Let's celebrate relicensing from an open source to a proprietary license | Hacker News Reader

Let's celebrate relicensing from an open source to a proprietary license

dirkriehle.com

23 pointsekTHEN25 comments

Yesterday, we were “rethinking” open source licensing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37849958

Today, we’re celebrating the bait and switch.

I can’t wait to see what nonsense we’re doing tomorrow.

Tomorrow we're going to "Use the sauce, Luke!"

The only thing I really wonder is how these things wind up on the frontpage here. Is it the lack of a downvote function?

Because holy shit, I can't imagine an article missing the point as hard as this one does. I'm trying my best to not be rude to random strangers on the Internet, but this is a level of misunderstanding that is so strong it feels difficult for my brain to not automatically assume malice. I'm not celebrating someone's market success when they just accomplished it by exploiting goodwill to get there, and almost universally pretend like what they're doing is good for open source, "protecting" open source, or anything else other than what it actually is, defending their business models.

I hope it's sarcasm and I'm just out of the loop.

When I first opened this article, I thought (and hoped) it was lampooning the Fermyon article.

Here's the real answer for what we're doing tomorrow :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37872553

Stone Soup (Revised)

Everybody in the village was starving, there was no food. A traveller came and told the people that he could make soup from a stone and water. Soon, the cauldron was bubbling. The traveller tasted the soup and said, “Yummy! But it would taste even better if we added a turnip.” A villager had a turnip, and threw it into the pot. Other villagers added some spices, a parsnip, a few mushrooms, some barley, and other ingredients. The mayor had a taste, and pronounced it delicious and nourishing.

Then the traveller took the cauldron to the city, and poured the contents into cans, which he sold for $20 per can. This generated enough revenue that he could open his own soup factory.

This is called relicensing.

>Most commentators view the licensing away from open source as a negative event. I’d like to argue that it is a milestone to celebrate. By licensing away the company signals that the product has achieved a mature state and that the help of an open source strategy is not needed any longer: The company has proved to the world that the software can be built and that the economy at large cares and thinks this software is a good idea. This is an important achievement!

Is "open source strategy" purely an economic tool? I though there was as much societal and political motivations involved as economic. Primarily isn't the idea of a healthy software commons a political move to avoid technological capture and rentseeking practices that hurt the economy overall. This authors framing the discussion are purely economical seems to miss why people might be upset. Where do the communities that grow up around and support open source projects fit in to this analysis.. Just people willing to give away their time and be instrumentalised to make make the product Mature enough to give a return to VCs?

I am honestly curious what the landscape is like on this issue. Should no-one ever contribute to an opensource project that is controlled by a VC backed company if they're not comfortable with the thought of a license change? Are companies treating open source just like a strategy to build a "community" for instrumental reasons only to pull out the rug later going to end up poisoning the well and undermining any sense of good will and community spirit of developing tools to share together. Conversely all well being and prosperity comes from a paycheck, who is going to apply their skills and time to build software out of goodwill alone. Is the problem that large cloud infrastructure providers are now in a position to lock customers in and engage in rent seeking, and by integrating opensource projects into their service catalogue the take off the table one of the monetization strategies of companies that developed them, that is providing premium support.

> Is "open source strategy" purely an economic tool?

Yes, because the only thing a good company cares about is economics -- namely, money.

This is, very literally, what the Cathederal and the Bazaar was about. Exploiting people's labour. ESR (i.e. the founder of the Open Source movement) very literally made an argument in the latter half of the book that goes "You get better performance out of people when you don't pay them/pay them less").

In what universe is ESR the founder of the open source movement? He wrote that book, and… fetchmail. Do you have him confused with RMS?

RMS is for Free Software, not Open Source.

lmao you're mixing up Free Software and Open Source Software, which are not the same thing.

Totally agree, "open source strategy is not needed any longer" doesn't make any sense for many projects where open source of that particular software or information is the primary purpose. It's not solely an economic engine.

> Is "open source strategy" purely an economic tool? I though there was as much societal and political motivations involved as economic.

There are many different types of open source projects. Those created for purely commercial exploitation usually don't care about the societal benefits much (but they are still there, fortunately.

> They are called fake open source companies, betrayers of the spirit.

> As the product matures, the open source strategy often becomes less valuable to them, and many, if not all, will license away from open source to a more restrictive license.

"I released my product as OSS as a growth hack because no one would touch it if it wasn't OSS and I wanted to feed off the community good-will that comes with people contributing back and building an ecosystem around what they believe will is a community project. But I don't actually share in any of those silly values the OSS community has. Unrelated, why are you all mad at me?"

> Let it sink in: Without VCs, there would be no Terraform, and without Terraform, there would be no OpenTofu. Without VCs, there would be no ElasticSearch, and without ElasticSearch, there would be no OpenSearch. The direct way from idea to OpenTofu or OpenSearch did not happen; it needed a VC-funded startup to blaze the trail.

Either this guy is high off his ass and I want some, or has reached the astral plane of scamming VCs. Yes pour money into this cool new software I promise it will be profitable one day. Ignore the poison pill that enables-- nay encourages, the community to just take it for themselves when the time comes.

> Either this guy is high off his ass and I want some, or has reached the astral plane of scamming VCs.

Really just work, 9 to 5, and rather mediocre cafeteria food.

While it may be better to have love and lost than never loved at all, you are not going to see people celebrate the breakup of what they thought was a good relationship.

