Gumroad’s license wouldn’t meet the widely regarded definition of open source | Hacker News Reader

Gumroad’s license wouldn’t meet the widely regarded definition of open source

danb.me

122 pointsssddanbrown50 comments

Original discussion:

Gumroad’s source is available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580103 (380 points | 9 hours ago | 185 comments)

What a lovely and radioactive mess. While there's a definition for "your company," edge cases like contractors, consultants, or complex organizational structures might create ambiguity about who is bound by the limitations. The immediate termination for any patent claim could be overly broad, potentially triggering even for legitimate patent disputes tangentially related to the software. The prohibition on sublicensing could create problems for legitimate business arrangements, particularly for development agencies or consultancies.The provision allowing licensees to cure violations within 30 days is vague about what constitutes "practical steps" to correct past violations. The license doesn't clearly address the status of derivative works or modifications. While the license mentions adjusting for inflation using the CPI, it doesn't specify how often this should be calculated or who determines the adjusted thresholds, creating potential interpretation conflicts. There's no clear mechanism for monitoring or enforcing revenue thresholds. Good luck!

Note that the HN submission's title was changed to "Gumroad’s source is available" after it was screenshotted for this post.

Additionally, this submission's title was changed from "Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today" to "Gumroad’s license wouldn’t meet the widely regarded definition of open source"

For whatever reason. It was the original title and is descriptive. Are the mods having a bad day?

I'm not sure, maybe they don't want to take a hard stance on the issue either way (to indicate how open source is defined on HN). Dang has been receptive to input and updated (what I believed to be) misrepresenting "open source" titles in the past though.

This post also seemed to be thrown off the front page for some reason.

It's customary on HN to avoid a repetition of a topic that's already being actively discussed. The original post is still on the front page and the licensing issue is being heavily discussed there. I've linked to your post from that thread.

Ah, okay, thanks for explaining and cross-linking!

No worries!

Sure, but the title change is strange. I'd even say changing the meaning makes it outrage bait in the first place, because now HN has taken a stance, where before it was just the article author's opinion.

The title we changed it to is a verbatim sentence from the post (which is what we always try to do when we change a title), and thus is also/still the article author's opinion.

But with this title, the discussion can be drawn towards the question of whether the license would or wouldn’t meet the widely regarded definition of open source, rather than whether it meets each commenter’s own definition of open source, which would be a much less gratifying discussion.

NB: A subtitle is one option HN prefers, but there are other options, including lifting a line from the article itself. "Always" is too strong a qualifier.

(I've frequently suggested title changes to HN's mod team, I'm pretty familiar with this.)

And, just so readers don't have to take my word, here's dang on the topic:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29425675> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42679582>

Maybe they bought SPY calls yesterday

The way the license is written is similar to https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/

Open source licenses as they exist today aren’t sustainable to run a business. We’ve seen with the cloud providers how easy it is to launch a competitor if you don’t have protective licensing. Gumroad’s licensing is still small business friendly and protects another Gumroad clone from being launched.

For web services maybe. I don't see Amazon destroy the business of a desktop application.

I would argue it is possible to run a business and be sustainable on open source, it's just harder and is not so compatible with the growth that many want.

I don't have an issue with this kind of license being used where open source does not suit, but I don't think we should change/widen the definition of "open source" to suit the sustainability needs of those that open source isn't compatible with, at the impact of the freedoms and open rights it provides.

The problem is that if you're not already differentiably the best at hosting your service right when you launch, someone else that's better at hosting can just do it and take all your business.

And hosting while keeping your prices down is not just a whole different skill set, anyone that's already a big will have pricing deals with AWS so they will beat you even if you host in the exact same way.

It's probably less differentiable in the case of something like Gumroad which is less likely to have big scaling problems, but for things like a distributed database, you run a serious risk of someone who is paying AWS half of what you are per compute hour just deploy the Helm chart and undercut you completely.

Can you name some?

I've been sustaining myself for a couple of years now on my open source project (BookStack). Still going in a positive direction.

Other than that, some that come to mind: Proxmox, Opnsense, SnipeIT, GitLab, Canonical, Codeweavers/wine, Plausible, Home-assistant/open-home-foundation/NabuCasa, FreeBSD Foundation, Laravel, Blender, Godot.

Within there is a whole mix of business plans, some offer hardware, some are open core, some offer related paid services, some offer hosting, some offer support etc...

Thank you!

Which is fine. Not everything needs to be defined to be suitable for businesses. It's even fine for things to be defined to be explicitly not suitable for a business.

> Gumroad’s licensing is still small business friendly and protects another Gumroad clone from being launched.

