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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

#61

Post by AndrewKemendo »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.

The basic argument is that Amazon is Free Riding because they get massively more out of the resource than they put in, by virtue of their scale alone.

The free-rider problem occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an underprovision of those goods or services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

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

#62

Post by danShumway »

cwyers wrote: post #49
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…

> nobody will judge you, nobody will call you evil I don't think this is true. Lots of people will call anything other than their preferred licenses evil.

Well sure, some people will call you evil for choosing GPL over MIT.

But the developer community as a whole, which has already shown themselves to be basically fine with proprietary software existing, is not going to be thrown off because you call yourself Source Available.

And the people who would judge you for choosing a Source Available license are not going to suddenly be OK with you using SSPL just because Mongo says to call it Open Source.

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

#63

Post by doliveira »

jupp0r wrote: post #31

So Amazon is not a good citizen open-source wise. Some companies doing this has been the state of affairs as long as open source exists, and the world has not ended. Eventually the cost of maintaining forks will force them to engage with the community. Customers will want newer features available upstream. Amazon will contribute things back that make their own life easier. Other companies will struggle with open sour…

The cynicism that pours into threads like these is kind of depressing, though. People are increasingly more tolerant to predatory business practices.

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

#64

Post by mavelikara »

danShumway wrote: post #53
mavelikara wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is, in effect, bringing attention to this issue and I am glad that they are. > What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return.") is obvious in hindsight, and should go without saying if you start a project with the express intent of commercializing it. Even if you do thoughtfully choose a licens…

> some competing project elsewhere - student projects, in your example - will eat your market. If a student somewhere is willing to do the same thing as your company for free and release their work under MIT, why is that a problem? This smacks to me of Microsoft complaining that projects like Linux shouldn't be allowed to exist, because its unreasonable to expect them to compete with free. If eventually we get into a…

> If a student somewhere is willing to do the same thing as your company for free and release their work under MIT, why is that a problem?

There isn't a problem with that. The problem is when such projects aspire to commercialize their work, find it hard, and then complain when other commercial entities exploit their work.

The hypocrisy I am pointing out is that to get a software adopted initially projects choose overly permissible licenses; then when they try to monetize the project, they run into issues and cry foul.

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

#65

Post by catern »

infinity0 wrote: post #55
momokoko wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might want to look into, if you have not already, a topic referred to as "gift culture"[1] The hard reality, that someone like myself believes, is that open source works because most actors try to be considerate of others. It falls apart when everyone acts selfishly. I personally believe the world is better off because we have open source software(as generally defined by the OSI and other groups). So my c…

The SSPL "debate" was indeed a shit-show hijacked by people either abusing permissive-license ideologies with a corporate interest in mind, or so blinded by that ideology that they are unable to grasp the idea that freedom is an inherently contradictory concept, and that to maximise overall freedom across space and time it is necessary to restrict freedoms that result in a restriction of more freedoms. Good on these…

>I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says.

Yeah, I think the issue is that these days there's a lot of open source developers, who zealously believe in open source, but are working for corporations. They have a natural incentive to maximize the usefulness of open source for corporations, whether they explicitly acknowledge that or not. On a social level, I think that's having many effects, one of which is the backlash against SSPL, which is obviously hard for mostly-proprietary corporations to comply with.

Many open source programmers have built a mental model around the notion that the scripts that operate and deploy an application (service) aren't part of the application (service), and therefore don't need to be open source. But that doesn't make any sense from a software-freedom perspective! The fundamental tenets of open source are that users should be able to use, modify, and redistribute the application. If the users don't have access to the scripts that are required to actually deploy a modified version of the service, then it's not meaningfully open source. That's a new perspective, it's true, but I think the old perspective (the scripts to deploy a service don't need to be open sourced) was just wrong, it came from a long period of biased, commercial-centric thinking.

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

#66

Post by adamson »

dcbadacd wrote: post #42
adamson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that hard to understand. To some degree, Amazon's behavior is exploiting an idealism that has given us software such as Linux that we're all benefitting from today, and it's easy to see why a starry-eyed engineer would want to carry on that legacy and create a project such as Redis with a permissive license. What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to…

Linux uses GPL, it kind-of forces the tit-for-tat relationship.

Sure, but in this case e.g. GPL vs BSD is only marginally relevant (any modification needs to be GPL in the GPL case) to the particular case of selling OSS software as SaaS since either license lets you package and sell the bare software.

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

#67

Post by phkahler »

infinity0 wrote: post #55
momokoko wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might want to look into, if you have not already, a topic referred to as "gift culture"[1] The hard reality, that someone like myself believes, is that open source works because most actors try to be considerate of others. It falls apart when everyone acts selfishly. I personally believe the world is better off because we have open source software(as generally defined by the OSI and other groups). So my c…

The SSPL "debate" was indeed a shit-show hijacked by people either abusing permissive-license ideologies with a corporate interest in mind, or so blinded by that ideology that they are unable to grasp the idea that freedom is an inherently contradictory concept, and that to maximise overall freedom across space and time it is necessary to restrict freedoms that result in a restriction of more freedoms. Good on these…

Why did they create SSPL when AGPL already existed?

IMHO all use cases can probably be covered by MIT/BSD, GPL, LGPL, and AGPL. Everything else is license proliferation and adds confusion and problems sharing code between projects.

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

#68

Post by mavelikara »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #60
mavelikara wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is, in effect, bringing attention to this issue and I am glad that they are. > What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return.") is obvious in hindsight, and should go without saying if you start a project with the express intent of commercializing it. Even if you do thoughtfully choose a licens…

Are you saying that choosing a permissive license is like "pissing-in-the-pool"? As if do so contaminates the market for everyone?

> Are you saying that choosing a permissive license is like "pissing-in-the-pool"?

Yes, choosing overly permissible licenses (non-GPL OSS ones, in particular) contaminates the market for other software projects operating in that market.

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

#70

Post by badsectoracula »

fergie wrote: post #51
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #20

I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.

Right. I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects, surf on the goodwill of open source, and then turn around and complain when other companies use elasticsearch as open source. The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well fu…

I think "hackers" should just ask for money for their work before you are allowed to use it, just like they did years ago - how to do this was already a problem solved even in the 90s. Sure you wont get brownie points with those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda, but at least you'll be able to get food from the supermarket. And besides, cults are only nice at the beginning when there are parties, later they start to suck when sacrifices enter in the picture.
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