Comment by MrBingley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrBingley | Hacker News Reader

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> However, today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings. Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to those open source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions dollars in revenues from them. Already, this behavior has damaged open source communities and put some of the companies that support them out of business.

The issue is that large companies can free-load off open source projects and make millions while contributing nothing back to the developers. The OSI has certainly known of this problem since its founding in the late 90s, and as far as I can tell has no intention of helping solve it. For example, most recently Kyle Mitchel developed License Zero [0] as a way for open source developers to make money from their work, and presented it to the OSI for approval. It was rejected. Here is one of the comments from Bruce Perens [1].

> > What does an economically viable open source look like?

> My usual answer for this is that if you have to ask how you're going to make money, you're the wrong person to make Open Source. Nowhere in the mission of OSI is any mandate to provide authors with a viable business method.

[0] https://licensezero.com/

[1] http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...

> The issue is that large companies can free-load off open source projects and make millions while contributing nothing back to the developers.

This is far from true in the case of Redis. Salvatore worked for VMware from 2010-2013 and Pivotal from 2013-2015. It was funded by these "large companies" that you speak of.

Redis was not funded by those companies. Salvatore was sponsored to work on his own project they had a business need for. All copyright and trademarks belonged and still belong to Salvatore, according to redis.io

To my understanding, this was a sponsorship, ie a support contract to debug and improve an open source product VMware and Pivotal (same people, different name) were using and depending upon for their products.

AWS, on the other hand... With Elasticsearch and Redis... ;-)

How is "paying the creator money to work on it" not "funding a project"?

Well in that case, we are all funding Jeff Bezos and he owes us.

> The issue is that large companies can free-load off open source projects and make millions while contributing nothing back to the developers.

That by itself is not necessarily a problem. There's lots of people using open source software without contributing back, and lots of open source contributors completely fine with it.

The problem, the one that Commons Clause appears to try to solve, is when the "freeloading" companies also threaten the viability of the company supporting the project. For example, if a project is developed by a company financing itself through providing commercial support for that project, then that only works if that company is the main player that companies in need of commercial support would go through (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat).

Agree. There's a place for a commercial open-source license that can hold up in court, and OSI should consider it. Ignoring the economic realities (cloud providers making all the money, and projects starving off, or getting pittances) is hardly a solution.

That's what the GPLv3 is for. It's also the most widely used open source license nowadays.

Josh Berkus, member of the OSI license review committee here.

License Zero was rejected because it's not open source. It is, in fact, a business model for a specific startup (and, I'd argue, not for the writers of the code either).

Kyle had some other interesting ideas for licensing that could have been approved as open source, but was uninterested in pursuing them if they didn't support License Zero the business.

Howdy, Josh.

The last draft of License Zero Reciprocal posted to license-review works perfectly well on its own, without any dual licensing, and without any relationship to the business I formed. Its language wasn't any more coupled to a particular business model, or any business model at all, than AGPL's. If someone told you otherwise, they told you wrong.

I released the source code for licensezero.com itself under a successor to L0-R, without offering to sell any private licenses whatsoever. Anyone could use the terms similarly.

"License Zero was rejected because it's not open source" is tautological. And, alas, that's mostly in line with my experience of the license-review process. Some great folks offered back-and-forth, and were willing to explore. But that was largely drowned out by bare conclusions, and the drama that flared up whenever I tried to probe them.

Thank you for the mention. I'm not surprised to see it, though I resolved not to post myself, so that conversation could focus on Commons Clause.

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