Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations

Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations by adamc on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:52PM (#25945693)

There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it easy to take and not give. It has many advantages, but that means that it is hard to give it high quality support and development (which generally requires paying people) if you cannot monetize something about the software -- be it support, or hosting, or selling some close-source product that depends on it.

If the licensing terms let someone else monetize your investment to the detriment of your own revenues, that's a problem. Even if you would be satisfied with break-even, you have to pay your own developers.

Amazon may be "within their rights", but the pattern is unsustainable as-is.

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Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations by gspr on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:54PM (#25945727)

> There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it easy to take and not give.

The GPL licenses address this problem. It's just a shame that the trend nowadays is towards BSD-like licenses.

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Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations by adamc on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:56PM (#25945778)

It does address the problem. However, it also scares away users and fractures the market.

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Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations by pmontra on Thursday January 28, 2021 @01:49PM (#25946878)

I never understood what is there to be scared about.

People buy Microsoft Word knowing they won't be able to change it, because it's closed source. However it sells well.

Do people use LibreOffice because it's Mozilla licensed and not GPL? Do all those people that don't dream about modifying Word really want to add secret proprietary features to LibreOffice?

Similarly, Oracle (the database) vs MariaDB (GPL) vs PostgreSQL (its own license, basically MIT / BSD.) There are definitely people that patch databases but I wonder how many people here decided to use one and not the other because they thought "what happens if I ever want to add something to MariaDB and nobody else must get it?"

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Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations by adamc on Thursday January 28, 2021 @02:24PM (#25947521)

No, where is scares them is at the copyleft level, when they are writing software. You're quite right that it probably doesn't scare many when they are just using it as an appliance (e.g., a database).

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Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations by shawnz on Thursday January 28, 2021 @06:29PM (#25951027)

Elasticsearch moving to GPL/AGPL/etc would not have blocked Amazon since Amazon already freely releases the sources of their contributions. That is why Elastic instead chose the niche license SSPL.

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