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Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#131

Post by getcrunk »

This goes against the foss ethos but given that foss is ultimately rooted in freedom I think what I will suggest can be reconciled with the primary principle.

I’ve been thinking the only way to truly protect freedom of individuals and of foss development is to have a dual license which is foss unless you deploy it to over 10m users or 10m revenue or belong to list of companies like the eu designated gatekeepers. In that case each project should have the latitude to decide if they will enforce terms if any. Meaning that given the needs of the developers being otherwise met they can always forego any additional requirements

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#133

Post by jratkevic »

sangnoir wrote: post #130
Pannoniae wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If money is not important, what's the harm in making it available as open source, but with a non-commercial clause?

Because I don't mind people using my software commercially if they are respecting the license. I wouldn't want to be charged for all my commercial usage of Linux, Git, Postgres, zsh, the rust toolchain, etc. I believe if everyone in our industry tried to capture all/most of of the economic value of their work, we'd all be poorer for it, metaphorically and literally since a huge part of high SDE salaries is due to hig…

Exactly. I don't understand the drama on this at all.

"Corporate Open Source is dead"?? I don't even know what that means! Having launched at least 20 open source companies, several that went public -- this is not news that this faction of companies were NEVER going to make it (AND WE SAID SO). And that is ok.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#134

Post by int_19h »

cogman10 wrote: post #83
jabl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it. Huh, what software is MS releasing under the GPL now?

Not as much as I thought. MIT is more common it looks like. https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories?q=license%3Ag...

MIT is the standard OSS license for Microsoft stuff that is open source. You also see Apache for some projects that predate standardization on MIT, and GPL where there's no way to avoid it (i.e. when you have to build on code that is itself GPL).

That said, peak OSS at Microsoft is already past. These days, it's all about advertising products as OSS while quietly close-sourcing parts of it (e.g. just about the only thing in VSCode that's fully open source is JS support, every other language extension is closed to some extent).

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#135

Post by int_19h »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #37
matheusmoreira wrote: post #19

Always remember: It's either AGPLv3 or proprietary all rights reserved. Anything else means you're giving your labor away for free to the beggar barons. Biggest wealth transfer in history, from developers and straight into the pockets of billionaires. It's just irrational. Also remember: Whoever owns the copyright gets to do whatever they want. The licensing security of free software, defined here as the likelihood o…

Those “robber barons” are also the source of most tech jobs and how most of us here earn a living

The source of most jobs (tech or not) are, ultimately, people and their needs.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#139

Post by Aissen »

geerlingguy wrote: post #71
deathanatos wrote: post #58

> And they're not even a pointless AI company! Are you sure? (/s), because IBM mentioned "AI" no less than 10 times in their announcement of the purchase: > AI-driven application growth … IBM's deep focus and investment in […] AI … The global excitement surrounding generative AI … HashiCorp's capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era … generative AI deployment c…

Ah, maybe IBM was duped into thinking HashiCorp was an AI play?

Obviously, you discover and talk to AI services with consul, store AI secrets in vault, deploy AI platform nomad with AI infrastructure software terraform.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#140

Post by piaste »

yencabulator wrote: post #116
piaste wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard Stallman, of all people, is not as intransigent as you. > I've considered selling exceptions acceptable since the 1990s, and on occasion I've suggested it to companies. Sometimes this approach has made it possible for important programs to become free software. > [..] [S]elling exceptions permits limited embedding of the code in proprietary software, but the [non-copyleft] X11 license goes even further, permi…

The continuous-rugpull part of demanding CLAs is selling other people's work as proprietary. You'll hear much less complaining if you're selling your own work under a second license.

It feels unfair to describe it as a "rugpull" when the first bullet point, in bold, reads:

> *Grant of copyright license*. You give HashiCorp permission to use your copyrighted work in commercial products.

https://www.hashicorp.com/cla

Unless that text was recently changed, or unless Hashicorp went out of its way to verbally reassure people that they didn't intend to ever exercise that option, I feel very little sympathy for any open source contributor who clicked that link and then was dismayed to find Hashicorp using his work in a commercial product.

Read what you sign, and take responsibility.

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