the point he was trying to make: there are a lot of opinions and interpretations swirling around, and his intention was to talk about something else rather than diving into the license debate which has been running since the Reagan era.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#130

Post by lolinder »

snowpid wrote: post #127
lolinder wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context from the GP comment already made it clear which government, I don't think we need to re-clarify which country we're talking about at every level of the conversation: > We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.

Mentioning the American govt once doesn't make 'the goverment' instead the American government. This is specially discussions about such general topics and this particular case THE GOVERMENTs of france and Germany e.g. pay people to make open source.

And what about the fact that I close with this quote?

> Each year, the U.S. government spends over $100 billion on information technology. ...

I get that people outside of the US wish that US residents would not assume that everyone on the internet lives in the US. I get that it's a real problem. But picking this comment on this thread to make your point just comes off as pedantic because there was no ambiguity within the context of this subthread.

This entire subthread formed in response to someone saying that they wrote their US senator about the complete lack of funding given by the US government to open source. Even if you discount the fact that I linked to a US government website to cite my numbers, no one (besides you?) was actually confused which government I was referring to.

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