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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.

> If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices... it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.

Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them?

I think Americans often ignore the reason behind the EU's deep concerns around privacy and regulation is simply because EU lawmakers have no other power over American corporations. Simply none. The most they can do is excessive financial penalties. They cannot jail Bezos. But what they can do, is impose an absurd financial penalty. Amazon will appeal. It will go to court, and the US State Department will try to help Amazon (an American corporation after all, representing American jobs and American workers) and the penalty will be reduced. The EU public is happy, the EU stuck it to Amazon! But they didn't face any significant consequence for their action, and never will.

If however, this happened in the US, it can get thorny for Amazon. A "lowly" judge in Texas can compel Bezos, the richest man in the world, to appear in court. The implicit threat being that, being in non-compliance would escalate the case until it reached the highest courts, which can compel the Federal Govt. to take action to compel Bezos.

A US judge has that power. No judge in any other country has it. Every other country has no reason to believe Amazon will do as it says. Only some have the power to impose the kind of regulations like GDPR, EU being America's close trading and diplomatic partner.

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

#92

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

Amazon isn't free-riding any more than everyone else. If I can buy hardware and hire SREs to run mongod myself, I should be able to pay AWS to do the same things for me, and it's weird that the authors expect a cut in one case and not the other.

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

#93
Interesting how human nature always wants to blame everything on one source. AWS might be bad, no argument against it. But the truth is there is more and more speaking about the end of open source as we know it.

E.g. smartphones (the most used end-user computer nowadays) being walled gardens. So walled, that not even a giant like Huawei can easily continue to use Google's OS.

E.g. Trade war makes every side being less open towards all other sides.

E.g. at least one huge Open Source proponent being sold to a company that is known for not handling open source too well.

E.g. big corps like Google having found a way to misuse stuff that is seemingly open source as marketing tools to spread there proprietary actual products.

E.g. with at least many big corps believing that the cloud has beaten on-prem, and who knows what is behind these APIs. Maybe they don't even use Linux and TCP/IP anymore.

E.g. with the rise of AI and machine learning software itself maybe(!) not being the most important tech development factor anymore.

E.g. with Valve not having won the gaming platform war against Microsoft.

E.g. with Microsoft claiming to integrate more and more with open source (but then how much control are they starting to wield, having a shitload of coders, money and users to field for their personal cause).

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

#94
post #34

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…

> an idealism that has given us software such as Linux

No, Linux is GPL licensed, it's not a naive permissive license.

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

#95
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly it. GPL worked in the past, but if we take a look at Android (which is based on Linux) we can see that it failed to protect users' freedoms completely.

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

#96

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?

Some people have argued that, yes. I've even argued it occasionally in the past.

The short justification given is that even though the GPL doesn't let you do everything, it still doesn't interfere with the 4 essential freedoms that Open Source guarantees. You may or may not agree with that justification.

But the people arguing in favor of SSPL as an Open Source license are moving in the wrong direction. If TechCrunch wanted to make the argument that the GPL wasn't free enough for inclusion into Open Source, they could do so. Instead, they're arguing that because the GPL might stretch the definition, we should just go whole hog and introduce straight-up end-user usage restrictions as well.

Techcrunch is taking the, "your thing isn't perfect, so we should all make it worse" position.

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

#97
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…

> an idealism that has given us software such as Linux No, Linux is GPL licensed, it's not a naive permissive license.

Mongo was AGPL.

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

#98
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that data belongs to the merchants, just like an S3-buckets logs belong to the developer. It has to be that way or who else has a claim on the data? HP for printing it? Microsoft because it was sent by email in Office? The EU suspects it is anti-competitive to allow Amazon as a vendor to cherrypick items to clone based on data Amazon collect as a platform. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/am…

Would you apply that logic to any reseller? The corner market shouldn't be able to tally how many apples it sold? That just doesn't seem like a consistent legal principle to me. Clearly if you allow someone to sell your product you are implicitly allowing them to record the fact that they did. There may be an antitrust argument here, but this data ownership thing seems like a non starter.

Unless it says "Sold by: Amazon.com", Amazon isn't party to the contract. DHL doesn't get to know what is in the package they deliver, so why should Amazon be entitled to that information?

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

#99
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices... it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.

Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them? I think Americans often ignore the reason behind the EU's deep concerns around privacy and regulation is simply because EU lawmakers have no other power over American corporations. Simply none. The most they can do is excessive financial penalties. They cannot jail Bezos. But what they can do, is impose an absurd financial penalty. Amazon will appeal. It w…

> Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them?

amazon themselves. risking the entire AWS business to figure out that their retailers are selling lots of shower curtains and they could be undercut by $0.05 is idiocy.

> I think Americans...

i stopped reading there, as it couldn't possibly have anything to do with what i was talking about. hope getting it off your chest made you feel better.

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

#100

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…

> Open Source was not invented so you could use it as a PR strategy. We don't need your help.

Ironically, "open source" was explicitly invented as a PR strategy by ESR and friends because the free software ideology was scaring aware rich companies:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s03.html

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