What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?
You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps work free.
The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license.
Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have.
That is an arbitrary criteria, and you'll end up with software being written by Apple Development LLC, the loss-making shell company that Apple uses to do all it's development.
If you want something other than the GPL you can use it but don't be surprised when people commercialise your software at scale, don't pay for it and don't release changes back to the community.
In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.
If you don't want people to use your work, don't publish it. Publishing has the totally selfish goal of getting others to help you by trying things out, report bugs and improvements and some of them to contribute those things to you. Don't publish if you don't care and just want mobey out of it. Then open source is not for you.
You think Linus Torvalds wanted donations when he published Linux? Or that he was in a particularly philantropic mood? No way. He did it to get other people to work for him. And it turned out great for the project! That he is now making a living with it is just a side effect.
I don't know about everyone else, but if I publish something as open-source it's because it's something I made and needed in the first place.
Open-sourcing it is just a way to enable other people who have an itch to scratch to be able to do so. More often than not, such scratches comes back benefiting me as the original author.
I don't get this fixation on everything having to be profitable, but then again I don't work on any FOSS projects full time. I only do it to scratch an itch, to make the software work for me.
And when it works... I go do the actual work I'm paid to work on, using the software I've helped make better.
At the time I was thinking "Yay! I'm famous! My code is good!".
Over the years I've seen some of my code, not much of course, end up in other big projects and I'm a little proud, and a little pleased. The fact that the company got the money and not me? Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
I write code for me, and if I get bug reports that prove other people used it then I'll try to improve things. Money just isn't a consideration, although I have linked an Amazon wishlist in a few places over the years, and received unexpected books/films which make me smile.
If you look at the mailing list with the announcement, it was "look ma, no hands" kind of moment. Just letting people know of his experimental project, with entirely no expectations if it growing as much as it did decades later.
That's not to say Linux is a good example to go by, for an average free software project.
In the same way that it's trivial to write a twitter clone in a weekend, yes.
Hundreds of goverments have tried for decades to do what you claim is trivial. Good luck.
What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.
Edit: Sadly, I think these kinds of battles are rather one sided.
It's practically unthinkable that a company like Apple/Amazon/etc is going to create an expensive, complicated international legal structure to conceal wilful infringement of some open source licence.
It's perfectly achievable to write a licence that forbids use or incorporation in products, servers or services from particular companies.
There are all kinds of ways you can write a license that won’t be used popularly but would achieve this specific goal. Do you want to close “your” software off to companies who might seek to be acquired later?
I do not have the motivation to lay out my full argument as that would take another entire paper, but even if it turns out to be not as hard as I think it is, it certainly isn't as easy as is posited here.
The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed).
Regardless, the text doesn’t really matter. Most companies will run for the hills as soon as they see anything remotely like the contemplated licence. It’s just not worth the risk for them.
Source: former lawyer.
And watch everybody avoid your lib. You think you are special? A competing lib will soon show up without that restriction. And that lib will get attention from corporations and they will have thousands of eyes use the lib and test it and beat the hell out of it and fix issues and send them upstream (since maintaining a fork is too much work) and eventually this commercial-permissive alternative will thrive and be 100x as stable and streamlined and your alternative will cease to exist.
But you are free to do this. Nobody prevents you from it. But please don't cry later when seeing effects that you don't like.
Assuming there are network effects for being the 'official' place to contribute to your project, than you can start with an MIT license, and once it gets popular, you take it private with slightly ever less permissible licenses.
(GPL wouldn't make this so easy.)
Fat chance. An average programmer will replace the library if the current one has issues, not fix the issues in the library. It is rational to do so (assuming a different lib exists, which it does for most libs).
The core issue here is all these lawyerly lawyers try to parse words and contracts and it's all bullshit. The core point about OSS isn't to hyper-centralize wealth. The core point about OSS is to enable people to create a common good. A common wealth for the people. I'm not against the core function of capitalism—the feedback loop that allocates resources to those that produce things that others want—I'm against some of its outcomes. Namely, a class of hyper-wealthy people that make out like bandits and incorporate in places like Cyprus to pay as little back as possible to the very communities that enriched them in the first place.
It isn't just. And quite frankly, I consider it to be a disease that hurts the billionaire class as much as it hurts the rest of us. This never ending dick measuring contest while the world burns. Ferraris driving past over-packed women's shelters. People ashamed that they "only" drive an Audi. Like, in bayesian free energy terms it's the equivalent to holding onto ninety tons of fat and still trying to eat more. Of course Bezos went ballistic when his phone got hacked. Security concerns sky-rocket when you're holding onto this much energy and power.
That said, not every shared-sources project would be used, if its license requires to pay royalty.
A lot of business code can just as well run on server, and that works around basicall all the open source licences.
Also a choice quote about Stallman [1]:
"Richard Stallman argues the obvious meaning of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
"Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending – in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me – were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive – a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic – just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened... "
Eric S. Raymond is about Open Source.
There are somewhat subtle, but very important differences between their philosophies.
Eg the Linux kernel deliberately uses GPL 2, and that community has rejected GPL 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shared_Source_Ini... lists the following licenses:
- Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) [open source]
- Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) [open source]
- Microsoft Limited Public License (Ms-LPL) [not open source]
- Microsoft Limited Reciprocal License (Ms-LRL) [not open source]
- Microsoft Reference Source License (Ms-RSL) [not open source]
So, "shared source" was clearly not a particular license by MS.
Also, at that time, Microsoft tried to establish this term (by its Shared Source Initiative) for the general concept of "source code is available, but the license is not necessarily open source".
In the linked Wikipedia article, one can read on this:
"However, former OSI president Michael Tiemann considers the phrase 'Shared Source' itself to be a marketing term created by Microsoft. He argues that it is 'an insurgent term that distracts and dilutes the Open Source message by using similar-sounding terms and offering similar-sounding promises'."
Edit: I guess you're asking about 'ESR' and 'RMS.' ESR = Eric Raymond, an early proponent of open source as a communal development model ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html ). RMS is Richard Stallman, the originator of the GNU project on which the Linux kernel is based, as well as the GPL. RMS disagrees with ESR, in that he argues that the term "open source" is a distraction from the larger goal of free software ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....) .
There have been plenty of other authors with strong opinions on the subject but these are the two whose names most often come up in the context. Point being, it is unreasonable to say that "open source" is a term of art (as the GP did) whose meaning will be agreed upon by practitioners and advocates everywhere.
This is certainly something I sometimes do, but not here. What are you talking about?
In any case, "open source" isn't a term of art. It did not originate with ESR or with anyone else in the software development field, so it means whatever anyone wants it to mean.
> No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue".
Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrapping a company or part thereof, then when they have buy-in, start charging. It's what Unreal and (I think?) Unity do, it's what Slack did (really successfully, in a lot of places where it was introduced it was snuck in the back door by employees, used for a couple of months until the restrictions became too much, then the company started to pay for it; I've never seen 'grassroots' software deployment like that before and I'm impressed).
But it'll be difficult to pull off fully without the software being as-a-service or DRM things.
I wonder if the package manager systems could play a role in that. Require you to register your application at e.g. NPM, then every time an `npm install` is done, keep track of it. If usage does not decrease, start charging for things.
One could also consider an alternative, compatible package manager; an open source publisher could opt to only push to and promote that one. The package manager charges for use, and pays package maintainers relative to usage.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want usage, you can make it MIT and then suffer while they capitalize your code (as they are with in their rights to do), or if you want protection but low usage, make it AGPL or proprietary even. I don't really see a scenario where you have high usage, high protection and also high profit from you selling your product, unless you are good at marketing and selling your product.
- high usage - high protection - high profit
What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?
> - high usage - high protection - high profit
> What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?
Software that meets those criteria also has an organization that spends quite a lot on sales and marketing. Stimulation of usage and extraction of revenue doesn't happen on its own.
More explicitly, if an already-profitable organization can't use the software without paying on day zero, quite a lot of effort has to be expended to get them to make the leap, hence the long enterprise sales cycle. You can do it with just marketing if you keep the purchase price low (ie. below what a department manager is allowed to spend using a corporate credit card).
Open source can circumvent this to an extent, but to do so it has to allow businesses to use the software for free, and convert a percentage of those users to paying voluntarily.
Whether the mechanism of conversion is consulting and customization services, hosting services, support services, dual licensing, an 'enterprise' version with specific features, or something else is immaterial, they are never just paying for exactly what they were getting for free. The closest a business will come to that is employing developers to work on the open-source software, or at least allowing employees to work on the software during work hours.
The specific licensing-only approach you're outlining will only work in a very narrow case: A new unprofitable company starts using the software for free, and starts paying once they cross over to profitability (at which point they might decide to switch to using something else, instead). Note that there are some very large VC-fueled companies that have yet to be profitable. Convincing an already profitable business to pay at the outset just can't be done without the aforementioned marketing and sales.
Going open source is one of the ways to increase your chances of increased usage.
It is very much the Silicon Valley mentality that all value is added by that company and that no suppliers should make any profit.
Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach?
The common terminology is “bait and switch”. Also very much Silicon Valley. Apple for example likes to become a critical customer for any supplier, then use their leverage to squeeze them.
Yes, maybe at the end of the day I lose out to potential suitors, customers, collaborators etc. but that's my choice.
Most people are likely assuming that the typical author intent behind the decision to open source is to increase usage and contributors over the default closed source/proprietary licensing.
I could be wrong but it seems obvious to me that semi-commercial licenses would explode the amount of open code available, because instead of devs working for corporations, corporations would end up working for them.
Commercial licensing - open code, free for non-profits, per-seat or per-user pricing for for profits with an official license, forks are considered a derivative work, clean room clones aren't. There would be details, but there are always details, and they don't stop two hundred page EULAs from existing and being (mostly) binding.
But we don't have this because Stallman is a zealot and he wanted to Make A Point about purity. So instead of creating a market where devs could actually get paid for original work and corporations would be the ones paying, corporations get millions of hours of development effort for free - because he thought he could somehow magically strong-arm them into playing to his rules.
But then they jack up the price a hundredfold.
You can't do anything (short of rewriting), even if you could flat-out hire a replacement dev team for the entire project for cheaper than what they're charging you.
OpenOffice and MariaDB are classic examples of Free Software solving this - the IP holder sandbagged, so the community forked and fucked off. Even despite that though, LibreOffice still suffers from losing its OpenOffice name, and plenty of users lose out because they're unknowingly using a barely-updated version due to abovementioned sandbagging.
Proprietary software hands a default victory to the IP holder. Free Software hands a default victory to the user. It's either one or the other.
More likely it would implode the open code available, since usage would drop like a rock.
1) Once you're required to pay money, people start comparison shopping and proprietary software is optimized to win that game.
2) Nobody wants to spend the engineering, accountant, and lawyer hours to keep track of assorted semi-commercial licenses for a zillion dependencies and what they're owed. Half the point of FOSS is that you don't have to keep track of licenses and compliance, as the periodic sob stories on HN/Slashdot about "Oh no, I got audited and wasn't in compliance and had to pay. I'm going to switch everything to FOSS; that'll show them!" show.
Uh, he's okay with selling exceptions.
Would you also reject a library with this license if you knew the commercial use license was pocket change?
> once you start to make money
So if a nonprofit uses that software to sell services (they gotta fund their expenses after all), does that count? Seriously. With vague phrasing like this, you're gonna have a bad time. Contracts are that verbose for a reason.
This of course means it’s not open to the kind of free-form open collaboration that typifies Open Source but if anything this just goes to show how more restrictive licences such as GPL actually promote innovation.
It's definitely more predictable.
Polyform Non-Commercial License
https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0
Prosperity Public License
Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, since their contributions would be GPL-protected and you may not sell them. So it's not a good model for larger open-source projects. But if you're an independent open-source developer who works as a sole contributor and feels exploited, then it's probably a better model.
If it's software for personal use, then the GPL is just fine. The GPL is explicitly designed to protect personal use.
If it's software for commercial use - I mean, that's exactly what the issue is here. Commercial users ought to need to pay for the software they use. Just because you offer a commercial license doesn't mean you need to charge a million bucks for it - if someone emails you and says that they work for a startup, you can always respond with a exclusive commercial license free of charge, if you like.
If you own the software you can charge whatever you like to different people.
Someone who's not employed by a fortune 500 company, probably the 99% of devs?
Like I said, go ahead and offer free commercial licenses to small companies, who in your estimation are 99% of developers.
> Like I said, go ahead and offer free commercial licenses to small companies, who in your estimation are 99% of developers.
Offering commercial licenses adds a lot of work on top of the already difficult development of OSS projects. I don't understand why you think that the situation can be fixed using existing solutions, when the problem arised with these solutions already in place.
Perhaps we need something different??
Edit: I also completely reject the notion that everything should be commercialized. OSS is the antithesis of this. Down with commercial licenses, down with rich capitalists exploting people's voluntary work.
If your GPL project will be so tightly coupled with the company's project that their entire project will become GPL - then yes. Big libraries like Qt, for example.
On the other hand, if the coupling to the user's project is loose and doesn't make their entire project GPL, they have no reason to pay for a license. For example, compiling with gcc or hosting with nginx, or calling ffmpeg doesn't make your entire product GPL.
It is common to require a CLA/CAA in these dual-licensing cases such as Qt and other big commercial projects.
