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."
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."
Half-assing it (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re: Half-assing it (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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>> "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.
Re:commercial versus academic lic (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not new, but the only difference here is that people want to take software with licenses too restrictive to be Open Source and call it "Open Source". They should call it something else.
Part of the problem is open source (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Part of the problem is open source (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
Real Open Source Licenses Protect Software Freedom (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Do not feed the trolls.
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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
OSI for software freedom so long as it helps biz. (Score:3)
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]
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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
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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.
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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.
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Most Open Source is still made today by people who don't care if they make money or not. They are making it in a cost center to do something necessary for their business, not to sell it, or sell services for it.
If all of those "Open Source companies" were to die tomorrow, it would not significantly diminish the amount of Open Source being produced.
Don't confuse the needs of the companies with the good of Open Source.
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The market value of the original copy was captured in your parent's statement: "if you do software as business you can meaningfully only sell development effort..."
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The whole idea of "selling software" is nonsensical. Software as a good itself has natural market value of 0 since it can be copied with nearly no effort.
All goods have a natural market value of zero, because they can be stolen. Locks and fences and guns and police raise this.
Such enforcement is also possible in software. Though physical and legal protections are usually bypassed, there are moral, reputational, safety, and quid-pro-quo protections which work well on businesses.
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Most Open Source is still made today by people who don't care if they make money or not. They are making it in a cost center to do something necessary for their business, not to sell it, or sell services for it.
Yes, most Free Software development is dependent on something proprietary. Often this is proprietary software, and the Free Software coders either work for them or release code as a resume-item because they want to work for them. This is Free Software's dirty secret.
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The Four Freedoms and the Open Source Definition are the same on this issue. You have to be able to use the software for any purpose.
Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:1)
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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
The code of conduct is the crisis (Score:1)
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
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Complex code that worked well and was supported over changing CPU, GPU and network use.
Todays efforts at computer "code"? A complex CoC looking over comments and what code is "used" for....
How about just letting the smartest people use their free time to write and look after the best code?
Thank them for their work and try and sent in a bug report.
Rather than placing political CoC over entire projects.
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Re: The code of conduct is the crisis (Score:2)
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The reaction they get is words like "professionalism" and the need to go back over all their great code to look for a list of the reported "wrong" words?
Thats hours and project time lost to looking at past comments in old code.
That feeling of community, fast code and free time is now gone.
Self censorship over past work is not a productive task given the hours in a day.
That smart person is going t
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The people with skills who create the great code in their own time for free now have to "clean it up" too?
How many hours do the best people have to now put in the consideration of "social consequences" before they can get to code?
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I was writing them for future me when I had to maintain something, emotions and swear words don't actually help communicate what is trying to be communicated so why would anyone put them in there? It strikes me as very illogical and not very smart or effective.
How? (Score:2)
"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.
They aren't "alternative", they just aren't free (Score:3)
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.
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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..
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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.
Freedom is for humans (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not a new problem (Score:2)
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 I describe it? (Score:2)
I describe it as "not open source." [opensource.org]