There's a reason why some call MIT/BSD licenses "cuck licenses." If you don't want others to profit off your hard work... don't pick a license that lets other profit off your work...
Bear is now source-available
451–460 of 509 posts
Re: Bear is now source-available
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing. The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals
> The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals As a counterpoint, when I make something open source, I really mean "freedom", which includes the freedom to build a commercial service using the software. I use the MIT license not because of "corporate interests to undermine free sof…
The GPL is meant to be viral... it infects other projects so as to open up software ecosystems. The open source movement came out of a time when nearly everything was proprietary and locked up.
Tivo-ization really woke up a lot of people to the dangers of proprietary lock in and abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
Re: Bear is now source-available
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very business-centric viewpoint. I publish a small number of open-source libraries. They are not a business. I have no interest in making them a business. In fact, the idea of making them a business is repellent. They're just code for doing some tasks more easily than starting from scratch. I made some of them because I needed them, and had no reason to own them. I made some because I thought another librar…
To be clear: I am not talking this kind of open source. Rather, full-time commitment to software of scale. Software that does have business use cases. Software where outages can cost money.
All software meets this criteria to someone
Re: Bear is now source-available
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like we need a "forever open source" license. A commitment that any significant derivative retain the original (or some later version) of the original license. "Free to do whatever as long as it retains this license. A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author". No special cases, just a blanket license for all derivatives. If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don…
I'm really not a lawyer, but I'm skeptical that such a thing is even possible; is it legally possible to say that you as the copyright owner will never relicense something? (What I'm given to understand does work is using a copyleft license and taking code from multiple parties without a CLA, because then relicensing requires all the copyright owners to agree, which for a large enough project is impractical.)
> I'm really not a lawyer, but I'm skeptical that such a thing is even possible; is it legally possible to say that you as the copyright owner will never relicense something?
It’s possible to say anything. Without something like a contract with reciprocal commitments to make it binding, the legal effect of saying it is limited (though not necessarily zero, because legal concepts like promissory estoppel exist.)
Re: Bear is now source-available
#455Naive. Guy picks a license that allow anyone to do anything they want with his code. Later realizes that was not appropriate when he's trying make money. Changes to an obscure license that on the surface seems to fix the problem. Your options are: MIT / BSD, GPL, LGPL, AGPL. All others are unnecessary and create needless incompatibility.
Open Source is not a business model.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, but for the people in the back: "Open source is not a business model!" As RMS has stated on multiple occasions, it's not a business model and has never been a business model. It is a model to enshrine software freedoms. Nothing more, nothing less.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable. It's only unsustainable when you are interested in keeping "user" and "developer" as distinct sets. > The hyperscalers aren't giving back 1/1,000,000th of what they've taken. Yet we go after "source available" or "fair source" like it's some grave evil. No we are going after it when people try to pass it off as open source when it really…
I can't comprehend this view at all. I hate open source purism. It's not pragmatic and it's enabled us to be resold a world with ever disappearing rights. This view is okay with hyperscalers. But it attacks the small developer. The hyperscalers are removing our freedoms and privacy. Not small developers. We need leverage against this.
Strongly agree with the view you're responding to. So maybe I can talk about it.
There's just tons of software that you expect people to re-host. Yunohost has a massive catalog of free and open source software that is specifically designed to be spun up in a matter of minutes on open source VMs. To do what you're suggesting for those pieces of software would destroy the ecosystem entirely. The goal is to have multiple providers that are interchangeable that can host the software you need. So if one provider goes down, you can switch.
Meanwhile, MBAs that wanted to make money on their open source software decided that a good way to do that was to host services in charge for them. I agree, but the challenge here is what do you do when Amazon decides to take your software and also make it available to host?
And that's the moment where people abandon free software because it's inconvenient for that particular business model. The bug is not in free software. The bug is in the business model of the companies wanting to claim that they're peddling open source software, while not actually doing so: they want to have a monopoly on providing that software as a service. I understand why, but it's not good for the customer.
A real example that's getting a little long in the tooth, but back in the mid-2010s, I wanted to buy elasticsearch for a geographic search for my startup, and turns out that elasticsearch hosting, which I preferred, didn't actually offer CPU intensive instances suitable for geo-hashing. And I ended up having to switch over to Amazon to get the kinds of memory and CPU allocations that were best for our use case.
I get that you're concerned about the sustainability of these businesses, but introducing a monopoly on hosting has other downsides.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#457I strongly believe that the BuSL [1] "Business Source License" is preferrably. It leaves the code as source-available for now, but eventually the code becomes open-source. It gives you a moat from which you can run a business. Or less of a moat, and more of a time-distorting slow motion field that your competitors are 4 years behind.
This is the license Hashicorp used. It means that abandoned projects never need to die. It means that the source code is publically available now.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well, too bad for them, because I can still fork this AGPL software and compete. So what's the issue? No legal department will ever allow it due to the FUD. That's the whole fucking point.
The AGPL is supposed to increase user freedom, not the legal department's freedom. The FSF have never cared even slightly about corporations being happy. Who cares if Google can't enrich themselves further? The point is to protect the users who are free to fork / host the software themselves.
I think one of the big problems is that there are different definitions of freedom, and not everyone agrees.
freedom TO vs freedom FROM
Re: Bear is now source-available
#459As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is. I'd like to see some recognition from this crowd of the "free-ride competition" problem as this author puts it. What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-availa…
> the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing. The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals
As someone in the MIT/BSD/Apache camp, no, for me it has nothing to do with corporate interests. When I release code for free I'm doing it altruistically, and to me MIT/BSD/Apache has the most impact as it can be used in the most places now and into the future.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With the AGPL, Bear's competition can offer the software as as service if they publish the source code they are deploying. Technically true, but in practice almost every tech company forbids GPL code. I bet if you re-read your employment contract closely you'll find that you agreed not to introduce any GPL code into the company's codebases. (Edited for clarity).
Companies not wanting GPL code in code bases they want to keep proprietary should not be surprising to anyone. I fail to see how that is relevant to the comment you are replying though. Some companies subscribe to FUD (aka lawyers covering their ass) and forbid use of AGPL, GPL and sometimes even LGPL software outright even though they allow proprietary sofware that has even more restrictions, but the big elephant in…
The comment I'm replying to says that the reason companies like Bear choose these licenses over the AGPL is that the AGPL allows other companies to offer competing hosting services. I'm saying that while that's true, in practice most companies will not touch AGPL code.