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Comment by throwaway17_17 | Hacker News Reader

I think, while correct, your argument is not addressing the point these commenters are making. The line of argument you are responding to seems to be based on the under-defined, and somewhat ephemeral, ‘spirit’ of open source software. The reasonings seems to be that open source software is done in some spirit of mutually and reciprocally beneficial manner. This ‘spirit’ is separate from the terms of software licenses and, it seems to be implied, that it should be seen to supersede the bare terms of a license. This reasoning is then used as the basis of ethical usage of open source software. So, when Amazon takes a piece of software and uses it not in the ‘spirit’ of open source, their compliance with licensing is irrelevant. I don’t particularly agree with this point of view, but I get the impression many people do.

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If there is a "spirit" to open source, it's a lot closer to "I can take software that you released and use it however I please, while also possibly releasing my changes so that you can do the same" than "Because I wrote this open source software, I am entitled to some arbitrarily defined 'fair' level of financial rewards, despite not giving my business model much thought."

Share and share alike. That's it.

When it comes to the "spirit", the people criticizing it seem to be talking about the "spirit" of Stallman and Free Software; the term Open Source and the OSI as an institution were explicitly built on friendliness to running side by side with proprietary software and to third-party commercial use.

Stallman has no problems dual licensing software and selling proprietary licenses to companies.

His goal is freedom zero, the freedom of a user to use the software as they want.

> Stallman has no problems dual licensing software and selling proprietary licenses to companies.

RMS doesn't, but others also in the copyleft camp certainly have. E.g. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

Nope I get it and I think it’s absolute bunk. And while I grant others are entitled to their opinion I think the implicit dismissal of my (not uncommon) opinion is condescending. As pointed out RMS doesn’t support this idea, and while he’s not some absolute moral authority I’d say it’s a strong counter argument to some absolute consensus on a “spirit” of free or open source.

Why does Elastic deserve to be deferred to here, though. They are making the license overly restrictive. Now I can’t start my own ELK stack hosting company. Meanwhile Amazon will likely benefit more users by keeping ES and Kibana open in a way that encourages their use and encourages contribution. I’m certainly not going to submit patches for Elastic’s forks now.

Re “spirit of open source”:

For people who believe in this, please study your history — look up the claims and counter claims around Emacs, specifically how it was created, commercialised, and then liberated (then forked and merged again).

“Good intenshuns” (my somewhat humorous term for “spirit”) is no way to settle even moderately complex commercial disputes — say for a text editor which in those early days of late 70s/early 80s, had very niche appeal and a small user base.

In the 21st century, with bigger markets and more money at stake, “good intenshuns” matters even less and this is why we have a bevy of F/OSS licenses to suit every need.

It’s very telling that RMS needed to create a license to support his vision of Free software. Perhaps from his experience he realised that legal code was the best way to enforce desired behaviour.

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