Re:An update to the Timescale license
by dragonwriter on Friday September 25, 2020 @11:56AM
(#24591144)
> I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license.
It's almost as if the, in practical terms, near-identical standards of the OSI and FSF weren't just picked haphazardly from the air, but actually reflect the result of a thorough and detailed consideration of what features are necessary to unlock the value that OSI pursues mainly from a pragmatic angle and FSF pursues mainly from an ideological angle, and that all the elements of that standard I react in a way that there is a crisp rather than smooth falloff in achieving the sought-after value when not all the criteria are met.
> Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale
Preventing competitive services is the same thing as protecting lock-in and rent extraction. Now, that is a central purpose of copyright and the traditional focus of proprietary licensing, so that’s not a novel focus of licensing at all. It is, however, directly opposed to the central purpose and value of F/OSS to end-users as well as downstream developers, both from a pragmatic/economic and ideological perspective.
> That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses
No, it's the central purpose and value of F/OSS licenses. It's a shortcoming from the perspective of prospective rentiers, sure, but that's not an incidental side effect unrelated to why F/OSS is sought by those who seek it; freedom from rentiers is the whole point.
It's almost as if the, in practical terms, near-identical standards of the OSI and FSF weren't just picked haphazardly from the air, but actually reflect the result of a thorough and detailed consideration of what features are necessary to unlock the value that OSI pursues mainly from a pragmatic angle and FSF pursues mainly from an ideological angle, and that all the elements of that standard I react in a way that there is a crisp rather than smooth falloff in achieving the sought-after value when not all the criteria are met.
> Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale
Preventing competitive services is the same thing as protecting lock-in and rent extraction. Now, that is a central purpose of copyright and the traditional focus of proprietary licensing, so that’s not a novel focus of licensing at all. It is, however, directly opposed to the central purpose and value of F/OSS to end-users as well as downstream developers, both from a pragmatic/economic and ideological perspective.
> That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses
No, it's the central purpose and value of F/OSS licenses. It's a shortcoming from the perspective of prospective rentiers, sure, but that's not an incidental side effect unrelated to why F/OSS is sought by those who seek it; freedom from rentiers is the whole point.