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Open Source

Do Alternative Software Licenses Represent Open Source's 'Midlife Crisis'? (dtrace.org) 87

"it is clear to me that open source -- now several decades old and fully adult -- is going through its own midlife crisis," writes Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill. [O]pen source business models are really tough, selling software-as-a-service is one of the most natural of them, the cloud service providers are really good at it -- and their commercial appetites seem boundless. And, like a new cherry red two-seater sports car next to a minivan in a suburban driveway, some open source companies are dealing with this crisis exceptionally poorly: they are trying to restrict the way that their open source software can be used. These companies want it both ways: they want the advantages of open source -- the community, the positivity, the energy, the adoption, the downloads -- but they also want to enjoy the fruits of proprietary software companies in software lock-in and its concomitant monopolistic rents.

If this were entirely transparent (that is, if some bits were merely being made explicitly proprietary), it would be fine: we could accept these companies as essentially proprietary software companies, albeit with an open source loss-leader. But instead, these companies are trying to license their way into this self-contradictory world: continuing to claim to be entirely open source, but perverting the license under which portions of that source are available. Most gallingly, they are doing this by hijacking open source nomenclature. Of these, the laughably named commons clause is the worst offender (it is plainly designed to be confused with the purely virtuous creative commons), but others...are little better...

"[T]heir business model isn't their community's problem, and they should please stop trying to make it one," Cantrill writes, adding letter that "As we collectively internalize that open source is not a business model on its own, we will likely see fewer VC-funded open source companies (though I'm honestly not sure that that's a bad thing)..." He also points out that "Even though the VC that led the last round wants to puke into a trashcan whenever they hear it, business models like 'support', 'services' and 'training' are entirely viable!"

Jay Kreps, Co-founder of @confluentinc, has posted a rebuttal on Medium. "How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product? I think Bryan's sentiment may be that it should be called the Evil Proprietary Corruption of Open Source License or something like that, but, well, we disagree."
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Do Alternative Software Licenses Represent Open Source's 'Midlife Crisis'?

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  • Half-assing it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15, 2018 @05:49PM (#57810012)

    "How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product?"

    Not compatible with the Open Source Definition. "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor."

    Seems like what this guy really wants is a split release: a proprietary enterprise version, and an AGPL/GPLv3-licensed "Community Edition." Not unlike what Qt has done for years.

    At this point in time, devising your own custom open-source license is like devising your own custom crypto algorithm: it's a bad idea, and shows that you really don't understand what you're getting into.

    • Re: Half-assing it (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Obviously that's true for open source.

      It is not true for free software, which is a different concept.

      The problem is, the article conflates these two. A lot of people do, precisely something RMS has warned of for years.

      You can resolve the apparent problem of a rigid specification be moving from the OSI model to the free model.

    • They don't want AGPL as its to weak. AGPL basically only protects their product directly from closed modifications. It does nothing for "XXX has been installed and configured on your instance YYY. Code is available in ZZZ". What they want is something so extensive as to prevent this whole field of exploitation altogether so that they can get monopoly for cloud service.

    • by stooo ( 2202012 )

      >> "How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than...

      Yeah, like "I write a server for X. You can use it for anything except for serving X"
      Thanks guys. That's not free software.
      Software is either free or it isn't.
      If you want proprietary, you're free to write your own proprietary software.

  • by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday December 15, 2018 @06:01PM (#57810048) Homepage Journal

    The FSF has repeatedly rejected the concept. Theo design Raadt has despoiled the libertarian notion by rejecting DARPA funding and decrying military use of his product.

    It is only the open source group, LAST on the scene, hijackers of the ideology, and largely the least successful lot, who have the problems.

    No, open source is NOT as old as claimed, back then you had FREE AS IN FREEDOM, where each group defined the key freedom they wished you to be free in. This was fixed. There was no corruption, there still isn't.

    Open Source rejected all that. It renounced the free as in freedom model and forced licenses to conform to a very different ideology.

    You can argue as to which way was better, this or that. Feel free. Maybe you'll even be right. What you cannot argue is that the old way is perverting the new by remaining as it always was. No. They are not equivalent things.

    All the article convinces me if is that the early objectors to open source were right. The free licenses, such as GNU and BSD, are better, are honest and are exactly the same in spirit as they were when created by different branches of academia.

    YMMV.

    • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Saturday December 15, 2018 @06:40PM (#57810154) Homepage Journal

      You seem to be confused about what Free Software is. Please read What is Free Software? [gnu.org] Right there as Freedom Zero is that you can run the program for any purpose.

      Richard Stallman would tell you that he is not a pacifist (he's told me that). He objects to particular wars, for good reasons, but not all war. Free Software licenses don't prohibit military use, or any other sort of use. Theo's rejection was a personal thing.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      The only thing that needs to change is the political nature of the FOSS movement. They need to form an aggressive politically active association, that will fund aggressive lobbyists and also coordinate political action to actively force the adoption of FOSS software into government. They must force government to justify the payment of software licences especially to foreign corporations, they must make it cost as many votes as possibly to buy closed source proprietary software, the perpetual software licenc

  • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Saturday December 15, 2018 @06:11PM (#57810074) Homepage Journal

    The Open Source Initiative, contrary to some folks here on Slashdot, has expressed its purpose as the preservation of software freedom. They did that in an official statement of the board regarding the license acceptance process.

    The Open Source definition, the definition of what is really Open Source and what is not, started out life as the Debian Free Software Guidelines. So, a Free Software definition. Once upon a time, there were some people who posed Open Source as an opposition to Free Software. Fortunately, those folks are no longer associated with OSI.

