That sounds like what the GP comment is saying. If someone said "turns out open source doesn't work for our business model" it's hard to argue with. If instead they talk about "evolving open source models" and whatnot, it feels like they want the best of both worlds. It's been happening a lot recently that companies pretend they are "open sourcing" something for the PR but really use a much more restrictive license.
I don't think this is happening at all. Open source means the same thing it's always meant. Some people are just retreating from open source. Which is fine, they should be writing Free Software anyway if they want the world to have it, or use proprietary licenses if they don't. Otherwise very wealthy people will live on your back.
But :shrug: I guess different people care about different things, is what I've realized watching these discussions unfold.
But I do think this purist perspective on open source is just going to result in more Snowflakes and fewer Hashicorps, because why bother with this fight?
Orgs like Hashicorp clearly think they benefit by pretending to be ope source.
They could simply stop being disingenuous about their source available proprietary software, and nobody would stop them.
But while that's what I think, it isn't at all the view espoused here by Hashicorp. They aren't claiming this is open source. They are accepting the OSI definition and not claiming their new license falls within it.
They aren't being disingenuous. You're putting words in their mouth, and then getting mad at them about those words they didn't say.
No, they say open source needs to evolve, the implication this is an evolution (not devolution) of open source.
Their announcement talks about how they spoke to OSS experts. That's not relevant: the experts would simply have said: that's not open source.
Hashicorp several times say the BSL is permissive. Permissive is a well established term in software licensing. No, the BSL is not. The BSD and MIT and Apache licenses are permissive.
Finally there is this claptrap from their FAQ:
> 17. Does HashiCorp still believe in open source? > > Yes. [...]
"implication"
> the experts would simply have said: that's not open source.
Presumably the experts did tell them that it is not an open source license, which is why they chose not to claim that it is.
> Permissive is a well established term in software licensing. No, the BSL is not.
I think BSL easily fits the bill for the word "permissive".
It's just all so much gatekeeping, and it's really tiring.
Because companies keep bringing this fight.
Companies will naturally conclude they should just make proprietary software, which doesn't require a big fight. And I think that's a shame.
How many of these companies could exist if all these projects underpinning their own swapped to the SSPL, BSL, etc? And I don't mean now - once you reach a certain size, if you have to replace a bunch of dependencies, you have the resources to do it. But when these companies were smaller, would they have been able to create their own implementation of all these dependencies and still get their product to market? Would they have had the resources to commit to all of it? Would they have had the money to pay for non-FOSS options?
How many of these projects would still exist if the community couldn't commercialize them? We're not even talking about whether or not they ultimately end up contributing code back, etc., because it's not like these licenses give you some threshold of code contribution after which you can commercialize it. Sure, the possibility exists of some special private licensing agreement being struck, but that's possible with proprietary code, too.
Source available might sound fine from a personal use perspective, but it ignores the fact that the environment that made all of this possible would not have been possible under that model.
To me, the difference is that these are all building blocks rather than standalone products. I think of these commercial products as making sense for standalone services, rather than libraries and other building blocks.
But also: I think the business model that built all those open source building blocks has always been pretty shitty, relying on a lot of altruistic un- or poorly- compensated work from people. And I think that's bad. But I don't think demanding that companies making useful services also be subjected to a shitty business model is a good solution.
But, let's take just apache and nginx as an example: Lots of people offer just webhosting as a service. It's gotten less and less common now, with things like Squarespace, Shopify, Medium, etc. etc. etc., but once upon a time there were tens of thousands of companies that were making all their money by providing storage/compute/networking and a place to upload your HTML files, and then later adding in additional services like PHP and other scripting languages, MySQL for database hosting, etc.
Now, the context here is a bit different here, of course, particularly for Apache httpd. But Nginx has Nginx Plus, MySQL AB would license you a closed-source version or do the usual support/consulting/etc. stuff. But it's not hard to imagine a world where they could have easily said "Hey you know we're experts in running this stuff, we should just run it for people and charge them" - just like we see with a lot of these "open source" companies today.
