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FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.

What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom. Nowhere in "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" does it say "and we should be able to pay a few developers a salary for their work towards that fundamentally ethical goal". Under the original paradigm and goals, any income streams are just cream on top of doing the right thing.

According to the OSI's history of itself [0], at some point people got it into their heads that the open development model was inherently a good one for business, too—Netscape jumped on board, and then some people got together and decided to rebrand Free Software:

> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.

The word FOSS reminds me a lot of American corporate Buddhism—mindfulness and meditation totally removed from its original deeply religious context and turned into some sort of self-help program, with the result being something that would be barely recognizable to the original practitioners. Free Software was never about sustainable development. It was about doing the right thing—enabling user freedom—because it is right. Everything else was just means to that end, but at some point along the line the means became the end and we started wondering why FOSS wasn't paying the bills like it was supposed to.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

> FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.

This seems an interesting point and one I share. Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that we now see. It's time the "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" be updated to something like 'users and makers should be free of coercion and exploitation by software.' What, after all, are the grounds for such freedoms? Are they issues of property? Or are they ones of the dignity of the persons involved? It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another uses us as means to their ends without our consent. In personal actions, many act as if they believe this. Yet corporations consistently do not act with those values. You're right: we should strive toward a system not in which it's viable to create businesses out of FOSS but in which both users and developers are not exploited or used unwillingly.

>Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that we now see.

If someone uses and benefits from your product, at what point does it become "unethical extractivism"? If I as an individual figure out a way to build a business centered around your product that you make for free, is that already unethical, or is it at a later point?

>It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another uses us as means to their ends without our consent.

But you gave your consent by publishing software for anyone to use.

> What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom.

This actually illustrates the key flaw in Stallman's understanding. To him, "user" encompassed both humans and megacorporations. But a corporation is an abstract legal convenience, cannot feel the pain of being "thwarted" in its use of software, and thus, want freedom. Freedom is only an ethical good for humans.

Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself. Encouraging otherwise borders on encouraging exploitation.

tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time, and encouraging THAT is unethical.

Well, stallman would probably advocate for the AGPL in such cases, which the megacorps are still wary of.

Stallman's reasoning wasn't flawed (at least, not in the respect you state). Corporations are simply a group of humans. I don't think there's a good argument to be made that humans should have a right to X, but suddenly lose that right when they get together as a group.

> Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself.

Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor". People are making an effort to put something out there for the benefit of the entire human race, and if that includes corporations that's fine. Not one person is harmed if Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a profit, even if they make it into closed source. My project remains freely available for the benefit of all, just as it was before Amazon used it. So who exactly has been harmed? Not me, I'm in the same state as I was before. Not my (non-Amazon) users, they are in the same state as they were before. Not Amazon, of course. If every single person is no worse off or even better off than before, I don't see how you can argue that the corporate users are doing something unethical. It seems to me that really this isn't about ethics, but is about "we don't like those icky people" masquerading in pretty sounding language.

> tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time...

Nobody should go broke to make open source software, period.

Fully agreed. This attitude—that someone making money off my freely published work is somehow hurting me—was, I think, best captured by the inimitable Matt Mullenweg in his response to DHH [0]:

> DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others.

There's a certain type of open source maintainer that is in it for the money—in it to "capture value"—and those people see it as a personal affront if someone else "captures" more "value" from their project than they do. This is not a healthy way to approach life, and it's not an effective way to approach free software. It's especially not an effective way to approach Open Source, which rolls back the GPL's copyleft provisions and makes it very explicit that you're doing this work for the collective benefit of everyone, including people who want to make proprietary stuff on top.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20241014235025/https://ma.tt/2024...

> So who exactly has been harmed?

Society, because your free work gives big tech the continuous headstart to focus on bottom line and forget about externalities. Look at current society and how much everyone is cranking their tech out fast as possible, including free software folks who start coding on the first hint of an idea. Starting hobby, then comes popularity and subsequently big tech adoption (read: harvesting of low-hanging fruit) so they can do more of their thing: ruthless value extraction.. from society. We are not talking healthy circular money flows, big tech is billionaire class leaning stuff, imho.

