Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

Post by eadmund » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 2:43 PM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #129

sangnoir wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depends on what your philosophy is. You believe in the software commons and the free sharing of software? You would want software to remain as a public good so no one can profit from it exclusively. > Are you a business who made some software? You don't want others to resell it because it's your work, you made it and you don't want others to freeload. I cant help but notice that you assume everyone uses money as a…

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

Post by Pannoniae » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

eadmund wrote: post #150

Pannoniae wrote: post #79

None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it, and prevent others from exploiting you in the process. Hyperscalers like Amazon exploit OSS projects by reselling them as a cloud service and they earn a gigantic sum in the process. But this is not a neutral thing to do - the OSS project is still responsible for maintenance!…

> None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it, and prevent others from exploiting you in the process. You’re begging the question of whether one should be able to earn a living from making free software. Free software is not fundamentally about business or profit: it’s about ethics. It’s about the freedom of software use…

Post by sangnoir » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 4:29 PM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #149

sangnoir wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's entirely fair, but you can tailor the licences to target the biggest freeloaders (prohibit hosting it as a cloud service, allow everything else) while letting everyone else use it without worrying about licensing. That's the beautiful part - you can choose vastly different approaches with differing levels of freedom/openness, depending on your and your users' needs. A game is licenced quite differently than a…

Post by Arrowmaster » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

barfbagginus wrote: post #78

buildfocus wrote: post #47

There are uses for CLAs besides rug pulls. For example, if you want to offer software as AGPL, accept community contributions, but be able to _also_ offer a non-AGPL option to paying customers (who effectively pay to be allowed to integrate the license without themselves being subject to licensing risk). Quite a few big orgs have a full ban on internal use of AGPL software so this can be very valuable. That requires…

Hmm. Orgs which ban AGPL should be marked and targeted for dismantling. Any way to scope them out, or public registry of them we can build? Orgs banning AGPL should not be allowed to exist at all, or use open source at all. They should all be systematically sabotaged by the OSS community, and if possible acquired/reformed, or destroyed. And it would be very convenient for me to be able to relicense an AGPL contributo…

Post by growse » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 10:20 AM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #86

geerlingguy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'. The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other…

I'm not sure what the alternative is or what you are advocating. Antirez stopped working on Redis 4 years ago. We were lucky someone created Redis "for the love of the game". Now before you there are a couple options 1. Antirez2 pops up and works on Redis because they love working on Redis 2. Someone is incentivized, with money, to work on Redis. (1) didn't happen, so we must go with (2), and with (2) comes the probl…