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Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

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Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#61

Post by davisr »

radlad wrote: post #54
davisr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make substantial income by selling copies of my AGPLv3-licensed program for $12/ea.

You've piqued my interest. Can you share more? Do you have a blog post about your product and how you sell it?

I don't have a post about it, but the equation is pretty simple: good cross-platform software + good documentation + responsive development = good product. The trick is to write good software -- the license doesn't matter so much. But, making it free/libre is competitively advantageous, all else considered. Some customers have told me they would not have considered paying for a proprietary option.

My project is called reMarkable Connection Utility (RCU), and it makes about $2.1k MRR, selling ~200 copies/month. Some months are worse, some are better.

I've never purchased any advertisement. Its users advocate for it through online forums. That genuine attestation, to its quality and also to me as a person/programmer, helps it sell. That its users, too, are free to share their copy with friends helps people encounter the program who otherwise would not have purchased forthright.

I sell it from my personal website with links to PayPal and Stripe. The return URL is its download page. No JavaScript anywhere. I provide the entire Git history of the project, as well as binaries for all major distros of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS. I also provide two mailing lists -- one for all customers to be informed of updates, and another for customers to talk with each other, see my latest code patches, and talk about its general development and the reMarkable tablet.

http://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#62

Post by Decabytes »

I'm glad Jeff pointed out the RMS article on Free software

> For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.

> “Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.”

> We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters. What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.” To make this clear, we avoid using those terms.

People in the FOSS world has been beating this drum since the very beginning. Free software was always an ideology. I get that that turns people off, just like projects wrapped up in religion and politics do, but it's the only way to ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen.

I concede that the people who champion FOSS are not always the kindest people to be around, see the response from people about Guix when I mentioned it as an alternative to Nix.

But when I was in Boston I was a card carrying member of the FSF. I went to a few libre planets, and I met some real nice people in real life who also cared about FOSS very deeply, so I know not everyone in the community is a jerk.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#63

Post by chrisweekly »

radlad wrote: post #54
davisr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make substantial income by selling copies of my AGPLv3-licensed program for $12/ea.

You've piqued my interest. Can you share more? Do you have a blog post about your product and how you sell it?

See his bio http://www.davisr.me/

I'm actually a paying customer of his RCU software (for managing reMarkable tablet firmware, backups, etc).

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#64

Post by mfuzzey »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #7

> By working on a project with a CLA, where you sign away your code, you're giving carte blanche for the company to take away your freedom to use their software. Ok it's been a while so I don't remember the details or how it played out, but when Linux introduced a CoC, there were people who contributed to the kernel in the past that threatened to withdraw their code from the kernel, which would've been a nightmare to…

I don't think a contributor can unilatary withdraw their code from a code base unless there is license change. Then it wouldn't be about "withdrawing" their code but refusing to allow it to be distributed under a different license than the one that applied when they submitted it.

So if Linus wanted to relicense the kernel under a different license than GPL2 he couldn't do it by himself without tracking down all the contributors and getting them to agree to the license change or removing the code in question which, for someting as large and with as many contributors as the kernel, would be basically impossible.

The CoC is completely different. It's not a license change but a process change. If a contributor doesn't like a new CoC or a new processs they can decide to no longer contribute in the future under that process, including no longer maintaining "their" code already in the kernel but they can't force anyone to remove it.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#65

Post by cogman10 »

buildfocus wrote: post #47

There are uses for CLAs besides rug pulls. For example, if you want to offer software as AGPL, accept community contributions, but be able to _also_ offer a non-AGPL option to paying customers (who effectively pay to be allowed to integrate the license without themselves being subject to licensing risk). Quite a few big orgs have a full ban on internal use of AGPL software so this can be very valuable. That requires…

Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it.

Latest versions stay fully open source while back ported fixes are a paid feature if you don't keep your software up to date. That, to me, is a win win.

Oracle is doing the same with the JDK.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#66

Post by wmf »

buildfocus wrote: post #47

There are uses for CLAs besides rug pulls. For example, if you want to offer software as AGPL, accept community contributions, but be able to _also_ offer a non-AGPL option to paying customers (who effectively pay to be allowed to integrate the license without themselves being subject to licensing risk). Quite a few big orgs have a full ban on internal use of AGPL software so this can be very valuable. That requires…

This is abuse of the AGPL and open source in name only.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#67

Post by RetroTechie »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #10
kevingadd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.

It's why things like Captura no longer exist. You make something fantastic with an open source license, someone else renames it and sells it in app stores, and the people running the app stores go "the license allowed for this, we see nothing wrong". It's well past time for getting rid of licenses that say "you can do what you like with this software", and replace them with licenses that allows you to sell as long as…

> MIT/GPL/CC0

There's (many) different licenses - for a reason.

If someone makes a small game, wants users to enjoy all the freedoms its developer had, but does not want random 3rd party to include it in a product without telling their users about that, use a GPL style license.

If someone is working on a network protocol, an image format, or audio/video codec, and have that go everywhere to become a defacto standard is more important than other considerations, go for a BSD/MIT style license.

Some vendors don't mind their users looking under the hood. But still want to retain control. Enter 'shared source' (=not open source) or dual licensing (eg. free for non-commercial use, commercial users: pay up).

Documentation is different. So is hardware.

If you're a developer (or vendor): think about this, and pick appropriate license. Just don't complain when you did open source something, and a 3rd party runs with it.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#68

Post by qwertox »

It's basically become market research where the amount of devs which get hooked indicate success and these devs also double as the client (a trap). I try to stay with my stack, which also makes me miss out on things like the highly recommended Tailscale-service.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#69

Post by matheusmoreira »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #37
matheusmoreira wrote: post #19

Always remember: It's either AGPLv3 or proprietary all rights reserved. Anything else means you're giving your labor away for free to the beggar barons. Biggest wealth transfer in history, from developers and straight into the pockets of billionaires. It's just irrational. Also remember: Whoever owns the copyright gets to do whatever they want. The licensing security of free software, defined here as the likelihood o…

Those “robber barons” are also the source of most tech jobs and how most of us here earn a living

Not robber barons. Beggar barons.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

Trillion dollar corporations. That beg for free labor. That exploit the good will of free and open source software developers.

Here's the latest example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39912916

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909949

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#70

Post by vertis »

adrianN wrote: post #16
kevingadd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not unless all the contributors signed an Evil CLA first so I can relicense it :-)

I start all my stuff with AGPL .

Haha jokes on you. I sucked your AGPL code into my LLM and now you have to prove I'm actually using your code when it generates the same thing. Good luck with that.
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