You could also share revenues, to incentivize developers to join.
I'm not sure how that would be possible in an effective and transparent way though.
As discussed more generally on P2P Foundation: http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft
AMA
Do you have licensing recommendations for software along the lines of copyfair/copyfarleft?
For capital information goods I recommend the GPL, or even BSD style licenses depending on what it is and who is making it and what their plan is.
Of course, the OSI's Open Source Definition precludes these kinds of restrictions, so it isn't "open source" by that definition.
Still I get your point, and they indeed don't need to negotiate to use GPL but, with GPL most of the times the actual developer receives the merit of the work (whatever it means) and more important, the community can use any improvements/features/functionalities that FAANG may develop on top of original work.
However, don't complain later on that you can't modify software or run it on your own device like you can with GPL. You can't have your cake and eat it too, pick one.
I wrote more about this in another comment but I'll paste here for convenience.
---
Why do people create something and explicitly license it under an open source license and are then surprised when it's used as the license permits? I can see a few possible reasons:
1. Culture: GitHub seems to have the culture of people using and putting out their code as open source just because everyone else is doing it, or they just don't know or care to do enough research about software licenses.
2. Promotion: open source seems to be used as a way to promote your product and you simply hope that no one will "screw you over" by using the license as it permits, even by big companies. They'll use open source to build their product but will cry foul when corporations do the same exact thing the open source creators were doing in the first place!
These two factors seem to account for a the reasons behind switching licenses or other licensing issues for a significant portion of the open source license based posts on Hacker News in the past several years. Companies could have just started with a proprietary or copyleft license initially but inevitably in most of the posts I've seen, it's always a company with a permissive MIT style license that then bemoans cloud vendors rightfully taking advantage of their code.
What will happen in the future? It seems that people will create more proprietary software in the form of ostensibly "open source" licenses such as the SSPL by MongoDB or others. People will say that they're not truly open source, just another variation on proprietary source available licenses, which is true but the problem isn't a moral one, it's a practical one. GPL was started because the end user freedoms were eroded, and these licenses also fall into that, where people will soon discover that a proprietary license isn't great when they want to expand the original software but are encumbered by the license, such as if they work for a large company or other such restriction. Having no restrictions is always better than having even small ones.
But how will open source creators make money, one may ask. The simple answer is, they don't, and they shouldn't expect to. The more complex answer is, open source is not a business model, it is merely a licensing and distribution model. You must compete not on the code but the problems your code solves. Your product must also include marketing, sales, branding, and other business skills. Treat your product as a startup.
Amazon could open source all of its code and infrastructure and it would still be the dominant player in cloud computing as well as buying stuff online. Why? They are not in the business of selling code, they are in the business of selling convenience (as every business is actually, you don't hunt your own meat, a grocery store sells you the convenience of buying food, with money rather than time and effort; business is just commoditized convenience). Moreover, people know and trust Amazon, they don't know your other site, even if you took their source code and made your own website.
At the end of the day, people need to understand that a product is not a business. If you want to make money, you probably shouldn't make a free product. There are ways to leverage a free product into a business, as seen with TailwindCSS (free, open source) to Tailwind UI (paid, proprietary) or Laravel to Laravel Spark and Forge (they're what's known as lead magnets in marketing terms, a free product to entice the customer to buy the paid version), but don't expect people to spontaneously pay you when they could use your product for free, unless, again, you have the business skills to make your product stand out via marketing and having product-market fit.
1.) selling physical copies
2.) charging for support
The first one is probably not viable most of the time these days, but I can see how the second one could work : for instance one could modify one's code forge so that you would need to pay to open a ticket, and/or put up an asked sum of money to start working on a ticket (that several people could contribute to).
It would be nice with a license template for this purpose, vetted by a lawyer to be reasonably airtight. Encoding that intent in a way that's not easily avoidable is probably harder than most people think.
What's that supposed to mean? Surely the value of e.g. Linux to its stakeholders surpasses 1B.
Using a free use license and then complaining that companies and people freely use is just completely moronic.
And it's not stealing so stop with the hyperbolic nonsense.
Any reason for that? Most of the opposition is on religious/fashion/popularity grounds as far as I can tell.
You are never going to fix the problem of centralization of wealth if you keep thinking that is a matter of "unfairness". (Much like Socialism and central planning), as long as people give in their freedoms to big central entities for the immediate benefit they offer (shiny hardware, low TCO, whatever) economies of scale lock-in and then it becomes almost impossible to get these entities back under control.
As long as there are people that think that it is okay for us to spend our resources creating private software we will get companies exploiting trying to extract value from software developers, and especially so from those that work on FOSS
The problem I am talking about is the asymmetry: Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc) can create value from the work from FOSS developers, but FOSS developers can not create value from the work of Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc).
I could probably dig up specifically an Amazon open source example, but I think you can convincingly argue that devs have created a ton of value building on top of the work on AWS.
Second, the examples you give are not part of the core value of the companies. They are commoditizing their complements. [0]
When Google releases a self-hosted version of their search and adwords programs, when Amazon makes AWS products compatible with OpenStack or when people can run iOS on any hardware and have access to the source, then I will start believing they are willing to give back proportionally to the amount of value they extract.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
How many fewer developer jobs would there be now if every OS installation cost what Solaris used to cost (or even what Win2K8 Server cost)?
Sorry, I am not following. What is the implication here, that application developersand Free Operating Systems are complemetary products?
> How many fewer developer jobs would there be now if every OS installation cost what Solaris used to cost?
Of course the market would be much smaller without FOSS, but how does this relate to what I am talking about?
I wish we had more FOSS, not less. I wish people were willing to refuse the short-term apparent benefit/convenience of closed source and started at least hedging their investments on FOSS alternatives.
Yes, that was my point (or at least application development and OSes are)
Anyway, the point from Joel's article that I think so many people miss is that *every smart business should try to commoditize their complements". If you are an OS developer, you will try to commoditize you hardware, If you are an application developer, the smart thing is to commoditize your OS, and so on up the stack.
So, I don't understand the remark about Linux costing as much as Solaris. I am not expecting the final consumer to look at Windows and Linux and say "yeah, we need to pay for Linux". What I do believe is that smart application developers would never voluntarily lock themselves into a closed platform.
Both applications and hardware are complementary to an OS.
So if you are an OS developer and are following this logic, you'll also try to commoditize the applications.
(And see eg the Apple app store for an illustration.)
Please explain. Especially what you mean by extracting value.
What makes me a better person than Apple etc?
https://anticapitalist.software/
By default it disallows use by entities like Apple, but you could dual-license it, to provide the million-a-year alternative
We tried it here in russia back in 1917. But then oops! something went wrong.
Just using anti-trust laws to their full effect would be enough.
