Let's celebrate relicensing from an open source to a proprietary license

Yesterday, we were “rethinking” open source licensing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37849958

Today, we’re celebrating the bait and switch.

I can’t wait to see what nonsense we’re doing tomorrow.

> Is "open source strategy" purely an economic tool?

Yes, because the only thing a good company cares about is economics -- namely, money.

This is, very literally, what the Cathederal and the Bazaar was about. Exploiting people's labour. ESR (i.e. the founder of the Open Source movement) very literally made an argument in the latter half of the book that goes "You get better performance out of people when you don't pay them/pay them less").

When things get relicensed, the companies give their reasons for doing what they're doing, and often come in HN to make their case. FAQs are added, and people are reminded that they can still view the source and use the software for free, provided they aren't a direct competitor to their cloud offering. Despite all that, the communities doesn't celebrate when it happens. This post tries to put it in different terms, but I think we already understand it. Yes, they're "exploring a search space", but that doesn't make it a pleasant experience to have the structure of the projects people depend on and contribute to turned upside down.

I was just thinking about this. I think LGPL was a great idea, but unfortunately, business rejected it, because contrary to free market ideology, they are interested in having control over their users (and don't want to show others their code).

But assume alternative timeline where LGPL is not rejected and sharing the source code with users of software becomes the norm, just like say, nutritional labels are the norm in the food industry. Then you could have a nice free market solution, where the commercial software (software done for money) would be available under LGPL and commercial license. To evaluate software, you use LGPL (because you can verify before you buy whether the software actually does what it says it does), and to buy and use the software commercially, you use the commercial license.

Compare this to today, where lot of components are under BSD license, so you can easily evaluate them, but you cannot sustain commercial operation around them, because you will get outcompeted by people writing the code for free.

I think Stallman has recognized (aside from his moral beliefs, let's just focus on pragmatic capitalism here) early on, that closing the source and code as a property are fundamentally incompatible. If you want to license somebody else's code, that is, treat it as private property, then you need to be able to evaluate it, and see its source. And he thought that companies, which are normally used to private property, will prefer clear licensing deals (i.e. they understand what they're buying) to having control over their users. Therefore the solution - dual LGPL and commercial licensing.

What he didn't thought of is that programmers will rather work for free (and fun) than punishing bad actors, which are the companies that close the source (to mislead their users). That's why we ended up in the world where BSD rules, but at the expense of private companies and properly maintained software.

What we see is capitalism failing, if the correct social controls of the property are not there (this actually goes into fundamental contradictions in capitalism, but let's put that aside). I think the government should mandate that everybody who provides software should also provide the source code (so that the software can be properly evaluated), and focus on enforcing proper licensing deals. This is what happens with other forms of "intellectual property" - patents, copyrights and trademarks all require that you disclose what you're selling before licensing it to someone.

Unfortunately, businesses largely reject free market in favor of screwing other people over. So the companies that wanted not to show the source code to their users (so they could sell more software) won, and it is at the long-term expense of having a functioning software market (and commercial companies themselves).

Totally agree, "open source strategy is not needed any longer" doesn't make any sense for many projects where open source of that particular software or information is the primary purpose. It's not solely an economic engine.