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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

I’m torn on issues like this. I respect and support companies that intend to make their software free and open for personal and academic use, but charge for commercial use. But the licensing challenges surrounding support of this intent is tricky, and is often attacked by FOSS purists. I don’t think a good license exists for companies like Neo4j, MongoDB, Elastic, etc…and we need one.

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The real problem is that they picked the AGPL, which has the Further Restrictions clause. If they didn’t want that, then they should have picked something else. They could have created a custom license, but instead they proudly announced that they were choosing the AGPL, and they gained significant goodwill from that. This lawsuit demonstrates that they are either incompetent, or that they were attempting to use the AGPL in a fraudulent way.

Neo4J have a genuinely interesting product but they managed, throughout the decades, to hamper its adoption at every turn.

I know virtually nothing about the software, but I keep hearing over and over about the licensing problems. I doubt it’s the reason they want people to remember their name.

Yeah, if money and time is no object graph databases are a joy to use but being a commercial database is pretty much the death knell for support in different languages and frameworks.

Let’s discuss intent.

(I have contributed OSS in a minor way via a few original projects. I don’t run a business. I don’t have a dog in this fight. But imo ..)

If you start an OSS project, get contributions, then the thing becomes a hit, and then when money comes knocking on the door — investors want returns as it happens — and you then suddenly realize that you wanted a business after all. Then you will run into then “no good license” issue if you still want the help of free OSS patches, workers, and OSS monicker but need to protect business interests.

One the other hand, you can start with intent of making a business from your OSS project, and give non-transferable non-commercial license grants (of a foundational subset e.g. a single node graph db) to whoever wants to see or help you with the code. This scenario is (ianal) supported by existing commercial licenses. However this -may- limit the free flow of code and love and care by non-stakeholders of your commercial endeavor. I am not sure if anyone has ever tried this.

IMHO it’s because we have no real way to pivot with this stuff, and you said it well enough, I just want to add:

In my mind, you’re either an OSS person who “goes viral” and maybe gets picked up or a large “thank you” contrib to your “buy me a coffee” bucket.. or you’re actually trying to make a product but need to “market test” on the old (but hardly ever used anymore) “shareware” concept. Free market testing and occasional PRs is not a proper path to IPO or venture capital. It’s just that you didn’t realize it when you set out, or you did and you’re “meta gaming” the lifecycle.

With a (to be invented?) license that allows pivoting, I reckon it can be the kind of thing that happens, and is a potential known to any product with that license.

I just don’t see it being popular.

Not that it works especially well for patents, but I could imagine a RAND licensing scheme for open source contributors that triggers when a license transitions from open to closed.

I imagine readers who've never babysat open source projects think that you "get contributions" and "free OSS patches, workers" but those things, for 99.9% of projects are 1-illusory, 2-when and if they materialize, usually more cost than benefit.

Patches are not the only contribution, although I am sure that while not every OSS projects get many, the most visible ones do get also Patches. Anyway whatabout the early testing, bugfiling, documentation and helping others to understand how to use these projects. A lot of people get involved with these activites because they want to support an OSS Project and often these, (especially testing early releases and Developer advocacy) are more important than a patch contribution for the success of the project and the chance for it to become profitable.

I've never seen those provide value anywhere that's anywhere close to matching the costs incurred. They get diluted by:

- bugs that are actually free support

- feature requests for things that some company needs, but won't pay them to create

- pull requests you can't accept, need to review, etc.

This is so true. I don't really want people to contribute because it takes more time to assess what they did vs just mindlessly doing it yourself. If I had the time to review I would rather implement the feature or fix.

I don’t think it’s about it being a hit so much as the business dynamics have changed incredibly the last 13 years, when many of these projects took off. Open source as a business is incompatible with the Cloud.

This is an excellent point. Something changed. I'd argue that that however yet again brings us back to question of intent. There were pathways, RH for ex., that had worked as viable business models. But then cloud messed up with the well laid 'plans'.

It's a good model but only when it starts like that from the beginnig. How many developers have contributed to that open source because of the liberal orginal license? Now they take all that work and make it commercial? Ok but in that case the rights should revert to the orginal contributors and the company should make licensing terms with them for the Commercial part.

Most of the controversies have been about this bait&switch Aproach.

Unless all your contributors signed copyright assignment to you (or you have no external contributors), you cannot just restrict license this way for copyleft licenses.

Ofcourse the contributors have signed copyright assignment to you (that's mostly standard practice) but they have done so for a project that at the time was with the liberal license. It may not be illegal but it's certainly abusive to then switch licenses because chances are those would not have signed the copyright away for free for a commercial product in the first place.

Maybe with Business Source License?

That is essentially a proprietary license that will turn the licensed work to FOSS software after a given period of time. So that everyone can use and fork the software, but the original author can also make money out of it sustainably.

Thank you for bringing that license to my attention. I've been figuring out licensing for a project and out of all the ways I've looked into, this one fits my thinking the most.

It will be attacked by the FOSS purists and the corporatists who will scream “see the GPL is a cancer to commercial code”

*OSS purists

what’s the label for open source idealists who view IP/copyright as fundamentally incompatible with the mission?

i’m not talking about the MIT or “permissive license” crowd, but the smaller group which explicitly avoids providing a license because doing so would grant legitimacy to the idea that intellectual property is a thing which should be licensed/controlled.

tends to have an overlap in piracy circles and anarchists, probably because copyright is tied to the state/legal code. anyway i see enough of them now where the acronyms like FOSS, FLOSS, etc definitely don’t apply, but i’m not sure what label to use instead.

Maybe as a compromise between copyright and copyleft you could call then copycentre?

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