211–220 of 259 posts
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This would be solved if people were educated on dual-licensing - no new license needs to exist if you go GPL and have a paid commercial license.
Probably AGPL if SaaS is a concern.
FOSS is the victim in a way, but that means it must defend itself. OSI needs to get off their asses and acknowledge the problem and work with the community to develop licenses that limit SaaSification and other forms of appropriation in a way that is compatible with the principles of open source and lacks the optics (FUD) problems of the GPL approach. I’m not holding my breath since the OSI is funded almost entirely…
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If you choose to monetize then you probably will end up accepting liability for it as well if it goes wrong. For a lot of open source developers putting a 'use at your own risk' license on the software is easier. Let another company sell/support it if they want. Or build a company around it yourself to offer support.
I don't think that's the case at all. Most commercial software comes with a 'use at your own risk' license, or if you're really lucky, will cap liability at the amount you paid.
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What about insurance companies that need to predict weather disasters? Is that also more predictable than software? If it's something harder to predict, is there a way you could put error bars around it? Granted premiums could get high as a result.
The key is establishing a market for this kind of insurance policy. That can only happen if companies are made liable. That needs to happen at some point, though it's not clear how to do it without getting unpleasant unintended side effects.
>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the univer…
universities are going to continue to exist and students will be attending them. what exactly suggests that this will not continue forever? of course FOSS has always depended on people who had the resources to work on it. in the beginning this was only universities and as FOSS got more popular more funding sources appeared. the problem that we are facing is not one of funding. there is plenty of funding available. th…
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In rebuttal I'll paraphrase a little from Paul Ramsey (maintainer of 20-year open source project PostGIS)[0] His basic view is that Open Source is the dominant model today, but tension comes as very little of the value produced comes back to the community that creates this value. He argues this will always be 'the bare minimum' by virtue of economics, but that if something important slows down too much someone will p…
This personally rings true for me. My company is getting literally billions of dollars worth of value from a couple of applications (one of which I created and maintain) built upon the foundation of Postgres and PostGIS. And we benefit immensely from active development of it: PostGIS version 3.1 released a new more efficient overlay algorithm which probably saves us $5k a year in compute costs alone , and untold thou…
That pretty much sums it up.
It's why money is unlikely to flow from businesses into open source projects unless the developers are employed by those businesses, in which case the question often becomes "why are we paying to develop software that will be given away free to our competitors?"
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There's another option -- those seeking to SaaSify F/OSS can support/partner the software they use. Sustainable hosting isn't something that larger corporations are into, but the right companies can do it, and as companies that have this mindset/condition built in (best if in writing, of course) grow, F/OSS becomes more sustainable by default. All it takes is a reasonable % of revenue contribution to the F/OSS poweri…
It becomes far too tempting for them to break the abstraction barrier though. Just look at the AWS offerings divergence from the originals. Some companies are big enough to fund multiple competitors at the same time, which is about the best thing I can think to do here.
It's like if I say "fruitcake is terrible" and someone says "I like fruitcake, I use it as a paperweight and a doorstopper" as a rebuttal.
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> Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. Well... BSD unix was. Unix itself was Bell Labs, the original TCP/IP spec was done by DARPA contractors (mostly BBN). HTTP was CERN but the breakthrough "browser" product was venture funded. GNU was a private organization, though RMS's office was provided by MIT for years and years. Linux obviously was an esta…
UNIX was only free beer because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it initially, the lawsuit against BSD and forbidding the Lion's commentary came rather fast as soon as they were allowed to take commercial advantage of their research work.
An argument from a frame of "Open Source only succeeded because ..." just seems obviously wrong to me. If not ITS then Unix. If not BSD then Linux. If not Mosaic then Chrome. If not gcc then clang. On and on. Opportunities for success are everywhere, nowhere is a critical path. Take any hero out of equation and there's someone else standing behind her to repeat the work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In rebuttal I'll paraphrase a little from Paul Ramsey (maintainer of 20-year open source project PostGIS)[0] His basic view is that Open Source is the dominant model today, but tension comes as very little of the value produced comes back to the community that creates this value. He argues this will always be 'the bare minimum' by virtue of economics, but that if something important slows down too much someone will p…
This personally rings true for me. My company is getting literally billions of dollars worth of value from a couple of applications (one of which I created and maintain) built upon the foundation of Postgres and PostGIS. And we benefit immensely from active development of it: PostGIS version 3.1 released a new more efficient overlay algorithm which probably saves us $5k a year in compute costs alone , and untold thou…