Funny enough, even the original paradigmatic case of breaking up Standard Oil was a farce.
I blame those that justify and help propagate this behavior, justifying abusers of free labor arguing that we wouldn't have all these nice products that make our lives easier. Yes we would, if there's a market for them we would - only now people would either get paid to create them or the companies would be forced to give back to the community just like they benefited from it.
So, authors, if you are sick and tired of your good Samaritan efforts being abused, switch to GPL and let them rant
* "any user data serviced by this software must be easily exportable; no attempt must be made to block other 3rd party companies or services from consuming this data"
* "if this software is itself sold as a service, any automation or tooling built in service of this system must also be made available as open source"
* "any devices using this software must not actively prevent or prohibit users from running their own software"
What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial incentive to startups to pursue using open source AND provide real revenues back to the community.
How is that the open source author's problem? Open source is meant to enable user freedom, not to save corporations money. If you want to use something, contact the author and get a commercial license.
That's not a problem of open source itself, of course.
The whole reason why we are in this mess and why GPL died is because the people behind GPL wanted to push their political views using the weight of persons using GPLv2 or later. The Linux kernel reacted by switching GPLv2 only. The only reason why would might want to name it GPLv4 is to use the weight of code of GPLvX or later people. Don't do that In addition some of you clauses have been shown to be easily enforceable by laws like GDPR and attempting to use contract is a crutch. They way to some of your points is phrased might be unenforceable in court and might void the complete license if it is ever testing in court. -> very bad
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g somewhere around 25 min it starts
But I don't think that such a clause is a good idea: very often these internal modifications are not of the required quality. Also, I can easily imagine that some projects might drown in low-quality upstream pushes.
Not like we didn't try.
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-...
This clause is a bit dangerous -- if a bad actor gets control of the FSF and manages to release an official GPL version that is completely bonkers, all current GPL-or-later software can be distributed under that license.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.If you have BSD-style outbound licensing and you assume that all inbound copyright is transferred to you, you will wake up in court after you try to change the outbound license conditions of someone else's copyrighted code.
The correct answer is that for any project in which there is no inbound contribution agreement in place, you would have to contact all contributors and seek their permission to relicense.
Inbound and outbound licensing are orthogonal.
The right reaction is whatever the author/maintainer wants to do. If they want to re-license, that is fine. If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too.
Actually if it's under a non-restrictive open source licence, it's not fine at all - the code will still be legally available for everyone.
Not really. A fork can easily continue developing and supporting it.
There isn't much that can be done with lax distribution licenses, but there is still much that can be done under copyright law.
You're mostly talking about trademarks at that point, not copyright.
For this to come under trademark legislation, there would have to be demonstrable trade. That's hard to show in the case of free distribution.
Many people have paid it forward with a lot of hard work and built the entire infrastructure, starting with open source operating systems, bios and drivers. It's the motivation of these people that keeps work free, and they probably want to see a thriving ecosystem of software and an open internet.
I think the kind of software written also needs to be adjusted. Most open source software I've encountered recently has either been created to solve a business problem that only happens at a large scale or solves a developer tooling problem that only occurs when working in large groups.
When the open source software is being made to address the problems of corporations and their employees, of course corporations are going to be the ones that benifit.
SaaS is the “antidote” to GPL from a corporate point of view.
To nitpick: They are not stealing it, they're using it per the license terms. Don't like that? Well, choose a different license.
That being said, I think there's an underlying point here. The "business-friendly" open source movement co-opted the idealistic free software movement. It was no longer about making the world better in terms of having a software ecosystem that respects the four freedoms etc., but about reducing wheel reinvention, minimizing transaction costs, attracting good developers to come work for your corporation, and so on.
One could argue that the idea of causing social change by coding free software in your basement was always an impossible dream. If you want to see political change, join a political movement and get out on the street protesting or something. And vote!
> Yes, it's managed, but you're forever a renter.
Welcome to 21st century tenement farming.
> Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?
I started hanging around on usenet in the early-mid 90'ies. Let me tell you, it was already a cesspool then (maybe it was better in the 80'ies, but I was too young then, sorry). Of course, back then it was mostly just people being assholes, not billion dollar corporations weaponizing assholes and hatred to drive clicks.
> Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take.
I think so far open source has worked out pretty well for programmers, because there's such a huge demand for (competent) ones. If you want a glimpse how it'll look when demand starts to match supply better, take a look at your friends with liberal arts, sociology, politics etc. degrees. Unpaid internships and extensive open source portfolios before you get a real job, here we come!
Yeah, this. To me, as an admitted Free software person, the Open software movement looks like it was designed to undermine the Free movement. I don't think it actually was deliberately designed that way, just that it looks that way in hindsight.
I also don't really get the point of Open licenses because you could always already just give away your code, so to me it makes it seem like the only folks really benefiting from OSS are the people using the code but not sharing their improvements and the people (often the same people) who want to lock you out of [editing the software in] their products.
> idea of causing social change by coding free software
FWIW, that also seems to me to be a later gloss. If anything, computers and software are new enough that it's not so much a matter of social change as it is of founding new social norms around these (physical/virtual) machines. RMS just wanted to edit the software in his printer. Look at the restrictive B.S. that tractor makers are foisting on farmers to see the relevance. Is the idea of being able to fix your own tractor a "social change"? :)
Yes. I think the original idea was just to present the hippy free software idea in a more business-friendly form, and thus cause more FOSS to be written.
> > idea of causing social change by coding free software
> FWIW, that also seems to me to be a later gloss. If anything, computers and software are new enough that it's not so much a matter of social change as it is of founding new social norms around these (physical/virtual) machines.
Fair enough. Though I don't think free software was so much about forging norms per se, more like an adaptation of old ideas like "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" to the digital age. As opposed to just letting the modern day robber barons have it their way, which to an extent is what's happening with open source.
> RMS just wanted to edit the software in his printer.
Sure, but it spiraled away from that pretty fast.
> Look at the restrictive B.S. that tractor makers are foisting on farmers to see the relevance. Is the idea of being able to fix your own tractor a "social change"? :)
No, more like defending "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" rather than letting the robber barons get away with whatever they can. That being said, AFAICS free software has had about zero impact on this topic; the successes in this are seem to be due to grassroots political campaigning (right to repair laws etc.) rather that some argument that software should be free (in the FSF sense).
It's hard to avoid feeling like the free software movement has failed pretty comprehensively at its stated goals.
For me, as a computer nerd, it's always been hard to understand why normal people aren't fascinated by computers like I am, but the plain fact is they're not. Something like two billion people think facebook is the internet, eh? Everyone has a radio-connected supercomputer in their pockets but it's a locked-down mall and video game arcade, and that seems to be all most people want.
I try not to think about it too much. Maybe this is the shape of human destiny? To be cells in some vast AI body?
