[HN Gopher] Open Source Bait and Switch
___________________________________________________________________
Open Source Bait and Switch
Author : mooreds
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-09-26 11:59 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (debugagent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (debugagent.com)
| kosinus wrote:
| This mentions the Elasticsearch situation, but there's nothing
| the GPL does that would've helped Elastic.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Wouldn't the AGPL with no CLA have made everyone happy? Elastic
| wouldn't have had to worry about Amazon adding secret sauce to
| a fork and then selling it as a service, and the rest of us
| wouldn't have had to worry about Elastic going proprietary.
| throwie_wayward wrote:
| FOSS was never about open source, it was about freedom and
| liberty.
|
| It is supposed to advocate a lack of restrictions upon what users
| can do to the software to balance against what software can do to
| the users, or more importantly, forbid the users from doing at
| all. (or permit doing with varying levels of
| convenience/inconvenience).
|
| but then, with a debate that software is better made in an open
| source development/collaboration style, and a political and
| economical state-society built around exclusivity and deceitful
| exploitation, there's no discourse around freedom left near the
| open-closed source debate.
|
| also, the earlier FOSS advocates (GNU crowd) thought they could
| 'hack' the system and use one of its own tools, specifically
| copyright laws, in order to 'trick' (hacker mindset) the law
| system into guaranteeing that the software was not going to be
| locked down and turned to work against the users. It's become
| clear now (in retrospect) it did not work.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Complaining about not getting paid always sounds like the
| equivalent donating to a charity or volunteering in a soup
| kitchen and then complain you didn't get your money back or paid
| for your time in the soup kitchen. If you're writing OSS,
| considerate a donation of your time.
|
| Why is payment required? If payment is a major motive then don't
| use an OSS license. If you're doing it because, in general, you
| support OSS as an ideology then be realistic and understand that
| compensation for your time equivalent to a corporate swe job
| isn't likely, and you're almost definitely never going to be
| compensated commensurate with the popularity of work that hits
| mainstream. If you find yourself complaining about how much time
| it takes to maintain and how demanding users can be, walk away in
| the satisfaction you've created something worthwhile and other
| people will continue the work if enough feel the same way.
| svnpenn wrote:
| > volunteering in a soup kitchen and then complain you didn't
| get your money back or paid for your time in the soup kitchen
|
| No, its not like that at all.
|
| It would be like if you volunteered in a soup kitchen, where
| every single day, half of the patrons were individuals that
| couldn't afford the soup, and the other half were businesses
| that were taking the free soup, putting their name on it, and
| selling it. The first group of people I am fine with. Thats why
| soup kitchens exist, and _pro bono_ exists. But once someone
| gets the ability to pay, _they should pay_. Thats why I support
| non-commerical licenses:
|
| https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0
| ineedasername wrote:
| I generally agree, noncommercial licenses are the way to go.
| Otherwise it is very much like setting up a soup kitchen
| where businesses can take the soup & sell it.
|
| Although under this metaphor the soup, once a single can is
| made, has an infinite supply at zero cost save the nominal
| costs a business has to transport cans from the kitchen's
| infinite pantry... or they can take a single can and build
| their own infinite pantry... well, all metaphors break down
| if you try to map their attributes 1-to-1 onto the target
| domain. In this case though I intend the metaphor to extend
| only to the labor aspect of running a soup kitchen because
| that is a significant & necessary aspect of keeping it going,
| as with OSS projects. OSS projects have an advantage over
| soup kitchens in that non-labor resources are proportionately
| very small.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Most people don't complain about working a few hours of unpaid
| volunteer time on a worthwhile cause; whether that is donating
| to a soup kitchen on a Saturday or fixing a bug in an OSS
| project during a couple evenings. The problem is that serious
| OSS projects (just like running a major charity organization)
| often require a lot more than a few evenings or a weekend here
| and there.
|
| Expecting people to donate thousands of hours of unpaid labor
| toward anything seems a bit extreme. If it is considered
| whining to expect some compensation for what amounts to another
| full-time job, then we should not expect anyone to stick with
| it for very long.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> If it is considered whining to expect some compensation
| for what amounts to another full-time job, then we should not
| expect anyone to stick with it for very long._
|
| It's whining to expect compensation when a person knew what
| they were getting into or decides to stick with it even after
| it becomes more than they thought they were getting into &
| complains about compensation.
|
| Not sticking with it for long is exactly what I think people
| should do when it grows beyond their desire to devote so much
| time to it. If I created a charity and it grew to the point
| where I didn't have enough time to run it, and couldn't get
| enough donations to cover my financial needs if I stopped my
| normal job, I wouldn't write blog posts about how "The model
| for running charities is broken because volunteers can't get
| paid enough to keep them running!" If no one else was
| interested in running it I'd scale things back or gently,
| perhaps regretfully, wind things down.
|
| An OSS project is essentially a charity organization. And,
| while developers may not like it, charitable organizations
| that reach even modest sizes have to spend a significant
| amount of time soliciting donations & volunteer time. St.
| Jude's couldn't function and wouldn't be such a highly
| successful charity without having built up such a newtwork
| and put in that effort.
|
| OSS doesn't need a compensation model because one already
| exists-- that of other charities. For projects that get large
| enough to start experiencing problems like this I'd encourage
| them to incorporate as a charity, a 501(c)(3) in the US. That
| gives them an excellent pathway towards covering labor or
| other costs and provides an excellent pathway for corporate
| users to contribute financial resources in formal & tax
| deductible fashion than when someone puts up a paypal donate
| button or similar.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There is a place where open source platforms and software should
| be the norm, and that's in government and education. There's no
| reason to use proprietary software and platforms as the
| governmental norm (for example, all software related in any way
| to collecting and tallying votes should be open source). Nor is
| there any reason to push Apple or Microsoft on students, or for
| that matter, proprietary and overpriced textbooks.
|
| As far as making money, governmental and educational programs
| should hire technical professionals who keep their open source
| systems secure and updated, and who also contribute updates and
| improvements to open source code.
|
| Yes, this cuts the investment capitalists and monopolistic tech
| corporations out of the taxpayer-financed public sector, while
| also improving the quality of governmental and educational
| programs, and likely saving on expenditures as well. Sounds like
| a win-win.
| achenet wrote:
| I completely agree with you. I hope this way of doing things
| prevails, although I am worried that the "megacorp sales org
| wines-and-dines key politician and secures juicy $$$$$
| government contract" way of doing things may still be prevalent
| and rather hard to dislodge in some places.
| jhahdghfdjdh wrote:
| ghusto wrote:
| Agreed on everything except the assertion that people don't buy
| support or consulting. Sure they do, just maybe not at the scales
| the author would like? Depends how much you're happy with.
|
| But the bait and switch, and the retail "loss leader" practices?
| Hundred percent. He gave some good examples, but some others you
| might not have thought about are Google and Chrome, and Microsoft
| and VSCode.
|
| We're already approaching Chrome being your only choice, and what
| do you think Google will do on that day?
|
| Much more difficult to get to is VSCode being the only game in
| town, but I can imagine it being the only one that matters at
| some point.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think VS Code's popularity has very little with it being open
| source. Indeed, many of the components that makes up the
| distribution of VS Code people use are closed source.
|
| Would it be better if VS Code was completely closed source?
| ghusto wrote:
| From the perspective of the Open Source community, you mean?
| I'd say yes. At least then people would know upfront what the
| game is, and maybe it wouldn't attract certain users.
|
| Same with his Android example. It's _technically_ open
| source, but not for most practical cases (similarly with
| VSCode, there's a version you can download right now that's
| fully open source, it's just not very practical).
