31–40 of 60 posts
I understand OpenWebUI team pain and perhaps not everything they do, they should do as Open Source
In my opinion you should think about Open Source as fundamental science - if you discover Gravity, people are going to use it and often not giving you any credit.
> But with Open WebUI’s rapid growth and success, we started seeing a pattern we couldn’t ignore: bad actors taking our work, stripping the branding, selling it as their own, and giving nothing back. I recently wrote a blog post on software licensing and this more or less feels like the reasoning behind some of the source available licenses like SSPL or the Elastic License. What sometimes ends up happening is that fo…
https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/software-licenses-and-hyperscal...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean funding model? I agree with the Ladybird developers, the best model is to accept donations and other no-strings-attached funding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YM7pDMLvr4
Moreso the structure of an OSS project, which includes the funding model. The license choice is arguably one of the most important decisions yet people seem to get bitten by it quite often in my view.
https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
> taking our work, [...] and giving nothing back
That's the BSD license for you. Following is a lot of FUD about what you can or cannot do, and what is open-source at all.
> the new branding clause [...] incentivizes individuals and organizations to actively contribute back
Not anymore with a CLA. I understand that they want money, but it never works by semi-closing open-source projects. It doesn't seem to be a famous project but I still expect the usual small forks while the real projects contributions slowing down because of the CLA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/software-licenses-and-hyperscal...
I note that the GPL does not require publishing the source code, only distributing it to users of the binary code.
How does keeping the branding in place reduce misleading customers? Won't it look even more like Open WebUI supports the forked product?
They address that, for forks you have to make it clear that it is a fork of Open WebUI.
I wanted to be on the dev’s side here. CLA’s can be reasonable and I’ve happily let others convert my GPL code to them before. But reading the Open WebUI developer’s blog [1] makes it evident this isn’t really about the community — as he says, “It’s just me” and what he wants that matters for Open WebUI.
[0]: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/8468/files [1]: https://jryng.com/thoughts/my-purpose
Why does this keep happening? Do people not understand the implications choosing an open source license.in the first place? There are a million licenses, in fact you can just make your own one up! But when you choose a class of license the specifically allows commercial exploitation... you don't get to act wronged when it happens.
Its deliberate, use a permissive/pushover license to get adoption, then rugpull once you have the userbase who are relying on you, then bathe your VCs in cash.
Do you have any proof of that? Hell, are OpenWebUI even receiving VC funding?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its deliberate, use a permissive/pushover license to get adoption, then rugpull once you have the userbase who are relying on you, then bathe your VCs in cash.
You can't make such a claim without any backing. While undoubtedly it's the case for some, I strongly doubt everyone does it on purpose. It's just that orgs mature with time and realise their original naiveté. Do you have any proof of that? Hell, are OpenWebUI even receiving VC funding?
Why does this keep happening? Do people not understand the implications choosing an open source license.in the first place? There are a million licenses, in fact you can just make your own one up! But when you choose a class of license the specifically allows commercial exploitation... you don't get to act wronged when it happens.
The license is still open source. There's only a branding requirement added. Not much unlike "you must retain this notice" in other open-source licenses, like the Apache license. I frankly find LGPL more useful in cases like that, but it apparently does not work for some parties. Open-source + commercial licensing also looks like a good balance between keeping the community-developed code accessible to everyone, whil…
Nothing, then get nothing as well.
Pay the work of others, than freely charge as much as they feel like.
On my repos, the only stuff I have with ROCm licenses are forks from projects where the decision was not mine to begin with.
As time has proven, shareware and trials is a much better model if one intends to make a living from software, without having it lock behind SaaS walls, or hardware.
Even street performers got their work tools from somewhere and unless they were going around the scrap yard, it wasn't at zero cost most likely.