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How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

jarinheit.posterous.com

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Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#61

Post by cies »

AGPL + contrib agreement is a way to ensure that commercial investments in open source projects are more likely.

everyone may use and modify it, but has to disclose its modifications. (since its AGPL'ed)

contributions that find their way back into the parent project (dispora) must sign the contrib agreement so that diaspora can license it commercially under terms they pick. this allows them to potentially make some money selling commercial licenses. investors need this security because they do not want to invest in a product that everyone exploit equally.

i think the model is valid and fair. it work for the company i currently work for (zarafa.com).

jarin has the right to not like the license, sure. but if he used his patches to serve a diaspora instance from heroku to anyone besides him self he should (AGPL) disclose those patches. of course this does not mean he should sign the contrib agreement, but that would limit the impact of his work...

jarin calls diaspora dead. i think thats unfair. they did a great job and it will be nice reference material for a rails3+mongodb+haml+jquery+websocket project. good choise of technology in my eyes! (thank $DEITY for not going with php)

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#62

Post by bitdiddle »

lzw wrote: post #13
dasht wrote: post #6

Heh. The reasons given also explain why the GNU project has failed to release any influential software like GCC, the various GNU shell utilities, GNU Emacs, GDB and other such insignificant projects.

No denying the influence of GNU, but have you noticed that commercially tolerant licenses are becoming more popular and businesses are some of the biggest producers of new major open source projects?

Do you have any numbers to support this assertion?

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#63

Post by loup-vaillant »

This guy apparently haven't heard about the freedom box.[1] It's not out, but it's doable, and once we have it, self hosted Diaspora seed will be a matter of plug and play.

Therefore, we have no need for huge, scalable seeds. And despite the AGPL, profitable companies can make money out of Diaspora: contribute => make the freedom box more attractive => sell more freedom boxes. Pure software companies can be paid by hardware companies to do this job, everyone's happy. Equating profitable with "proprietarizeable" is quite a stretch.

I feel like I'm stating the obvious, here. Could I be missing something?

[1]: http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#64

Post by bitdiddle »

Qz wrote: post #52
baddox wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that's a bad policy necessarily, I'm just saying it isn't exactly what I would call "free" software.

It's not about being completely free for you, it's about being mostly free for everyone.

Thanks for saying this. I think it's best to compare this kind of freedom to freedoms we get from our constitution. You can't deny others those freedoms.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#65

Post by jarin »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #63

This guy apparently haven't heard about the freedom box.[1] It's not out, but it's doable, and once we have it, self hosted Diaspora seed will be a matter of plug and play. Therefore, we have no need for huge, scalable seeds. And despite the AGPL, profitable companies can make money out of Diaspora: contribute => make the freedom box more attractive => sell more freedom boxes. Pure software companies can be paid by h…

Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#66

Post by loup-vaillant »

baddox wrote: post #45
lnguyen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about making sure that if you build upon the work that others have made openly available, that you contribute back. If you want to keep your code closed, then you're more than welcome to do that. Just honor the choice that others have made with their code.

I'm not saying that's a bad policy necessarily, I'm just saying it isn't exactly what I would call "free" software.

Remember that the GPL prevents one thing and one thing only: making proprietary forks. Meaning, the only "freedom" it doesn't give you is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others.

This limit is perfectly in line with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. I argue that anything that allow this limit to be crossed does not most efficiently promotes freedom.

Yes, permissive licences do not most efficiently promote freedom. (Don't get me wrong: they do promote freedom.)

Now the AGPL, because of its additional restriction, could be seen as less free. I think that technically, it is (it doesn't fully give you the right to private modifications). But the spirit is the same, applied to remote applications instead of distributed software.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#67

Post by loup-vaillant »

jarin wrote: post #65
loup-vaillant wrote: post #63

This guy apparently haven't heard about the freedom box.[1] It's not out, but it's doable, and once we have it, self hosted Diaspora seed will be a matter of plug and play. Therefore, we have no need for huge, scalable seeds. And despite the AGPL, profitable companies can make money out of Diaspora: contribute => make the freedom box more attractive => sell more freedom boxes. Pure software companies can be paid by h…

Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?

Free? Free?

Let me put it this way. Say you have a Facebook account. Say you use it as intended: by doing most of your (semi) private communication through it.

Now, how much would I have to pay you for you to surrender a copy of your Facebook account, with your wall, your past conversations, and a copy of what your friends let you see? Promise, I won't do anything bad, but please sign this little paper that let me to, just in case.

That's the real price of using Facebook. Either you really think your price is $0, or you didn't think this through (most people don't, which is why I think Facebook is so popular). My price is $you_can't_afford_it.

(Edit: I forgot to mention advertisements, but I don't know how much they really cost me.)

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#68

Post by drdaeman »

jaekwon wrote: post #54

I'm not familiar with the AGPL. Does this mean that I cannot modify the Diaspora source code to run on my server for my business needs, without giving join ownership of my modifications to Diaspora? / without releasing the modifications to the public? OK that's a letdown.

Yes, it means that you have to allow your users to access any modifications you did and freely use and redistribute them further under AGPL.

The only problem I see here is site design - companies certainly won't like that their corporate style will be used freely. Hope this'll be worked around somehow (trademarking?)

About the code itself - Diaspora is a distributed system, so IMHO it's quite absurd to attract users with some proprietary installation-unique features. Diaspora is more of a network, not a product. Imagine some ISP creating their own proprietary extensions to the TCP procotol - sounds weird, right?

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#69

Post by jarin »

drdaeman wrote: post #68
jaekwon wrote: post #54

I'm not familiar with the AGPL. Does this mean that I cannot modify the Diaspora source code to run on my server for my business needs, without giving join ownership of my modifications to Diaspora? / without releasing the modifications to the public? OK that's a letdown.

Yes, it means that you have to allow your users to access any modifications you did and freely use and redistribute them further under AGPL. The only problem I see here is site design - companies certainly won't like that their corporate style will be used freely. Hope this'll be worked around somehow (trademarking?) About the code itself - Diaspora is a distributed system, so IMHO it's quite absurd to attract users…

Actually it's not so absurd to want to build in proprietary features. Let's say Yahoo! wants to create their own seed for their users, but they want to tie the user accounts to their internal, confidential authentication systems. It is both completely disadvantageous for Yahoo and has absolutely no benefit for the OSS community for Yahoo to adopt Diaspora in that scenario. And I'm sure there are a lot of companies and developers out there who have unique features to add to their seeds that have absolutely no relevance to the main codebase or other developers.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#70

Post by jarin »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #67
jarin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?

Free? Free? Let me put it this way. Say you have a Facebook account. Say you use it as intended: by doing most of your (semi) private communication through it. Now, how much would I have to pay you for you to surrender a copy of your Facebook account, with your wall, your past conversations, and a copy of what your friends let you see? Promise, I won't do anything bad, but please sign this little paper that let me to…

Diaspora is asking users to do the exact same thing: give up their Facebook accounts and start over on Diaspora. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a serious incentive for users to move over.

"It's open source" is not going to cut it for anyone but a subset of techies. Data portability probably won't be a big incentive for most people either, considering you can't even get them to back up their hard drives. Although I think it is a pretty cool idea (and I would like to have one), I have serious doubts that "you can pay us for a thing that you plug into your wall and your profile lives on it" will be much of a sales point for most people either.

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