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think things like LineageOS and other android forks have
| proven that there are benefits for Android being open
| source.
| solomatov wrote:
| Could you tell which of the many components are closed
| source?
| pxc wrote:
| Chrome and VSCode are both proprietary software, though VSCode
| is arguably 'more' so.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but my opinion on how
| to make money off open source is mostly, "you don't"
|
| Companies release and contribute to open source because the open
| sourced code isn't their primary business and there is more value
| in having outsiders contribute than the competitive advantage of
| forcing competitors to create their own version of whatever the
| open source code does. This works fine without making money.
|
| Individuals work on open source because they want to participate
| in the community and might want improvements. This works fine
| without making money.
|
| Yes, we would lose companies that are created solely to develop
| and release open source software, but I am kind of ok with that.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Yes, we would lose companies that are created solely to
| develop and release open source software
|
| We wouldn't even lose them. If open source were incompatible
| with software development companies, then Red Hat wouldn't be
| in business.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Open source advocates love to point to Red Hat as a shining
| example of how software development around open source can
| lead to a successful business model. Unfortunately, it is an
| outlier instead of proof it works for the majority (or even a
| significant minority). If simply releasing your source to the
| public lead to monetary success (or even sustainability) then
| there would be hundreds or thousands of other 'Red Hat
| examples' out there.
| subpixel wrote:
| Red Hat didn't create a new thing from whole cloth, open
| source it, and prosper.
|
| They spotted an opportunity to sell a version of an open
| source thing to commercial customers. This, in turn, made
| product development out of what looks on the surface like
| open source contribution.
|
| That worked really well for Red Hat, but the wrong lesson
| to take away is that there is big money in open sourcing
| software.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Simply hiding your source does not lead to success either.
| Anybody can hide their source, but only some people succeed
| in starting software businesses.
|
| I don't think anybody claimed _" simply releasing your
| source to the public [will] lead to monetary success"_
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I have a software project that I am considering open
| sourcing. I have people tell me all the time 'just open
| source it!' as if money just magically appears in your
| bank account after doing so. Making good software is
| hard. Making it profitable is also hard and open source
| is not some magic bullet. Most advocates for it are also
| realistic, but there are enough out there who seem
| convinced that it somehow is.
| vidbina wrote:
| I share the pain of musing over license options.
|
| From a pure business perspective, I feel like there are
| more data points out there that have won (as in,
| "survived") by shipping proprietary software.
|
| Don't want to make moral judgements here about
| proprietary-vs-FLOSS but within my hacker bubbles, one
| biases themselves to be partial to FLOSS very easily. If
| I were to ship "some things" (it really depends what the
| thing is) as proprietary, this community may not take too
| kindly to that move (and neither may I).
|
| On the other hand, I don't think that the world at large
| really cares. Sometimes it feels that one can either be
| a) financially well off or b) more beloved by the hacker
| community. These things are not mutually exclusive like
| that but the union of these is rather rare. Hard choices!
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Speaking of license options, even if you decide to
| release all your code as open source, there are so many
| options to choose from. I counted 116 different open
| source licenses that are currently 'blessed' by OSI:
| https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical How do you
| pick the 'right one' for your project that you won't
| regret later on?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Look at what other similar projects have been doing, and
| if it's been working out well enough for them. And if you
| are the sole copyright owner, you're not locked into your
| choice. You can either refuse community contributions or
| make them sign over the copyright to you. Then you're
| free to distribute your software under another license
| going further.
|
| Proprietary software doesn't save you from having to make
| decisions like this. Proprietary software can be licenced
| under many different terms. Are you going to sell
| perpetual per-seat licenses? Subscriptions? Selling
| updates? Support contracts? Avoiding future regret is
| always going to be a speculative affair.
| nrclark wrote:
| The model works for Redhat, yes. What about for the authors
| of all the FOSS packages that comprises it?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > But AWS was forking and not really helping their bottom line.
| So Elastic changed their license to block AWS. AWS started their
| own fork. Some people vilify Elastic in this story
|
| The negative reaction to Elastic was not because they changed
| their license, but because they made their own proprietary
| license, rather than an understood OSI-approved license, like
| AGPL.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _People have various answers for open source business models.
| E.g. "consulting" or the vague "support". I always wonder if such
| people ever tried selling consulting? Or maybe "support"._"
|
| Oddly enough, that's been most of my career. A fair number of
| people have paid me a goodly amount of money to install and keep
| running OS software, and to answer questions from people using
| it. When I discover problems, I report them to the original
| developers, including a patch if at all possible.
| Kukumber wrote:
| imagine if Pythagoras said: "my theorem is proprietary, you shall
| not use it unless you purchase a LGPFLFDPFDLFDFDPGTM licence from
| me"
|
| licenses and "for profit" mindset has to disappear asap, just
| like with patents, bottleneck of humankind
|
| let the knowledge be shared and known by everyone, let people
| unlock what's yet to be discovered
| [deleted]
| lioeters wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
| j3s wrote:
| > GPL is the Best License
|
| imho, you shouldn't care whether companies make money from your
| code. licenses won't stop them - take a look at Linux.
|
| if your whole deal is to stop companies from using your code for
| free, consider never releasing the source code at all. :shrug:
|
| > Open source is becoming a corporate-only game. It's used as a
| weapon between battling tech companies.
|
| i wrote a little bit about this: https://j3s.sh/thought/drones-
| run-linux-free-software-isnt-e...
|
| > if you're an open source advocate. Tune down the rhetoric. It
| isn't helpful.
|
| i think the author should consider who they're blaming and why.
| imiric wrote:
| > This means that anyone who wants to wipe Google Play off their
| Android device in favor of a 100% open source solution; will find
| that they have very few software choices for apps.
|
| This is a common misconception. "Very few" is subjective, to be
| sure, but using a de-Googled device is not only possible for
| enthusiasts, but for anyone willing to make a minor effort to
| look for alternatives, of which there are plenty. The F-Droid
| store has many high quality apps, and Play Store apps can be
| installed via the Aurora Store. Even if they depend on Play
| Services APIs, projects like microG work pretty well to bridge
| the gap, and notifications and even banking apps work well over
| it.
|
| The more difficult change is abandoning the Google / Meta
| ecosystem of services, but you can always use the browser or
| another device for these. There's no support for paid apps,
| unless you want to keep using your Google account with Aurora, or
| apps offer alternative payment options.
|
| I've been running GrapheneOS on my main device for a few months
| now, and /e/OS on a secondary one for years, and haven't missed
| or needed to depend on any Google services.
| joemazerino wrote:
| Reminded: open source does not mean free. Free code is free, open
| source is open.
| djha-skin wrote:
| It reminds me of Joel Spolsky's "Strategy Letter V" talking about
| how open source is often used to commoditize the complement of
| your product[1]. It's been very sad to see the open source
| community being taken over as the OP points out by corporations,
| but there is hope. There is still a thriving community of people
| who do open source for fun, but as the OP points out, a lot of
| these communities do use GPL. I'm thinking about sr.ht in
| particular.
|
| 1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
| nine_k wrote:
| OTOH two large companies trying to commoditize each other by
| releasing viable open-source solutions looks like a potential
| win for the rest of us.
| zomglings wrote:
| Real world example: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Bait and Switch is a totally absurd term for what google did with
| android. Making one open source product does not commit you to
| making anything related to that product open source forever.
| deworms wrote:
| The bit about how GPL "forced" a company to release its own
| source code is obviously false. If you release your own software
| under the GPL, you can't be forced to do anything, this only
| applies if you integrate third party GPL code. For your own code,
| you retain full copyright, and by definition the license you
| yourself applied cannot force you to do something you don't want.
|
| This is a fundamental misunderstanding about how copyright works,
| the author could have closed the source completely without
| changing the license, because the license only applies to third
| parties trying to use that licensed code, not the authors.
| mcc1ane wrote:
| I didn't get how exactly GPL helped.
| invalidname wrote:
| RoboVM tried to close the source but they made a release of a
| version that still had the GPL license attached to it. They
| didn't commit those sources to the public git.
|
| They had to release those sources after the fact because they
| didn't change the license in the general release.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| It's unclear from the article whether:
|
| 1) RoboVM had to use the GPL license because they used other
| people's GPL code - which they presumably pulled out /
| rewrote themselves in their new closed-source version
|
| or
|
| 2) the author mistakenly believes that RoboVM is bound to the
| terms of the GPL license, or forced to offer new GPL
| licenses, on code they own 100%, just because they have
| offered GPL licenses to other people in the past
| invalidname wrote:
| 3) They released a binary and included the GPL license as
| part of the binary release licenses thus committing to the
| GPL in that release while not making the code available.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| If they owned 100% of the copyright, then it still
| wouldn't matter. The GPL gives additional permissions,
| along with some restrictions / obligations, to Licensees.
| As copyright holder you are not a Licensee.
|
| You do not need to grant yourself a license to distribute
| your own works. You always had that right.
|
| Besides, who would sue you? The only person who has
| standing is the copyright holder. You're gonna sue
| yourself because you failed to honor the terms of a
| license, which was granted from yourself to yourself?
|
| If they didn't own 100%, then see 1).
| invalidname wrote:
| Feel free to check their old Google group. It's still
| around somewhere.
