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By now, this kind of open source rug pull is becoming routine. I'm really not sure how I feel about it. I'm thankful for all the free stuff, and I can't fault anyone for trying to make a buck or two. I'm a huge advocate of free software, but mostly for personal use and individual freedom. So I don't feel like the loss of Scylla is a great loss in that respect. I can't imagine a lot of individuals are harmed by this m…
Buuuttt... projects like these would probably never haven gotten the traction they have now if they wouldn't have started out as opensource but being closed source. For example Hashicorp and Redis definitely wouldn't be where they are today if they had start out as opensource. So in that sense these license changes are a bait and switch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The audacity, right?
Not the word I'd have used. Weird take. I doubt anyone criticizing is doing so because of "How dare they want money?" Which just begs the question, why did you think that? That take just exposes a complete missing of the point of open source software and why (honest) people invest their time in it. There are others who just want the caché and benefits that come with producing open source, but without the annoying act…
Can you refrain from personal attacks here please?
In reality open source is very difficult to build a business around, which means that software can’t exist long term. It’s not about not wanting to be open source, it’s about realising that you and your employees livelihoods are being abused by people who see open source and take it to mean they shouldn’t pay. Especially egregious when your competitors take your work and build a closed sourced business around it.
Where it exists in a small community of other developers, most of whom have a similar mindset, it works fine.
And for very popular projects, there’s enough users for whom it makes economic sense to have some devs on staff to support their usage, tailor stuff, and keep it moving forward to maintain the project.
But in the middle, where most things are, it kinda doesn’t work.
By now, this kind of open source rug pull is becoming routine. I'm really not sure how I feel about it. I'm thankful for all the free stuff, and I can't fault anyone for trying to make a buck or two. I'm a huge advocate of free software, but mostly for personal use and individual freedom. So I don't feel like the loss of Scylla is a great loss in that respect. I can't imagine a lot of individuals are harmed by this m…
In the 90s, we had shareware/freeware/beerware. No one expected source availability. At universities, the Unix world had open source, in the real sense. Then something happened that caused these two tracks to merge.
Maybe the university students grew up and carried on their belief in open source, but also had to create the business. After 20 years, they realized (1) it doesn't have to be open source to _feel right_ and (2) maintaining in the open is more expensive. They're now in management positions, not coding. Selling B2B doesn't require code to be open to the public, since you can have source available licenses. And as you said, perhaps ScyllaDB isn't really targeting the hobbyist. We'll continue this trend.
Or perhaps open source has stopped being a buzzword. We're now much more of a SaaS world, where being open source isn't as important as costing $10 per month or having 200 "data partners" that need to track you.
That said, I think there's a really good reason for core libraries and security-sensitive libraries to be open. I want to be able to inspect them, before using them. And I'm in the HN crowd of actually using open source code because I can fix bugs as I encounter them, but I realize this is a small crowd.
I'd love for open source to be a useful word again, and not something that goes on the Silicon Valley PR budget.
I understand it will have limitations on the data that you can use (up to a certain size) and the CPU power (up to these many cores). Will it also limit the activity type (commercial, SaaS offering, ...)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the word I'd have used. Weird take. I doubt anyone criticizing is doing so because of "How dare they want money?" Which just begs the question, why did you think that? That take just exposes a complete missing of the point of open source software and why (honest) people invest their time in it. There are others who just want the caché and benefits that come with producing open source, but without the annoying act…
> and no one who's not an idiot thinks it is Can you refrain from personal attacks here please?
By now, this kind of open source rug pull is becoming routine. I'm really not sure how I feel about it. I'm thankful for all the free stuff, and I can't fault anyone for trying to make a buck or two. I'm a huge advocate of free software, but mostly for personal use and individual freedom. So I don't feel like the loss of Scylla is a great loss in that respect. I can't imagine a lot of individuals are harmed by this m…
Definitely also understand everyone needs to make a living. Buuuttt... projects like these would probably never haven gotten the traction they have now if they wouldn't have started out as opensource but being closed source. For example Hashicorp and Redis definitely wouldn't be where they are today if they had start out as opensource. So in that sense these license changes are a bait and switch.
What makes you think there are genuine open source projects that don't get traction? Ansible is still GPLv3 even while owned by RedHat^W IBM and works fine. Any one of the bazillions of front-end toolkits, build tools, bundlers, whatever, many initiated by some company and practically all under open source licenses.
My experience has been that if something is useful, and its open source license means one can fix bugs they encounter or at least have a small chance it'll remain around indefinitely (not go out of business) in order to bake it into your workflow, then it'll be adopted and blogged about and show up in HN and Reddit
The other interesting example is Copyleft software, where "Corporation" does not have complete copyright holder. For example Percona or MariaDB can't "close source" their MySQL forks of the core software, though it does not prevent them from doing it with other parts of the complete platform, think MariaDB MaxScale.