There was never a general outcry about tons of businesses making money just hosting these open source services, even though the vast majority never contributed financially or otherwise to these open source projects. The only real difference I can see between then and now is simply what path the companies behind the projects, where applicable, have taken to monetize. Would the internet be a better place if MySQL AB moved to offering hosting as a service and put MySQL on the BSL, preventing all of these webhosting companies from having existed? If F5 had done it after acquiring Nginx? Cheap and plentiful webhosting is a big part of what grew the internet so quickly, particularly before the 'Web 2.0' days of social media sites centralizing so much of the traffic on the internet into a handful of places.
> But I don't think demanding that companies making useful services also be subjected to a shitty business model is a good solution.
Well, I'm not demanding a company do anything. I'm just saying that the internet as it exists today, including all of these companies we're talking about, would not exist if earlier on people had made the same choices they are. Open source is not about guaranteeing a viable business model to companies - it doesn't care about your business - it's about ensuring certain freedoms in software. And the internet we're discussing this on exists because of those freedoms it guaranteed.
If you can't build a viable business when abiding by those freedoms for whatever reason, then sure - go build proprietary software. I'm not going to call it or you evil. But I do take issue with a company using open source as a method to gain adoption, additional contributions, mindshare, etc. and then no longer being open source while talking about how they are an "evolution" of it. You're not an evolution of open source if you're removing freedoms.
Yes, the FSF has a general preference that people use copyleft licenses like the GPL, but they recognize that permissive licenses meet the Free Software Definition.
The difference between free software and open-source is a matter of marketing. Open-source is a way of presenting free software to businesses and investors. Free software is an unabashedly political movement, openly concerned first and foremost with the public good. But the licenses themselves and the software itself, those things are identical.
On the other hand, if popular software becomes faux-pen source (I read that somewhere recently) and community members stop contributing, it's a loss too because it means we all become takers on whatever company's terms.
Your almost certainly right about the window shifting, I'm going to keep complaining anyway.
Only if we let it, and stop shouting about it and finding alternatives every time a company does this.
This isn't a new thing; companies have been trying to play "almost open source" games for decades, and they'll continue playing those games as long as it either works or doesn't have sufficiently large penalties for trying. (Much as companies will continue violating copyleft licenses as long as they either get away with it or the penalties for trying are simply an expected part of the risk.)
The best possible response to a company doing this is that someone forks the code, starts or expands a competitor, and the original company's revenue drops massively as a deterrent.
Example of the last time this worked?
https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2023/...
Oracle decided to make Hudson commercial, it was forked and Jenkins is still around but Hudson is dead.
Turns out Jenkins development needs to be sponsored somehow.
but still manages to suck the air out of the room when you want Elasticsearch because AWS already has the company's billing details and no one wants to figure out paying another provider.
We've had "source available" for a long time, which means something else.
I don't disagree that people may still use SA software more as time goes by, but I would argue that when possible people will prefer open source controlled by entities that keep it such.
I’d kill for your confidence
This has been the case since the 2000s, as companies want the branding without the openness. This is extremely well worn by now.
I argue that companies who want it both ways are continuing to throw up chaff. But we know this chaff extremely well.
None of this discussion is new. "open core" has always been a euphemism for "proprietary."
Yes. And in some ways, source available licensing is a nicer model for proprietary software than open core. At least with the former you can actually see all of the code to inspect how it works when something is broken.
Bleh. Every business wants to build on software freedom but they don't really want to see others freely build on their own software.
perhaps according to Hashicorp's marketing team, otherwise I haven't seen any evidence this is the case
https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-software-licenses-101-agp...
The reason AGPL isn't being adopted in these situations is that it doesn't sufficiently protect against someone doing what e.g. AWS repeatedly does - turning open-source projects into services and then dominating the market while continuing to benefit from the upstream project. See the ElasticSearch licence change for a prominent example.
inbound=outbound license terms is a good norm for FOSS. Why should a software vendor play by different rules than everyone else when it comes to things like copyleft compliance?
[1] https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-l...
[1] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
I don't know enough about their operations to have good suggestions on how to become sustainable. But, I don't like this move. There are many sustainable open source companies. Moving to source available from open source will likely never be a move I like.
What are some examples?
