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Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

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Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#141

Post by ensignavenger »

mlyle wrote: post #122
ensignavenger wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary solution never cost "only" money. You generally have to negotiate licensing, then you have to renegotiate licensing when you need to make a change (or when you current terms expire). You have to invest effort into understanding your license (Open Source licenses are usually at least somewhat standardized and usually a lot short than proprietary licenses). Finally, the big kicker is vendor lock-in. If the…

I think this misses the point, though-- no matter how true it is. The costs associated with procuring the existing, proprietary solution are understood and accepted. If it goes wrong, it's a risk that the organization has collectively selected together. Advocating for doing something cheaper doesn't gain any individual person that much necessarily, and incurs outsized risk. It also incurs a lot of explicit, poorly-un…

Selling any sort of change to any company is usually very hard. It has nothing to do with proprietary versus open source. Open Source is a major selling point, and the Open Source community can/needs to do better explaining the value proposition of Open Source. That is why companies that wish to sell change employ salespeople.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#142

Post by vipa123 »

hda2 wrote: post #86
pabs3 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a lot of effort and money to enforce copyleft open source licenses, a lot of companies just violate them regardless. Some companies even violate permissive licenses, for eg my router violates the microhttpd BSD license. The latest GPL lawsuit I saw was only possible due to a large grant from amateur radio hobbyists. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/press/qand…

Damages. Offer two licenses. One GPL and the other commercial. Make the commercial license as costly as possible, even Oracle grade by charging per core. Include language stating that the licensing agreement falls back to the commercial license if the GPL is violated and the violation is not remedied according to the provisions set in the GPL. Any licensing fees collected get poured back into the open source project.…

Do you have a real-world example of what a license like this looks like?

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#143

Post by jgilias »

riveducha wrote: post #135
jgilias wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you suggest is not really dual licensing though. It's a source-available license with a free tier. Dual licensing means that there are two licenses that the user can choose from at their discretion . This is why GPL may work together with a commercial license but not MIT, as businesses have reasons to avoid GPL.

It sounds like otrahuevada is describing the same thing, doesnt it? Choose a commercial license if you want support, or the open source license if you don’t. That is how I understood it.

What otrahuevada is describing is a situation in which the software developer determines under what terms a particular user may use the software, not a situation where the user makes this choice. Only the latter situation is (can be) dual licensing. The difference may seem subtle, but it's actually huge.

There was a discussion about this with someone else just yesterday. I'll find the link.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871302#29873586

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#144

Post by semi-extrinsic »

guitarbill wrote: post #100
hda2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damages. Offer two licenses. One GPL and the other commercial. Make the commercial license as costly as possible, even Oracle grade by charging per core. Include language stating that the licensing agreement falls back to the commercial license if the GPL is violated and the violation is not remedied according to the provisions set in the GPL. Any licensing fees collected get poured back into the open source project.…

Is there an easy way of providing commercial licences? Has anybody had experiences with this? I've seen Super Source ( https://supso.org/ ), which I think used to be called Supported Source ( https://supportedsource.org ). It seems to make providing commercial licenses easy. But their website is pretty bare. Do people usually just roll their own with Square or Stripe? I've found it hard to get search results on this…

From my experience, RLM is one option that is widely used for this. FlexLM is another one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_License_Manager

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#145

Post by mlyle »

ensignavenger wrote: post #141
mlyle wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this misses the point, though-- no matter how true it is. The costs associated with procuring the existing, proprietary solution are understood and accepted. If it goes wrong, it's a risk that the organization has collectively selected together. Advocating for doing something cheaper doesn't gain any individual person that much necessarily, and incurs outsized risk. It also incurs a lot of explicit, poorly-un…

Selling any sort of change to any company is usually very hard. It has nothing to do with proprietary versus open source. Open Source is a major selling point, and the Open Source community can/needs to do better explaining the value proposition of Open Source. That is why companies that wish to sell change employ salespeople.

Right. I don't think anyone else in this thread really said that it had something to do with proprietary vs. open source or even very much to do with free-as-in-beer vs. costly.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#146

Post by kube-system »

Devasta wrote: post #76
phoronixrly wrote: post #21

Developments like this one and the faker.js and colors.js fiasco from last week have made me rethink my position about licensing. Now it seems to me that releasing code you wrote for free under a permissive open-source license is somewhere between ill-advised and unethical. On one hand it will not benefit you in any way, on the other, it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expens…

No one except the most credulous buffoons really believed the "MIT is more free" nonsense about the GPL, it is, was, and always will be a push to move away from "Free as in Freedom" to "Free as in Free Tech Support". Large Corps won't use your code if its AGPL? Thats a feature, code away without worrying about breaking anything!

