I think the software community is having an "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" moment.
The community pushed for a long time for licenses that donated labor to corporations because the licenses sounded more "free", and that flattered their politics.
When the corporations actually pick up the value everyone left on the table, the community gets outraged.
That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon it.
But OSS is a fragile and wonderful thing, and an entity with the resources and clout of AWS would (at least in my opinion) do well to tend that garden rather than strip it bare.
Use an open source license that contains ALL of the terms you want involved. You don't get to back out of the open source deal or heap guilt on others because you have regrets about other people literally complying with your terms.
That’s the whole point of the license. You’re putting code out there for others to use however they want.
This isn’t even about legal requirement vs intent. If you put up a super permissive license, you are making the intent very clear that people can do whatever they want with it.
The lack of obligation, both legal and societal, of using open source software is what makes it so useful and lets the whole ecosystem flourish.
If your in open source for glory and getting monetary or promotional credit for your work, you’re doing it for the wrong reason.
Same thing with a company like Amazon. They are enormously wealthy. So we look poorly on them when they don't give back to those bringing them even more wealth. Because they easily could. Because it wouldn't hurt them at all. Because it is right.
To say “if you want to restrict use, then license appropriately” is to push heavily towards everyone using more restrictive licenses.
If other people contribute back, great. If I get credit, great. But those are not the motivations when you put up something like a BSD license. Licenses mean things so you need to choose a restrictive license if you get your feelings hurt when people use your software in a way you don’t like.
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many, many other companies are literally building tools for their competitors.
That's so outside the realm of possibility in any other industry that a copyright lawyer (or executive) in any heavily-patented field would laugh you out of their office for suggesting something like that.
AWS has appeared to be doing a better job recently (from what I can see) in that regard. It's all around good PR. They lose nothing by thanking the maintainer/community for the work, even though the license doesn't require this. On the other-hand they build good-will.
Given the AWS response linked above, it would appear AWS recognizes this, and so maybe they will better accredit the work.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits." [1]
> "Okay, first of all, let me answer. What they did is illegal, number one. Also, the numbers are all wrong, with the numbers they released. And just so you understand, when you have a lot of real estate, I have real estate, you know a lot of it. Okay? Right down the road, Doral, big stuff, great stuff. When I decided to run, I’m very underlevered, fortunately, but I’m very underlevered. I have a very, very small percentage of debt compared. In fact, some of it, I did as favors to institutions that wanted to loan me money. $400 million compared to the assets that I have, all of these great properties all over the world, and frankly, The Bank of America building in San Francisco. I don’t love what’s happening to San Francisco. 1290 Avenue of the Americas, one of the biggest office buildings."
[1] https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/HJCYu2w66p28wT2...
Back in the day I thought Obama was amazing. He was articulate and considered in his manner of speech. Then we hearing about the drone strikes with heavy collateral damage. And then Snowden came out and told us how Obama administration had put in place all the necessary infrastructure for a surveillance state. And then he put in place Title XI and kangaroo courts at Universities to completely undermine the core tenet of our legal system "Innocent until proven guilty".
Articulate does not equal morality or justice or fairness. It certainly did not with Obama.
I do not think that is accurate. The Obama administration sustained the growth from the previous administration. I do wish they had curtailed this growth, but c'est la vie.
Just give it different names each time congress finds out- Total Information Awareness, Carnivore (slightly different system, head of same hydra), etc.
We have not seen such an egregious abuse of open source software with any other company. Most companies that make use of a large amount of opensource actually contribute a fair amount back.
Like hiring on the core developers or making a large amount of code fixes and feature development contributions.
Amazon does neither of these things.
Take a look at any highly successful society or community. There is a large amount of gifting and selfless behavior
I don't think your claim about Amazon is true. But even if it is, it's not relevant. None of the OSI licenses require improvements to be contributed back to the original project. The most restrictive of them simply requires improvements to be open to the user.
The intention of open source licenses was never to force those who redistribute the software to improve on it. It was to provide end users with the freedom to be able to do that themselves, by distributing the improvements as well.
It's unfortunate that licenses from a generation ago don't adequately cover all the nuance of cloud computing. But the reality is that open source licenses were never about preventing companies from profiting at the expense of original developers. They were about user freedom. If you're unhappy with the way a company is using the software you open sourced, that is a sign you weren't prepared to commit to what open source means, philosophically.