> Corporations are simply a group of humans.

This is incorrect, and it's obvious with even a little bit of reflection.

Corporations are effectively unkillable, for starters. No corporate charter has been revoked since the 19th c. iirc.

Corporations cannot be jailed, for another, and extend their limited liability protection to the people under their umbrella. So corporations have way more latitude to commit crimes and escape punishment than a human.

Corporations lack human morality. In fact, if you believe in fiduciary duty, corporations can, and have been, sued for failing to pursue profit above all else. In a corporation, this is "good"; in a human, this is psychopathic. And the humans making these decisions enjoy diffusion of accountability.

In fact, this distinction between humans and corporations was well understood back in the day; it wasn't until court decisions like Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad, that the fiction of corporate "personhood" really took off.

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> Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor".

That's literally what FOSS used by AWS is. Unless Amazon employs you, they didn't pay for it. You might not personally mind it, but it's still unpaid labor by definition.

> Not one person is harmed if Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a profit, even if they make it into closed source.

Again, your personal opinions are not universally shared. Lots of people are trying to do FOSS, pay their bills at the same time, and don't want to work for a FAANG. They're most definitely harmed by free-riders who could be paying, like AWS.

Even worse, I suspect that all the free hobbyist FOSS labor artificially depresses dev salaries, hurting everyone else. Otherwise, the FAANGs would have to hire people to replicate what they currently get for free.

So while it's fun, and I certainly do my own fair share of FOSS, I'd prefer a completely different license environment. Honestly, I'd love to see a switch to noncommercial/commercial distinction. I'm not sure AGPL/commercial dual-licensing cuts it.

> I suspect that all the free hobbyist FOSS labor artificially depresses dev salaries, hurting everyone else. Otherwise, the FAANGs would have to hire people to replicate what they currently get for free.

The way I see it, FOSS enables a ton of smaller entities to launch products when they would not have the capital otherwise (see: anything built on Django). Those represent a lot of jobs too! This could be the software version of the Jevons Paradox.

Megacorp are a different problem. They do contribute back to the commons, but this seems like a drop from the bucket of the quintillion dollars they represent. Is it fair? That's a moral judgement, because software being FOSS means its legal in any case.

This is a good line of thinking, and you're right that smaller entities get the benefit of software they couldn't otherwise afford.

Of course, a more directly equitable arrangement would be a software co-operative. If prices are tied to usage, then everyone should be able to afford to fund a FOSS project's development at whatever level they can bear.

Eventually-open-source commercial licenses are already a bit like this, in that those who can pay, do so, and those who want it for free, can still get it, albeit delayed by a couple years. Ditto for projects that are funded by bounties, where only funders get access up to some dollar amount, after which it's FOSS to all.

Sometimes I wish I could upvote twice in replies like this.

Many open source developers has misread the room and thinking the environment is still like it was 15~20 years ago where open source software were the works of hobbyists who has a well-paid day job and only here for street credit.

You know who read the room correctly? GitLab. They've found a balanced way to offer their product under an open source scheme while keeping their lights on. They've earned trust as well as income, that's a job well done.

If one wants to live off of their open source work, then they need to run it as a business and perform appropriate business tricks. Otherwise their own effort may one day become their own rip-off. Not saying anything sinister, but fairness is a balancing game, if you hard work don't treat you well, then it's unfair too.

GitLab has collected a few severe CVEs. I would choose "v4 final final actually final" folders as a versioning scheme before I used them. It is surprising to me that they have any users at all.

What does that have to do with whether it's a successful business?

GitLab isn't profitable yet, at least on a GAAP basis. They're definitely moving in that direction, and I hope they'll get there, but IMO it's a bit early to put them on a pedestal.

Copyleft licenses are supposed to prevent to an extent this sort of free riding, but they are no longer "fashionable".