I don't have any problem releasing stuff under permissive licenses like MIT.

What you shouldn't do is have unrealistic expectations about the software you release. If you give stuff away for free, expect that you're giving it away for free. If people ask for free support, and you don't want to give it, be prepared to tell them so. Also, don't expect that there is any unwritten expectation for anything in return.

Your license is your agreement with your users. If it doesn't outline what you want, you picked the wrong one.

I'd use GPL if I wanted to expend the effort trying to force people to contribute to my projects. But that isn't always the case.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#147

Post by charcircuit »

eropple wrote: post #104
charcircuit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a child starting from $0 I built up almost all of the money I have now doing contract work by making closed source software using open source software. Being able to quickly make things without even having to spend any money is great for someone with no money. It didn't make me poorer as someone with $0, it made me much richer. I know my software was a positive to the lives of many people even if it is closed sour…

Are you giving back to the people who enabled you to do so?

Honestly, no. They released their software for free, so that's what I will pay.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#148

Post by rbanffy »

akerl_ wrote: post #120
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT licenses enable closed source software that would otherwise have to be open source, is the point.

“Would otherwise” assumes a default state where the original software was GPL, presumably. But the fact that the MIT license allows for use in closed source software isn’t in dispute. Do you (and the other commenters in this thread) believe that closed source software is unethical? And if so, why? And do you believe that MIT-licensed software is also unethical, because it allows for closed source usage? If so, why?

I question whether allowing unethical behavior is, in itself, unethical, when you have the option of not allowing it at all. I didn't mention software licenses anywhere in the question.

To use a situation common these days, knowing people wearing masks are less likely to pass COVID to others wearing masks, is it ethical to have a restaurant that allows clients not to wear masks? Is it ethical to operate a whore house that doesn't mandate regular AIDS tests?

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#149

Post by favorited »

SloopJon wrote: post #138
phoronixrly wrote: post #21

Developments like this one and the faker.js and colors.js fiasco from last week have made me rethink my position about licensing. Now it seems to me that releasing code you wrote for free under a permissive open-source license is somewhere between ill-advised and unethical. On one hand it will not benefit you in any way, on the other, it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expens…

> it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expenses necessary to develop it Without necessarily taking a position on the ethics, I would point to macOS and its derivatives as a clear example of this. Apple invested significant resources into a successor to System 7 called Copland, abandoning it in 1996. While the purchase of NeXT in 1997 hugely influenced the design of OS X, look a…

The flip side (of this specific example) is that several of those projects were either started or nearly exclusively funded by Apple.

- Mach's primary architect, Avie Tevanian, was hired by NeXT to productize it, and he continued that work at Apple with XNU and the OS X strategy to replace the classic MacOS

- Apple hired Chris Lattner after he finished his PhD (where LLVM was started) and then created Clang and open-sourced it, as well as other LLVM tools like libcxx

- Apple hired Michael Sweet (creator and maintainer of CUPS) and paid him to maintain it for several years

As you say, Apple's software wouldn't be where it is today without open source. But major open source projects either wouldn't exist at all (e.g., Clang) or would have needed someone else to pay for their maintenance (e.g., CUPS) without Apple.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#150

Post by akerl_ »

rbanffy wrote: post #148
akerl_ wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Would otherwise” assumes a default state where the original software was GPL, presumably. But the fact that the MIT license allows for use in closed source software isn’t in dispute. Do you (and the other commenters in this thread) believe that closed source software is unethical? And if so, why? And do you believe that MIT-licensed software is also unethical, because it allows for closed source usage? If so, why?

I question whether allowing unethical behavior is, in itself, unethical, when you have the option of not allowing it at all. I didn't mention software licenses anywhere in the question. To use a situation common these days, knowing people wearing masks are less likely to pass COVID to others wearing masks, is it ethical to have a restaurant that allows clients not to wear masks? Is it ethical to operate a whore house…

This is a thread about software licensing. If you’re looking to have a theoretical debate about whether in general unethical behavior is unethical to support, I guess that’s a fun debate, but it’s not really relevant to this post or comment tree.
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