If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license.
But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.
The hard reality, that someone like myself believes, is that open source works because most actors try to be considerate of others. It falls apart when everyone acts selfishly. I personally believe the world is better off because we have open source software(as generally defined by the OSI and other groups). So my concern, and I'm guessing the concern of others like the author of this article, is about losing open source as we know it today. The fear is that as actors like Amazon behave in a very anti-social and self interested way, other actors in the ecosystem will be drawn into behaving similarly. Eventually we'll return to the era when software was almost always closed.
Of course, you may not find any real value in the spread of open source software. If that is the case, then I would imagine this situation seems strange to you.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homestead...
Good on these guys, I hope they build a licensing model or some other thing that can stand up to Amazon. I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says.
Yeah, I think the issue is that these days there's a lot of open source developers, who zealously believe in open source, but are working for corporations. They have a natural incentive to maximize the usefulness of open source for corporations, whether they explicitly acknowledge that or not. On a social level, I think that's having many effects, one of which is the backlash against SSPL, which is obviously hard for mostly-proprietary corporations to comply with.
Many open source programmers have built a mental model around the notion that the scripts that operate and deploy an application (service) aren't part of the application (service), and therefore don't need to be open source. But that doesn't make any sense from a software-freedom perspective! The fundamental tenets of open source are that users should be able to use, modify, and redistribute the application. If the users don't have access to the scripts that are required to actually deploy a modified version of the service, then it's not meaningfully open source. That's a new perspective, it's true, but I think the old perspective (the scripts to deploy a service don't need to be open sourced) was just wrong, it came from a long period of biased, commercial-centric thinking.
SSPL is less free than most of propertiary EULAs. It is literally impossible to comply with the section 13 of the license.
SSPL requires the user to release the source code of everything they are using to host their service and license it under the terms of SSPL. Everything, that even includes operating system and firmware of the server used to host the user's service. No one is able to do that.
I don't understand how can anyone defend that awful license.
IMHO all use cases can probably be covered by MIT/BSD, GPL, LGPL, and AGPL. Everything else is license proliferation and adds confusion and problems sharing code between projects.
Hence, the need for a new license.
However, they seem to have kept the deployment infrastructure as a trade secret, and since that didn't interact directly with MongoDB's interfaces, it șes that it really didn't come under the scope of the AGPL.
I think another commenter got it right: this is a fuss created by commercial entities that wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
Because they were already using the AGPL, and it did precisely Nothing to stop Amazon from turning into a massive free-rider who undermined the very ability of the project to fund continued development of the project Amazon was free-riding on.
We can attempt to solve this free rider problem, or we can shrug our shoulders and decide we’re just comfortable with a world with a lot of dead Open Source projects and a lot more proprietary software. But “the current situation is fine and sustainable” is head-in-sand thinking. This Bad Citizen behaviour is an existential threat to the long term prospects of Open Source.
There is no "free rider" problem. There are companies competing and one of them out competing the other. Are you as vocal about every company who failed because they didn't have a good business plan?
Now, should companies (or anyone) who use f/oss contribute back in kind or monetarily? Yes, of course they should; no one is arguing that.
Open source was born out of a closed source world. It couldn't possibly have been a "gift culture" at that time, and yet it birthed and blossomed and amazingly so. To seriously believe open source would go away requires a belief that the forces that birthed it in the first place no longer exist or have significantly diminished. I'd be interesed to hear you expound on that.
This state of affairs continued through the initial phases of the workstation/PC era. It was when IBM PC clone hardware (with their narrower profit margins) started to dominate that proprietary software gained more attractive margins, and the ISV era really took off.
It was this growth of proprietary software cutting into and threatening the existing gift-culture during the 80s that prompted the formation of Free Software and Open Source philosophies (the latter named in the 90s but existing all along).
What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return.") is obvious in hindsight, and should go without saying if you start a project with the express intent of commercializing it. However, in many cases, it's not the obvious decision for reasons related to the project's genesis (e.g. Spark or Mesos being student projects), and in others, it's not the route taken because of an idealistic impulse that I think would be really unfortunate to see squashed.