The issue that I see is that many (most?) people want a middle ground:
On the one hand, it's not important to them to use some sort of viral copyleft license that forces people who use their project to make their code free.
On the other hand, they don't want people who use their project to be aggressively anti-competitive or anti-developer.
So for example, it would be fine if Apple charged for their OS and kept it closed source as long as they allowed anyone who wants to develop apps for their OS to do so.
Agreed, and you're not even nitpicking, this is a significant point that devs need to understand before they choose to go open source.
But let's talk more broadly: Servers. Linux is great for servers. But remind me: who gives a flying fuck about servers? Surely not the FSF, because most real people use personal computers (that means desktop/laptop/tablet/phone/smartwatch/anything else you the typical user can physically unplug/open) and don't administer servers, and on top of that the FSF dislike services in the first place! (See: "service as a software substitute").
People don't have control over enterprise software in most cases - even at the office, your IT department literally chooses what you can do on "your" computer. So why do we have so much free software aimed at business, and so little aimed at e.g. games? Because that's what our money systems are set up to get funding from. Point is, enterprise software being open-source is not an end in itself, it's only useful as a means to an end.
So while corporations can be a useful tool when our interests align, they should not be our primary pillar of support. That should be the actual users, who pay money.
I think the biggest mistake we ever made was leaning into the "free" in free software. It's not as hard as you'd think - let me ask you, why is paying with ads and data-sucking so popular? I'd say, because they're convenient and ubiquitous. Every browser and user on the planet has support for ads/tracking, so every webpage supports them. They make PayPal niche in comparison! They're also incredibly convenient, having zero-click autopay!
Distros should have had payment models built into the OS (available) from the start. There should have been "app stores" selling free software from repositories - it's absurd that selling free software is claimed as a way of making money, but distros do absolutely nothing to accommodate such sales and will in fact undercut* potentially sustainable free software by repackaging it and putting it in repositories gratis, so now there's not even the slight convenience benefit to buying!
Yes, it's legal for a distro to do that. It's also legal for corporations to be parasitic, that doesn't make it moral.
Anyway, move towards patreon-style funding or traditionally proprietary models that take money directly from the consumer. Then you won't see desktops stagnate due to all the money coming from servers.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/619/
Open source will mostly be corporate developers developing OSS on the payroll, where the corporations deem that releasing (some, not all!) software as OSS is better for the bottom line.
Individual developers may release stuff as OSS if they think building an OSS portfolio makes them more employable. Otherwise I think we'll see more, say, "source-available free for non-commercial use" style licenses, because people don't want to be schmucks that are taken advantage of.
Free software will be more clearly focused around trying to drive social change, together with traditional political activism approaches. E.g. right to repair legislation, forcing opening of network protocols so users can access services with their own software and devices, anti-DRM work etc. And as you say, this will clearly be focused on individual computation devices, or small scale servers that individuals can and have a reason to run. That some huge corporation runs or doesn't run free software on their server fleet is irrelevant.
Had Linus not chosen it for Linux and I bet I would still be using a mix of Solaris, Aix and HP-UX on the server room.
Dual licensing is the only true path, it was already so in the shareware days, and it will be back to be the daily reality.
Bills have to paid.
It's strange to me that the GPL licenses get regarded as too ideological, but an mit license also has an ideology behind it. Yet now we're discovering that lots of people have been using mit style licenses when they don't agree with the ideology.
All the tools have been available to avoid this problem. Essays have been written about why these things are problematic. Hopefully now actual practice will catch up with theory.
And this is trivial but tedious code that you could replace on the spot.
I'm not dissing the author but these rants about opensource licensing and whatnot are completely out of touch.
Most (but importantly not all) of serious non-trivial open-source is sponsored by big corporations or academia so this stealing narrative is ridiculous, and MIT/ Apache is an excellent licence that successfully facilitates collaboration on some of the largest OSS projects out there so there's nothing wrong with using them.
Asking for a friend...
You don't want to pay upstream for their work? Use GPL license and get as much money as you are willing to give them.
Otherwise use it in a commercial setting, you need to pay for the commercial license instead.
It is not much different from the demo versions of shareware days, and yes even in those days you could get the source in some products.
if anyone has a problem with that, then they have a problem with software being open source.
Or they are discriminatory and just don't want anyone they personally dont like to benefit.
Which is their right as long as they are not discriminating against a protected class, as it's their work, but they should have put that in the license.
Are all contributions to the "original" pre-licenced source? If so is there some extra legalese to ensure that the changes will always end up in the AGPL source too?
I know of many successful projects using dual licencing so it must work, I'm just wondering how on a legal front.
It looks like this is subscription-based, so I'm guessing you can update for the length of your subscription.
Perhaps you're asking whether you're allowed to use development patches written by external people that you'd maybe find in github discussions etc.? If you need that, you will probably have to negotiate for that option yourself. If that is your question, then that isn't really a naive question at all.
- Agree to a Contributor License Agreement that grants the project owner an irrevocable world-wide commercial license (probably missing a few adjectives but you get the idea)
- Transfer the copyright
- Release to public domain
Commercial users however have to buy a copy, but the source is available for all.
Maybe somebody could create a github (sharehub?) equivalent where anybody doing a clone has to register and then commercial entities can pay for the licence or single use hobbyists could attest.
people sharing the code can then set what they see as a fair price and the website will take a cut of the revenue (e.g. 30% ducks )
Sometimes I think adherence to the open source has pushed hobbyist community backwards. Source available for hobbyists and paid for commercial use is no worse than GPL (GPL gets violated as much).
> Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them. “You don’t create intellectual property,” he said. “You create a program that does something.” But from then on, on instructions from Schlesinger, he treated everything on Goldman Sachs’s servers, even if it had just been transferred there from open source, as Goldman Sachs’s property. (At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)
From an excellent article[1] by Michael Lewis, on Goldman Sachs' attitude towards open source software.
EDIT: typo
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...
> 3599 = (3600 – 1) = (602 – 12) = (60 – 1) (60 + 1) = 59 times 61. Not a prime number.
Where does the (602 - 12) come from? Can someone explain that to me?
Also, use a leading space to keep things out of your bash history.
You can’t offer people a free lunch and then claim they are steeling if they don’t voluntarily tip you the full cost of a lunch.
Open source software is provided under a license and if Apple or Amazon or whoever do not violate that license they are not steeling. If you didn’t want them to use the software under the license you provided the software under chose a different license.
The point of open source is exactly to provide software under open source terms. If you want to add additional terms like “unless you make money then I want to get paid”, then just do that! It’s your software and your license! But you cannot have Heisenbergs open source software which is open source only until someone picks it up and makes money at which point it retroactively becomes proprietary in order to force that moneystream past you.