| deworms wrote:
| If they're the authors of the code they didn't have to do
| anything they didn't want to.
| spookie wrote:
| Well some of that code had a license that obligated them
| to, not kosher y'know
| deworms wrote:
| The article makes it sound as thought their own license
| forced them to release their own code. This could have
| only happened if the project had outside GPL'd code
| integrated into it, but then they wouldn't be able to
| legally change the license without removing that GPL'd
| code.
| tyingq wrote:
| That's interesting, though if you're the copyright holder and
| didn't complicate things with contributions from outsiders,
| dual licensing is fairly easy. That is, you're free to have
| both GPL and proprietary code mixed if you control all the
| contributed code.
| leni536 wrote:
| > contributions from outsiders,
|
| and other 3rd party GPL dependencies.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Some developers use problematic open source licenses which they
| can then leverage for sales. But then they get vilified as "not
| open source enough". There's no winning there.
|
| There aren't different degrees of open source. Either your
| license meets the OSD or it doesn't. What companies get vilified
| for is choosing licenses that are unambiguously not open source,
| but then trying to capitalize on the trust and goodwill
| associated with open source anyway.
| sneak wrote:
| Yeah. Open Source is about free software philosophy and
| freedom, not about whether the source code is public.
|
| The source code for Windows is public and available.
| svnpenn wrote:
| > The source code for Windows is public and available
|
| No its not.
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| bawolff wrote:
| > People don't buy these things [consulting].
|
| I know plenty of people who do open source consulting
| professionally, (in an ethical fashion). I myself did it briefly
| (not really my thing)
|
| Yes predatory people and scammers exist. But lets not dismiss an
| entire field because some people are assholes.
|
| Also, i have no idea what the bait and switch the author is
| talking about is. Did anyone really think that google open
| sourcing android meant that it was open sourcing the entire
| android ecosystem? There has to be an intention to mislead for it
| to be a bait and switch. Someone doing something you dont like is
| not a bait and switch unless they try and trick you.
| invalidname wrote:
| Selling consulting is hard... You need a whole sales org and if
| not, a salesperson personality. This often clashes with the
| hacker mentality and requires different disciplines. I would
| say this doesn't sell "easily" like a SaaS would.
| bawolff wrote:
| Of course its "hard", if it was trivial nobody would pay you
| to do it. And you are right, the skillset is different from
| pure dev. However, you don't need a "sales org" to do it.
| Plenty of people do it by themselves or in a small company of
| a couple devs and an administrative assistant.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| here is a preview for you -- for three or four years after
| being a thirty year old hot-shot on some current in-demand
| tech, yes.. great life consulting.. fast forward ten
| years.. "people over 35 should consider retiring" and no
| consulting.. at the same time, massive, huge outsourcing to
| the lowest wages, for newer tech stacks, and maintenance
| mode for lots of things that were current.
| bawolff wrote:
| Don't chase fads if you want stability (for that matter,
| chasing fads is bad if you want to be a rockstar too -
| its like going to the goldrush after everyone has already
| flocked).
|
| Anyways, as a php dev, i can assure you im not working on
| whatever the popular trend is right now.
| nine_k wrote:
| Chasing the fad of COBOL undertaken right now, I think,
| could help one bring home some bacon for years and years.
|
| Certain tech stops being a fad but stays entrenched and
| in a certain, while not overwhelming, demand. Hiring for
| PHP and C++ jobs will continue for a loooong time.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Also, i have no idea what the bait and switch the author is
| talking about is.
|
| My impression is that it's relicensing a product from a FOSS
| license to a proprietary one after it's gotten a bunch of
| users.
| bawolff wrote:
| Oh, i guess that makes sense. Its weird how they tie GPL into
| it, because unless they accepted third party contributions
| the story would be exactly the same with a bsd license.
| pacifika wrote:
| Thanks to open source we have an operating system that doesn't
| demand my privacy or attention. Yeah occasionally an organisation
| runs with it, maybe fails, but in the long run it's contributed
| and build upon allowing non commercial benefits
| zzzeek wrote:
| Can we please not start having all our blogs use creepy DALL-E
| garbage as the cover art. This is going to be really shitty if
| all the blogs have distracting uncanny-valley bio-morphic junk
| splashed across their titles.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| The text seems a little GPT as well...
| deworms wrote:
| I thought the post will somehow relate to AI art and how
| disfigured it is.
| leonidasv wrote:
| Sad to see that even the website logo is neural-net generated.
| I didn't think I'd be missing stock photos sometime in my life,
| but I'm starting to do.
| pwinnski wrote:
| A lot of blog templates, as well as tools that syndicate blog
| content, require some sort of image. They'll take the first
| image they encounter, no matter what it is. If you want to
| avoid it being some sort of sidebar glyph, or the page looking
| wonky, you have to supply an image. What image would possible
| have fit this article? And so we end up with AI-generated
| filler.
|
| That doesn't make it desirable, but I hope it helps to explain
| it.
| zzzeek wrote:
| Assuming the blogger has a phone with a camera:
|
| 1. Go outside
|
| 2. Look up!
|
| 3. Take a picture !
|
| Now you have a hi res photo of the very beautiful sky of
| Planet Earth . For free !
| pwinnski wrote:
| Are you saying you would prefer all blog posts to be header
| by the same undifferentiated photo of a blue sky? I'm not
| quite getting what you're saying here.
|
| I mean, if a person is only ever going to write a single
| blog post, then yes, absolutely, post a personal photo of
| something beautiful. Why not? But if a person might post
| more than one blog post, then presumably there's some
| motivation to tying each (required) photo to the post in
| question in some way, even if tangential, right?
| zzzeek wrote:
| perhaps you're being a bit pedantic here? You are well
| aware that one can iterate on the "take a picture of
| anything, every time you make a blog post!" theme, you
| don't need to compel me to spend my time telling you
| that. There's surely more productive ways to spend one's
| time.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Been saying this privately for a long time. Agree on "GPL is the
| best choice," as well. My personal experience with devs who don't
| want to GPL their code or contribute to GPL projects is that
| they're under the impression that having a permissive license on
| their own project will get $corp to use it and, somehow, they'll
| profit from $corp using it. Haven't personally seen it yet, but I
| _have_ seen a bunch of permissive licensed stuff get pulled into
| bigger projects and changes never contributed back.
| simonw wrote:
| My single biggest incentive when I'm writing open source code
| is that I want to NEVER have to solve the same problem again,
| for the rest of my career, no matter who I am working for in
| the future.
|
| That's why I chose the license that seems least likely to
| prevent me from being able to use the code I've written
| (currently Apache 2).
| em-bee wrote:
| for the same reason in one job i was able to change my
| employment contract to include a guarantee that all code i
| write on that job will be released under the GPL
|
| i thought that way i would always be able to use the code in
| my own FOSS projects but i would also not be able to sell out
| and make my work proprietary (since it would contain GPL code
| owned by my employer)
|
| this may seem less beneficial than an apache license but it
| was aligned with the company goals as far as my work was
| concerned, so i essentially had them put a verbal promise
| into writing, and i thought it was a neat way to commit
| myself to FOSS
| goodpoint wrote:
| > That's why I chose the license that seems least likely to
| prevent me from being able to use the code I've written
| (currently Apache 2).
|
| That's incorrect. As the upstream author you have every right
| to use your own code any way you want.
| bogwog wrote:
| > As the upstream author you have every right to use your
| own code any way you want.
|
| Well, that depends on if the project accepts pull requests,
| and whether they have something like a contributor
| licensing agreement in place.
| goodpoint wrote:
| I wrote "your own code". Obviously if you accept
| contributions from others it's different.
| b3morales wrote:
| I think the parent is alluding to a situation where their
| employer has copyright for the code written on the job. If
| you take your own previously-written code and just "submit"
| it to the codebase, you've created a legal snafu for
| yourself if you ever want to use that same code again
| elsewhere.
|
| Of course you can take your code and license it to said
| employer in whatever way you both agree on. But this is
| going to be much easier if the code is already publicly
| available to _everyone_ , with a known license: the
| employer doesn't need to even care really who the author
| is, just the license.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > If you take your own previously-written code and just
| "submit" it to the codebase, you've created a legal snafu
| for yourself
|
| Not at all. The code you are going to submit already has
| a license file attached. Just update it with an accepted
| FOSS license before the submission.
|
| You don't have to provide any special license or make it
| public.
| b3morales wrote:
| As I said
|
| > Of course you can take your code and license it to said
| employer in whatever way you both agree on.
