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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

But this is what leads to rational developers working for companies on loss-leader open-source "bait+switch" models.

There's this idea that open source should be totally free, but then how does the developer writing the software wind up eating and paying their rent? There's the linux kernel and mozilla and other massive open source projects which have large companies and foundations and budgets behind them, but that is the 0.01% of open source projects.

When OSS maintainers setup companies and go the "loss leader" or "bait and switch" or "freemium" models so that they release open source code, but the Enterprise-level offerings are locked behind proprietary licenses then this is looked at as being a betrayal.

The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely consume all of their work. That just isn't sustainable.

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I use GPL (and recently have started to move to AGPL).

So companies will generally keep away from my stuff, but people doing open source will happily use it.

I've had several people complain about this and ask me to use MIT. I put in my code of conduct that asking that is forbidden :D

You can always license out your software to those people under a special license for them. Which might include a fee or any other conditions. Just that your software has one open source license doesn’t mean you can’t distribute it with other licenses as well. Things might get complicated if you have other contributors though.

Theres a small issue that you overlooked here which is that once it has contributions from several other people, anything AFPL becomes impossible to relicense, how do you get 6 random GitHub users to sign a contract, without robust copyright assignment/management mechanisms ahead of the very first outside contributor, AGPL effectively kills the ability for anyone too pay you for your own work on terms you might want to agree to.

By using aggressive open source licenses like AGPLv3 you have to do more work to keep the door open for yourself to profit later if you so choose, it’s a bad personal economic choice, and while some view it as the ultimate in altruism to prevent this, it’s also an act of denial, everyone who could have used it inside companies or projects that can’t change their license to be compatible are denied the ability to use the code.

Nothing says you have to accept outside contributions. Signal rewrites outside pull requests for this very reason.

Also hot damn, the AFPL license is super aggressive, makes AGPLv3 look downright business friendly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_Free_Public_License

> Signal rewrites outside pull requests for this very reason.

Too bad that rewriting something doesn't transfer copyright :D

Might mean to reimplement from scratch without looking at the would-have-been contributed code.

Ideas aren't copyrightable. IANAL

Eh I've just put a contributing file where to contribute you must accept the software might go under lgpl and future versions of gpl/lgpl might be adopted.

That's it. I have no plans for using anything more liberal than lgpl ever.

Yes for libraries I can consider doing LGPL for some companies.

> Things might get complicated if you have other contributors though.

Not really… they distribute under whatever license they got it from.

As an OSS developer, I will also avoid GPLed code unless I am only using it as something to be consumed (such as emacs when I get the decade itch to remind myself why I don’t use it). I write the libraries that I write to be given away and for my joy.

I write libraries that don't help companies walk all over users and deprive them of freedom :P

I've also started moving from good old GPL to AGPL, good idea about putting "don't ask about relicensing" in your COC, I think I'll start doing that as well.

I've been seeing this trend pop up more and more (so I wrote about it[0]), glad to see more people talking about it openly:

[0]: https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...

> The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely consume all of their work.

It's a weird sort of exploitation, because OSS maintainers who don't think they're being adequately compensated are free not to participate by volunteering their time.

I think the key point here is that we would like to incentivise a society where people can be sustainably compensated for their time while still making the fruits of their labour available to all for mostly unrestricted use. Rather than ending up in a world where one either:

- Is well-compensated while working for a for-profit company where the codebase is proprietary.

- Works in open source but is poorly paid or not paid at all.

In the scenario you would like to incentivize, who gets to decide what labor is compensated?

Not all open source developers are poorly paid. I think it's a free market, and I don't see that as a problem. I don't think open source developers are really being exploited, because typically they are capable of earning what they need if they want to. An open source developer can simply work for a for-profit company on proprietary software if they don't think they get paid enough, for example[1]. And the industry will pay what they need to get the software they need.

[1] That they might prefer to work on open source is their problem, and not one for the economy, I think; I say this as an open source developer who gets paid to work on open source and prefers this over working on proprietary software.

> That they might prefer to work on open source is their problem, and not one for the economy, I think;

I think it's a problem for the economy, not because of individuals' preferences, but because I think there is an overall economic benefit to work being open source.

Not to mention the countless societal benefits.

> The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely consume all of their work. That just isn't sustainable.

First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time -- what changed?

Secondly, a lot of major open source projects are being worked on by developers who are employed full-time by large corporations to do it. And I don't just mean Red Hat or the Linux kernel. Those devs get paid by their employers to work on open source projects that benefit their employers and also the wider community -- it seems like a really successful, scalable, sustainable model.

The people who are having a hard time are the indie devs, but let's be honest, being an indie dev who gives away software for free has always been, and always will be, a bad business model. It's not a good idea to do that for a living. It never will be.

> First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time -- what changed?

Big failures like OpenSSL fiasco happened - where sure, company was sustainable but due to skewed priorities coz of funding (companies that founded it founded features that from perspective of any other company were bloat, and not enough work went into modernizing the code) the code was shit and full of traps.

And it's still a fact that vast majority of developers of stuff used everywhere wouldn't be able to do it as full or even part time job for financial reasons.

All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good, GPL bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute anything back to stuff they take

> All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good, GPL bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute anything back to stuff they take

Yeah and people eat it up.

"oh it won't have as many users"

well who cares? It's less hassle. Not like you get anything back from having 100x more downloads.

Companies that are NOT RedHat though have a problem with making that sustainable.

It isn't just the Indie devs it is the smaller businesses as well. Those are the ones pulling license changes, doing "freemium" models and other things that the OSS community is objecting to and the author is throwing shade at. Those models are NOT working well or we wouldn't be having these discussions.

The models that "work" for the coder are just tossing your code into public and not caring because it is a side project or something that you're doing to learn to code and you'll abandon it in a few years. Or else working for an existing Fortune 500 company getting hired to work on open source, or one of the few large open source foundations (sponsored heavily by massive corporations and/or academia).

And I worked for the past 10 years in open source at a startup-to-small-business getting paid by my employer for open source. That model is not very good, which is why we're seeing so many issues with "bait and switch" at those kinds of smaller corporations.

Yeah, I was at Red Hat for a bit, and loved the business model - sup, we employ a lot of the lead devs on FOSS projects you use, so we've got fantastic support for you.

And that's it, no "enterprise editions", the only extra code you're paying for is backported critical patches, and deterministic builds of software (and all its dependencies) from source. RH puts a huge amount of effort into those builds, it's incredibly painful as an RH dev sometimes, but it seems to be a huge factor in building trust.

But, I can see why it doesn't really work for other companies, step 1 is "Be Red Hat, and have Red Hat's reputation."

I've been involved in Kafka a bit, and it's been very sad seeing Confluent devs having to deprioritise work on FOSS Kafka to focus work on stuff that, well, they can sell for money, but I totally get why.

> The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be in poverty

The maintainers chose OSS. It's like taking out a loan then complaining about having to pay it back - either don't go OSS, or step down as maintainer.

Well we need to make it a bit more clear then that OSS is a dead-end and nobody should do it unless you work for a foundation or megacorp. And stop whining about smaller companies who take their OSS work private again so that everyone can make a living.

Depends what you mean by "dead-end", there is plenty non-corp OSS.

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