Something like the AGPL would be preferable, if also more controversial. Then you'd also have a peanut gallery of people telling you your software is "source available" instead of open source.
Perhaps that was the intentions of the license creators, but famously Linus for example chose the GPL license precisely as a quid pro quo - I give you code for free, you give me back code for free.
When companies couldn't find free software to use, they just wrote it themselves, typically, unless it was something big and way outside their domain.
Rather than being beholden to a licensing agreement, it would be nice if OSS had a license for an "enterprise-level donation" that was mandatory for for-profit use. It would be a one-time cost, so it would be easier to push through the accountants at lots of big companies, and companies could feel free to use the software at their leisure. Authors/contributors could choose to charge another fee for upgrading to a new major version, opt to end support of an old version or not and so on and so forth.
I love how these reckonings and syntheses are coming.
Then use a different license. Hoping that a company like Amazon finds it in their hearts to always do what _you_ consider "the right thing" is just a loser of a strategy. You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides. Good luck with that.
Interesting idea for a license.
Everyone can use and modify it, but if a large company with a market cap above $100m or a company wholly funded or owned by such company decides to utilize this project as a for-profit service, then said large company must hire me at for no less than $175,000 in 2020 value.
No, I think I'll respond to that. It's not that I don't _care_, but it's naive at best to expect anything else. Besides, if your license allows it, they're not really taking advantage are they? Change your license.
>Everyone can use and modify it, but if a large company with a market cap above $100m or a company wholly funded or owned by such company decides to utilize this project as a for-profit service, then said large company must hire me at for no less than $175,000 in 2020 value.
Seems incredibly difficult to implement logistically, and most companies will probably just say "screw it" as they all hope to be valued at > 100M some day. Just enforce a per-basis license negotiation for commercial use or disallow it entirely. What happens if a company goes from a cap of 99M -> 101M -> 98M (etc etc). Just seems wrought with obvious problems.
^^ Written as if you've been burnt before...
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Common...
As stated on the Creative Commons website (licensed under CC-BY):
Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software? We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.
Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.
Version 4.0 of CC’s Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism. Read more about it here.
>Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available
But as far as I am aware, there are no comparable software licenses that prohibit commercial use. So, the CC NC licenses seem to be the only option here, even if supposedly imperfect.
Do you have an example of an ambiguity with regard to non-commercial use?
You might consider whether it serves your intended goals.
In effect, if you sell redis as a service (which, and IANAL, as I understand doesn't mean you sell a service supported by using redis) you must pay them in some way.
FYPML.
Figuring out the right terms would be difficult, but not impossible.
In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.
It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the original author. The point is to ensure that the code remains free, the original author has no say over what happens to it.
Whether the GPL is good enough for that depends on whether end users are recipients of binaries and therefore would be entitled to the source under GPL.
I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed: it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of generosity, but rather in their own interests.
Licenses are contracts. You can add to the contract that people who fork must do star-jumps every morning, if you feel like; but you have to state it upfront.
It baffles me how many people fail to understand this.
Both are about freedom that is only directly meaningful for developers or people that can employ developers on their behalf; permissive license are about simply providing that freedom rather directly, with limitations that tend to be focussed mainly on avoiding unexpected costs to the original provider of the software (liability, reputational, or otherwise). Copyleft licenses compromise direct provision of freedom to acheive broader but less direct social goals which relate to that freedom.
If you both agree with the goal and agree with the pragmatic judgement involved in the design of the detailed mechanics in a particular license about how to acheived that goal, its quite possible that a copyleft license is better for your interest.
Personally, whether the goal is (and these are two very different goals I've seen cited by GPL proponents) promoting development of free software or inhibiting development of nonfree software, I'm not sure the GPL family (or any other copyleft license) does that better, in practice, than permissive licenses.
The GPL is better at inhibiting nonfree direct descendants of a particular code base, but I don't generally see that as a valuable goal.
GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.
Nobody has a gun held to their head and are forced to use GPL code in their code.
These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part of the binary you're distributing vs. an external dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon tens of billions in revenue.
This is a very, very, complicated situation.
Sure the author can't require payment after the fact, but there are no open source licenses that prevent the author from soliciting payment from a downstream user. This is all fair game.
>You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides.
