This "it's not open-source unless you allow Amazon to profit from your charitable work" is horse hockey. I don't care if this is how a hardliner sees it. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive, and this is important enough that I support the migration of "open-source" to include these restrictions. Which, as they point out, affect none of the people using their code, and only the corporations (not people!) who would abuse the goodwill created by the Open Source movement.
Well, "we" in the Open Source movement decided that it means not restricting what users do with their code.
I don't understand what's so hard about this. Overwhelmingly, the biggest players in the Open Source ecosystem have consistently been saying, "call it whatever you want, just be clear that you're not the same as us." And the response from a lot of people has been, "no, you have to let us call ourselves the same as you."
Source Available has been a term for a really long time, and its generally understood what it means, and plenty of people use the term with plenty of good will. This shouldn't be a controversy, it's such a straightforward, easy concession. There's nothing wrong with being Source Available.
So why do we need to come up with a new term that describes the freedoms we've been consistently preaching for decades just because a couple of for-profit companies want the good will that we've generated? This isn't language evolving over time, it's people outside the community trying to decide how we're allowed to define ourselves within in the community.
Yes, language is descriptive, but that doesn't mean you can just redefine anything you want any time you want. Even more than that, the fact that language is descriptive does not mean it's a bad thing for communities to try and publicize and preserve the descriptive language that already exists. Open Source advocates are hardliners on this issue specifically because we recognize that language is descriptive, and that our ability to preserve the meaning of the words that describe our community is dependent on us taking the time to educate and correct people who are genericizing those terms.
The terms might be superficially similar to some F/OSS licenses, but the reason it fails to meet the OSI or FSF definitions is precisely that it's spirit is diametrically opposed to F/OSS
The "GPL" is way more onerous. You see, one can only be truly unrestricted by being restricted into taking certain actions. Nothing Orwellian to see here.
I fear we're letting perfect be the enemy of the good here, and letting the FOSS ecosystem wither and lose incalculable value by letting trillion-dollar corporations exploit the hard work of people for free. If the choice is between "cheap Timescale on AWS run by Amazon" and "slightly less cheap Timescale on AWS run by Timescale", I'll take the latter.
I think banning FAANG from competing with the single source of revenue these FOSS companies have is a small price to pay to ensure a thriving FOSS ecosystem, and I think insisting on absolute freedom is killing the ecosystem.
Some people feel just as strongly about imposing field-of-use restrictions to exclude military entities as you do about excluding "trillion dollar companies". Others feel strongly about excluding all commerical usage.
But "Open Source" means no field-of-use restrictions — so although any of you are free to craft your own licenses excluding X, Y, or Z, you don't get to call those licenses "Open Source".
> I fear we're letting perfect be the enemy of the good here, and letting the FOSS ecosystem wither and lose incalculable value by letting trillion-dollar corporations exploit the hard work of people for free.
No economic value is lost. Timescale is free to publish their own software offings with their own licensing; those offerings merely exist outside the Open Source ecosystem.
Open Source is plenty successful. It does not need to destroy itself in order to encompass all things.
Besides, "letting trillion-dollar corporations exploit the hard work of people for free" is what Open Source has always done. Everybody gets to use it for free — trillion dollar corporations, governments, religious organizations, activists, convicts... everybody!
Sounds like public domain. What’s the difference between the two then?
Public domain, other than by copyright expiration or (in the US) federal government creation is actually not clearly possible to create in a legally unambiguous way in many regimes with automatic copyright and no direct provision for unilateral transfer to the public domain; the most permissive open source licenses approximate it while providing better legal clarity.
Open source licenses often seek to protect the originator from liability they might otherwise incur from chain-of-commerce relationships, making it safer for them to make the software available without fee, and to prevent misattribution of origin. Other open source licenses, while not having field of use limits, seek to assure that derivatives are also offered on similarly-free terms. There's quite a variety, within the bounds of certain essential guarantees that are central to the common value proposition.
(Of course this is a somewhat cynical view, and this isn't even getting into the other costs associated with second hand furniture -- anything with upholstery carries a risk of containing mold or vermin and you may need to pay more to get it cleaned/sanitized)
But disallowing such field-of-use restrictions is exactly what makes open source collaboration between otherwise competing companies possible. It is a fundamental difference between Open Source and Source Available licenses.
While Google may have done it to make their own Cloud offering better, it ultimately has succeeded in saturating the container compute market and with their own success has brought plenty of competition.
They succeeded quite well in that.
>The right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications.
Description of the license from the linked articles:
> Rights still disallowed under Timescale License:
> No right to distribute modified Source
> No right to distribute modified Binaries, unless as part of a Value Added Product
I'm very confused on how you're reconciling your stated view on the definition of open source and the directly conflicting text of this license.
Open source is a well-defined term with a well-defined meaning. In fact, it was coined precisely because "Free Software" was considered to be too ambiguous.
Words have meaning. You can't just change the meaning of a well defined term to suite your views.
Wouldn’t it grant “the right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications” and provide protection from FAANG profiting without reciprocating, while being OSI and FSF approved?
What everyone seems to miss here is that the GNU Affero General Public License offers the ability for people to make that choice. Cloud providers would be forced into an ugly situation if almost every single XaaS codebase switched to AGPL. Their business model depends on being able to make minor investments to provide things people want as a service and not share it with the community.
However, if the AGPL was normalized and used more often, cloud providers would be in a situation where they'd either have to A) build everything of theirs on their own if they don't like the license or B) use the software people want, release their improvements back to the community, and everyone benefits.
