Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

131–140 of 239 posts

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

#131

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.

Likewise, I don't understand your position. Just because something is legal doesn't mean we're not allowed to complain. Besides the legal contract, the social contract can be just as important.

For example, my country has freedom of speech and assembly and so forth, and it's easy to see cases where someone exercises their legal rights in ways that are supremely annoying to others, and not in any way productive for society. When we see people abusing the system, we speak out about it. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

What's the alternative? Disallow freedom of speech? Sometimes we might feel tempted, but it turns out that that has all kinds of terrible problems. As they say: this is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

There are many cases where doing the minimum that the law allows is fine and accepted. (Most people don't intentionally overpay their income tax.) There are other cases where doing something that's merely not technically illegal is frowned upon by social convention. What we're seeing is the corporate world (legal minimum) and the individual world (social contract) colliding. Who wins? So far, the corporations are.

It's easy to say "You should have picked a different license, then!" after the fact, but maybe there isn't a license which would have worked better. Maybe this is the best of several bad options. (Maybe using a more restrictive license would have caused the company to ignore the software entirely and write their own completely proprietary alternative, for example.) Maybe using the internet soapbox to plead for leadership is actually the optimal strategy.

The GNU GPL was an amazingly clever hack to use the legal system to assist enforcing a social contract, but I don't think we can expect to find solutions like that in every case.

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

#132
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, just another reason this example was not very good. It’s a complicated one.

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

#134

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…

Right, but leadership is needed to coordinate that change. The OSI needs to stand up and say "hey, the widespread use of permissive licenses is a threat to the open source community; please try to avoid them, and here's some ways you can accomplish your goals without a permissive license." Most open source projects aren't monetized, and most monetized projects won't be picked up by Amazon, so without a coordinated push permissive licenses are just the simplest way to go.

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

#135
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 "hackers" should just ask for money for their work before you are allowed to use it, just like they did years ago - how to do this was already a problem solved even in the 90s. Sure you wont get brownie points with those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda, but at least you'll be able to get food from the supermarket. And besides, cults are only nice at the beginning when there are parties, later they start t…

> ...this was already a problem solved in the 90s. Sure you won’t get brownie points by those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda...

The “indoctrinated” industry has created a massive community and even more massive ecosystem of interoperability which almost certainly wouldn’t exist under the walled off from everything else and “fuck everyone” nightmare of the 1990s.

Those 90s walled off isolated companies were significantly more cult like and significantly less effective than the system which won out in the open market—the “GNU propaganda” as you refer to it.

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

#136

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

I’m not sure if CC is meant for software either (except for CC0 perhaps).

For instance, does non-commercial mean (1) you cannot use [the output of] the program for any commercial purposes, or does it mean (2) you cannot sell the program itself (and its derivatives).

The difference is subtle but AGPL permits (1) whilst practically forbidding (2) by enforcing copyleft; hence it fits the OSS criteria whereas CC NC wouldn’t if both (1) and (2) are true.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m not sure if CC is meant for software either (except for CC0 perhaps). For instance, does non-commercial mean (1) you cannot use [the output of] the program for any commercial purposes, or does it mean (2) you cannot sell the program itself (and its derivatives). The difference is subtle but AGPL permits (1) whilst practically forbidding (2) by enforcing copyleft; hence it fits the OSS criteria whereas CC NC would…

Creative Commons themselves say that CC licenses (outside CC0) are not designed and not recommended for software.

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

#138
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean sure, for the specific case of storing financial reports in s3, you have a technical solution that works. My point still stands for abhorrent monopoly behavior of some US corps outside of the US.

Amazon did not get where it is by being nice (in fact, this HN post is about that aspect of their behavior). They're rational, they will abide by all laws _where they need to_, including regulations (you can't call in favors all the time). Without regulations, this behavior is incentivized. Even with regulations, there is an ultimate get out of free card if the regulation is non-American.

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

#139
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them? amazon themselves. risking the entire AWS business to figure out that their retailers are selling lots of shower curtains and they could be undercut by $0.05 is idiocy. > I think Americans... i stopped reading there, as it couldn't possibly have anything to do with what i was talking about. hope getting it off your chest made you feel better.

> i stopped reading there

Ironically, if you had actually read the post you might have understood that it does.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, I think we are in agreement. Except that MIT is not as well understood as most people think it is (Kyle Mitchell wrote about it, can't find the link right now), so you might want to lawyer up for opensource too. :) I just think a solution that better aligns incentives of users, businesses and developers is needed, because opensource doesn't do its job good enough. But time will tell which licenwe will get enough…

Sure, but the whole point is that the parties choosing to adopt "Source Available" licenses are doing so because they failed to predict how their users would use and profit from it, and in response, are wanting a new arrangement that better benefits them. So in some sense, we know ahead of time that this is a group which has been upset by unexpected use of their software. Now they've created a license that specifically gives them the benefit of the doubt in such scenarios in the future (vs. MIT which gives that benefit of the doubt to the user). As such, I as a user would be entering into an agreement that specifically is weighted against me in a case that has happened before, with a party that has shown in the past to want to change the rules when they felt they were not being sufficiently compensated. This makes me feel significantly less safe without the presence of a lawyer than with a license that has lots and lots of example usage. Would you say that's fair?
Post reply on HN