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

drewdevault.com

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

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

hendzen wrote: post #7

At the end of the day, open source projects need developers... and developers need to eat. These license changes have been forced by the business reality of larger cloud companies capturing all the value created by open source communities and leaving OSS developers to starve. Who deserves the value created by Redis? Antirez and the Redis Labs developers? Or Jeff Bezos?

> These license changes have been forced by the business reality of larger cloud companies capturing all the value created by open source communities and leaving OSS developers to starve.

No, they haven't, because the “big industry players capture the revenue, while open source devs mostly work for those players, either directly or through sponsored projects” isn't something that started with the cloud; it's why Linus Torvalds isn't a billionaire.

It's forced by firms wanting the economics of classic proprietary software and the PR benefits of F/OSS, in many cases, apparently, because they have investors who bought in to F/OSS-based endeavors based on expectations that were unrealistic ab initio given the economics of the industry.

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

#142

Post by slededit »

dragonwriter wrote: post #139
slededit wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL says nothing about monetization. It only says Amazon would have to open any modifications they made. Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers it does not solve the problem of paying the people actually doing the work.

> Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers Which, if they really are the dominant beneficiary, they probably will; whoever is making the most money from the software has the most financial interest in maintaining it, and that's the reason so many big corps that benefit from FOSS invest heavily back into those projects, either via sponsorship of projects or paying their own developers to work on the codebase o…

Doesn't really happen with Openssh. Or MySQL or Postgres for that matter. With Open Source there are a lot more takers than givers.

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

#143

Post by dragonwriter »

slededit wrote: post #142
dragonwriter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers Which, if they really are the dominant beneficiary, they probably will; whoever is making the most money from the software has the most financial interest in maintaining it, and that's the reason so many big corps that benefit from FOSS invest heavily back into those projects, either via sponsorship of projects or paying their own developers to work on the codebase o…

Doesn't really happen with Openssh. Or MySQL or Postgres for that matter. With Open Source there are a lot more takers than givers.

> Doesn't really happen with Openssh.

Who is the big player dominating revenue from OpenSSH? Projects with extremely diffuse benefit like that (or, perhaps more clearly, OpenSSL) do often have a problem here, but that's not what Commons Clause claims to be directed at.

> Or MySQL or Postgres for that matter.

Postgres definitely gets lots of support from significant commercializers of Postgres like EnterpriseDB, Postgres Pro, Citus, and Heroku.

MySQL, maybe not, but a GPL arrangement, especially one requiring copyright assignment, discourages third-party commercial contributions, especially when the owner is actively dual-licensing. Who wants to pay for development of IP someone else can sell more freely than you can?

(Permissively-licensed SQLite, OTOH, has huge contributions for downstream commercial users.)

> With Open Source there are a lot more takers than givers.

By design. There are also more givers than with propietary-licensed software, also by design.

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

#144

Post by koonsolo »

duckerude wrote: post #99
koonsolo wrote: post #76

We need a different name for this, so either - Source-available software ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software ) - Shared source ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative ) So that it's clear that source code is available in some form, but it's not open source.

Shared source ranges from actual free software to software that you aren't allowed to modify or redistribute, and it's only used by Microsoft. I don't think it's a good idea to expand the meaning to cover software that isn't Microsoft's.

So we need a different name, I don't really care which. But I think it's clear we need one to make the distinction.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #140
esotericn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you walk by me in the street, you're implicitly reserving the right to throw me in to oncoming traffic. In reality, despite being strictly possible, this barely ever occurs in practice. I don't think it's fair to use the term "implicit" in that way. No-one is suggesting that you write your startup's infrastructure based on random bits of code, that's obviously a bad idea. I'd basically consider 'no licence' as e…

> When you walk by me in the street, you're implicitly reserving the right to throw me in to oncoming traffic No such right exists, so it is not implicitly reserved. This is not the case, in law, with copyright.

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by staticassertion »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #105
BeetleB wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is a loud minority of people who disagree The minority is those who insist on the OSI definition as the only appropriate way to use "open source". >mainly people who are wondering if in the future they can exploit open source community in a similar manner. The problem I'm seeing is the labeling of people who disagree about a single point (terminology) as bad actors (i.e. people who are bent on "exploiting"). A…

>The minority is those who insist on the OSI definition as the only appropriate way to use "open source". No, it's not. I actually ran a poll on my Mastodon account last night: https://www.strawpoll.me/16741426/r I followed up with many of the "something else" folks and most of the people I spoke to said that they were confused by the premise because free/open source are different things, and one had a strange and po…

That poll seems extremely biased by the fact that they're your followers.

Beyond that, your answers are leading, and don't include the proposed "Source availability". When you put a poll this way its obvious that people will choose specific answers.

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

#147

Post by mrjn »

(Author of Dgraph here).

To Drew Devault: Just came across this article, and there's no comments section in your blog post.

> Finally, I have some praise to offer. Dgraph was briefly licensed under Apache plus the Commons Clause, and had the sort of misleading and false information this article decries on their marketing website, docs, and so on. However, they’ve rolled it back, and Dgraph is now using the Apache 2.0 license with no modifications. Thank you!

Please don't "praise" us. When we switched to the clause (back in April 2018), we had changed wordings on our site (we don't do any marketing, so not sure which marketing website you're referring to) to not mention open source but to mention liberally licensed (which I strongly hold that Apache + Commons Clause is, more so than AGPL). There was no false or misleading information. In fact, that was pointed out to you multiple times, but that didn't change your rhetoric.

Dgraph is no longer under Commons Clause and (its core) is under Apache 2.0 license, so I think I can speak as an open-source guy here. There are people like me out there, who'd like to ensure that they can make a livelihood out of writing open source software, without asking for donations, or doing another job. We'd also like to ensure that if we run a company around open source, that company can be sustainable and profitable. If your answer to these people is to switch to closed source, then you're doing a bad job of promoting open source.

In fact, your attitude towards open source is damaging to anybody who is willing to spend their time and effort building open source and expects to make a good living out of it.

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