Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by leoc » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #52

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…

> What you say [...] is obvious in hindsight It was also widely known for many years before Redis was a thing, i remember Slashdot comments from early 2000s about how BSD proponents are taken advantage of and they seem to like that whereas GPL proponents are taken advantage of as much as they take advantage those who take advantage of them (weird phrasing because the original quote i remember was a bit more explicit)…

[Fade to the regular Stallman Was Right opening credits. Theme tune plays.]

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

#142

Post by detaro » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

leoc wrote: post #141

badsectoracula wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you say [...] is obvious in hindsight It was also widely known for many years before Redis was a thing, i remember Slashdot comments from early 2000s about how BSD proponents are taken advantage of and they seem to like that whereas GPL proponents are taken advantage of as much as they take advantage those who take advantage of them (weird phrasing because the original quote i remember was a bit more explicit)…

[Fade to the regular Stallman Was Right opening credits. Theme tune plays.]

I'm sure listening more to Stallman would have helped AGPL-licensed MongoDB avoid all this.

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

#143

Post by eeZah7Ux » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

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.

A lot of people has been mislead (by some propaganda) to think that "permissive" licenses would be enough to build a collaborative ecosystem.

Now they are starting to realize they were naive.

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

#144

Post by Reelin » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

hannob wrote: post #21

For people who haven't followed this: The headline is as misleading as it can be. The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source, because he doesn't like what that entails (as it also means "amazon enjoys the same freedoms as everyone else"). But they like to confuse it as much as they can. This would be much less of an issue if these people were upfront: "We d…

> The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source

The situation seems to be much more complex than what you portray (ie "we don't like open source"). Take the SSPL for example - OSI may not recognize it, but as far as I'm concerned it is an open source license. Commons Clause I'm not certain about - is explicitly disallowing sale really inconsistent with open source ideals? I've yet to make my mind up on that one. Then there's the RSAL. That one definitely doesn't seem to be entirely consistent with open source ideals:

> The only restriction is that the application cannot be a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine.

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

#145

Post by leoc » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #142

leoc wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Fade to the regular Stallman Was Right opening credits. Theme tune plays.]

I'm sure listening more to Stallman would have helped AGPL-licensed MongoDB avoid all this.

Please rephrase your comment without the poorly-considered sarcasm and I will respond to it. Doing so is also likely to help you think through your position more clearly.

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

#146

Post by AnaniasAnanas » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:16 PM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #118

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

Would you mind elaborating on that? I am interested in a super-copyleft license for my next project and thought that AGPL was the "best" option out there. In what ways can it be bypassed?

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

#147

Post by Reelin » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

adamson wrote: post #41

hannob wrote: post #21

For people who haven't followed this: The headline is as misleading as it can be. The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source, because he doesn't like what that entails (as it also means "amazon enjoys the same freedoms as everyone else"). But they like to confuse it as much as they can. This would be much less of an issue if these people were upfront: "We d…

I don't see this. Are you saying the author has a bone to pick with Amazon in particular or that he has a stake in seeing OSS-based cloud services become non-OSS because he has money at stake in selling those services? None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software.

> None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software.

Actually...

The Fair Source License (Sourcegraph, https://fair.io/) explicitly does restrict those things.

The RSAL (Redis, https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-labs-modules-license-change...) kind of does, but only under some circumstances.

> The only restriction is that the application cannot be a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine.

The Confluent Community License (https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat...) only says you can't run it directly as a SaaS offering, which is better but I'm a bit uncertain where the line would be drawn in terms of product functionality.

The Commons Clause (https://commonsclause.com/) explicitly prevents you from selling the software, including hosting, consulting, support, etc. As with the Confluent license it isn't entirely clear where the line is drawn in terms of product functionality.

The SSPL (mongoDB, https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...) is in fact an open source license as far as I'm concerned, but OSI hasn't (won't?) recognize it.

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

#148

Post by pfortuny » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

tolmasky wrote: post #47

If you make your project open source, your goal should be maximizing people using it, not maximizing how much you profit from it. I know they may seem identical, but they aren't: Apple makes a lot of money by making software that has huge roadblocks to using it. And as many people are now realizing, open source has the ability to not make lots of money by making it incredibly easy for anyone to use. We all benefit gr…

The simplest example of this is TeX and MetaFont, MetaPost. The only aim of Knuth was getting people to use them. One was, the other two not so much.

And he has not complained that I know of.

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

#149

Post by AnaniasAnanas » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

Drdrdrq wrote: post #95

adamson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in this case e.g. GPL vs BSD is only marginally relevant (any modification needs to be GPL in the GPL case) to the particular case of selling OSS software as SaaS since either license lets you package and sell the bare software.

This is exactly it. GPL worked in the past, but if we take a look at Android (which is based on Linux) we can see that it failed to protect users' freedoms completely.

Something that GPLv3 would have prevented.

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

#150

Post by Reelin » Sat, Jun 01, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #146

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #118

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

Would you mind elaborating on that? I am interested in a super-copyleft license for my next project and thought that AGPL was the "best" option out there. In what ways can it be bypassed?

Check mongoDB's SSPL FAQ (https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...).

As far as I'm concerned, SSPL is superior to AGPL in that it catches all the bits that make your software actually work, forcing you to include them as part of the offering. I honestly don't understand the apparent objection to referring to a license with such a clause as open source - all it does is close a (major imo) loophole.