Re:Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana
by AmericanChopper on Thursday January 14, 2021 @05:27PM
(#25783669)
I very strongly agree. It's always seemed like a quintessential tragedy of the commons to me. Everybody benefits from open source software, no matter what they're doing. Proportionally, very few people/organisations contribute to open source, and I would guess that nobody contributes to every open source project that they consume. I've always seen one of the core aspects of the value of open source being the common utility they provide. The idea that an open source consumer should contribute back value in some way proportional to the value they derive runs counter to that. The moment you start to restrict access to open source software based on some model of deservedness, you start to undermine the principles of common good that a lot of open source values are based on.
This x 10000. I couldn't agree more, thanks for putting that so clearly.
Frankly, I think a number of people in the Open Core movement have a psychological hangup around profit. They feel that if a company - particularly a large corporation - is making money using their software without "contributing back", that that should not be allowed. Well, if you don't want to allow it, fine, but don't pretend you're in the business of releasing free software - you're not. You want to be in the business of proprietary software, since only proprietary software lets you say "hey I don't want Jeff to profit off of my work without paying my for a proprietary license".