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The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

drewdevault.com

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Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#31

Post by sonnyblarney »

vinceguidry wrote: post #23
sonnyblarney wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that it's an ideological argument at all, I see it as a pragmatic perspective on what will 'actually happen' given the arguably 'ideological' stance of this new kind of license. The license are short and powerful ant try to 'make a statement' themselves ... in reality, the resulting behaviour of the community is another thing altogether.

The pragmatic perspective is the one given by the supporters of the Commons Clause. The ideological one is the one given by the Free Software advocates who have longer memories and thus know where this leads. I personally support the ideological position, I just don't think this is the right way to make that argument.

There is nothing pragmatic about the CC because it will wield all sorts of problems, most of them unanticipated and unexpected, and may very well 'do the opposite' of intended. That's not 'pragmatic'.

'Pragmatic' is recognizing that maybe what we have today is kind of crap and not perfect, but it's much better than some new pipe-dream of a clause.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#34

Post by marcinzm »

falcolas wrote: post #27
fh973 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake news, according to the man himself: http://antirez.com/news/120 The whole thing is evidently not about Redis, but modules that were developed by Redis Labs.

That presumes that functionality of Redis is not subsequently moved into modules, and that new functionality is not only done in modules. The current development path does seem to favor modules - a slim core with the functionality added as modules.

Reminds me of Databricks, the company founded by the Apache Spark creators. More and more of what they do is fully proprietary and at least one their previously OSS module is now proprietary (Redshift integration). They also boast of how much faster their cloud offering (running on top of AWS) is than other Spark cloud versions (running on top of AWS) which makes me suspect there's performance improvements that they're not open sourcing.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#35

Post by _hyn3 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #19
nathan_long wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This argument is theological in that it's arguing against an idea, labeling it heresy. I find this use of "theological" insulting and not fitting to the situation. "Ideological" or "partisan" would be better IMO.

Au contraire, I find religion to be extremely fitting to the free software - open source debate. Richard Stallman himself is very sympathetic to theological analogies for technology debates, calling himself Saint IGNUcius. https://stallman.org/saint.html

Invoking an atheist like RMS doesn't help matters, even if he may have a lot of wisdom and experience in the licensing wars. Conflating an argument over a particular licensing debate in 2018 with deeply-held religious beliefs that may have existed for thousands of years and even inspired actual religious wars (where thousands of people, or even millions -- might as well loop Godwin's law into this debate -- actually died in horrific ways) would certainly appear to be insulting to those who are religious (and many who are not) and might take your irreverence more seriously than it was intended.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#36

Post by fosco »

vinceguidry wrote: post #19
nathan_long wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This argument is theological in that it's arguing against an idea, labeling it heresy. I find this use of "theological" insulting and not fitting to the situation. "Ideological" or "partisan" would be better IMO.

Au contraire, I find religion to be extremely fitting to the free software - open source debate. Richard Stallman himself is very sympathetic to theological analogies for technology debates, calling himself Saint IGNUcius. https://stallman.org/saint.html

Thank you for this!

> To join the Church of Emacs, you need only pronounce the Confession of the Faith: There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#37

Post by foundry27 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #6

This argument is theological in that it's arguing against an idea, labeling it heresy. His ideal 'solution' is to just fold it all up and try to forget it ever happened. But you can't fight ideas, ideas provide solutions to problems that people have and if you want people to stop rolling their own solutions, then the orthodoxy needs to make their solutions actually work for actual people, not just the faithful. Not e…

I don’t usually post here (more interested in the articles than the discourse over them), but this is something that really resonated with me. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of engineering. We don’t know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our disciplines. The history of the study of engineering shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often insufficient for the changing future, and that fundamental insights into new possibilities can arise from the most unexpected sources.

All of us are entitled to our opinions on the healthiness of the Commons Clause, but if history has taught us anything, censoring the mere _idea_ of it for being in conflict with one’s personal ideology is the greater injustice, and will accomplish nothing in the long run. Might its adoption hurt some people? Maybe. Might it help some people? Also maybe. But shooting it down before it has the chance to do either feels wrong.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#38

Post by paganel »

Someone1234 wrote: post #25
fh973 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake news, according to the man himself: http://antirez.com/news/120 The whole thing is evidently not about Redis, but modules that were developed by Redis Labs.

People need to stop using the term "fake news" it is more a meme at this point than constructive English. Even reading that statement and assuming the best intentions I can see why people would be upset/concerned. Redis has gone from Open Source to "Open Core" with some of the best modules now essentially paid for.

> People need to stop using the term "fake news" it is more a meme at this point than constructive English.

Just yesterday the most powerful politician from my country (a EU and NATO member) said during a live interview on prime-time TV that George Soros had sent 4 men in order to assassinate him last year (spoiler alert: they didn't succeed, even though they had been checked-in at the local Hilton hotel). His right-hand man had an interview the day before that saying that the KGB (yes, the Russian KGB) had tried to recruit him (spoiler alert: apparently the Russians didn't succeed). All I want to say is that "fake news" is indeed a live and active concept, just trying to hide it under the rug won't bring back the former, saner times.

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#39

Post by addicted »

vinceguidry wrote: post #19
nathan_long wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This argument is theological in that it's arguing against an idea, labeling it heresy. I find this use of "theological" insulting and not fitting to the situation. "Ideological" or "partisan" would be better IMO.

Au contraire, I find religion to be extremely fitting to the free software - open source debate. Richard Stallman himself is very sympathetic to theological analogies for technology debates, calling himself Saint IGNUcius. https://stallman.org/saint.html

From that page:

Warning: taking the Church of Emacs (or any church) too seriously may be hazardous to your health.

So at least that page is absolutely not evidence that Stallman is sympathetic to theological analogies (the fact that he is joking by making a theological analogy indicates the opposite).

Re: The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

#40

Post by djsumdog »

I wish there were more publications on how open source is really funded. Earlier Linux and BSD kernels were made by a combination of researchers, people with spare time, volunteers as well as big companies who paid people full time. We see much more of the latter. Intel has an entire OSS division in Portland, OR that writes most of the drives, works on Linux kernel patches, etc. Nintendo and Sony both use big parts of the BSD TCP stack in their operating systems and have an interest in contributing and keeping it up to date.

But open source didn't depend on these funding models in the 90s/2000s did it? I did a whole post on the philosophy of open source a while back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...

..but one of the things I didn't find enough sources on where a lot of funding came from (And percentage of volunteer contributors).

This recent Redis things reminds me of the Caddy controversy, and maybe even more recently, how Win/Mac Docker binaries are behind a login wall.

What changed? Do developers no longer have the time to volunteer to work on this stuff? The desire? Is the demand for tech in The Valley/West Cost changing the dynamics of how much time people have to contribute. Were the earlier efforts way less commercial and new efforts moving much faster and requirement more maintenance/resources?

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