Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

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TAForObvReasons

This announcement is about Handsontable completely shutting down the open source offering and using the same distribution channels to pump proprietary software. Wheres a month ago https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/ had open source code, now it is all proprietary. That's not something to celebrate.

As pointed out in the github discussion, Elastic did the same thing with Elasticsearch, and that contributed to AWS forking the project: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

The same exact issue applies here:

> The maintainers of open source projects have the responsibility of keeping the source distribution open to everyone and not changing the rules midstream

> we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code

Those comments aren't an indictment of the open core business model or of attempts to monetize open source, but rather a criticism of "muddying the waters" and trying to create licensing confusion.

> The maintainers of open source projects have the responsibility of keeping the source distribution open to everyone and not changing the rules midstream

> we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code

I disagree. Nobody has the responsibility to do anything for free. Amazon is free to take that responsibility for itself though.

The fact that this comes from a company that in more than one case has modified an open source project and kept the changes hidden behind a SaaS only adds insult to injury.

> Nobody has the responsibility to do anything for free.

In general, yes. If you call something an Open Source project, however you take on certain responsabilities that you wouldn't otherwise have, such as not playing bait-and-switch, and can hope for people sending in bug fixes and patches (and even signing copyright assignments if required for dual licensing).

If it were just "doing things for free" and not receiving anything in return, FOSS would not interest anyone and we'd get back to the shareware world of the 90s where (as a user) you got an evaluation license but no stake. Some developers prefer the shareware model to going full OSS, which is fine. Playing bait-and-switch by turning an Open Source project (with the community and the help and credibility that potentially come out of it) into a Shareware product will, like any bait-and-switch, irritate people.

To me, Handsontable's position is much more understandable than Elastic's, because Elastic could (and do) monetize as a service. That's not really practical for Handsontable.

The only way I see to get money out of someone for a product like Handsontable, while maintaining an open souruce version is by withholding some features + extended support. That's what they've been doing and they've said it hasn't been bringing in the return they need.

In Elastic's case, they have a product that is easy to monetize while keeping an open source version: you offer your product as a (hosted) service + extended support, so if people don't want to deal with setting it up themselves, they pay you. Docker seems to be a good example of this. The open source version is still fully availiable and can be used however you like, but comes without that extra support (and maybe a few features).

Instead, Elastic has stuck a bunch of proprietary code on Github, seemingly to bait people into use it, when they're not allowed to. Handsontable aren't doing anything like that. Once they go proprietary, they're archiving the repo. It's still there if people want to use it, but it's not being maintained. That's really no different to any other random piece of abandoned code on Github (of which there is plenty).

> Elastic has stuck a bunch of proprietary code on Github, seemingly to bait people into use it, when they're not allowed to. Handsontable aren't doing anything like that. Once they go proprietary, they're archiving the repo.

That's not true, last month https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/ was MIT licensed, today it is proprietary. Handsontable is attempting the same sort of "baiting" that Elastic did. There is no evidence they are archiving the old repo, and in fact they are archiving the proprietary repo and merging it into the open source one:

> The Handsontable Pro package on NPM is marked as deprecated and the repository on GitHub is archived (made read-only)

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