It was also widely known for many years before Redis was a thing, i remember Slashdot comments from early 2000s about how BSD proponents are taken advantage of and they seem to like that whereas GPL proponents are taken advantage of as much as they take advantage those who take advantage of them (weird phrasing because the original quote i remember was a bit more explicit).
So it isn't really something you only knew in hindsight, it is also something that comes by ignoring people who were warning you about the consequences of your choice (royal you here).
> What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return.") is obvious in hindsight, and should go without saying if you start a project with the express intent of commercializing it.
Even if you do thoughtfully choose a license with the express intent of commercializing the work, some competing project elsewhere - student projects, in your example - will eat your market. It is about time players entering our industry be warned of the effects of such "pissing-in-the-pool" activities.
If a student somewhere is willing to do the same thing as your company for free and release their work under MIT, why is that a problem?
This smacks to me of Microsoft complaining that projects like Linux shouldn't be allowed to exist, because its unreasonable to expect them to compete with free.
If eventually we get into a state where Open Source development really isn't viable, then people will stop doing it, fewer people will be eating your market, and then Source Available projects will become commercially viable.
There isn't a problem with that. The problem is when such projects aspire to commercialize their work, find it hard, and then complain when other commercial entities exploit their work.
The hypocrisy I am pointing out is that to get a software adopted initially projects choose overly permissible licenses; then when they try to monetize the project, they run into issues and cry foul.
Yes, choosing overly permissible licenses (non-GPL OSS ones, in particular) contaminates the market for other software projects operating in that market.
Reciprocal licenses work like herd immunity: you need a large enough ecosystem to effectively keep freeloaders at bay while rewarding those who cooperate often.
MongoDB had a "We gave others freedoms we didn't like" problem, so they rescinded those freedoms. Freedoms that they'd given in the first place to profit off of the reputation of Open Source Software. If they'd never given those freedoms out, they'd never have had any problems.
No, Linux is GPL licensed, it's not a naive permissive license.
Conversely the LGPL and family exists in some sense because the free software community tried to apply copyleft to project that can really only be successful with a permissive license.
For example, my country has freedom of speech and assembly and so forth, and it's easy to see cases where someone exercises their legal rights in ways that are supremely annoying to others, and not in any way productive for society. When we see people abusing the system, we speak out about it. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
What's the alternative? Disallow freedom of speech? Sometimes we might feel tempted, but it turns out that that has all kinds of terrible problems. As they say: this is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.
There are many cases where doing the minimum that the law allows is fine and accepted. (Most people don't intentionally overpay their income tax.) There are other cases where doing something that's merely not technically illegal is frowned upon by social convention. What we're seeing is the corporate world (legal minimum) and the individual world (social contract) colliding. Who wins? So far, the corporations are.
It's easy to say "You should have picked a different license, then!" after the fact, but maybe there isn't a license which would have worked better. Maybe this is the best of several bad options. (Maybe using a more restrictive license would have caused the company to ignore the software entirely and write their own completely proprietary alternative, for example.) Maybe using the internet soapbox to plead for leadership is actually the optimal strategy.
The GNU GPL was an amazingly clever hack to use the legal system to assist enforcing a social contract, but I don't think we can expect to find solutions like that in every case.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/01/wurfl-and-database-copyrigh...
I really hate people who don't understand what open source really means and get offended when someone uses their work in a way that doesn't violate the license, but doesn't give back.
I don't understand this. If the old version was licensed permissively what argument does he have to take down a copy of it with DMCA?
And the original companies using it wouldn't care - of course they'd have their own vendored copy internally - they don't need GitHub to keep using it.
The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well funded companies and self appointed governing bodies.
Let’s find a way to pay hackers!
I think the problem with Elastic is they have lots of VC investment pushing for a big payout, so it’s not a “pay the hackers” it’s a “make a big payout for founders and investors.” Which I’m not against and think is cool, but I don’t really care about it that much.
