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Comment by adamson | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's that hard to understand. To some degree, Amazon's behavior is exploiting an idealism that has given us software such as Linux that we're all benefitting from today, and it's easy to see why a starry-eyed engineer would want to carry on that legacy and create a project such as Redis with a permissive license.

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.

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> What you say [...] is obvious in hindsight

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).

Amazon is, in effect, bringing attention to this issue and I am glad that they are.

> 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.

> some competing project elsewhere - student projects, in your example - will eat your market.

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.

> 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?

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.

"exploit", you need the quotes because nothing was exploited. Someone else was able to execute better than you were, that isn't a crime.

Are you saying that choosing a permissive license is like "pissing-in-the-pool"? As if do so contaminates the market for everyone?

> Are you saying that choosing a permissive license is like "pissing-in-the-pool"?

Yes, choosing overly permissible licenses (non-GPL OSS ones, in particular) contaminates the market for other software projects operating in that market.

Yes. The whole AWS problem stems from having too much software under "permissive" licenses and now enough under reciprocal licenses.

Reciprocal licenses work like herd immunity: you need a large enough ecosystem to effectively keep freeloaders at bay while rewarding those who cooperate often.

How would less permissive software existing have helped e.g. MongoDB with their "AWS problem"?

MongoDB did not have an "AWS problem". AWS did not release anything related to MongoDB until after they stopped making open-source releases.

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.

Linux uses GPL, it kind-of forces the tit-for-tat relationship.

Sure, but in this case e.g. GPL vs BSD is only marginally relevant (any modification needs to be GPL in the GPL case) to the particular case of selling OSS software as SaaS since either license lets you package and sell the bare software.

This is exactly it. GPL worked in the past, but if we take a look at Android (which is based on Linux) we can see that it failed to protect users' freedoms completely.

Something that GPLv3 would have prevented.

Then Android would probably have just based off BSD like iOS did.

> an idealism that has given us software such as Linux

No, Linux is GPL licensed, it's not a naive permissive license.

Yes, but you’re still free to turn around and sell Linux as part of a SaaS offering as Amazon does. It saves you from someone surreptitiously forking your project and selling the fork without contributing back improvements to the public, but it doesn’t totally sidestep the issues in the article.

True, but SaaS didn't exist at the time Linux was invented, so it's hard to fault Torvalds for not foreseeing this particular issue. The broader point, I'd argue, is that the idealism behind many successful free software projects was tempered by realism in choosing licenses that compel contributing back to the community.

SaaS has been around since the 1960s

Mongo was AGPL.

There was no “idealism” behind the creation of Mongo, ElasticSearch, or Redis. They were all trying to profit and used open source as marketing.

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