|
| but that's likely to be a manual step with a lot of
| raised eyebrows, frowns, and questions involved.
| simonw wrote:
| Not if I was writing it for someone else's closed source
| project at the time.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| Makes sense. There are two broad classes of code, actual
| standalone projects, and handy code you don't want to rewrite
| at each job. The latter really fits BSD or Apache - you're
| trying to break down as many barriers to use as possible and
| you aren't concerned about receiving contributions.
| LtWorf wrote:
| > My single biggest incentive when I'm writing open source
| code is that I want to NEVER have to solve the same problem
| again, for the rest of my career, no matter who I am working
| for in the future.
|
| You can tell your company to either buy a proprietary license
| from yourself or reimplement the whole thing.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I don't think that's necessary, though. As the original
| creator, you're the "owner", not a licensee.
|
| As the owner you reserve the right to re-license it to
| anybody you'd like, under any license you'd like, _as long as
| you don 't give that right away_.
|
| At a job, or on a contract, the employment agreement or the
| contract will almost always says you're giving that right to
| them in exchange for compensation.
| mcguire wrote:
| ...unless you accept contributions from other people, who
| then own those contributions.
| gkbrk wrote:
| But then it's no longer about "using code you've
| written". It becomes "using code you and other people
| have written".
| moron4hire wrote:
| To add on to this:
|
| There's also the path that--even if you have a permissively
| licensed project--$corp will see your thing, like it, and
| decide to just copy it, to overall avoid having to deal with
| dependencies they do not own. In other words, a lot of places
| are unwilling to play in anyone else's backyard. They "support"
| open-source, but only when it's on their terms.
|
| They might even call you, under the pretext of a job interview,
| and of course they want to discuss in detail the most
| significant project you've worked on! But you find out there
| are all kinds of awkward conditions on the job offer, like a
| cross-country move, or much lower pay than you were expecting,
| or no actual commitment that you'd be working on your project
| but just a vague, verbal statement that you could continue
| "during 10% time". You'll have to interview three more times
| with 15 more teammates. Everything gets dragged out for months
| and then you see them announce their own project in opposition
| to yours.
|
| That is, _if_ anyone pays attention to your project. Most open-
| source developers are categorically averse to anything
| resembling advertising. Try building a thing and then posting
| about it on a topic-appropriate sub-Reddit. So many of them
| will delete your post or ban your account from the sub for
| "spam".
|
| The vast majority of the market--including other open-source
| developers--want open-source developers to write code, shut up,
| and go away. The minute you start talking about maybe wanting
| some remuneration for your efforts, you're suddenly
| "ungrateful" or "shilling" or "spamming" or "selling-out".
| (EDIT: It's happening in this very thread, further down the
| page)
| CJefferson wrote:
| The only problem I have with GPL is that I don't want to use
| "or later version" (as I don't trust all future FSF leaders),
| but it's illegal to link GPL V2 and V3 code, and I would expect
| the same problem will arise with a future V4.
| karussell wrote:
| As an open source project 'owner' my personal experience is
| similar i.e. nearly nobody of the companies contributes back.
| Often times you are not even allowed to talk about their usage.
|
| But still, I think the permissive license we picked was the
| better choice. Especially after our company was formed and we
| want to use the project for ourself too the (A)GPL would make
| the community working together with this harder (CLA, dual
| licensing?)
|
| IMO a permissive license is better and easier for the developer
| and the GPL is better for the end user.
|
| But even the GPL does not grant you anything without a lawyer
| :) E.g. I tried to get the GPL source code from Waze (tried it
| multiple times!) and got a reply: "I've looked into your
| concern and determined that it needs some extra attention from
| our end." See also https://2jk.org/english/2014/03/27/israeli-
| waze-hit-with-gpl...
|
| (btw: you can get the inofficial code from here
| https://github.com/maximuska/Freemap-waze)
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _But still, I think the permissive license we picked was
| the better choice. Especially after our company was formed
| and we want to use the project for ourself too the (A)GPL
| would make the community working together with this harder
| (CLA, dual licensing?)_
|
| Regardless of license, most software projects are either
| community projects, or corporate projects, but not both.
| Corporations rarely see fit to invest in the development of a
| project they're using because some other chump is giving it
| away for free. And volunteer programmers rarely want to deal
| with submitting commits to a project with corporate managers
| who are focused on the needs of the organization and see
| volunteer programmers as out-of-the-loop nuisances.
|
| Whether you're a corporation open sourcing something to get
| free community labor, or a volunteer open sourcing something
| to get corporations to contribute, you'll probably be
| disappointed.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > IMO a permissive license is better and easier for the
| developer and the GPL is better for the end user
|
| No, as developers we use tons of software. We are users
| before being developers. As such, GPL protects developers as
| well.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Especially after our company was formed and we want to use
| the project for ourself too the (A)GPL would make the
| community working together with this harder (CLA, dual
| licensing?)
|
| In this scenario, your company is the thing GPL is trying to
| protect your community devs from (i.e. the gpl is trying to
| stop a company from taking contributions donated on the
| condition they would be open-source, and selling them
| privately without compensation). You are basically saying the
| GPL makes it harder to do the thing the GPL was trying to
| stop.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The GP wants to donate some software to the community, on
| the condition that he gets to use any derivative community
| work on his product. Anybody contributing to the code is
| clearly informed of that, and decides to do it out
| willfully.
|
| It's a perfectly reasonable arrangement that adds value to
| both the community and the GP, and that the GPL "protects
| against". So, yes, the GP's point stands in that there are
| uses for licenses other than the GPL. All of the complaints
| about they only being good for people creating proprietary
| software are true, they just completely miss the point.
| bawolff wrote:
| To clarify, i dont think that GP is morally wrong or
| anything (as long as they are upfront about what they are
| doing, although it can get morally questionable fast if
| they aren't careful). I guess the point i was trying to
| make is its weird to describe that as a flaw of the GPL
| when its basically the primary use case .
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, the GP is in a context of people strongly implying
| that any permissive license shouldn't be used at all.
|
| But if you take too long to reach it and forget the
| context, it does indeed sound like a weirdo complaining
| that the GPL is copyleft.
| xani_ wrote:
| > IMO a permissive license is better and easier for the
| developer and the GPL is better for the end user.
|
| users don't care, they aint taking the code for changing.
|
| Arguably it also doesn't matter till you are corporation
| closing the code for profit. If all you do is OSS and are
| used by people that also release OSS, extra protection GPL
| gives are not useful. But of course real world is not that
| idealistic.
|
| And for that of course BSD/MIT is better. No facility for
| anyone to get anything out of you so you can take and take
| without ever giving back aside from occasional bug report and
| outrage over someone having a bug they didn't fix in project
| they are not paid to develop in the first place
|
| GPL gives one guarantee - that the code you give will not be
| closed down for money and used to save some corporation some
| dev-hours. Some devs don't like it because it is making their
| life difficult (and I'd also argue anything higher than LGPL
| for stuff like libraries is kinda pointless), but that's
| kinda the point.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > IMO a permissive license is better and easier for the
| developer and the GPL is better for the end user.
|
| A permissive license is only better and easier for developers
| of proprietary software. The GPL is better for developers of
| free software and for end users.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I agree, though I think there's an irony in the mutual
| incompatibility of many FOSS licenses. For instance, try
| making a GPL project that depends on a data file licensed
| under Creative Commons. One's best bet in such a situation
| is to ask the rights holder to release to you under a
| compatible license, but people (and institutions) are
| generally reluctant to do so.
|
| Two permissive licenses, one headache for the FOSS dev.
| twic wrote:
| > My personal experience with devs who don't want to GPL their
| code or contribute to GPL projects is that they're under the
| impression that having a permissive license on their own
| project will get $corp to use it and, somehow, they'll profit
| from $corp using it.
|
| I don't think i've ever heard someone saying this. Does anyone
| really believe this? Some concrete examples would be
| illuminating.
| gampleman wrote:
| For me the logic roughly worked out like this. I managed to
| get successive employers to "sponsor" (i.e. pay me my normal
| salary but let me use my work time to work on my open source
| project) my open source project, because we were using that
| project at work and it was missing features my employer was
| interested in.
|
| Some of those employers had policies outright prohibiting GPL
| use...
| LtWorf wrote:
| if it was lgpl licensed they'd have no choice but to do
| that
| [deleted]
| twblalock wrote:
| > My personal experience with devs who don't want to GPL their
| code or contribute to GPL projects is that they're under the
| impression that having a permissive license on their own
| project will get $corp to use it and, somehow, they'll profit
| from $corp using it.
