Hacker News Reader

Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations. Then for-profit corporations co-opted the "Open Source"(tm) label to ensure they could benefit from all this free labor. You and many others are falling for it, and doing their work for them by scolding OSS developers for "going against the OSS philosophy".

So screw this corporate "OSS philosophy", and stop telling people what they "should" do. Those licenses exist and people can use them and this is what happens. We can and should also make different licenses which protect our interests as developers and we don't need corporate shills invoking some philosophical argument to discourage us.

View on HN

> The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations

I beg to differ here. OSS and Free Software movement was conceived for the freedom to change the software to the user's needs. The entire meaning of free as is freedom means as long as I abide by the license properly, I can do whatever I want with it. Whether you like it or not, this means Microsoft can make money out of curl project if they want to. This is the same way we used to burn Ubuntu cd's and resell it back in the early 2000s. It's allowed and IIRC Ubuntu cd cover used to proudly advocate burning, sharing those cds.

This big tech and money in OSS is a new phenomenon. I am neither against them or with them. But just that it is not the reason why OSS or Free Software movement happened.

> the freedom to change the software to the user's needs.

How is this not exactly helping end-users? Corporations are producers, not users. And no one is complaining about MSFT or any other corporation using OSS as users, but only about co-opting it as a producer.

The license discussed above explicitly tries to prevent Microsoft from using the software.

The corporations _are_ end-users. They're just using a project to make adoption of their platform easier. Just because a user passes on the benefit of their usage to more than a single human doesn't mean they're not a user.

Sometimes corporations are end-users. When someone creates a fork of a project, they are no longer an end-user; they have become a producer.

OK. But that is allowed right? "Sharing" and "redistribute" are words you should have heard if you know what OSS. You are missing the whole point of Open Sourcing code. What you want is source available or proprietary software if you are bothered by this. And at that point, this has nothing to do with OSS.

This is literally why when a company stops open sourcing something, community or other company continues the fork. When a product fails as business and when open sourced, the software itself thrives.

Let me re-iterate, Open Source is purely about the software and the capability to share and make changes. IT IS NOT ABOUT MONEY, BUSINESS, CAPITALISM etc etc etc.

It is not even about collaboration. That is something that came out of Linux development which is one of the most famous Open Source project. All that is necessary is to make the software licensed under an OSS license. And I don't have to get PR from you, I don't need to accept outside collaboration etc etc.

> The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations

Citation needed here, if you're going to make such a bold claim.

The open source movement began as a counter to proprietary closed-source software, and nothing more. It has never been about "fairness" (however you define that) or about preventing anyone from profiting from OSS.

Now that said, fairness matters and I agree that some of what transpires today in the open source world doesn't feel fair.

But that's what new or difference licenses can accomplish, depending on the wants of the authors.

And that's different from the philosophy behind Open Source Software. We should be clear about that.

The GPL was "To prevent free code from being proprietarized" by for-profit corporations.

In addition the origin of Stallman's open source philosophy was a printer he couldn't use because of closed-source software. From the start it was about the rights of the users, not corporations.

https://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/

> In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs. While Stallman created the first Emacs in 1975, Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs (Gosling Emacs) running on Unix in 1982. Gosling initally allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code, which Stallman used in early 1985 in the first version (15.34) of GNU Emacs. Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and Gosling Emacs became UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman was forced to comply. He later replace these parts with his own code. (Emacs version 16.56). (See the Emacs Timeline) To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL.

The GPL and Free Software, yes. Open Source not so much. The term "open source" was originally coined to make Free Software more easily understandable to newbies. Pretty much right away, though, it was used to water down Free Software licenses to make them more palatable to businesses by selling the end users' freedom.

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

As someone else said GPL !== OSS.

> The GPL was "To prevent free code from being proprietarized" by for-profit corporations.

You are adding the "by for-profit corporations" here. That's not in the link you provided. Let's distinguish between what was actually said or meant, and your own personal interpretation or editorializing here.

In the GPL context "proprietarized" could apply to anyone. I could write and release proprietary code with restrictive usage limits, and I'm not a corporation. And the GPL wants to prevent me from doing that as well.

The right to see and modify the source code to the software you run is not restricted, or aimed at, individuals or corporations. I think the GPL's goals here are universal, meaning any entity should have those rights.

Which I think is a good thing. We agree on the ideals of free software here, I just think you're layering "for-profit corporations" on top of it in a manner that was never actually part of the philosophy, because it doesn't make those distinctions.

It can certainly be part of your philosophy, but be clear about that.

No. Free software was conceived to help end users. Open source was created to fight that and instead help megacorps take without giving anything back.

The point is what do creators want to get out of their open source project. If it is the opportunity to sell, they can make it source available. If they don't want money, having open source license is better as it could mean more contributions.

In practice it doesn't mean more contributions though. If MSFT used his project for profit and contributed back, he wouldn't be complaining. Instead they forked his project, without even sufficient attribution, and now he has to do even more work to differentiate his original project from their derivative.

So the point is that we need another license that does gives open source rights to individuals, yet does not permit corporations to take everything and give nothing.

> So the point is that we need another license that does gives open source rights to individuals, yet does not permit corporations to take everything and give nothing.

Why doesn't the AGPL fill that role?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com