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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

#71

Post by skybrian »

luckylion wrote: post #48
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…

> 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 you don't like with it. GPL is source available, then?

As far as I know GPL complies with the open source definition. You can run the software for any purpose, including selling commercial services.

Source available licenses would be appropriate if you want to restrict use. (For example by Amazon.)

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

#72

Post by ngold »

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…

Excellent point. Anything to misconstrue a common definition in the name of marketing buzz.

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

#73

Post by neya »

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.

There's a famous project that did something similar to this. It's WURFL. The creator behind the project got offended when a big co (Google I assume, not sure) who forked his project and never paid him anything at all. I believe it was under a different, very permissive license. When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license screwing companies who depended on his database. Luckily, someone cloned the project on Github, but he took it also down with a DMCA.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/01/wurfl-and-database-copyrigh...

I really hate people who don't understand what open source really means and get offended when someone uses their work in a way that doesn't violate the license, but doesn't give back.

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

#74

Post by scarface74 »

adamson wrote: post #34
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.

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…

There was no “idealism” behind the creation of Mongo, ElasticSearch, or Redis. They were all trying to profit and used open source as marketing.

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

#76

Post by brentonator »

What a lot of people overlook is when Amazon takes something (DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility) on internally is they are re-inventing the way the database works in such a way it's dubious if the community would benefit. I do think it would have been better to see this go the Postgres route where they could have continued to contribute to the core product but I believe MongoDB saw competition against their MongoDB Cloud product and decided to change the licensing. This neccessitated the need for a hard fork since they were not interested in working together. An AWS Q&A stated they are working on a completely independent code base that is API compatible with MongoDB 3.6, so there is nothing to contribute back to the MongoDB open-source code base.

DocumentDB much like Amazon Aurora has pivoted much of the database internals to depend on the AWS ecosystem. The whole concept of replica-sets on MongoDB are very rigid and inflexible compared to the elegance made possible by EBS and Amazon engineers.

MongoDB replication is measured in seconds meanwhile DocumentDB replication is "usually less than 100 milliseconds". This makes read replicas in DocumentDB more relevant for all kinds of real-time tasks vs MongoDB.

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

#77

Post by jcoffland »

Open-Source is alive, well and functioning as intended. Tens of thousands of Open-Source projects are producing the software that is driving most of today's tech.

To a venture capitalist, Open-Source is a marketing strategy. VCs would like to profit from the popularity of Open-Source by inserting themselves in the cash flow. But the cash flows in Open-Source are periphery. And the periphery is a humble position for a VC.

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

#78

Post by infinity0 »

phkahler wrote: post #67
infinity0 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... "Why did you base the SSPL on GPL v3 instead of AGPL?"

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

#79

Post by antisemiotic »

luckylion wrote: post #48
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…

> 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 you don't like with it. GPL is source available, then?

Last time I checked GPL explicitly allows using the code for any purpose ("Freedom 0"). FSF is also clear that it's fine with people making money off free software. The requirement to distribute code together with binaries makes many kinds of business impossible with GPL-d software, but that's a side effect, not the goal as in "Source Available" licenses.

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

#80

Post by chrisseaton »

neya wrote: post #73
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.

There's a famous project that did something similar to this. It's WURFL. The creator behind the project got offended when a big co (Google I assume, not sure) who forked his project and never paid him anything at all. I believe it was under a different, very permissive license. When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license…

> When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license screwing companies who depended on his database. Luckily, someone cloned the project on Github, but he took it also down with a DMCA.

I don't understand this. If the old version was licensed permissively what argument does he have to take down a copy of it with DMCA?

And the original companies using it wouldn't care - of course they'd have their own vendored copy internally - they don't need GitHub to keep using it.

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