201–210 of 966 posts
Unrelated, but why do people prefer to assume gender over just using gender-neutral pronouns? Not a native English speaker but I've seen this a lot, especially on HN even when there's no indication of subject's gender whatsoever. Or is it just weird to use they/them? Thanks
Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source. Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's…
That is what happens when the hipster folks attack GPL and push for MIT like licenses. Had Linus not chosen it for Linux and I bet I would still be using a mix of Solaris, Aix and HP-UX on the server room. Dual licensing is the only true path, it was already so in the shareware days, and it will be back to be the daily reality. Bills have to paid.
And this is trivial but tedious code that you could replace on the spot.
I'm not dissing the author but these rants about opensource licensing and whatnot are completely out of touch.
Most (but importantly not all) of serious non-trivial open-source is sponsored by big corporations or academia so this stealing narrative is ridiculous, and MIT/ Apache is an excellent licence that successfully facilitates collaboration on some of the largest OSS projects out there so there's nothing wrong with using them.
I think that open source developers can benefit from a few business classes and a few philosophy classes in general.
Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source. Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's…
Facebook and Google at least have put out a lot of open source code, have you heard of React and Angular? PyTorch and TensorFlow? There are some pretty big names in their list of public open source projects.
Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source. Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's…
> Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them. “You don’t create intellectual property,” he said. “You create a program that does something.” But from then on, on instructions from Schlesinger, he treated everything on Goldman Sachs’s servers, even if it had just been transferred there from open source, as Goldman Sachs’s property. (At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)
From an excellent article[1] by Michael Lewis, on Goldman Sachs' attitude towards open source software.
EDIT: typo
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...
Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source. Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's…
Hmm, I agree with you, but this is a bit different. It’s not like someone took faker.js and started charging for it. It’s a tool that the author chose to give away, and other companies used. There’s literally nothing even asking people to pay, other than sponsorships at the bottom of the README. You can’t expect companies to pay if you never ask! I’d love to see GitHub create more avenues for paying for software. Sha…
You're right. Sadly, those making use of the software are often not the ones holding the purse. The request gets only to the Devs looking at the software pages and nobody generally writes to management saying "we want to use this open source software in our product and this guy/girl asks to be monetarily supported to maintain the software".
Just straight off making a commercial use license is better and clearer. However, often devs can't take on potential liabilities in such cases, which further complicates matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…
Another potentially _right_ solution is for programmers to have a union, and put pressure on employers such as google/amazon/facebook/apple to donate x% of their profits back to open source initiatives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Spotify You don't own the music. You can't share it, use your own software to analyze, shuffle, remix it, etc. > Netflix subscription But now there's Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Peacock Premium, etc. Except now instead of one easy to use interface to access it all, it's spread out all over the place and inconsistent as hell. And more expensive!
You never did “own” it on a CD, or for that matter a on vinyl or cassette. You owned a license to privately listen to your copy of the music, that lasts as long as the medium is playable. Recording from the radio is technically unlawful, as is playing the music at large gatherings or broadcasting the music. Same goes for video cassettes, DVDs and other mediums. What you do own is a physical copy of the music/film. Yo…
1. Culture: GitHub seems to have the culture of people using and putting out their code as open source just because everyone else is doing it, or they just don't know or care to do enough research about software licenses.
2. Promotion: open source seems to be used as a way to promote your product and you simply hope that no one will "screw you over" by using the license as it permits, even by big companies. They'll use open source to build their product but will cry foul when corporations do the same exact thing the open source creators were doing in the first place!
These two factors seem to account for a significant portion of the open source license based posts on Hacker News in the past several years.
What will happen in the future? It seems that people will create more proprietary software in the form of ostensibly "open source" licenses such as the SSPL by MongoDB or others. People will say that they're not truly open source, just another variation on proprietary source available licenses, which is true but the problem isn't a moral one, it's a practical one. GPL was started because the end user freedoms were eroded, and these licenses also fall into that, where people will soon discover that a proprietary license isn't great when they want to expand the original software but are encumbered by the license, such as if they work for a large company or other such restriction. Having no restrictions is always better than having even small ones.
But how will open source creators make money, one may ask. The simple answer is, they don't, and they shouldn't expect to. The more complex answer is, open source is not a business model, it is merely a licensing and distribution model. You must compete not on the code but the problems your code solves. Your product must also include marketing, sales, branding, and other business skills. Treat your product as a startup.
Amazon could open source all of its code and infrastructure and it would still be the dominant player in cloud computing as well as buying stuff online. Why? They are not in the business of selling code, they are in the business of selling convenience (as every business is actually, you don't hunt your own meat, a grocery store sells you the convenience of buying food, with money rather than time and effort; business is just commoditized convenience). Moreover, people know and trust Amazon, they don't know your other site, even if you took their source code and made your own website.
At the end of the day, people need to understand that a product is not a business. If you want to make money, you probably shouldn't make a free product. There are ways to leverage a free product into a business, as seen with TailwindCSS (free, open source) to Tailwind UI (paid, proprietary) or Laravel to Laravel Spark and Forge, but don't expect people to spontaneously pay you when they could use your product for free, unless, again, you have the business skills to make your product stand out via marketing and having product-market fit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…
> Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have. We tried it here in russia back in 1917. But then oops! something went wrong.
Just using anti-trust laws to their full effect would be enough.