That's fine and dandy, but that doesn't inhibit me from rewriting the code from scratch and creating a clone myself by just matching Gumroad's existing feature matrix.

RoadGum.py, here I come!

It seems to me what they are really doing is offering a free self-hosting license to businesses that make less than a given amount in sales.

This allows them to offer a free "plan" without incurring the hosting costs of providing the service.

If you want to use something that is currently approved by the OSI, but at the same time is crafted to drive revenue, you can use the AGPL.

IMO this is a losing battle. Regardless of good intentions, the term "open source" is simply not descriptive enough to carry connotations about licensing. To the layman all it means is that the source is open (accessible to the public). IMO the OSI would be better off coming up with a more clear term and popularizing that rather than trying to convince everyone that their restrictive definition of "open source" is the one true definition.

Don't get me wrong. I think OSI's approach to open source is admirable. I think there should be a useful term to describe what they currently call "open source" and I think projects which use those licenses should be celebrated. I just don't think they're going to win the battle for the term "open source" in the long term.

> To the layman all it means is that the source is open (accessible to the public).

I disagree. To the layman I think "open source" means "I can use it for free". Which in this case may not be true depending on your employer and whether this is a good revenue year or not.

I think OSI's definition is well thought out, widely understood, and regularly referenced. We should continue using it.

> I think OSI's definition is well thought out, widely understood, and regularly referenced

I agree it is well thought out, but I strongly disagree that it is widely understood and regularly referenced. By the kind of folks who frequent HN maybe, but not by the industry at large - and definitely not by most people outside the industry.

Ah the eternal debate between open source and Open Source.

The owner of Gumroad is a millionaire, but for some reason decided to crank up the cost of charges from 2.9% to 12.9% a few years ago. Needless to say, most people who don’t like being screwed switched to Stripe or another provider. That’s all you need to know about Gumroad.

How much does Stripe and typical other providers charge?

Stripe charges 2.9% (plus a fixed transaction fee).

https://stripe.com/pricing

Stripe is 2.9% + 30¢, I think most of the popular providers are pretty competitive with that. Gumroad does handle some hosting and analytics and stuff though, its not just a payment processor afaik.

2.9% + 30 cents

Given they're a merchant of records, cost of compliance increased, mainly thanks to europe (that seems to have as a mission to ruin working people' lives as much as possible).

Stripe + Lemon Squeezy was a competitor.

Paddle is a competitor (which I use precisely to avoid having to deal with worldwide regulations) and they charge around 5%.

Gumroad also gives you a marketplace so there's some extra value.

I pay 25% for another marketplace, so 13% is not that crazy if they can bring you traffic.

I mean Stripe has gotten bazillions in VC money allowing it to take huge losses in order to grow to its point.

Gumroad is tiny and does not have the economies of scale of Stripe, without knowing their financials this does not say anything at all.

As a marketplace platform, it’s still lower than Apple/Google/Valve’s 30% cut. You pay for distribution, security, pre-integrations, shopping cart and other capabilities if you don’t want to do your own software development.

Again with the pointless discussion about what the "widely regarded definition of open source" is. The source is there. That's it.

The term "open source" was coined for a specific meaning, and codified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

Destroying the meaning of words is an activity for Orwellian villains.

Although OSI claims that they coined the term, there's irrefutable proof that the term was already in-use well before that. Originally, "open source" just meant "source available": https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part...

I coined it today to mean something else. There is no reason to take someone's meaning of a word for gospel.

IMO the distinction is important; it tells me, broadly, what I can and cannot do with the source code.

Heck, the .NET Framework source has been available for eons (referencesource.microsoft.com), but you can't go compile it and build your own .NET Framework distro (Mono is a different story).

there was some guy on hackernews whose post I had read who had actually compiled .net entirely from source.

Like the issue I think becomes that .net itself was written in .net and so you needed the earlier proprietary versions right?

But Gnu also had a .net compiler and he had actually used it on guix (basically like nix) to really create sort of reproducible .net , I am sure that some reader of this comment will attach the post on which I am talking

I believe this was https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2024/adding-a-fully-bootstrappe.... It was submitted to HN but only got a few comments.

"open source" has been defined by the OSI since decades and this does not fit that definition.

I don't really mind whether it fits someone else's definition really.

> That's it.

No, that's not it. What you can do with the source code is just as important as the source code being available.

Then call it a new term. Don't change the definition of existing words. An open door isn't an invitation to change it, or to use it for free. It's just an open door and you can look inside.

> The source is there. That's it.

No, that's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

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