    I don't speak for the OSI board. I am, however, co-founder and current standards chair and member of the license committee. So I might know what I'm talking about :-)

    As far as I can tell, these various licenses in discussion are not Open Source licenses and won't be accepted as Open Source licenses. The folks who promote them can use any license they wish, as long as they don't call it Open Source. I suggest they do that. I even help them, for free, as long as they are clear that conflicts witbh Open Source should be avoided.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The folks who promote them can use any license they wish, as long as they don't call it Open Source. I suggest they do that. I even help them, for free, as long as they are clear that conflicts witbh Open Source should be avoided.

      Considering the fact you apparently haven't seen the other trash articles /. has ran about open source "not making quarterly profits" lately, I'll fill you in.

      They don't care what it's called. It could be called "The Spaghetti License" and they would still use it as clickbait to he

    • The Open Source Initiative, contrary to some folks here on Slashdot, has expressed its purpose as the preservation of software freedom.

      The OSI (for most of its existence) called the efforts of advocating for software freedom "ideological tub-thumping", hardly language I'd associate with preserving software freedom. Every now and then there's also some organization which calls itself an open source distributor that boasts of its association with a proprietor. Like the time Red Hat told us it was "partners" w [redhat.com]

      • OSI was founded to evangelize the idea of Free Software with different language, because at the time RMS wasn't really reaching business people - the message of a priori valuation of freedom over all else still plays best with programmers. Today many have reached an appreciation of Free Software starting with Open Source's gentler introduction. I don't deny that one person actively deprecated RMS. But it's long over.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org] says the answer is 'No'.

      Knowing actual history backs up Betteridge and shows how little 'new' is in the news that asks questions like this.

      All of the freedom respecting licenses were born into a world of commercial, closed and proprietary licensing for software and services by default. From the 1970s onward, outside of BSD you had to pay somebody for a black box bag of code to run your hardware. All of these boxes included and still include specific instructions that there ar

    • Thanks for adding your view.

      It was somewhat confusing to read their piece. Absolutely nothing in my experience matches their position. Excepting those that want to restrict the use of software while leveraging free resources.
    • And of course, it's right there in the open source definition [opensource.org]. Item 6 is, "no discrimination against fields of endeavor". The definitions of "free software" and "open source" are practically identical, and what these people are doing doesn't meet either one.

  • But didn't this start being a problem about the time Redhat wen't public.
    • No, this one isn't a red hat issue. This is an issue that people created "Open Source companies", and then got upset because some really big rich companies ;like Amazon and Google actually used their software under the rules of Open Source, and made all of the money offering the software as a service while the actual authors of the software didn't do too well financially.

      So, maybe the business methods of "Open Source companies" don't actually work for some of these companies. Others are doing quite well, of

  • Stop looking at code comments.
    Stop making political speech demands the most gifted, smart, amazing people who give their free time to write the best code in their generation.
    A person writes great code. With few computer problems. Use the code and attract more skilled people.

    Micromanagement of language use, politics, comments just makes "free" feel like another day at work.

    Want a business model? Sell your code.
    Want to do open source? Work in your free time and see what others can add to your hours
  • by dos1 ( 2950945 )

    "How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product? "

    Definitely neither as "open source" nor "free software", which it simply isn't. If for some reason you don't want to just call it "proprietary", which it is, then invent your own new term.

  • by melted ( 227442 ) on Saturday December 15, 2018 @11:25PM (#57811088) Homepage

    It's OSS, strictly speaking, but it's not FOSS anymore. The moment you introduce arbitrary requirements or restrictions, the "freedom" part flies right out of the window. The "ethical" way to make money is, IMO, to offer your software under AGPL3 with a commercial license available on a company-by-company basis. That way, on the one hand your software is fully free as in speech (and any proprietary changes to it become free as well), yet there is a way out for SAAS vendors who want to tweak it to run better on their infra, which is basically all of them.

    • AGPL is much to weak for their purpose. Amazon or Google would have no problem with complying with its terms and still offering the service to customers. The problem here is money that author company doesn't get and not getting some mythical code modifications..

      • by melted ( 227442 )

        As a former googler: Google doesn't even allow you to install VLC on company laptops. It's safe to say they will not allow the deployment of _anything_ AGPL licensed in the datacenter.

  • by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Sunday December 16, 2018 @02:37AM (#57811422)

    I'm all about _people_ having the freedom to use software however they see fit. But I couldn't give a flying fuck if corporations have "freedom" to do anything at all.

    Because Freedom is for human beings. Corporations are "legal entities", more or less malevolent machines, little petty gods we've built and raised up over ourselves.

    I want to release software under a license that grants the Four Freedoms to human beings. And grants jack shit to corporations. No license I'm aware of does this. But maybe it could be hacked into existing licenses with just a few edits. Any thoughts on the wording?

    PS: There's probably some numbnuts out there thinking, "Hey doood, a corporation is just a group of people. Corporations have rights too!!1!" Sorry bro, it's Current Year, and no one believes that obvious lie anymore.

  • I worked on a major DoD acquisition program in the previous decade, where the prime contractor and the government both kept a lawyer busy nearly full-time evaluating Open Source licenses.

    We did overcome a lot of the resistance to the GPL, but that was a significant set of both legal and business arguments that went up to the executive levels.

    The worst was packages with a mix of commercial and Open Source licenses, when we had to figure out not just what we could do with the their code and our code, but also

  • How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product?

    I describe it as "not open source." [opensource.org]

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