Open Source Bait and Switch: Licensing and Beyond
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>open source movement is not about making it easy for you to do business, it is about freedom for users of your software.
Say what you will about RMS this is the exact kind of thing that the GPL is written for. "Open Source" exists to benefit business. "Free Software" exists to benefit users.
On the flip side I think it's fair that if they have many of these large customers with more than $25 million in turn over not contributing that they do pay for the software development.
If your net worth, inclusive of tech stock options is >$5mil you should have to pay to the developer for any open source software that you use, or is used in any of the products you use. (hint: its going to be expensive)
Do you mean for every single OSS project? Have a look at the dependency graph for a typical React project or anything built with Maven. Charging for this is unworkable. The collaborative work on which open source is based would collapse.
Just as a concrete example, ClickHouse incorporates something like 97 other software packages in contrib ranging from NuRaft to zstd. ClickHouse in its current form is only possible if those packages remain free.
Yes of course many large companies do not contribute. If your goal is to FORCE to contribute customers to your liking this is what Proprietary license is for. Go proprietary and you can discriminate customers based on their ability to pay. Open Source though requires same access - rich and poor, good and evil and especially relinquishing control for you to decide which is which
> Open Source though requires same access - rich and poor, good and evil and especially relinquishing control for you to decide which is which
No it doesn't. If you believe the legal system, then you believe that we can make real rules about people's behavior, even in circumstances where we won't physically be the there to force that behavior.
More concretely: We can certainly say "this code is freely available to read" without saying "you can do whatever you want with this code with no repercussions", even though technically anyone can download any open source code and use it to run a business on their servers.
If you do doubt that this is possible to enforce, then consider music: I can listen to almost any piece of modern music on Spotify. That does not mean I can use any piece of modern music in a commercial royalty-free unless I'm interested in getting sued.
The question is not whether we can enforce Copyleft/etc licenses. It's whether we have the will and money to do so.
You should not shame people who try to build something sustainable, but instead try to improve the system that makes altruistic work difficult.
I think it is fair to talk about this and how it can maybe be done better.
I agree, though it's evident that the discussion is stained by the tone of this article.
They aren't approaching this topic with some respect and understanding, while being fully aware that these license changes are aimed at large companies which keep taking, but do not support the open source community.
[0] https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/ (Kind of old but I don't think it has changed much.)
If maintainer believes the hard choice of Open Source is not for them it is fine. Go ahead write proprietary software instead
Being Buddhist Monk is hard too but you perhaps would find it silly someone wanting to call himself one but not wanting to follow the rules which come with definition ?
Comparing the licensing change to murder during the Vietnam War seems like an odd tone to take on an official company blog.
No sane person before would have read this sentence and thought that the author was comparing licensing changes to murder
It feels like either the author is trying to invoke the murder of villages during the Vietnam War as a way of lending weight to their argument about licensing changes, or they view the example of village destruction during the Vietnam War as something trivial enough to be in this post about licensing changes. Both of which feel odd.
Whatever it is, it's the second sentence of the post and is literally written as a comparison to the license change statement from Lightbend, so it feels like the author intended it to be important.
I’m not sure why you feel the author is trying to use vietnam to lend weight to his argument. He’s merely pointing to the absurdity of the sentence.
And likening that absurdity to that of Lightbends post
projects with no users fizzle out.
That's the point of dual licensing: companies will need to purchase a closed source license.
> And if people can’t eventually use it for work, people don’t tend to use it at all these days.
Lots of folks are late night hackers and Free Software enthusiast. They'll use it and pass the good word along to the Big Corp they work for.
> projects with no users fizzle out.
That's no different than proprietary software.
and why would people ask for something that haven’t used?
and why would people use something that is AGPL and they can’t use it anyway?
we would see a lot of AGPL projects out there if it worked the way you described
The exchange of money for a closed-source software license is no different than the same business purchasing a license to proprietary software. At least with duel licensing they _could_ theoretically choose the copyleft license, but in practice they won't or can't.
And this says a lot. GPL does exist for a reason and it is a hell of a good one: prevent the kind of leeching these companies are so fond of.
That being said, I've personally chosen Apache2 for my projects. I feel that the growth and adoption from the community outweigh not having VCs crawling at my door, if you can afford this path. Curious what others have to say about other high profile switches from Mongo, Elastic, Sentry, etc.
Of course security patches are a big driver for businesses so this makes sense from the profit sense. However as an open source project I would be very hesitant to add this as a dependency because now I am forcing my user to enter a contract if they want security.
I think this is the problem with non-free licenses in general. It makes it a much harder decision for other projects to build upon. Because now any user is required to become a customer of another business with pricing and licenses that I have no control over and can change at any time.
We need the freedom to use the software for any purpose. We also need some assurance that others will feel enough ownership to enable a sustainable community of contributors. Apache 2 is overall the best license to achieve that goal, though obviously others do the same.
Edit: typo
First, certain amount of revenue, even if it looks high for you, does not mean it is able to pay ANY amount vendor require. Paying Oracle $50.000 per CPU Core to run Oracle (for 100s of thousands of CPU cores) would be steep even for Facebook/Meta
This idea what there are those large evil companies do not contributes to Open Source, and there are same large VC funded copyright holders are just struggling to survive is quite wrong - it is not that simple and it is Open Source which is one of the ways which create balance of power
Second, it is not about money. Having any restriction on who can use it makes it impractical for using as component of other Open Source software, which Is where I think Open Source power really shines. Check out this article for example
https://flink.apache.org/news/2022/09/08/akka-license-change...
Nothing against this text in particular, but interacting with anything originating from there leaves a ... slimy feeling.
Also, if we all avoided companies and products that have patents, wouldn't that rule out owning a mobile phone?
Disclaimer: We're Percona partners and Peter Zaitsev is on our board. I endorse the view in his article without reservation as you can probably tell. ;)
- “Disk-resident streaming dictionary” (2007) [1] seems to be the main one for both the COLA (if it is patentable at all—the base datastructure, fractional cascading, and deamortization were all in the literature a decade or more before, though impressively obscure from where I’m standing) and the CO B-tree; owned by MIT and (according to Google) exclusively licensed to Tokutek and afterwards Percona;
- Same (2012) [2], a “continuation”(?), allowed to lapse and expired;
- “High-performance streaming dictionary” (2010) [3], the one I found during the double-check, but hell if I know what it actually discloses—using a search tree to implement a database? a specific database implementation? WTF? definitely not anything cache-oblivious specifically; (according to Google) owned by Tokutek and then Percona.
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8185551B2 ; https://fees.uspto.gov/MaintenanceFees/fees/details?patentNu...
[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8489638B2 ; https://fees.uspto.gov/MaintenanceFees/fees/details?patentNu...
[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8996563B2 ; https://fees.uspto.gov/MaintenanceFees/fees/details?patentNu...
May I ask for more details - in your particular case, how would having your software open source hurt your business?
Just pure curiosity, nothing else.