I don't see the point of refusing to add additional (copyleft) terms to a license, only to end up hoping companies act as if the terms existed out of good will.

Companies like Google love the permissive licenses, and go as far as to sponsor MIT/BSD-licensed replacements to common building blocks like toybox.

EDIT: I see that Forgejo v9+ is indeed GPL-licensed.

I agree that copyleft is less fashionable these days, but I think big companies have figured out all the tricks they need.

Case in point: Amazon offers a hosted Grafana service, which is AGPL. They may not be able to meaningfully change the code in secret, but they can still impoverish the actual Grafana creators trying to sell Grafana as a service.

I released a tiny toy fun project under the GPL. It’s the kind of thing that no one could possible want to monetize, but the first PR was someone pleading the case that I should relicense to something more friendly, like MIT. I’d never before been so instantly tempted to ban someone from a project.

How exactly does that apply? What's the "corporate welfare" here? Almost nobody is profiting off Gitea, especially not big tech. I know using the big tech boogeyman is useful to justify open source projects rugpulling on their licenses, but it doesn't even apply here. Not that it usually makes sense[0], but in this case it's not even something that the maintainers themselves ever alluded to.

[0] projects like MongoDB, ElasticSearch or Redis only became popular because they were OSS, and probably limited competition for years simply because competing with free is hard. only to then switch on their users years further down the line. So any money that they ever got was due to them being OSS in the first place since absolutely nobody would've used MongoDB 1.0 if it was a commercial product.

FOSS is a distribution strategy, not a business model.

> Regardless, it looks like exhibit #187 of FOSS failing for anyone outside of hobbyists and FAANGs.

Forks that survive after splitting off are cases of FOSS succeeding, not failing. Failing would mean closing down, in this case it's replicating with changes, we (the public) are getting even more options.

The idea behind choosing a license like MIT is that people can create forks from your work, requiring not much more than attribution. If what the license calls out as valid is considered a failure in your eyes, don't choose a license like MIT.

This paints it as if Gitea was not a fork of Gogs specifically to turn a profit out of something they did not make on their own. I might be more sympathetic if they'd created Gitea, but given it's a fork of another project, it looks a lot like they're playing the same game that beat them.

I don’t think this is quite correct. Gitea was a community fork of Gogs, because Gogs was limited by its single maintainer, who was often unresponsive for months. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296717

In a way that makes it worse. A community fork that is repurposed by a select few to make money off of work that those few did not do for the most part.

It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them).

FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.

So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.

What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.

The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open Source what it is.

And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.

It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.

But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.

A regular user who just downloads a build and runs it on their system (i.e. the most common use case, because it's the one that takes the least effort) also doesn't share anything. Why is it worse if a company does the exact same thing?

Are you purposefully playing dumb or what? If you don't see how the answer is obvious, I'm afraid nothing I say is going to make you change your mind.

Okay, thank you for confirming you have no answer.

Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics. Legality doesn’t imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this was about legality, people would say so.

Then why is there not a file outlining the ethical expectations, alongside the legal agreement? The companies using the products have no way of reading the developers' minds regarding expectations of reciprocity.

The idea really isn't so far fetched, lots of projects today have non-legal outlines of expectations of community members. For a single example, codes of conduct are very common.

I don’t think this is a discussion about what the project owners specifically expect ethically (users would be free to disagree), but about what we collectively find to be ethical or unethical in this space. If there is disagreement about the ethicality, then one party having it written down doesn’t change anything about the disagreement. And there is nothing that binds one party to submit to the other party’s notion of ethicality, unless you turn it into a legal matter by making it part of the license.

Again, this thread is about whether we as a society, or as the software development community at large, consider the behavior ethical or not. It is not about the specific open source developer imposing specific rules.

> They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.

Please, quit the cheap sophistry.

Evolution doesn't intend or plan anything for us, and you will have a very hard time convincing people that we would be better off living in a tribal/clan society than whatever we have today.