|
| A lot of big corporations will not allow GPL dependencies to be
| used in their codebases, and not having a GPL license will
| definitely make software more usable by those corporations.
|
| How the developer expects to profit by giving something away
| for free is definitely a mystery, but there is also some truth
| to the idea that a GPL license does scare companies away.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I choose BSD over GPL because I want myself and others to have
| the maximum utility of my work. demanding downstream users
| coordinate that work with me doesn't really support that goal
| for either of us.
| nine_k wrote:
| The case of Linux vs *BSD is probably the largest-scale test of
| efficiency of GPL vs permissive licenses on stuff contributed
| back. It also looks pretty decisive, too.
| erk__ wrote:
| I think it is dangerous to look at this too much, there are
| other reasons that Linux got off to a better start not
| directly related to the license. Such as some rather serious
| lawsuits against FreeBSD in the past, that hurt adoption in
| the time Linux was getting up and going.
|
| But yeah it is true that Linux is much more efficient at
| getting stuff upstreamed, I think Sony has sent more patches
| to Linux than FreeBSD and the PlayStation runs on it.
| bawolff wrote:
| GPL is still a questionable choice for anything that can be
| turned into a SAAS app. Remember if you dont distribute the
| binary, you dont have to distribute sources.
| Y_Y wrote:
| This is a good point and I'd like to suggest (without being
| certain) that the AGPL is a good solution.
|
| > The GNU Affero General Public License is designed
| specifically to ensure that ... the modified source code
| becomes available to the community. It requires the operator
| of a network server to provide the source code of the
| modified version running there to the users of that server.
| Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly
| accessible server, gives the public access to the source code
| of the modified version.
| sneak wrote:
| Many people find the AGPL to be a nonfree license, myself
| included.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Do you mean you believe it doesn't comply with the Free
| Software Definition and/or Open Source Definition, or
| that you believe it does but that it's nonfree anyway (or
| in other words, that you disagree with those
| definitions)?
| ebiester wrote:
| What isn't free about it?
|
| As a corporation, I might not want to use it in
| conjunction with my code, but that's the point. You are
| free to do what you want, but you in turn must share your
| code.
|
| Or you engage with the owner to make a financial
| arrangement for a separate license.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> As a corporation, I might not want to use it in
| conjunction with my code, but that's the point.
|
| I've worked for several large corporations and were in
| the throes of a major project. Using an Open Source tool
| would've cut a lot of our dev times by many hours. Three
| out of three times, all three team leads and managers
| said "no" to using open source. We had to build several
| large components from scratch, which did lead to extended
| development timelines, a ton of working late at night and
| several "crunch" weekends.
|
| Their rationale? They didn't want to have to maintain a
| piece of software that was open source. The resounding
| opinion was it was "dangerous" and not safe - because
| someone could check in a malicious piece of code and that
| could end up in our very large, enterprise application
| when we needed to update it. Nobody wanted to be on the
| hook if that ever happened.
|
| In the end, it seemed like it was more about upper
| management types playing CYA instead of trying to put out
| a solid product.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I don't think there is any computer currently in use with
| 0 open source on it.
| sneak wrote:
| In short: It prohibits you from not sharing your code
| based on whether or not the ethernet cable is or is not
| plugged in to your machine.
|
| This is like nonfree usage restrictions on otherwise free
| software, like the famous (if unenforceable) "can not be
| used for evil" license clause.
| bawolff wrote:
| Right but which freedom does that restrict that's not in
| the spirit of the gpl?
|
| I.e. the gpl prohibits you not sharing code if you
| distribute the binary. What is the philosophical
| underpinning of "sharing binary" not being a restriction
| but "ethernet" being a restriction.
|
| The evil thing is not similar because you are
| discriminating against a field of endevour (similar to
| licenses that say educational use only, non-commercial
| only or non-military only). It seems to be a very
| different type of restriction.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > whether or not the ethernet cable is or is not plugged
| in to your machine
|
| That's not even remotely near what it is.
| em-bee wrote:
| that's not right. in my understanding the intention of
| the AGPL is to share code with users of a program, even
| if the users didn't get a copy of the program.
|
| therefore the AGPL shouldn't force you to share code if
| the program runs on a server. but it should force you to
| share code if the program can be accessed by a user.
|
| this may even apply to running something like a kiosk
| device where users interact with a program on a device
| they don't own.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Many people believe all sorts of absurd things with no
| evidence.
|
| Do you have evidence?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Am I mistaken in believing the only additional
| requirement of the AGPL is, in layman's terms, that if
| you operate the software as a paid service you must also
| release the source code of any changes that you apply to
| it?
|
| If that is the case, I don't see how the AGPL
| qualitatively infringes on any "freedoms" that the GPL
| doesn't already restrict: _you must keep derivatives
| free_. Of course one may argue that the GPL is nonfree
| when compared to BSD /MIT style licences, in which case
| fair enough.
| krab wrote:
| I would say GPL constrains some freedoms of the code
| users to provide some freedoms to the end users.
|
| It's not entirely clear what counts as derivative work
| with regards to GPL. There is a lot of corner cases and
| workarounds in the real world. It becomes even less clear
| when you widen the definition of distribution.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| The justification usually given for AGPL is to prevent
| other companies from running paid SaaS without sharing
| their modifications. The actual terms is that any user
| who interacts with the software over the network must be
| able to download the sources. It doesn't say anything
| about whether the service is paid or free.
|
| I think the argument of FOSS people who don't like it
| would be something like, as a user, just running the
| software on my machine can potentially create a legal
| obligation to set up source distribution, if, like, I
| forgot to block a port.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > just running the software on my machine can potentially
| create a legal obligation
|
| Not true: only if you made local modifications.
|
| > I forgot to block a port
|
| Also not true. You have plenty of time to close that
| port.
|
| """your license from a particular copyright holder is
| reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies
| you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is
| the first time you have received notice of violation of
| this License (for any work) from that copyright holder,
| and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your
| receipt of the notice."""
|
| If you expose services on the Internet by mistake you are
| going to have 1000x bigger problems than the risk of
| being sued successfully for a honest mistake.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Personally, I am much more wary of the definition of
| "interaction" than of unwillingly distribute the
| software. The later one is a fault of the person
| accessing my computer against my will, not mine. But I
| have no idea how far "interaction" can be stretched-up,
| is using your software equivalent to signing some NDA?
| Hell if I know.
|
| That said, FOSS authors normally aren't the kind of
| people that pushes to those crazy maximalist
| interpretations of documents. So if any risk exists, it's
| not large.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Ah, I was unaware that it applied regardless of it being
| a paid service or not. I imagine that would be somewhat
| analogous to distributing binaries of modified GPL
| software for free without providing the sources.
|
| In any case, does the AGPL requirement to provide sources
| apply even if you are running an unmodified version? In
| other words, would merely pointing to the original
| repository not be enough?
|
| Regarding the risk of accidental legal obligations, I
| suppose it depends on the details and technical wording
| of the licence.
|
| If the requirement broadly covers any use of the software
| on the machine (e.g. some backend service that happens to
| help your public webserver to stay online) I can see the
| discomfort, especially if one must explicitly provide or
| link to unmodified sources too.
|
| On the other hand though, if the requirement is limited
| to actual provision of the software's functionality to
| 3rd parties, I would argue that if someone accidentally
| provides it due to forgetting to block a port then they
| have much bigger problems than the AGPL.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| You can read the terms yourself, the network part is
| section 13, it's not long.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
|
| It just says interact remotely through a network.
| Interpreting what this means precisely is left as an
| exercise for the reader / the reader's lawyer.
| forgot to block the right port
|
| I'm not against AGPL myself so don't take that as like,
| the strongest argument against it. It was meant a bit
| tongue-in-cheek.
| jhahdghfdjdh wrote:
| thats's just silly.
|
| if you get notified of a security breach caused by your
| own incopetence, you secure it. which would effectively
| be the highest harm apgl can inflict on you already: stop
| hosting the service. which was your point all along.
| em-bee wrote:
| i think pointing to an upstream repo is probably enough
| in most cases provided you can link to the right version.
| but what do you do if the upstream repo disappears?
|
| for a popular program that's not very likely, but lost
| source code is the bane of software development, so
| hacing your own version available would be better, at
| least as a backup
| LtWorf wrote:
| > but what do you do if the upstream repo disappears?