It is true that VC money has created a ton of great open source software that would have never been created otherwise. But it is not a forgone conclusion that the software eventually going closed was a requirement of that VC investment. Nor do I see it as a sign of good health for the software or the company. It might be a sign that the company has given up on future growth and decided to milk existing customers as much as they can. It might be a hail-mary pass to try to bring in income because their current model isn't working. It might be a swinging of tides against a business model that many companies tried, but far fewer succeeded at. It might be an emotional knee-jerk to what they see as unfair use of the software. But I really don't see the argument that it is a mark of success.

> But it is not a forgone conclusion that the software eventually going closed was a requirement of that VC investment.

True, but it is the best option these vendors currently see, otherwise they wouldn't do it. There are alternatives, but none has stuck so far.

When things get relicensed, the companies give their reasons for doing what they're doing, and often come in HN to make their case. FAQs are added, and people are reminded that they can still view the source and use the software for free, provided they aren't a direct competitor to their cloud offering. Despite all that, the communities doesn't celebrate when it happens. This post tries to put it in different terms, but I think we already understand it. Yes, they're "exploring a search space", but that doesn't make it a pleasant experience to have the structure of the projects people depend on and contribute to turned upside down.

> These complaints were only justified, if the company had promised open source forever and had anchored altruism and minimizing profits as their reason of existence. And if they had done that, who would have believed it and would the company been able to achieve its goals? The answer is obviously: No, non-profits don’t get venture capital (VC) funding, and VC funding is critical to building the software in the first place.

So close to getting it right... Consider the countercase, where the company says up front that the product is only open source temporarily. Would anyone use them? Maybe, but they'd have a way harder time getting any buy-in.

> The complaint is usually not about a company providing open-source software, but rather about (a) withholding the closed complement and (b) eventually dropping the open source license for future development. Again, without the closed complement there wouldn’t be the commercial open-source software in the first place, so complaining about it is pointless.

On the contrary, pulling a bait-and-switch is actively harmful to the ecosystem because it steals oxygen from would-be competitors:

> Let it sink in: Without VCs, there would be no Terraform, and without Terraform, there would be no OpenTofu.

Or, without Terraform, there would be other options instead of TF having been very nearly the option until they decided to shoot their own foot off. (Yes, there are still other options, but it's telling that ex. pulumi uses TF providers)

> Most commentators view the licensing away from open source as a negative event. I’d like to argue that it is a milestone to celebrate. By licensing away the company signals that the product has achieved a mature state and that the help of an open source strategy is not needed any longer: The company has proved to the world that the software can be built and that the economy at large cares and thinks this software is a good idea. This is an important achievement!

The switch to rent-seeking mode can mean that they think they've succeeded, but actually it's more likely to mean that they've realized they aren't making enough money, so... no, even if we were willing to celebrate other people succeeding when that means them pulling the rug, it's not actually true.

> So close to getting it right... Consider the countercase, where the company says up front that the product is only open source temporarily. Would anyone use them? Maybe, but they'd have a way harder time getting any buy-in.

You cannot retroactively remove the open source license, so what the vendor is doing is to stop supporting and developing the open source version. If the software is relevant then, as we can see, those who can still exploit it for commercial purposes (hyperscalers and distributors) are likely to come in, fork it, and pay for its continuation.

No.

Hey David, is this a no to the "let's celebrate"?

Yes.

:-)

I was just thinking about this. I think LGPL was a great idea, but unfortunately, business rejected it, because contrary to free market ideology, they are interested in having control over their users (and don't want to show others their code).

But assume alternative timeline where LGPL is not rejected and sharing the source code with users of software becomes the norm, just like say, nutritional labels are the norm in the food industry. Then you could have a nice free market solution, where the commercial software (software done for money) would be available under LGPL and commercial license. To evaluate software, you use LGPL (because you can verify before you buy whether the software actually does what it says it does), and to buy and use the software commercially, you use the commercial license.

Compare this to today, where lot of components are under BSD license, so you can easily evaluate them, but you cannot sustain commercial operation around them, because you will get outcompeted by people writing the code for free.

I think Stallman has recognized (aside from his moral beliefs, let's just focus on pragmatic capitalism here) early on, that closing the source and code as a property are fundamentally incompatible. If you want to license somebody else's code, that is, treat it as private property, then you need to be able to evaluate it, and see its source. And he thought that companies, which are normally used to private property, will prefer clear licensing deals (i.e. they understand what they're buying) to having control over their users. Therefore the solution - dual LGPL and commercial licensing.

What he didn't thought of is that programmers will rather work for free (and fun) than punishing bad actors, which are the companies that close the source (to mislead their users). That's why we ended up in the world where BSD rules, but at the expense of private companies and properly maintained software.

What we see is capitalism failing, if the correct social controls of the property are not there (this actually goes into fundamental contradictions in capitalism, but let's put that aside). I think the government should mandate that everybody who provides software should also provide the source code (so that the software can be properly evaluated), and focus on enforcing proper licensing deals. This is what happens with other forms of "intellectual property" - patents, copyrights and trademarks all require that you disclose what you're selling before licensing it to someone.

Unfortunately, businesses largely reject free market in favor of screwing other people over. So the companies that wanted not to show the source code to their users (so they could sell more software) won, and it is at the long-term expense of having a functioning software market (and commercial companies themselves).

> I was just thinking about this. I think LGPL was a great idea, but unfortunately, business rejected it, because contrary to free market ideology, they are interested in having control over their users (and don't want to show others their code).

There is not just "one uniform business". Companies who use open source components in their products reject copyleft for obvious reasons. Other companies with a commercial open source strategy usually use copyleft to keep competitors away. The irony of the copyleft effect today is that it does close to the exact opposite of what Stallman wanted to achieve.

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