Evolution intends in the sense that it follows an abstract fitness function. I didn't think I'd have to explain that here. I know how to implement evolution algorithmically.

And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over ideological differences all the time. Political parties are tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes. Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are tribes.

We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if we're talking about a cluster of people.

A tribe assumes a strict hierarchy and mobility only though power and violence.

I can agree with you about the issue of societies failing to organize themselves past a certain scale, but this is not a problem with "Capitalism".

Fair, I used a very loose definition then.

My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts: that profit is the driving force behind action; that short term effects are prioritized over long term ones; and that global markets operate at a scale that does not allow individuals to have any real agency in their environment due to the points outlined in the previous comment.

It just fosters the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be according to my understanding of the conditions in which we thrive.

i.e. it turns people into selfish venal assholes and it destroys our chances at a better future with each passing day

Perhaps I'm also using a wrong definition of anarchy then. But it's honestly the closest label I know for this concept. A less centralized society.

But profit _is_ the driving force of human action. Doing anything voluntarily is by definition profitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it.

This smears out the definition of profit beyond usefulness.

I can pretty much guarantee hunter-gatherers hunt to not starve, children play for sheer joy, and nobody's thinking of profit.

There are better psychological/anthropological terms to apply to human drives than calling them "profitable". That's weird economist thinking, trying to bring everything under their purview.

Worse, it’s an attempt to get us to agree that humans only do things for profit, in order to advance an ideology and make our thought more malleable when an author turns around and starts writing about public policy and ethics applied to things that actually are about profit.

At least that’s what is going on when the schools of “thought” this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This particular poster might not be. But usually it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present themselves as simply following logic. Gross.

"My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts", then you go on to describe things that are not exclusive to Capitalism AT ALL.

Again, please quit the cheap sophistry.

> the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be

Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a college sophomore who is sure has a solution to all of humanity's problems...

> turns people into selfish venal assholes

... and can only assign blame on others.

I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about what you would do if you were given enough power over any "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about imposing your view over everyone than ensuring your small community can prosper and be happy.

"then you go on to describe things that are not exclusive to Capitalism AT ALL."

Why are they required to be exclusive? If I said that uncontrolled train crossings lead to more train crashes, would you retort that train crashes aren't exclusive to uncontrolled crossings?

> Why are they required to be exclusive?

They are not required to be exclusive, but it would require that we can establish cause and effect.

If you tell me that your "issue with Capitalism" is that "we have people driven by profit/greed and wealth is unevenly distributed", but a quick look through history tells you we can always find "people driven by personal gain and wealth inequality", then what does "Capitalism" has to do with it?

"A quick look through history" is what I'd expect from someone who skims over a book and completely misses the point because they think they know it all.

Indeed I gave you three constraints but you're only looking at one independently.

When else in history were markets global? Why am I arguing with someone who can't even read?

> When else in history were markets global?

Right, so the fundamental issue is that we are living in a globalized world, which reduces any room for nuance and imposes an uniform and homogenized culture, top-down policy-making, and a totalitarian approach by the ruling class.

Thing is, this would still be our reality regardless of the economic system. Globalism would be a problem even if the Soviet Union had won the cold war.

We would still be subjected to uniform culture, top-down policy-making and totalitarianism.

The people would still be acting by their own personal interests.

People would still favor short term benefits over long term prosperity.

So, again: what does Capitalism has to do with it?

> I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about what you would do if you were given enough power over any "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about imposing your view over everyone than ensuring your small community can prosper and be happy.

Damn, you sound very angry for someone who is having a calm discussion on the internet. More importantly, you seem to be assuming a lot of stuff about me but we've never met. And you have no clue about how much of it is right.

So please just, kindly, shut up. You look like an ass.

I'm sympathetic to some of what you're saying, and I believe the original hacker ethos spurred some of the original FS impulses, but...

FOSS licenses don't, and can't, embody anarchism (or any socialism) because they make no distinction between humans and capital-holding entities, lumping them all under the term "users".

Which megacorporation abused Gitea here? And how?