No, but I can be miffed if I offer people a free lunch and they turn around and sell the free lunch I paid to make and keep all the money.
It seems odd to me to have the solution completely within my power to fix, but not fix it, and complain about the situation.
In my view, the license is specifically made to allow reselling. That’s why I pick MIT, Apache, and BSD. If I don’t want people to resell then I pick GPL or some other license.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
(And GNU even encourages it.)
See also about selling exceptions to GPL, like Qt does :
What I meant is that releasing software under a license that doesn’t reflect what I want and the complaining will just lead to frustration.
This seems like a simple problem to solve, just release under whatever license I want. This faker.js project is released under MIT. The author can continue development under some non-OSS license and I think that will make him happier because rich people would stop using it. But I don’t think it will make him the income he wants.
I think the problem is that non-OSS licenses will result in people just not using the project, not that rich people will start shelling out.
As a small business, I would avoid these licenses as well because having multiple licenses kick in at different levels will be confusing and expensive. I’d rather use OSS or just buy commercial products.
> As a small business, I would avoid these licenses as well because having multiple licenses kick in at different levels will be confusing and expensive. I’d rather use OSS or just buy commercial products.
You could just license it from the start and not have to worry about the license kicking in, though.
It seems like his current take is just seeking patronage to keep working on an MIT project.
I think this happens quite a bit, but not normally this way. There are lots of companies who employ people with the sole purpose of writing for MIT/Apache/BSD projects. So I guess that’s a form of patronage.
I hope this guy gets what he likes. I’ve never heard of this project, but it has at least 26k people who liked it enough to star it on GitHub. Not sure how that will ever equate to 100k+/year.
Forums and the communities they fostered are dead. Their replacement, Reddit, has a structure that favors the hive mind.
There are ads everywhere and they swing between downright creepy (ads about what you were searching for an hour ago) to completely awful (semi-pornographic Taboola/Outbrain ads). When they're neither of these things, they are just plainly deceptive (sponsored content).
I used to work at a company that pivoted into "growth hacking" and it seriously made me sick how at the end we had 1500 freelancers being paid peanuts to write about subjects they had minimum knowledge about, using other similarly shallow articles as their only reference.
Today I can't search anything on the internet without coming across those. It's always the same: a shitty Wordpress blog and a 1500-word article with 1% of the depth of a Wikipedia Article. And some people have the gall to distrust Wikipedia when believing those.
We have 50 websites for lyrics and guitar tabs but they are 10% content (and it's always copied from somewhere else, or each other) and 90% advertisement.
If you look for software you're are either gonna get legitimate companies (Download.com) trying to inject you with install-spyware, or piracy blogs trying to infect you with legitimate malware.
Not really - I still use forums (that use my native language) and they feel great! way better than Reddit and have significant active user base.
I used to love it so much. It's what taught me my current career and brought me financial independence.
If I could press a button and erase Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter from existence I would. It's all trash.
The "old" Internet is still out there, at places like https://tilde.town.
Nostalgia and signalling (that leverages said nostalgia), basically.
You can’t expect companies to pay if you never ask!
I’d love to see GitHub create more avenues for paying for software. Shareware-esque licenses with an easy way to pay, bounties attached to Issues, etc. I think companies _would_ pay (if given a reason); right now it’s framed as a sponsorship (not even a donation!) so the thought process for a company (assuming they even notice it and consider it) is “well, I don’t think it’s a good marketing expense for us” and that’s it.
I’d say most people using faker.js aren’t big companies trying to fuck over a random dev. It’s an employee typing “npm install faker.js”, and genuinely never thinking about it.
You're right. Sadly, those making use of the software are often not the ones holding the purse. The request gets only to the Devs looking at the software pages and nobody generally writes to management saying "we want to use this open source software in our product and this guy/girl asks to be monetarily supported to maintain the software".
Just straight off making a commercial use license is better and clearer. However, often devs can't take on potential liabilities in such cases, which further complicates matters.
That's the problem.
That sentence is a contradiction in itself.
> Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source.
Not on GPL-licensed open source, as far as I know.
> Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps.
That is simply not true. A great deal of the open source software I use on a day-to-day basis is funded by some of these companies. The number of GitHub repositories they publish for all to use, under permissive licenses, is immense.
> The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.
You are right about this, but this is at best tangentially related to open source.
You don't own the music. You can't share it, use your own software to analyze, shuffle, remix it, etc.
> Netflix subscription
But now there's Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Peacock Premium, etc. Except now instead of one easy to use interface to access it all, it's spread out all over the place and inconsistent as hell. And more expensive!
I'm a consumer of music, not a creator so I don't care that I don't own it. There are tons of ways creators can analyze, shuffle, remix or do whatever with it, but as a pure consumer Spotify is simply much better for me than CDs. I never cared about owning Music, CDs were always just a transport Medium so I can listen to the music.
> But now there's Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Peacock Premium, etc. Except now instead of one easy to use interface to access it all, it's spread out all over the place and inconsistent as hell. And more expensive!
They aren't though because you can be selective and cancel anytime and resubscribe. And you can watch exactly what you want at any time compared to cable. As a consumer it is way better because there is way more choice and competition at the moment.
Also, if you’re arguing against 30% fees, Spotify takes about 30% as a margin on every fee they receive, more for ads.
I thought this was settled the other way in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....
How did Apple's Rip. Mix. Burn. campaign play out in the UK?
On the other hand, they seem to be all about audio books while I tell them they are not the same as sitting down with a real one. They tell me they don't have time for books, and listening to them while working our, jogging, cycling is how they 'read'. I don't think they are getting the same thing out of it that I do actually reading the physical book in a single tasking way, but then again, I shouldn't be bothered by other people's habits.
Back in my younger days in Australia I remember we had to get the "Entertainment Plus" pack in order to get the sports channels on Cable. That included 65 other non-sport channels for a minimum of $110 a month. Now I pay $15 a month for a sports-only subscription service.
one easy to use interface to access whatever was on
Outside of the USA there’s far less choice, so less subscription overflow
I'm not sure what that should be, but unlimited local copies of everything for a small amount of money doesn't sound fair -- but Spotify hardly deserves a big cut of it either.
A pickle indeed, if only there were a service that was more of a co-op of artists. Happy to hear recommendations, I'm using soundcloud still.
Don't get me wrong, the music is lovely. I like the idea a lot. It's just really not comparable =/
The service doesn't even need to go down, the licenses with Spotify can be revoked/expire/etc. I love the convenience of having an almost unlimited library of music to listen to, I absolutely detest the fact that one day I might think, "Oh I'd like to listen to <X> from my playlist." and suddenly it's no longer available, because <reasons>.
Hobby or just passion of open source is fueling the industry to forge massive profits while on other side provide peanuts for authors, far less than if they were their employees (or lets rather say: 0).
