Re:AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
by JoshTriplett on Thursday January 17, 2019 @01:27PM
(#18933149)
> [F]OSS sends most of the money to the opposition
That's where we fundamentally disagree. People who are building and contributing to FOSS are not "the opposition" just because they're large companies; on the contrary, it's a huge success story of FOSS that it's powering billion-dollar industries, both by supplanting proprietary software and by enabling use cases that don't even exist in proprietary software. The size of the whole pool is growing.
> I said you can loose money if they patent sue you or pull some stuff about API.
There are multiple licenses that address that, such as by including an explicit patent grant; that prevents the "submit code and then sue people who use it" problem. And there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent patent lawsuits from people who aren't subject to the license, short of reforming the patent system (which, please, by all means do if you can).
And regarding API, similarly, some licenses include provisions that would prevent someone from suing over code they submitted, and beyond that you can't protect against people outside your ecosystem suing you or others inside your ecosystem.
> not funding work in Congress and courts to protect our freedoms.
There's a substantial and constant conversation going on regarding how to better improve laws to support FOSS.
> I call mine shared source or source available per your prior advice on that. (Thanks again btw.)
That's where we fundamentally disagree. People who are building and contributing to FOSS are not "the opposition" just because they're large companies; on the contrary, it's a huge success story of FOSS that it's powering billion-dollar industries, both by supplanting proprietary software and by enabling use cases that don't even exist in proprietary software. The size of the whole pool is growing.
> I said you can loose money if they patent sue you or pull some stuff about API.
There are multiple licenses that address that, such as by including an explicit patent grant; that prevents the "submit code and then sue people who use it" problem. And there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent patent lawsuits from people who aren't subject to the license, short of reforming the patent system (which, please, by all means do if you can).
And regarding API, similarly, some licenses include provisions that would prevent someone from suing over code they submitted, and beyond that you can't protect against people outside your ecosystem suing you or others inside your ecosystem.
> not funding work in Congress and courts to protect our freedoms.
There's a substantial and constant conversation going on regarding how to better improve laws to support FOSS.
> I call mine shared source or source available per your prior advice on that. (Thanks again btw.)
Thank you, I really appreciate that.