It's amazing how everyone has forgotten why Linux won over all the other server, mobile, and edge platforms, and is slowly inching to dominate everything else. The terms underlying most of the core Linux system software, including the kernel obviously, require things incorporating it to be released with usable sources to the public. That is what enabled individuals to sustain a project and make it into the successful juggernaut it is today.
But because Google has managed to poison the well with AGPL, we're in a situation today where "business-friendly" permissive licenses like the Apache Software License are used and companies are surprised when they get sucked dry by cloud providers abusing the properties of that license.
Companies building open source software should expect one of two things: money or code. Both are intrinsically quite valuable to them, and they should take care to nurture that those are the two valid options.
I am personally currently unaware of any AGPLv3 licensed software in use in an AWS service. That said, I would be skeptical of advice to use AGPLv3 due to any particular organization's current policy on the license.
Regarding Presto, work on the service includes changes that should go upstream. For the changes that are appropriate for upstream (e.g., ones that are generally useful, not only of benefit or interest to AWS), PRs are sent. For example: https://github.com/prestosql/presto/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3...
Practically speaking, it is difficult to maintain a development branch of any software project with sufficient change velocity if you have a goal of continuing to integrate improvements from the upstream version.
I think there's a serious amount of FUD around it. I suppose it's because of how rare it is. With more usage, it would probably bee seen as less dangerous.
See also [2]
I hope in the future the Elastic, TimeScale, Confluent and any other "fuck Amazon" license could be merged into one and kind of standardized on as many freedoms as possible, while keeping AWS out of it.
This kind of "screw the big guys" is something I can totally get behind -- power to them for setting the terms of their relationship with them but it's not and shouldn't be open source. And that should be okay. The right to run a piece of software for any purpose whatsoever is fundamental to the spirit of open source.
That's like trying to describe a nectarine without talking about peaches or plums. You could do it, but you could communicate more effectively if you could make comparisons to the most similar well known concept.
They are somewhat careful to make the distinction and refer to it as source available, open source in spirit, etc. I think that's fine and legitimate communication.
Source available is a less controversial term, but it's also less descriptive. It can be a wide variety of software licenses. Whereas open source is much closer to this license. I don't see the problem here, how would you communicate it if you worked in their marketing department, if you're being honest?
I'd emphasize that both an "Open Source" offering and a more complete "Permissive Source Available" offering were available. The goal would be to contrast the source-available offering favorably with closed-source proprietary offerings, rather than to invite, needlessly, a possibly unflattering comparison with Open Source.
But how about just not picking a fight with the Open Source community?
The argument over field-of-use restrictions is anything but new, so going in with the notion you're going to either win everybody over or that people are going to quietly roll over is foolish.
The other possibility is that you deliberately pick a fight with the Open Source community for the sake of publicity. Some marketers are cynical enough to do that, but I'm not — and Timescale are not taking a combative approach and don't seem to be either.
But people really ought to know by now that attempting to coopt the term "Open Source" is certain to provoke an infuriated and vocal response. This latest wave has been going on for what, a year or two by now?
That's not meaningful; there's a reason why the FSF and OSI have very similar criteria that end up being essentially identical in practical application; the value associated with F/OSS isn't on a smooth continuum that varies with proximity to those definitions, there's a very sharp cliff near the edge and this is outside of it.
That other actors are free to commercially exploit, including offering SaaS versions without restriction, the software is a major benefit against vendor lock-in for users, even if they have no desire to exercise that freedom directly, and has important effects on building a diverse, invested community around a piece of software. Restricting this to allow rent extraction, while not unethical (outside of, e.g., the ideological framework of the idealistic Free Software community, as opposed to the F/OSS for pragmatic reasons communiry) in the same way other proprietary-licensed commercial software is not unethical, does not even approximate the value of F/OSS.
Vendors can keep having proprietary rent-protection licenses, they just need to stop trying to convince the Open Source community that they are somehow pragmatically equivalent to Open Source. They aren't, even approximately, and critically that is the entire reason that vendors choose them, so they need to stop the dishonest sales pitches.
But it is nearly functionally identical, that's the fact of the matter. It's open source with one tiny restriction that matters to nearly nobody. That sounds pragmatically equivalent to me, from the definitions of those words. I find your claim more dishonest than theirs on that basis. You're trying to say it's a far cry from open source, and that's just not the case.
No, its not. Its superficially similar (in much the same way that, say, the Constitution of the USSR was superficially similar to a liberal democratic constitution), but not having key commercial uses reserved for a rent-seeking copyright owner is central to the function of F/OSS.
> It's open source with one tiny restriction that matters to nearly nobody.
It matters to lots of people; sure, very few people are likely to directly exercise it, but that others are free to exercise it is central to the value proposition of open source for other users.
Open source is a philosophy which I have always admired and it motivated my way of thinking. But I can not accept that a few large corporations want to apply their monopoly and scale to single handedly reap the benifits.
Stopping them is vitally important to preserve those exact freedoms that open source gives us.
The Open source movement was not created in an environment where there was such massive centralisation of computing resources and their financial implications. How do you know if the Open source movement itself wouldn't have started differently in an environment like today's?
> It ain't. It is firmly in the spirit of "source available" licenses
Let's put a few more of the OP's words around that:
> a source-available license that was open-source in spirit, but
I don't have a problem with the terms of their license. Use whatever license you want — just don't call it "open source"!
From the blog post... This is problematic:
> open-source in spirit
It ain't. It is firmly in the spirit of "source available" licenses, which have a decades-long history and almost all of which do the same thing this license does: impose a field-of-use restriction to limit commercial competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
By corrupting the term "open source", they are leeching off of the goodwill created by the Open Source movement, and they shouldn't expect people to stop complaining about it until they stop.