I was working on multiple close source projects for different companies that were avoiding anything GPL, searching for permissive replacements and in never giving back anything - not even bug fixes.
Like openssl[1].
Actually even GPL is not a protection here, with sources given away they become almost a manual how to re-implement it which is far simpler than making it from scratch (oh and yes, people are doing that without copy pasting).
What open source has accomplished was for sure making technology more available, but on the other side, to name just a few:
- lowered expenses of companies on buying software, especially on various SaaS companies that dont distribute software
- keeping the need for experienced developers and vages down while on the other side raised paychecks of system administrators and system integrators
- creating a viability to hire anyone as a developer while on the other side driving anything complex out of industry as companies were avoiding doing projects where complex knowledge is needed (I am not talking about top of gauss curve companies)
- lowering a quality of software - putting together lego blocks and if they dont fit writing a little glue is hardly ever as efficient as writing tool for problem solving dedicated to the problem. Not to mention free availability of tons of over-complicated "does it all" frameworks that dont really fit to solving any particular problem perfectly, but are good enough to avoid solving complex problem where you have no workforce that would actually be able to solve it.
And guess who profits - engineers certainly not.
Actually we are denominating our work by giving it out for free (try to get someone to paint your walls, to lay down some ceramic tiles, to fix your car,... for a price of mentioning who did it behind the bumper, under a tile,...)
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisstokelwalker/the-internet-is-b...
That's quite a gamble, since it falls foul of the Clean Room Implementation criteria
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Big companies (faang) won't touch that approach with a 10 meters pole, but obviously I'm not surprised that smaller actors might have a more cavalier attitude to copyright law.
But the other side of the coin is that this is increasingly unsustainable. Free/open source software development works best when it is based upon mutual self-interest fostering cooperation and collaboration. At the extreme, it is increasingly an altruistic/parasitic arrangement (on the part of producer and consumer, respectively) where the producer gets zero benefit from their efforts but the consumer benefits greatly.
It has always been the case that there are more consumers than producers. That's an inevitability, and the number of consumers isn't itself the problem. But this simply cannot be sustainable at scale due to the limitations of available developer resources and ongoing requirement for unavoidable commitment. It becomes exploitative because it sets up the expectation and demands that people work for free, writing code, reviewing code, maintaining infrastructure, supporting users etc.. This is one reason I've dialled back all my participation; it ends up costing me greatly in time, resources and stress, for almost zero benefit. At some point, free is actually too costly, and paying for products and services is fairer all around. We have, after all, invented a monetary system, companies and employment laws to ensure that people are properly compensated for their efforts.
The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.
This is the important part from the GP. If they were under the AGPL or say a new better GPL which patches the problems with GPLv3 then those companies that have destroyed the open web would have at least had to buy the work or do it themselves. Even if that doesn't have a huge impact on the state of things, at least project maintainers can say that they are not contributing to it.
[1]: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/master/tsl/LIC...
* Perimeter
https://polyformproject.org/licenses/perimeter/1.0.0
* Shield
I'm not saying there's a radical difference between "free software" projects and "open source" projects or anything, but it really seems like we ought to stop and reflect on where we might have made mistakes in the past.
Stop. Buying. Their. Shit.
> What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?
For folks who do not work 100% in OSS, there can be many points:
- The whole Github-as-resume thing makes it important to have public contributions (most people's day job lives in private repos). To some extent, much of the industry needs OSS in lieu of effective employee screening processes.
- It's a convenient way for big companies to exchange IP without formal bilateral agreements. Everyone else just benefits for free.
- Your line of work is X, but you built a crude project for Y. You open source it because you don't actually care about area Y at all but hope your work could be useful for someone else.
- You write something for yourself and publish in the hopes that someone else will help you improve it for free. You're looking for free work and/or critique of your work. You don't actually care if someone else makes a billion dollars on it because you weren't interested in starting a business around it. Plus, you gain reputational points from having built it (consider Linus Torvalds's ability to get work as a programmer as a result of having started Linux, for example).
Of course, there might hopefully be a better way of sorting this out so that if devs want to, they can also get some kind of 'open comp' as well.
Let's imagine a VPN company is a thin front on top of Tor and they charge $50/year for their "service". They're not stealing Tor. It doesn't mean Tor should stop existing. Sure, it's a scummy thing for the company to do, but Tor is still a valuable resource that remains free for anyone to use.
The point of open source is the creation of value. That some companies capture some of that value (usually less egregiously than this example - AWS is actually providing a dynamic host scaling service that happens to host open source software, Apple is providing a software vetting service and top-notch hardware that happens to be built on Unix) is irrelevant in the bigger picture.
> Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?
This is still true if open source developers are more focused on delivering overall value than they are on their jealousy that a company is integrating their software and charging for it. This could definitely be frustrating if the developer was hoping to make a business out of their software, but if that's the real problem then the license should reflect that.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry that so many proponents of non-copyleft software are belatedly discovering that grasping corporations will take and take without ever contributing back.
Now do you people see why the GPL matters?
People are still perfectly at liberty to run their own servers, and the fees for running servers that handle the kinds of traffic that used to happen "when the Internet was actually pleasant" are peanuts. Running any kind of server used to involve purchasing hardware, bandwidth was orders of magnitude more expensive and so on.
This server-as-a-service means that for $5 a month I was able to build a Python Twitter bot that tweets the diary entries of a 17th century English naturalist[0,1]. It means I got to do something fun without the overhead of actually running the server. It's a small thing, and as I said I agree with what was probably the main thrust of what you were saying, but it really feels like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater through your obvious exasperation.
[0] https://twitter.com/gilbertwhitetwt [1] https://gilbertwhitetweets.org/
If consumers only look at sticker price of every product and ignore all externalities, then companies will work to give them that. It is up for consumers to refuse software that takes their freedoms, locks them up in golden cages, makes their lives super convenient at the expense of underpaid/exploited labor, etc.
The internet was not pleasant, it was chaotic and that s what made it so fun. And yeah there's nothing like building stuff on an open platform that nobody gatekeeps. A feeling lost for an entire generation of developers now.
Facebook and Google at least have put out a lot of open source code, have you heard of React and Angular? PyTorch and TensorFlow? There are some pretty big names in their list of public open source projects.
Either way the internet is still just a big ip network. You can still setup a vps and run your own email, website, rss, blog, etc. And I know some people (masochists, psychos?;-) who do but they do that admin work for a living. Yeah, you gotta roll up your sleeves but that's just life: you have to work for it. These companies prey on human laziness and "free" stuff.