|
| distributions keep archives. Just use a distribution and
| you're fine.
| krab wrote:
| It doesn't matter whether the service is paid or not.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Many people find the AGPL to be a nonfree license,
| myself included.
|
| I don't understand this stance.
|
| From the point of view of the user, the AGPL offers the
| same freedoms as the regular GPL. If you _use_ the
| program, you have the right to see and edit its source
| code, regardless if the program runs on your own computer
| or on another computer.
|
| How can anybody call this feature "nonfree" is beyond me.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Imho if you're ok with the GPL v3, the AGPL v3 is almost
| always the better choice. The spirit of the GPL is "if you
| change it for anything other than internal use, you have to
| distribute the changes", and the AGPL just logically
| extends the enforcement of this to services provided over
| the internet.
|
| The AGPL v3 and GPL v3 also contain provisions to make them
| compatible with each other (resulting in AGPL terms for the
| combined work, but the GPL parts remain GPL).
|
| The FSF goes a bit more into detail on this:
| https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-
| of-t...
| bawolff wrote:
| FWIW, i dont like the ambiguity of what is
| "configuration" and what is "code". I feel its a bit
| unclear.
|
| I also think its a bit problematic taken in the absolute,
| sometimes you have security patches you want to deploy
| and test out for a week before making the issue public,
| or perhaps emergency patches for sudden (downtime
| causing) issues.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I don't think the nitty gritty details of the AGPLv3
| matter much in practice. Those details matter most to the
| sort of organizations that fear lawsuits and consult with
| lawyers, and such organizations will likely not use
| AGPLv3 licensed code at all.
|
| AGPLv3 is thus a _de facto_ 'hobbyists only' license, and
| hobbyists by in large don't go around suing each other;
| generally they just make good faith efforts to respect
| each others licenses and maybe use social ostracism when
| somebody steps over the line. Since hobbyists don't take
| their community disputes to court, the technical legal
| minutia of the license doesn't matter to most of them.
| bawolff wrote:
| I still think details matter because it helps determine
| what is good faith following the license. Ambiguity also
| helps spread fud, which makes it harder for big companies
| to contribute and reuse such software.
| cycomanic wrote:
| This post resonated a lot with me. I'm also a big fan of OSS, but
| have been thinking for a while that it's currently being
| weaponized by the googles, amazons etc. of the world to make
| software a commodity so that all the "value" is in the data which
| they own.
|
| I don't have a good solution, but I sometimes wonder if we are
| heading in the right direction.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Any particular reason he points to Zig as a template for
| supporting/monetizing OSS? Was that just an example? There is the
| Rust Foundation and many others, no? Just curious if Zig was a
| pioneer in this or if this was just one example of many he could
| have given.
| scombridae wrote:
| The modelling of open source as loss leader is spot on, and
| should really give pause to anyone considering a computer science
| major.
|
| As a broke college student, I revelled in free-as-in-beer Linux,
| emacs, R, and LaTeX. Now that I'm on the other side, I can't help
| but regret Torvalds and Stallman giving away the farm (yes, I'm
| inclined to take not give). As much as we hated Microsoft in the
| 90s, it was an economy in which a coder's skill translated
| directly into shrink-wrapped profits. Now we're all coding in
| service to high-latency cloud crap and selling customer data.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Computer Science as a major or as a
| field.
| scombridae wrote:
| A particular field owes its popularity largely to its
| financial appeal. In the past the most popular majors were
| biology (pre-med) and economics (pre-business). Today it is
| computer science.
| gfosco wrote:
| I called it "Selfish OSS", how FAANG uses open source
| communities... I was an open source advocate there for a while,
| but became disillusioned with it pretty quickly. Some of the
| engineers care about contributing to the communities, sure, but
| the companies absolutely do not give a shit about that. It's all
| about enforcing dominance / crushing competition, and making
| recruiting easier. What the users want is only supported if it's
| also what the company wants. If your feature request isn't also
| desirable to the company, it's not happening, even if you submit
| the code. I'm now more likely to advocate for closed-source.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| There's millions of companies out there creating software all the
| time. Of those, tens of thousands don't need that software to be
| closed-source, due to their business model. But open sourcing
| software is a huge hurdle: cleaning up code, finding a brand that
| doesn't violate a trademark, making sure the software doesn't
| violate any software patents, choosing the right license, finding
| a way to interact with a community (if at all), etc. It's
| expensive and time-consuming and dangerous.
|
| We need to make it dead simple for companies to open source their
| code. And we need to popularize the hires that happened because
| of a company's open source, or their outreach in the FOSS
| community. An organization dedicated to this work could have a
| huge impact.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| See also Joel Sposky's take on the economics of open source
| software: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-
| letter-v/
| invalidname wrote:
| That's a classic. A lot of things have changed though.
| froh wrote:
| which of these things that have changed go against
| commoditizing the complement?
| invalidname wrote:
| The core concept hasn't changed. We have a lot more data
| about what works and what doesn't. Back in 2002 funding for
| development tool companies and open source companies was
| non-existent. Git or github didn't exist. Things changed.
| scombridae wrote:
| Here's one (an example of what's changed):
|
| _easy for software to commoditize hardware... hard for
| hardware to commoditize software._ (Spolsky 2002)
|
| Linus effectively killed the golden goose of writing OSs, a
| super-difficult task that deservedly propelled Gates and
| Allen to the stars.
|
| All it takes is a college kid and a laptop to ship
| software. I wouldn't know where to start building and
| shipping chips and circuit boards. And that's why Azure,
| not Office, is where Microsoft's placing its bets.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 2002
| spookie wrote:
| You can't explain everything that happens in the open source
| through such a focused view. It might work for some cases,
| relatively few though.
| windexh8er wrote:
| > People have various answers for open source business models.
| E.g. "consulting" or the vague "support". I always wonder if such
| people ever tried selling consulting? Or maybe "support". People
| don't buy these things. Especially in a downturn economy.
|
| I'm conflicted with this statement. In 2008 I was consulting and
| I had a longer, than usual, backlog of work at the time. I would
| drive to my clients and remember the dichotomy of what was coming
| from the radio and my situation. It seems as though some
| organizations view consulting as a cheaper way to get things done
| in tighter financial times - I'm curious how the next few years
| play out, but I would gather that open source solutions, and the
| consulting around them, goes up as organizations look to cut op
| and capex.
| debacle wrote:
| A bait and switch is an intentful swindle.
|
| I don't believe this is the case for most OSS. Many of these
| companies (e.g. Sun) had the greatest intentions, however at some
| point the purpose of a company is to make money.
|
| Some (like Automattic) are lucky enough to do this through
| hosting and/or a marketplace, but for most it will be some form
| of open/closed model or lock-in.
|
| Whenever I see a company whose product is OSS take on investor
| money, to me that is a red flag for the longevity of that OSS
| software.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > Big corporations aren't benevolent - the advocacy I see around
| OSS projects from FAANG (MAANG) companies is problematic. They
| don't support OSS. They use and leverage it.
|
| How is this problematic? For most of my career, I also haven't
| supported OSS -- I too use and leverage it.
|
| Open source is relatively simple: it does what it says on the
| tin. If you make something freely available under a non
| restrictive license, you no longer own that thing. Sure, you may
| retain some copyright, but you've given it away. Why are people
| always surprised when those free things are leveraged? Is
| everyone truly this naive?
|
| GPL, AGPL, BSL... they all solve different problems. There's no
| right answer. If you're building something and want to make
| money, then it behoves you to choose a license that strengthens
| your position to make money, rather than introduce a
| vulnerability.
| [deleted]
| goodpoint wrote:
| FOSS goes beyond throwing some code on a forge and slapping a
| license on it!
|
| A lot of companies do astroturfing by creating a false
| impression of community, cooperation, openness and
| decentralized development.
|
| Later on they add CLAs, switch to open-core or use other tricks
| to strictly control development and use.
| caseyross wrote:
| Open source, historically speaking, is an implied social
| contract:
|
| I as the developer do something nice for the world. I therefore
| hope that you, as the user, will pay it forward.
|
| When this ethos is subverted by people who _don 't_ pay it
| forward, who just see "Free!" and unthinkingly take and take
| without ever thinking to give anything back, it rubs people the
| wrong way.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't think so, historically speaking.