And Hashicorp + Red Hat managed to make it work as open source companies for >10 years also
There are many more "open core" companies, like TimescaleDB, Docker, etc, who then sell proprietary services on top of the open source software
> pretty much every crypto company in the blockchain/web3 space
The entire "space" has yet to prove to be sustainable. Most of these are hype-driven borderline scams, I would not list them in a _sustainable open source business_ context :)
Firstly, I don't have a problem with BSL. I do think in general it's a bit of a slap in the face to build a business on the backs of volunteer contributors, and then close-source all your codebases which are comprised of their work.
Sure, when people contributed, they signed a CLA which gives Hashicorp the right to relicense the work (which has legitimate uses outside of killing open source, such as giving them the ability to make that software available under other terms in addition to their open source offering)
But when as little as a year ago they promised "We remain committed that the core of our technology will always remain open source." (https://web.archive.org/web/20220703202305/https://www.hashi...)
it gives whiplash to the people who contributed based on that promise.
Actually, I don't even know if this is legal, but even if it is, it's a huge violation of the trust of outside contributors to their software products.
> The entire "space" has yet to prove to be sustainable.
I agree that it's unproven, but this downturn has made apparent that so are the majority of software companies which have not IPOed and shown a sustained profit for 5+ years.
I'd give Uniswap pretty good odds of outliving the majority of YC startups.
The majority of YC startups are definitely not sustainable.
Probably even most of the successful ones are not sustainable, they make empty sustainability promises hoping to get bought by <BIGCORP> and end up on "our amazing journey" lists.
But a surviving project moving to BSL is still clearly better then the company going under and the project ending in limbo.
Even with BSL you can still access the code, audit it, learn from it, fork it to keep your own patches on top and keep up with upstream, etc. Huge value compared to closed source.
SUSE is a niche player that was bought out in various forms a number of times.
Canonical is largely a billionaire's toy and hasn't published financial numbers in half a decade. They were losing money last time I looked at them.
Don't know Prisma.
Gitlab is losing money.
For the crypto companies, let's hold off on any of that in terms of "sustainability".
Look at the top 20 software companies. How many of them have open source their core product, their main revenue source?
GitLab (Enterprise) is also proprietary software.
> And Hashicorp managed to make it work as open source companies for >10 years also
You mean they lived off VC money for >10 years?
> There are many more "open core" companies, like TimescaleDB, Docker, etc, who then sell proprietary services on top of the open source software
As above. Since when is Docker making lots of money?
You're not free to decide your source available model is open source and reap the marketing benefits of open source without the costs.
That way all the "it's not really technically open source" complainers couldn't day that its not technically open source.
It wouldnt substantively change anything of course, but that's somewhat the point. BPL/EPL/SSPL was always fully within the spirit of open source, it just pissed off the same large corporations who also can't stand the AGPL.
BPL, EPL, SSPL are all "not open source", and AGPL+CLA is "we're setting up for a bait and switch with not open source versions".
This was all hashed out years ago in numerous flame wars on Usenet, as I’m sure you know.
Which is fine imo as long as the moment they pull the bait/switch they stop calling it open source (and others can fork at that point)
I view that as a very different question from whether its ethical to advertize something agpl+cla as being open source.
It literally is not, and they only exist in order to not be.
The one restriction is that you can't compete with their hosted services using their software. Which 99% of people who use their software have zero interest in.
The "it's not fair! it's not real open source!" narrative is pumped up by companies like Amazon that feel entitled to use their monopoly power to leech value from these companies by selling paid versions of their products.
It does affect the the richest, most abusive corporations though.
It isn't just the need to eat. There's also the issue of keeping investors happy and their continual drive to maintain growth or earnings at stratospheric levels.
Strict IP laws are the only safe way to do that, and that is why so much software has leveraged them over the years. The internet era felt like an aberration for a while, but things seem to be shifting back to high double digit margins as the only desirable goal.
High level, times have changed. Source should be (my two cents, ymmv) about a mutually beneficial partnership between builders and users, not “give it all away for free or you’re not legit.” Users get to understand and extend what they’re running (via source), while the project steward/maintainer/owner can continue to do so.
It is a balance to be maintained in tension, not an equilibrium to be reached.