The “indoctrinated” industry has created a massive community and even more massive ecosystem of interoperability which almost certainly wouldn’t exist under the walled off from everything else and “fuck everyone” nightmare of the 1990s.
Those 90s walled off isolated companies were significantly more cult like and significantly less effective than the system which won out in the open market—the “GNU propaganda” as you refer to it.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "extend existing open source projects". Elastic the company was founded by the creators of Elasticsearch and is the way that its authors and most of its contributors are rewarded with actual cash money.
I think s/he means Elastic's use of Lucene - https://lucene.apache.org/.
> Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow.
The stronger part of the argument is that Amazon is being anticompetitive by using their privileged role as AWS' hardware operator to compete with app providers in on higher layers. Maybe in a few years we will have a lawsuit related to the one Apple is facing now about ios apps.
The free-rider problem occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an underprovision of those goods or services.
It’s like complaining because Seattle sets up a free subway that supports infinite riders at $0 marginal cost and Amazon has all their employees ride it instead of making google buses.
There’s also an issue that Elastic’s district was actually worse than Amazon’s new distro due to license confusion.
On the contrary, permissive licenses has been quietly pushed by companies, together with replacing Free Software with Open Source, in order to exploit it.
For example, is it that far fetched that at some point someone will come up with the abstract argument that your blogging service is really actually just a fancy interface to your MongoDB instance -- and thus you should pay up since you are a MongoDB provider.
Just to be clear, if you are referring to Commons Clause, you can freely use the software for real estate or whatever, you just can't sell the router itself, software itself, or offer paid consulting / support / hosting for the software (well you can, but you need to obtain a commercial license - which is fair enough, since you are making money off the software, not off you real estate business).
This is a common misconception about Commons Clause. You can use it for commercial purposes. Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it.
As for blogging example, the concern is imho not justified. Hybrid licenses need support of community as much as open source ones and such behaviour would be suicide. It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early... There aren't many projects using Commons Clause yet for example.
I think we're agreeing here: no one actually knows the boundaries of this. I'm simply not interested in being the guinea pig of where the line is of "the services that base on it". In my experience the actual deciding factor for this is when you become successful enough and worthwhile to sue. Then it's up to some judge in Texas to decide whether my service is "based on" this technology? I mean, I can't run my services at all without Linux -- I think they'd have a really good argument that my entire business is "based on it". You and I may see how this is silly, that's not sufficient for making me feel safe in a legal environment that currently rewards patent trolls for example.
> It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early...
If we're in "warrant territory" of explicitly stating up front every possible "OK use case" to make the user feel safe, then its either going to have so many allowable use cases as to be self-defeating, or not possibly able to predict really exciting unexpected uses and rule itself out from those domains. At the absolute minimum, I'm going to start to actually have to read over the license with a lawyer now (as opposed to one common understanding of something like MIT), since I can't imagine a "one size fits all" of acceptable explicitly spelled out use cases when the whole point of these licenses is to carve out meaningful profit areas for the project itself - something that in my opinion is going to vary greatly project to project depending on the unique features it provides.
I just think a solution that better aligns incentives of users, businesses and developers is needed, because opensource doesn't do its job good enough. But time will tell which licenwe will get enough backing to succeed in dethroning it.
But the problem for me is that if developers don't have incentives aligned with their users', then we get low quality software. I am a FOSS user and have been for many years, but while I appreciate the freedoms it grants me, the whole experience is... Let's say "inconsistent". I would prefer limiting some of the freedoms in exchange for better software, and especially in exchange for having it at all on mobile.
I think the somewhat extreme view FOSS movement holds about freedoms actually hurts opensource adoption, because it hurts its quality and availability.
Note that I don't mind Amazon (ab)using FOSS so much as I mind not having any freedom on mobile.
I want you to have the right to be an asshole, but I'd prefer it if you were not an asshole. I don't want to enforce my preferences through contracts, licenses, and law. I might still call you out if you're an asshole.
How hard is it to understand this worldview? A world of freedom, where people do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and not because they are given no other choice.
Now they are starting to realize they were naive.