If you do it right there aren't downsides. As far as business is concerned, the point with choosing any license is to create a win-win situation for all parties involved.
That's not how GPLv3 works. Both in terms of selling [1] and in terms of additional permissions under section 7.
GPLv3 without a CLA essentially requires you make the modified code available, but not when it's behind a cloud/webservice. For that you need AGPLv3.
This does go against some philosophical decisions underlying the GPL license but IMO GPL itself is less free than BSD/MIT licensing and to each their own.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/amazon-cl...
I wonder if FOSS licenses can be modified such that if you are claiming in press that you are "launching" something and it is substantially based on something open source you must state the original authors prominently in body of the press release.
Unlike other types of work, this isn't necessarily true elsewhere (eg in the US & UK), but I understand moral rights originate from France and German and are especially strong there.
(I see that page now mentions "Credits: CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder is based on the Headless recorder. " - is that new? )
The problem is if I tack it on myself, nobody will ever touch or use my code even in the ways I want them to, because people fear obscure licenses if they don't have lawyers.
If I release code as GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, people will use it without second thoughts. IF I release code as "BSD with modifications" people will look at it with suspect eyes.
The effect I want to have is NOT to prevent large companies from using my code. In fact I want to encourage them to use it, but to also publicly mention me along with its use, which would be very valuable to career-building and job seeking. That way, when writers of open source code aren't offered jobs by the companies that use that code, at least they gain high visibility for other companies to want to hire them.
Better would be to use mechanisms that already exist to sponsor the core developers for a length of time (Patreon, liberapay, etc). Alternatively, companies like Amazon could create an internal fund that assists key open source projects they've commercialized to set up as non-profits and then makes donations to them over X number of years.
A specific example that comes to mind, one of the main core developers of Webpack (Sean) got hired by Microsoft to essentially just work on Webpack on MSFT paycheck (I think now he branched out a tiny bit into other adjacent areas as well, but he is still one of the main Webpack contributors). I think it worked out great partially because he was not the sole creator, but just one of the few, and he was the only one who went to MSFT, so the other core devs still had some level of control they could exercise on their own without anyone being able to tell them otherwise.
That said, it feels like there is a missed opportunity in the space. Most large companies already donate money toward interests in their local communities, etc. Why isn't there an easy mechanism for tech companies to donate to sustainable funding of open-source that they all depend on? My guess is that because open-source projects are rarely set up as organizations, they can't achieve 501(c)(3). It would not only be tax advantageous for companies, but would also support business continuity and recruiting pipelines. It would also be great for open-source developers and the community.
Maybe there are efforts out there to create something like this?
Open source projects are often very poorly maintained so being the steward of one that’s interesting does not actually qualify you to productize it for a company.
> It seems like you're arguing that people should get both the good will of having an open source license and the profits of a closed source license. Which comes across as disingenuous.
It isn't. Linus Torvalds and all kinds of other people are paid to work on the Linux kernel, sort of like how the op suggests, and if that hadn't happened Linux would probably be a shadow of what it is now.
The alternative is to have some guy slave away for another's profit, and eventually burn out (which happens to tons of open source developers).
[1] Specifically, no OSI-approved open source license but that's what most people equate with "open source license."
It may also be worth noting that Creative Commons put a lot of effort into trying to define noncommercial over time and wasn't able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Obviously there are cases that are clearly commercial but many others are far less clear. This was being debated over a decade ago and nothing has really changed: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-co...
(A legit question. Have an upvote.)
FWIW all the supposed complex questions they ask are clear cut. Advertising on a website makes it commercial, using works in a presentation at work makes it commercial, etc., they're all clearly commercial.
A harder question might be "what if I'm not charging and am giving files away" that becomes commercial if it substantially inhibits commercial activities, for example (according to copyright caselaw I've read).
But that doesn't matter that much, was the guy making $10 a month from adsense using your work commercially (legally, yes): it doesn't matter, why bother to sue them (actual damages is going to be tiny). NC is for the company advertising with your work, or ripping off your work, etc..
NC doesn't seem that hard to define but in any situation where it would be worth you suing for tortuous infringement then it's going to be very clear -- unless someone made a lot of money, or you lost a lot of money, then ...
instead of forking they could work with core devs to see if they wanted to support the desired features (potentially with an NDA until release).
this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source.