|
| "Open Source", historically speaking, was the right (and
| obligation) to have the ability to modify the source code of
| software you use. There was nothing about 'paying it
| forward', but rather giving users the freedom to control the
| software they run.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The parent comment to your's has been my understanding
| (using FLOSS since last year's of last millennium), why do
| you find it not to be true that there was an implied
| social/moral contract with free-libre software?
| josephcsible wrote:
| > GPL, AGPL, BSL... they all solve different problems. There's
| no right answer.
|
| While there are legitimate arguments in favor of different open
| source licenses, the BSL is a proprietary license and is always
| the wrong answer. I'd agree with this if it used a real open
| source license like Apache or MIT as its third example instead.
| erk__ wrote:
| Well BSL is pretty much a MIT license
| https://opensource.org/licenses/BSL-1.0
|
| And well the other BSL (Business Source License) may be
| appropriate for proprietary software that you want to be
| released under a open license at a later time.
|
| Although I am also not really aligned with the idea on a
| ideologically plane.
| [deleted]
| josephcsible wrote:
| I meant the Business Source License, and I'd be willing to
| bet that the person I was replying to did too.
| twblalock wrote:
| I don't get it.
|
| If you give something away for free, you should not expect money
| for it. If you license it for anyone to use, you should not be
| surprised if some of the users end up being big companies. By
| choosing to give it away, you have chosen to give up control of
| what happens.
|
| If you want to sell software for money, then do that. If you want
| control over how it is used, choose a license that gives you that
| control. But don't just give things away for free and then
| complain about what users do with the freedom you willingly gave
| to them.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| If the author decides to they could always get around this with
| a license too - they could say that it can be used but not in a
| for-profit company, or that anything built using it must also
| be open sourced, etc. A more restrictive license would limit
| adoption but then the author can still have some control over
| how it's used afterwards
| lamontcg wrote:
| But this is what leads to rational developers working for
| companies on loss-leader open-source "bait+switch" models.
|
| There's this idea that open source should be totally free, but
| then how does the developer writing the software wind up eating
| and paying their rent? There's the linux kernel and mozilla and
| other massive open source projects which have large companies
| and foundations and budgets behind them, but that is the 0.01%
| of open source projects.
|
| When OSS maintainers setup companies and go the "loss leader"
| or "bait and switch" or "freemium" models so that they release
| open source code, but the Enterprise-level offerings are locked
| behind proprietary licenses then this is looked at as being a
| betrayal.
|
| The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be
| in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely consume
| all of their work. That just isn't sustainable.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I use GPL (and recently have started to move to AGPL).
|
| So companies will generally keep away from my stuff, but
| people doing open source will happily use it.
|
| I've had several people complain about this and ask me to use
| MIT. I put in my code of conduct that asking that is
| forbidden :D
| aequitas wrote:
| You can always license out your software to those people
| under a special license for them. Which might include a fee
| or any other conditions. Just that your software has one
| open source license doesn't mean you can't distribute it
| with other licenses as well. Things might get complicated
| if you have other contributors though.
| halostatue wrote:
| As an OSS developer, I will also avoid GPLed code unless I
| am only using it as something to be consumed (such as emacs
| when I get the decade itch to remind myself why I don't use
| it). I write the libraries that I write to be given away
| and for my joy.
| twblalock wrote:
| > The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers
| to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely
| consume all of their work. That just isn't sustainable.
|
| First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time -- what
| changed?
|
| Secondly, a lot of major open source projects are being
| worked on by developers who are employed full-time by large
| corporations to do it. And I don't just mean Red Hat or the
| Linux kernel. Those devs get paid by their employers to work
| on open source projects that benefit their employers and also
| the wider community -- it seems like a really successful,
| scalable, sustainable model.
|
| The people who are having a hard time are the indie devs, but
| let's be honest, being an indie dev who gives away software
| for free has always been, and always will be, a bad business
| model. It's not a good idea to do that for a living. It never
| will be.
| xani_ wrote:
| > First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time --
| what changed?
|
| Big failures like OpenSSL fiasco happened - where sure,
| company was sustainable but due to skewed priorities coz of
| funding (companies that founded it founded features that
| from perspective of any other company were bloat, and not
| enough work went into modernizing the code) the code was
| shit and full of traps.
|
| And it's still a fact that vast majority of developers of
| stuff used everywhere wouldn't be able to do it as full or
| even part time job for financial reasons.
|
| All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good, GPL
| bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute anything
| back to stuff they take
| LtWorf wrote:
| > All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good,
| GPL bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute
| anything back to stuff they take
|
| Yeah and people eat it up.
|
| "oh it won't have as many users"
|
| well who cares? It's less hassle. Not like you get
| anything back from having 100x more downloads.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Companies that are NOT RedHat though have a problem with
| making that sustainable.
|
| It isn't just the Indie devs it is the smaller businesses
| as well. Those are the ones pulling license changes, doing
| "freemium" models and other things that the OSS community
| is objecting to and the author is throwing shade at. Those
| models are NOT working well or we wouldn't be having these
| discussions.
|
| The models that "work" for the coder are just tossing your
| code into public and not caring because it is a side
| project or something that you're doing to learn to code and
| you'll abandon it in a few years. Or else working for an
| existing Fortune 500 company getting hired to work on open
| source, or one of the few large open source foundations
| (sponsored heavily by massive corporations and/or
| academia).
|
| And I worked for the past 10 years in open source at a
| startup-to-small-business getting paid by my employer for
| open source. That model is not very good, which is why
| we're seeing so many issues with "bait and switch" at those
| kinds of smaller corporations.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yeah, I was at Red Hat for a bit, and loved the business
| model - sup, we employ a lot of the lead devs on FOSS
| projects you use, so we've got fantastic support for you.
|
| And that's it, no "enterprise editions", the only extra
| code you're paying for is backported critical patches,
| and deterministic builds of software (and all its
| dependencies) from source. RH puts a huge amount of
| effort into those builds, it's incredibly painful as an
| RH dev sometimes, but it seems to be a huge factor in
| building trust.
|
| But, I can see why it doesn't really work for other
| companies, step 1 is "Be Red Hat, and have Red Hat's
| reputation."
|
| I've been involved in Kafka a bit, and it's been very sad
| seeing Confluent devs having to deprioritise work on FOSS
| Kafka to focus work on stuff that, well, they can sell
| for money, but I totally get why.
| rlpb wrote:
| > The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers
| to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely
| consume all of their work.
|
| It's a weird sort of exploitation, because OSS maintainers
| who don't think they're being adequately compensated are free
| not to participate by volunteering their time.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think the key point here is that we would like to
| incentivise a society where people can be sustainably
| compensated for their time while still making the fruits of
| their labour available to all for mostly unrestricted use.
| Rather than ending up in a world where one either:
|
| - Is well-compensated while working for a for-profit
| company where the codebase is proprietary.
|
| - Works in open source but is poorly paid or not paid at
| all.
| newtritious wrote:
| In the scenario you would like to incentivize, who gets
| to decide what labor is compensated?
| [deleted]
| rlpb wrote:
| Not all open source developers are poorly paid. I think
| it's a free market, and I don't see that as a problem. I
| don't think open source developers are really being
| exploited, because typically they are capable of earning
| what they need if they want to. An open source developer
| can simply work for a for-profit company on proprietary
| software if they don't think they get paid enough, for
| example[1]. And the industry will pay what they need to
| get the software they need.
|
| [1] That they might prefer to work on open source is
| their problem, and not one for the economy, I think; I
| say this as an open source developer who gets paid to
| work on open source and prefers this over working on
| proprietary software.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Well, it's a bit like you organize, at personal cost, and for
| all the right reasons and out of the goodness of your heart, a
| food-bank, free to anyone who needs food.
|
| And then the CEO of megacorp sends employees to come everyday
| and empty your foodbank and serve the food at the company
| canteen, because this saves the company catering money, and
| thus profit.
|
| Yes, _technically_ everyone 's welcome at your food bank, but
| ... it won't be long before you'd stop doing it, right?
| moron4hire wrote:
| The problem is that open-source purists the likes of the Free
| Software Foundation have and continue to maintain that FOSS
| doesn't have to mean _gratis_ , that there is supposedly some
| kind of reasonable path to being able to feed yourself while
| working on FOSS.
|
| There is an idea pervasive within the developer culture that--
| through sweat and grit--one can build a project (regardless of
| FOSS or not) and eventually be recognized for the effort. And
| not just recognized, but recognized in a specific way. For some
| developers, that is notoriety. For others, it's money. But the
| idea is basically "my code in -> my definition of validation
| out".
