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

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

#161

Post by skybrian »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #106
danShumway wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people have argued that, yes. I've even argued it occasionally in the past. The short justification given is that even though the GPL doesn't let you do everything, it still doesn't interfere with the 4 essential freedoms that Open Source guarantees. You may or may not agree with that justification. But the people arguing in favor of SSPL as an Open Source license are moving in the wrong direction. If TechCrunch…

> The short justification given is that even though the GPL doesn't let you do everything, it still doesn't interfere with the 4 essential freedoms that Open Source guarantees. You may or may not agree with that justification. Wait, what? "Four essential freedoms" are part of FSF philosophy, not Open Source, and GPL is literally the canonical example of a license that guarantees and safeguards them. Many Open Source…

Yes, the open source definition has its own rules. The one that seems most relevant here is:

"No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

"The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

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

#162

Post by danShumway »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #106
danShumway wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people have argued that, yes. I've even argued it occasionally in the past. The short justification given is that even though the GPL doesn't let you do everything, it still doesn't interfere with the 4 essential freedoms that Open Source guarantees. You may or may not agree with that justification. But the people arguing in favor of SSPL as an Open Source license are moving in the wrong direction. If TechCrunch…

> The short justification given is that even though the GPL doesn't let you do everything, it still doesn't interfere with the 4 essential freedoms that Open Source guarantees. You may or may not agree with that justification. Wait, what? "Four essential freedoms" are part of FSF philosophy, not Open Source, and GPL is literally the canonical example of a license that guarantees and safeguards them. Many Open Source…

I am conflating Open Source and FSF, and I think people are very right to call me out on that. Especially in this context :)

The point I was trying to get at is that regardless of existing debates over the merits of permissive vs. copyleft licenses, neither side of that debate would say that SSPL belongs here.

Permissive license advocates would say that while they dislike GPL's restrictions, adding more restrictions is a bad idea. GPL advocates would say that the point of the GPL is to safeguard the 4 essential freedoms, and SSPL doesn't safeguard them.

Techcrunch is arguing that because there isn't perfect consensus within FOSS, FLOSS, and Open Source communities, that we might as well just turn this whole thing into a free-for-all.

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

#163

Post by lightedman »

ForHackernews wrote: post #125
adamson wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you’re still free to turn around and sell Linux as part of a SaaS offering as Amazon does. It saves you from someone surreptitiously forking your project and selling the fork without contributing back improvements to the public, but it doesn’t totally sidestep the issues in the article.

True, but SaaS didn't exist at the time Linux was invented, so it's hard to fault Torvalds for not foreseeing this particular issue. The broader point, I'd argue, is that the idealism behind many successful free software projects was tempered by realism in choosing licenses that compel contributing back to the community.

SaaS has been around since the 1960s

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

#164

Post by tango12 »

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…

This is true. We had to change our license from AGPL to Apache to make sure enterprise adoption was frictionless because there’s often a blanket ban on AGPL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064281

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

#165

Post by strken »

Reelin wrote: post #147
adamson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some interesting tests would be Firebase, Airtable, and Google Sheets. Assuming each of those products was built on top of databases available under each license, which would be legal?

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

#166

Post by Reelin »

detaro wrote: post #156
Reelin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) loo…

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, al…

Upon rereading the bit you quoted, I agree that could be an issue. I had initially misinterpreted "all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available" to mean it was limited to any essential supporting bits you had implemented that might have otherwise been made proprietary (much to the detriment of a user trying to actually use the source code you provided). It does seem to be overreaching, but I also maintain that the AGPL has a major loophole as things currently stand.

Edit: From the sibling comment, it seems that SSPLv2 tries to address this.

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

#167

Post by karmakaze »

tango12 wrote: post #164
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…

This is true. We had to change our license from AGPL to Apache to make sure enterprise adoption was frictionless because there’s often a blanket ban on AGPL. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064281

Hmm, wonder if there's something we can take away from this. Let's say the latest major release is AGPL (or newer dominant copyleft) and the previous major release is more enterprise friendly licensed with those offering paid support handling the security and maintenance of them. This means that the community can continue to develop and use the latest and greatest. Not perfect but it might work in some cases.

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

#168

Post by Reelin »

ryukafalz wrote: post #157
Reelin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) loo…

From my reading of SSPL v1, it would seem extremely difficult to use in concert with other free software; it requires you to distribute all software [0] you're using to run your service under the SSPL. The trouble is, you can't do that if you're using any other software in your environment that's licensed under another copyleft license such as the GPL. Does this apply all the way down to the Linux kernel? Who knows!…

It seems there are indeed serious issues with SSPLv1 that I was unaware of. That being said, the loophole in the AGPL that they are attempting to address is also a serious issue. The rewording in v2

> “storage software and hosting software” changed to “host orchestration software”

seems to be fairly reasonable though, unless I've misunderstood things once again?

> But note that not even MongoDB, the project that the SSPL came from, is using v2 at the moment.

From the page you linked,

> If this version is approved by OSI, we plan to apply it to the next release of our MongoDB software, which is currently available under version 1.0.

so it seems they really do just want to address the current loophole in the AGPL.

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

#169

Post by treis »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #9
webmaven wrote: post #3

> "It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs." Basically, there is no such thing as an "Open Source API". APIs are not software, and we've already seen the damage that treating APIs as software (for copyright purposes) can do. The proper abstraction f…

This. If the only thing keeping customers on my platform is an incompatible API, what does that say about me as a vendor?

A well thought out API is a valuable thing and there's no shame in that being your competitive advantage.

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

#170

Post by samcodes »

When I open source code, I use MIT. I have introduced open source strategies at places I work, and guided teams through the process.

Ok now that I've established my OSS cred: I'd be really interested in a license that is effectively MIT, _except_ for the 20 largest software companies, for whom there is no license and any use is restricted (you'd need to clearly define what makes a company a software company, and what it means to be the largest, but that's what lawyers are for). They could pay for a commerical license if the customer demand was high enough.

This seems like it would address the main issue as I see it, that is, I want almost everyone to be able to use my software to build cool shit and make money... But if you're FAANG or some shit, come on. The rules are different.

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