fossfox.com
Engineering teams can post for free. Open directory of available positions is here [0].
- These are not paid opportunities for Open Source work. This a job board. The title makes you think that there are gigs to work on some open source projects and get paid for it.
- There are no guarantees that these "open source friendly" companies will hire you to work on Open Source. Working on Open Source projects is the exception, not the rule. Unless the company has gone the full OS model, which is just a few startups. And still, sometimes these companies have other kind of work (customization for a certain client) at which point you are not involved in the OS work at all.
Any thoughts about location? No idea what here is relevant for where I live.
All jobs should be remote-friendly. There's nothing to do - if you see the jobs, they should be relevant to you.
Some companies do have physical offices (meaning you're welcome to work from there), and those cities are listed if you click on the company's name. Right now it's region-biased per country -- if you scroll to the bottom and click "more" you can change the country. There's def still work to do (visas, non-remote, fine-tuning, etc).
Would be helpful to mention where by the way; some positions are world-wide remote, others Europe or US only.
Timezones are often more flexible, and I wouldn't bother too much with that. But location often doesn't have that due to legal hassle etc (other than visa sponsorships).
These two categories seem pretty distinct, and the second is pretty nebulous. What does "significant" mean here, and how well does that translate to the odds of me working on an open source project? It's unclear why Netflix and Cloudflare are included but, say, Facebook and Microsoft aren't.
If you're going to include both, it would be nice if there were a way to distinguish and filter between these two categories. I really like the idea of being able to see all the open source jobs out there, but having Netflix at the top of the list makes me unsure how many of these companies are truly open-source-first.
edit: Linked Fossfox in https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources
Can you enlarge the fonts please? My vision is not so good.
Hint: Editing font-size to 18px (for <div class="sc-4dp71k-0 hIhENr app-app-wrapper">) via web dev tools (Firefox) produces an incredible output for me.
It would be nice if you had a fast filter for remote-only postings.
Also, your mailing list software drops the part after a `+`, this breaks filtering rules. I'd also like your base to store my address in a form I provided.
I've certainly seen many different licenses used in COSS projects, including different mixes of them. E.g.: for my latest project I've decided to use mainly AGPL-3.0 (a pretty strong copyleft license) with specific parts licensed under MIT.
That said, my goal wasn't to limit the usage, but to be open-source, and provide self-hosting option (the 2 fundamental advantages you can provide to your users by being open-source, IMHO), while making sure nobody just runs the product on their servers, rebrands it, and sells it to others as a service (which, while possible with other licenses, is simply unethical in my book).
One of the explicit permissions of Free Software (and by extension Open Source Software) is that you can sell the software or otherwise profit off it. There is no stipulation that you need to be the primary author, or any kind of contributer to do this.
Equally there is the very explicit freedom to not restrict what people can do with the software. This is quite literally in the definition of Free Software.
Thus rebranding a product, and hosting it yourself, is completely consistent with the Free Software ideals, as long as the user conforms to the terms of the license (making source code available.)
AGPL does not stop rebranding/ rehosting, nor is it designed to. There are licenses that do that well, but they are not OSS licenses.
Ethically I subscribe to the idea that the author was free to license their work (open or closed) however they chose. I'm happy to use , or not use, the product based on the license -they- chose. I'm not obligated to impose additional restrictions on their work. If they wanted those restrictions they have the choice to add them.
You are of course free to apply any framework of ethics to yourself that you like. I'd also point out that using the AGPL specifically does -not- prevent someone from running your product on their server rebranding it, and selling it for money. Doing that is completely within the bounds of AGPL.
You are correct that under AGPL-3.0 people still can provide the software as a service, but they’ll have to disclose any changes to the source code they’ve made.
This, in my mind, effectively discourages doing so as, if all you do is change the branding, people will eventually know and, depending on their ethics and the provided offering, they might choose not to use the “official” service.
In theory people still could distribute the product as-is or just be fine with the open-sourcing and actually add something of value to their fork. However, as I’ve seen in practice, this doesn’t seem to happen at a meaningful scale and people usually prefer to contribute directly to the original project.
Like you’ve said, there are other licenses that aren’t really open-source, prohibiting this from happening at all.
Most interesting options from these, for me, were SSPL (which puts the open-sourcing requirement on other elements of your stack, like hosting provider, making it a non-starter), or ELv2 (which just prohibits SaaS use entirely).
But again, not being recognized as official open-source licenses, using these puts the project more in the camp of source-available software rather than open-source.
>>This, in my mind, effectively discourages doing so as, if all you do is change the branding, people will eventually know and, depending on their ethics and the provided offering, they might choose not to use the “official” service.
There are a lot of factors that go into a SaaS decision. Price obviously, but also things like name-recognition etc.
In a business environment I'm more likely to use ElasticSearch from AWS because we already pay them every month (so I don't need a million people to sign off on it.) Plus I'm comfortable that they will be around next year, and they have the resources to fix hardware issues.
AWS running ElasticSearch is completely within the license (OK, until recently) and thus ethically I'm free to use it. It's being used -exactly- as elasticSearch released it to be used.
They obviously thought your argument was true, that people would prefer their hosting, but apparently they were wrong.
I get the desire to advertise a product as "free software" or "open source". But don't then complain when users make use of those freedoms. Be sure to pick a license that conforms to your actual goals. If you have conflicting goals then you need to resolve that first.
I love open source as much as the next guy, but its not a marketing term, it's a licensing term. Be sure you choose it for the right reasons.
I think it all depends on the project’s scale, type (is it part of your infrastructure like a database or all-in-one solution like a CMS, etc.), goals and other factors.
It’s difficult to make the right choice at the very start, as something that might have worked then might not work when you’re at a scale of competing with AWS.
When you say Infra here on HN, you show you are from the past.
/sarcasm-not-so-much-sarcasm