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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

#221

Post by mgfist »

ajross wrote: post #103
zyx321 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it says "Sold by: Amazon.com", Amazon isn't party to the contract. DHL doesn't get to know what is in the package they deliver, so why should Amazon be entitled to that information?

You have a cite supporting that legal theory? Because the fact that it happened on their website using indexing in their database and (especially) that they took payment directly, seems like a pretty strong argument that they ARE a party to the contract.

Amazon isn't buying the goods though. The store selling the good isn't just selling it to Amazon, so it's not reselling.

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

#222

Post by galaxyLogic »

karmakaze wrote: post #219
galaxyLogic wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an interesting idea. How about taking it even further and say what you say above but then also provide the latest and greatest release also as a commercial version. Then companies who want the latest will pay for it and OS community gets the latest with AGPL, while companies who prefer MIT license get a version that works but is not the latest or greatest. That would be much like paying for support, getti…

I wondered about combining it with dual licensing, but I don't even know how people do that today. Say if a whole community contributed to an AGPL project and it has a dual commercial license, who controls and profits from it?

Maybe all (registered) contributors would have to sign agreement that they give rights to publish also with commercial license to the corporation or non-profit that is in charge of the distribution. Would they be willing to do so? Well maybe they should get a cut of the profits.

That gets complicated managing all the payments, but I can see a single company using this model for their own benefit. Build momentum with the (two) OS licenses and get some income from the commercial license.

What could make this an attractive simple-to-manage model is that there would still be just one product, with different time-based releases of it, provided with a different license.

No need to fix bugs in the older releases, they are fixed in later versions. And everybody gets the fixes eventually but those who pay (or agree to AGPL) get them sooner.

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

#223

Post by kemitchell »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #121
hendzen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mongodb already used AGPL prior to switching to the SSPL...

The problem is that only MongoDB did it, not the majority of the FLOSS ecosystem.

That’s not what Mongo said. They called out specific issues with AGPLv3’s terms.

http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...

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

#224

Post by kemitchell »

AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #146
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL is vulnerable to certain workarounds in the same way that GPL was. The CC class of non-commercial licenses might be more applicable, but that may harm adoption. EDIT: honestly not sure why this is so heavily downvoted (-7 as of the edit), the whole point of SSPL and other licenses is to address the "workarounds" that Amazon and others have discovered in AGPL

Would you mind elaborating on that? I am interested in a super-copyleft license for my next project and thought that AGPL was the "best" option out there. In what ways can it be bypassed?

https://paritylicense.com/

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

#225

Post by kemitchell »

bhickey wrote: post #26

More whining from Sunil Deshpande. He's upset that no one on license-discuss was dumb enough to fall for the Commons Clause or SSPL. It'll be a happy day when he gives up his anti-open source abuse campaign.

Nobody proposed Commons Clause to OSI. And I’m not the only one who stood up for SSPL as open source.

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

#226

Post by quickthrower2 »

jeena wrote: post #212
quickthrower2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source isn’t particularly about making money. The making money is orthogonal and potentially harder if the source is available with a permissive license. Free software is about freedom of the user to make copies and distribute the source code and again money is orthogonal. But I think in practice both open source and free software are hard to monitise. Often the open source software is a marketing platform for a…

I still disagree, open source from the start was designed with companies (and it's developers) in mind and companies are particularly about making money. It's about the underlying values, open source is about making development easier, cheaper, etc. Btw. I'm not comparing open- vs. closed-source but open-source-software vs. free-software.

I haven't read up on the origins of OSS, so I can't really comment on why it was designed. I will at some point read up on it more.

I agree Open Source & Non-Free (as per R.M.S.) would be much more commercially useful than Free in a lot of circumstances, because if I pay $1000 for some Free as in Speech software I can then go and sell it to your competitors for $10.

The only way I can think that this is not business-destroying if said software is so tricky to set up that it only makes sense to buy it from the original vendor who will set it up for you in the price - in which case that probably breaks the spirit of free software.

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

#227

Post by AnaniasAnanas »

kemitchell wrote: post #224
AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on that? I am interested in a super-copyleft license for my next project and thought that AGPL was the "best" option out there. In what ways can it be bypassed?

https://paritylicense.com/

That's cool and all but it does not seem any more copyleft than AGPL, in fact it seems even less copyleft than GPLv3 as it lacks the Tivoization/drm/etc clauses.

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

#228

Post by AnaniasAnanas »

imtringued wrote: post #206
AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on that? I am interested in a super-copyleft license for my next project and thought that AGPL was the "best" option out there. In what ways can it be bypassed?

Someone with more money than you can do a proprietary clean room reimplementation.

So I will force them to waste money compared to if I used a more permissive license? Sounds good. Plus I could offer proprietary licenses this way.

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

#229

Post by SolarNet »

luckylion wrote: post #48
danShumway wrote: post #38

We have two contrasting terms that work perfectly well right now: Open Source, a set of licenses that allow users to run and modify software for personal or commercial purposes without your permission. and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things yo…

> and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things you don't like with it. GPL is source available, then?

No. If you wanna get technical about it GPL is structured around ensuring every user can see and modify the code, and do whatever they want with it, except prevent people from doing the first thing (seeing and modifying the code). It's sort of a vacuously false thing where "provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up" has the criteria of ensuring the original clause of "a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code".

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

#230

Post by msbarnett »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #159
msbarnett wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why did they create SSPL when AGPL already existed? Because they were already using the AGPL, and it did precisely Nothing to stop Amazon from turning into a massive free-rider who undermined the very ability of the project to fund continued development of the project Amazon was free-riding on.

But why should Amazon be prevented from running said software? "Because I don't like it" isn't a good reason.

They shouldn’t, per se. But if they’re not going to be good citizens by contributing back to the project they’re profiting off of, while simultaneously attacking and undermining the ability of the project to fund itself, that’s a massive Free Rider problem that in the long run ends in the loss of a lot of important Open Source projects.

We can attempt to solve this free rider problem, or we can shrug our shoulders and decide we’re just comfortable with a world with a lot of dead Open Source projects and a lot more proprietary software. But “the current situation is fine and sustainable” is head-in-sand thinking. This Bad Citizen behaviour is an existential threat to the long term prospects of Open Source.

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