Just stop using garbage services and take back control. I'm one of those technological troglodytes who refuses to participate in most modern web nonsense. I have a smart phone with only a few utilitarian programs. I don't use any social media. I use bandcamp to stream/download my music collection which I paid outright for. I don't have any smart appliances, TV's or IoT trash. My life is fine and I have plenty of friends and a social life. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking you need to drink the dumpster juice internet koolaid.
That was went it wasn't useful for normal people. You don't want to go back in that time. Most people browsing this site wouldn't have the job they currently have without popularization (and thus pollution) of the Internet.
>left us with (...) music options worse (...) personal audio libraries.
This has to be hyperbole, right? My music library has exploded since I signed up to Spotify. I get exposed to new artists and genres pretty frequently. Way more often than in the days of sneaker netting mp3s. Not to mention that I get this all legally and guilt free.
The way you word this is like streaming is the only option we have. It's not. Just buy CDs.
I do. I definitely miss it. And I fully agree with your post up until this point.
> Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take.
Or just use a license which forbids locked down SaaS exploitation.
If this a a concern, then at least use GPLv3 and not BSD or MIT.
Also start looking at a plan B for the www. Gopher is a winner there because it’s difficult to use it for anything other than information delivery.
While this is extreme, we need a contrasting platform to fall back on always.
In the same context, how long does it take to write something like faker.js? I've never used it, but I see commits that are at least 6 years old and there are 200+ contributors. Is that 1000s of hours? I honestly don't know.
Let's say it's 1000 hours just for an example and that someone worth $100k / year could write it. At $50 / hour that's $50k if you have have to build it in house and you lose out on the value of having 200+ contributors that are familiar with part of the codebase plus tens of thousands of users exposing bugs and edge cases.
So IMHO when you have codebases like this the corporate donations should be in $10k increments.
I would never publish a line of code under the MIT license. It's great for companies that want to popularize their platforms (like Microsoft is doing), but it's terrible for small developers and you'll rarely get any value from those projects.
The problem (okay, "a" problem) here is that it is indeed OSS, and not FOSS, that is being used.
It might be worth re-visiting "Post-Open Source" by Melody Horn (boringcactus) [1] on this. You might want to copy/paste that link instead of clicking. :) It has been discussed here before [2] and (unsurprisingly, IMHO) gotten quite a bit of blow-back from the HN crowd.
The General Intellect Unit podcast recently had an episode on the piece [3] and I think they made the point clearer (well... also they roll the piece out to 1h 40min) by more openly posing it in a class struggle context. (Side note: please don't post replies attacking this as communist. The podcast has "marxists" in the name, you wouldn't be insulting them, and I'm merely engaging with their content, so if you're gonna try to attack their/my positions, please do the same and don't just throw scary words.)
The bottom-line is that Open Source Software has nothing to do with the freedoms of the developers. It is...
* a corporate entrenchment scheme: enlarging your hiring pool by establishing your in-house solution as the industry standard, giving you full hiring pipelines and stronger negotiation position against current and prospective employees.
* a capitalist commons: by tending to one industry standard, the companies (not their devs, who will still have full work days) save on duplication of effort.
At the same time FOSS (which does focus on the freedoms of the devs to read, modify, learn...) kind of misses the point by being...
* too obvious a trap, and thus ineffective. No sane capitalist company will go anywhere near AGPL code (and we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty)
* ultimately not even clear on how this will make anyone's lives materially better, even if it were effective. It's not gonna raise your salary, nor give you more paid vacation, health insurance. As a dev, you'll still be producing surplus value (okay, in a hopefully less alienated way) that will then not be paid to you (that's the definition of profit) so from this perspective the "F" in FOSS doesn't really bring much to the table.
The GIU podcast concludes that yeah, working in IT was nice for a while, because it posed some fundamental problems to capital and as a dev you were in a much better negotiation position. However, those times are over. Capital has found a way to make IT labour just as fungible as manual labor, at least to the extent that we should expect those "rock star" benefits to dwindle soon. Up to us to realize that and take action.
Again: relaying analysis here. Not sure I buy all of it. But even if, please keep your replies centered on the content, not the vocabulary it's presented with.
[1]: https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24397552
[3]: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/066-post-open-source/
Source plz ?
> the "F" in FOSS
It's free as freedom, not beer. GNU seemingly doesn't want to use 'libre' because Indians might not understand it or something, which IMHO is ridiculous considering how often this confusion is made !
Otherwise, I get that E.S.Raymond has furiously anti-leftist political views, and I can respect that, but IMHO he should be held accountable for the current situation…
EDIT : Also, isn't it fairly ironic of someone using the closed and Microsoft-owned Github to complain about these issues ?
The dominance of permissive licenses in the industry (compared to GPL) and the relative non-impact of AGPL software. I can't think of many AGPL (or similarly licensed) projects that have similar industry standard status as react or tensorflow have in their respective niches.
> It's free as freedom, not beer.
I'm sorry I should have made this point more explicit I guess. Of course I am well aware of the double meaning of free, and that it relates to freedom in this context. My point is that yes, that freedom allows you to do and read things, of course. But what? In an (exaggerated, and not entirely fair) analogy, it would be like claiming/securing the right to wear clown shoes during coffee breaks in the office. Yes, it's a right you may not have had otherwise, and it will brighten up your day, but ultimately it won't change the material relationship to your employer.
In the same way, being allowed to read, modify, and distribute software is not in itself a solution to this specific problem at hand here, i.e. the strategy of Fortune 500 companies, as a stand-in for capital to get free labor from OSS devs. (note the omission of the "F" in this case because again, for the most part, this will happen with open source work, but not so much with libre projects).
-------
As an aside, I'm unsure how to interpret the tone of your comment, so just to clarify: please don't mistake this as an attack from me on AGPL and similar. I think they're better than nothing and I personally prefer contributing to strongly copyleft projects. But they won't be a mechanism that can have a similar impact on the software industry as widespread unionization had on employer/employee relationship a hundred years ago. I lived in the Ruhr Area in Germany for a few years and the impact was really impressive, quite hard to imagine it happening like this today... The conclusion of the podcast I linked above is that IT work (and programming in particular) has developed from something where the individual holds significant negotiation power (and thus individual choices matter a lot) to a market in which workers are essentially interchangeable (since they all work with the same tools anyhow) and thus individual choices like Marak's are relatively less likely to be effective.
Of course I hope that Marak gets hired and paid accordingly asap, but following this argument, in the long run programmers (the non-glamorous term for anything to do with code) will have to organize and/or accept significant drops in their salaries.
> we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty
----
Yeah, sorry, short comments can end up sounding critical/judgemental - that wasn't the goal.
Not really sure whether capitalism really plays a significant role here more than simply allowing enterprises to exists
Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source.
Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's managed, but you're forever a renter.
They've destroyed our open web, replaced RSS with DRM, left us with streaming and music options worse than cable and personal audio libraries.
The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.
Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?
Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take.