Show HN: Micro – A platform for cloud native development in Go | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Micro – A platform for cloud native development in Go

github.com

44 pointsasim29 comments

The license[0] for this project might be problematic. It is worded very vague and far reaching.

[0]: https://github.com/micro/micro/blob/master/LICENSE

The current status in open source licensing in relation to cloud providers such as AWS should signal why the choice was made to move to using Polyform Shield. Its drafted by Heather Meeker, a lawyer with vast experience in this space who has drafted many of the other custom licences for the commercial open source businesses. We are in desperate need of licensing standardisation for commercial open source that moves beyond custom drafting or AGPL, etc. In this case, having spoke to Heather we chose to adopt Polyform and think others will too in time.

This is a commercial license, but it's not even a remote approximation of “open source”, so the references to “commercial open source” and comparisons to the AGPL (which is a copyleft open source license) are misleading.

The source is openly accessible, openly developed, and you can fork it if you don’t like it. It’s definitely open source.

https://opensource.org/osd

“6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.”

vs.

https://github.com/micro/micro/blob/master/LICENSE

“## Noncompete

Any purpose is a permitted purpose, except for providing any product that competes with the software or any product the licensor or any of its affiliates provides using the software.

## Competition

Goods and services compete even when they provide functionality through different kinds of interfaces or for different technical platforms. Applications can compete with services, libraries with plugins, frameworks with development tools, and so on, even if they’re written in different programming languages or for different computer architectures. Goods and services compete even when provided free of charge. If you market a product as a practical substitute for the software or another product, it definitely competes.

## New Products

If you are using the software to provide a product that does not compete, but the licensor or any of its affiliates brings your product into competition by providing a new version of the software or another product using the software, you may continue using versions of the software available under these terms beforehand to provide your competing product, but not any later versions.

## Discontinued Products

You may begin using the software to compete with a product or service that the licensor or any of its affiliates has stopped providing, unless the licensor includes a plain-text line beginning with `Licensor Line of Business:` with the software that mentions that line of business.

Licensor Line of Business: M3O (https://m3o.com)

## Sales of Business

If the licensor or any of its affiliates sells a line of business developing the software or using the software to provide a product, the buyer can also enforce [Noncompete](#noncompete) for that product.”

I am aware of the OSI definition of open-source. However that is only one definition. Although it is a popular one, it is neither authoritative nor ubiquitous. My definition is just as valid as theirs, and it has never confused anybody outside of pedantic debates like this one.

According to the author of the license[0], it is not open source.

[0]: https://polyformproject.org/what-is-polyform/

Yeah, the non-compete term makes it particularly radioactive.

Unless you're not using it to compete. Which would be most applications providing content directly to users.

> Unless you’re not using it to compete.

Well, if you thoroughly explore the licensors current business so as to assure yourself that that’s not an issue, and are willing to accept the cost of ongoing monitoring in the future since your rights to continue to pull in future updates are affected by changes to the licensors business interests of which they are not required to provide you any notice (they only have to provide notice for things that they want to lock you out of even if they temporarily abandon a market).”

No sane user with anything at stake is going to put any kind of reliance on something with those terms.

And that’s just for a piece of software with a single upstring licensor with those terms. I don’t even want to begin to think about what a nightmare would be involved if you wanted to build a system that would rely on more than one piece of software, from different licensors, under this license.

If I were writing an app that provided information as to what plants were native to a user's particular region, for example, I would have absolutely no fear of that license.

That said, I can understand if one has a philosophical aversion to the license.

The part that's really tricky to me is the noncompete clause, since neither side is a static entity. There are lots of situations where you could end up as competitors.

Thanks for pointing this out: previously I had looked at Micro with a view towards using it, and I had utterly failed to notice this.

Isn't there [another editor](https://github.com/zyedidia/micro) written in golang called 'micro'?

I guess we are just going to see more cases of overlapping branding for FOSS unless they have the money to register a trademark tbh.

I started to distinguish projects via their github handle, it is the only way to avoid confusion.

> I guess we are just going to see more cases of overlapping branding for FOSS

This isn’t FOSS, its offered under a proprietary shared-source license.

I like this a lot, but am prevented from using it by the fact that it is not open source/free software, from my reading of the license.

Do you philosophically oppose the license or is it because your application might compete?

I don't use nonfree software when I can avoid doing so, personally.

Professionally, I assiduously avoid using it ever in important server infrastructure, such as anything "cloud native".

Spoken as someone who doesn't like Go one bit - why would I ever need this?

Can't I just use any web framework I like in Go and the official gRPC libray?

Conversely, can't I just do the same in whatever language my company is using?

What is micro offering - a part from an additional middleman in my dependency list I need to security vet?

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25236552 Micro – a self hosted cloud platform for API driven services development (2 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044604 Micro 3.0 is a platform for cloud native development (3 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999682 Micro 3.0 Released (3 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999036 Show HN: Micro 3.0 (M3O) – a platform for cloud native development (3 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23081544 Announcing: M3O – A Micro services development platform (9 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23067233 Micro Server (9 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070042 Show HN: Micro Server – run and manage microservices locally and in the cloud (9 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200647 Show HN: Micro v2.0.0 (12 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21562859 What is Micro? It's just the future of microservices development (1 year ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21491378 Show HN: Go Micro – A Go microservices development framework (1 year ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19545615 Micro – the microservice toolkit 1.0.0 release and beyond (2 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178690 Micro – A microservice ecosystem (4 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930775 Show HN: Micro – a microservice toolkit at Go Meetup London [video+slides] (5 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11710611 Building Resilient and Fault Tolerant Applications with Micro (5 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11706540 Building Resilient and Fault Tolerant Applications with Micro (5 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11564021 The Micro Bot – ChatOps for Microservices (5 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518847 Micro architecture and design patterns for microservices (5 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11471004 Micro on NATS – microservices with messaging (5 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327679 Show HN: Micro – a microservice toolkit (5 years ago)

That's quite a campaign. And I once had a job whose major role was to put out the dumpster fire caused by this lovely little framework.

I was about to say I've seen this somewhere.

Wow.

Bruhh

It's a hard sell for me at least. The downside to this is that it's tied to Google Cloud and requires learning Go while AWS has been offering this for years with a familiar language.

edit: its not tied to GCE but how would this convince someone already on AWS to make the switch?

After cursory reading the docs, I do not feel that it's tied to GCP, only Kubernetes.

It could be a nice starter kit, but obviously I would not recommend migrating to it just because.

It is not tied to Google Cloud. Micro runs locally by default using standard Go and linux processes. It also supports kubernetes for what we now deem as a more production grade cloud environment.

Tangent from the discussion: I am thinking to start using to develop some side projects.

What are the industry practices in terms of which libraries to use?

Could someone share light on their setup.

For Go, there is no industry standard yet, but I've been using Echo for years now and love it. I also use Gorm for handling dealing with MySQL, both have made development in Go extremely productive for me.

From what I've heard from other Go developers, and what I've seen personally, is the library you use doesn't matter too much. They'll all offer their own benefits but because it's so easy to dig into the source to see what's going on underneath the hood, it makes picking up someones code easier than it would in other languages.

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