|
| And I think it's pretty clear that, for most projects out
| there, that's just not true. Or, more specifically, there is a
| huge chunk of the story that is missing. Because it's not hard
| to find dozens of projects in almost any niche, across
| thousands of niches. For the vast majority of them, they toil
| in obscurity. Some of them might be underdeveloped, but I see
| that more as a result of the failure to receive said validation
| leading to quitting the project. There is clearly some other
| factor involved in between creating a project and finding
| success with that project.
|
| A lot of that missing element is selling. Even FOSS projects
| that are delivered free of charge to users need to "sell"
| themselves. Linux wouldn't be anywhere if Linus Torvalds hadn't
| recruited users. You have to convince people to try your thing
| and that convincing can take many forms. "Selling" is putting a
| name to "the act of convincing".
|
| It's not quality code. It's not documentation. It's not a
| pretty website. Lots of failed projects have those things. Lots
| of successful ones don't. You have to market your project, and
| that's work.
|
| Work that isn't coding. And that's why more developers don't do
| it.
|
| Celebrity developers have people hanging on their every word on
| Twitter already. They have already done the work of advertising
| --advertising themselves--and now they cash in on the
| reputation and can make a successful project just by announcing
| it. Large corporations have money to pour into actual
| advertising and marketing for new projects. But independent
| developers don't have the cache or the money to be able to pull
| that off, and don't have the visibility into the background
| work on those other projects to know how their efforts are
| different from the projects they look up to.
|
| But FOSS advocates keep pointing to the work of celebrity
| developers, of "open-source aligned" corporations, and saying
| "see, open-source can work". There's a lot of pressure from
| other developers to open your work. Most of the loudest voices
| keep saying, "this path works", leaving out the key element,
| making it sound like a dream.
|
| I call this the "Field of Dreams Paradox". We have the phrase
| "if you build it, they will come" stuck in our cultural memory,
| but have forgotten that the movie is about a literal miracle.
| xani_ wrote:
| There is also problem of funding model.
|
| Like, how is even say a single developer of mildly popular
| lib doing one thing gonna setup financing ? Or get people to
| pay ? Anything from patreon to tips was tried to mild results
| at best
| jlarocco wrote:
| I've been pointing this out for a long time, and 100% agree
| with you.
|
| Open source was originally about the freedom to use software in
| new and creative ways, and NOT about giving away free stuff.
| shapefrog wrote:
| The vast majority of open-source enthusiasts I have
| encountered, 99% of whom have never looked at a line of code,
| are advocates of open-source software for free beer reasons
| not for freedom reason.
|
| There is almost a point where, like all language, the
| original meaning becomes obsolete and a new one takes over.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Sure, but I think it's important to remind people because
| the "problem" in the article isn't going to be fixed any
| other way than developers fixing it on their own and
| changing their behavior. Free as in beer code is a huge
| benefit to everybody else, so don't count on them to fix
| the problem.
|
| Really, from the outside it looks silly - "I gave my code
| away, and now I'm not profiting from it!". Then at the same
| time all of the biggest, richest companies in the world are
| software companies because they chose not to do that.
| shapefrog wrote:
| So much of the internet famous generation got rich by
| doing something, giving it away for free, then making a
| pile of money from giving it away for free. From bloggers
| to vloggers to streamers to influencers to banksy to
| almost every tech company. The outlier of sorts is open-
| source developers.
|
| To be honest I have no answers to the problem, and
| personally find most of the answers that do get thrown
| around dont pass the most basic of logic tests. So like
| you the only option I see is for developers to make the
| change, stop the freedom and the free ride.
| dingosity wrote:
| There's a difference between copyright and license. Under US
| intellectual property law, it is possible to release software
| for zero dollars, but retain IP interests. This is why you'll
| see a LICENSE file in the source code for most open source
| projects. It contains a legal contract explaining the users
| rights to use the software.
|
| What you're probably thinking of is "Public Domain." That's
| where a creator disclaims most (though not all) rights to the
| creation.
| dark-star wrote:
| Yes, but this is exactly the point: These companies want to
| start open and free, to get as many people as possible to use
| their product. And then, later, they want to make money from
| it.
|
| This is the "bait & switch". It is planned right from the
| beginning, the tricky part is that you need to make the "it's
| completely free" phase as long as possible (using borrowed
| cash, investor money, whatever) to have as large a userbase as
| possible. And THEN switch.
|
| It's literally the definition of "bait & switch"
| LtWorf wrote:
| You can't change license of published work.
|
| They are changing license of the new stuff.
|
| You are free to keep using whatever you were using forever.
| It's the same as a maintainer just abandoning a project and
| you having to take over.
| kazinator wrote:
| The copyright holder can absolutely change the license of a
| published work. The FOSS license thereby becomes
| unavailable; no new users can become licensees.
|
| If the FOSS license was such that it didn't restrict use,
| but only redistribution, then only the existing
| redistributors are licensees. The existing users have no
| rights.
|
| If the new license says that unlicensed use is not allowed,
| then the users are now infringing. They didn't agree to any
| license in order to use the program when it was free and
| therefore they are not in any agreement that can be
| grandfathered.
|
| Even if a license says that it's irrevocable (or some
| doctrine applies which makes it so, regardless) it can only
| be irrevocable to those users who have entered into the
| license. Those users may enjoy the continued right to
| redistribute the program. However, new users receiving the
| program do not benefit from the irrevocability; they have
| no existing license contract that can be grandfathered.
|
| If a program has gone from FOSS to "cannot redistribute or
| use", the situation is like that existing licensees are
| allowed to give away copies, but the new users receiving
| them aren't allowed to do anything with those copies.
|
| Software whose copyright holder has expressed revocation of
| a FOSS license should be regarded by all parties as a piece
| of radioactive or biohazardous waste.
|
| Don't even think about maintaining a fork or anything of
| the sort.
| api wrote:
| The confusion revolves around free vs. freedom. Open source is
| supposed to be about freedom first and foremost, but for most
| people it's really about free. People would rather have free
| bait with a hook attached than freedom that costs something,
| even if the cost is quite small.
| dingosity wrote:
| [citation needed]
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| Author says "We need to get paid". Who is we? He should have
| talked for himself. This "we" talk is sometimes get tiresome.
| dingosity wrote:
| My experience with GPL is that it's used to sell commercial
| licenses. For instance, the Second Life viewer is dual licensed:
| GPL and Commercial. Several commercial customers (names redacted
| to protect the guilty) made changes to the viewer and were later
| told by Linden they had to purchase a commercial license to avoid
| violating GPL, even though they were only distributing the viewer
| internally.
|
| I dunno man. _That_ seems like a bait and switch. You start off
| with "oh. how could we charge you, it's open source" and then
| turn around and say "pay up or we'll get Eben Moglen to sue you."
|
| Seems like a racket to me.
|
| But YMMV. I release things under a BSD license, but that's just
| me. Unlike GPL fans, I don't try to tell other people what
| license they should release their software under. If you're hip
| to GPL, by all means use it, I don't think that EVERYONE using a
| GPL license is running a racket. Just mentioning it so peeps
| might understand the pushback on EFF/GPL some people feel.
| xani_ wrote:
| That's not bait and switch, that's just not the license terms.
|
| > even though they were only distributing the viewer
| internally.
|
| That is explicitly allowed. You just have to live with
| consequences of it being legal for any of the users to take and
| "bring back to the light".
|
| It is either that this company didn't wanted their inside
| people to do that, or that Linden lied to them about what GPL
| implies
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Oh @dingosity, my favourite ex-cow-orker, I think you may be
| wrong on the bait-and-switch aspect. The third parties involved
| knew the implications of the GPL'd SL Viewer from the
| beginning. Maybe not everyone in the organization, but the
| people who agreed to buy a commercial license knew about it and
| it was supposedly budgeted for.
|
| Though yes. If a company did do a bait and switch like that, it
| would be bad. But I don't think Linden did that in this case.
| rakoo wrote:
| > and then turn around and say "pay up or we'll get Eben Moglen
| to sue you."
|
| No, you turn around and say "you know how it was cool that you
| could use that thing to do what you wanted ? Well, continue
| this tradition and make _your_ thing available for others to do
| what they want. Recognize you 're standing on the shoulders of
| giants by giving back to the community".
|
| The only reason one might not want to release under the same
| license is because one does need money to live. That's a
| necessity of our current political system and changing it is
| the logical conclusion of being in the camp of those who want
| to spread Libre Software
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