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Comment by amrocha | Hacker News Reader

You’re living in theoretical fantasy land.

Yeah, it’d be great if everything was open source and everyone was happy.

But that’s not really what happens. Redis and Elastic are popular exactly because there’s entire companies behind it constantly maintaining it, securing it, and adding features.

If you want use open source software at your job that’s a hard requirement. No, you can’t use “MySillyKeyValueCache” that Timmy develops in his free time with no security or compatibility concerns.

Companies cost money to run. Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support. This is what you should be really mad about. The internet giants are literally killing open source.

If they have their way you’ll be stuck with their proprietary software. In practice AWS is already there.

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> Companies cost money to run. Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support.

I don’t understand this take, if Google/AWS/Microsoft decide to host your service and some vulnerabilities are discovered then you got free Security Research done, your product would either have remained vulnerable or someone else would have filed the same bug.

You own the code so you can decide only certain people can commit PRs and can choose to close any feature requests issues.

If one of the cloud providers decided to use your product it’s because they deemed it reasonable as is or they can fork / contribute upstream.

That is what OSS is, by definition.

Hell you can post the code with a license like MIT and then never touch it again, and if someone else can monitise that code kudos to them.

If you are an existing company and open sourced your code, Facebook/react, then you presumably already make enough money to support development yourself or intend to stop development.

If you open source code that is your core business and somebody “steals your lunch” your learnt an important lesson and hopefully won’t make the same mistake twice. If you then decide to relicense and the community abandons you and causes uproar on the internet you are reaping the rewards of your actions, accept them.

Look, in principle I don’t disagree with anything you said.

However, I think OSS is a net positive to the industry, and would like to see it remain that way.

The classic way to monetize OSS has been to provide hosting and support for a price.

Now the internet giants are taking that entire pie for themselves.

If we agree that we want OSS to be a viable option going forward, and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project, then what do you suggest be done?

> and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project

Therein lies our disagreement, you don’t need to. If you are amazon and upstream is willing to accept requests then amazon can hire devs, and if someone eats their cake then those devs will eventually migrate to the new location.

As someone who did the initial work for OSS I put the code out there, if I dislike the direction a fork is taking I can ignore said fork and keep working on my own version, why do I need to use the version they are using.

It boils down to why did you even start an OSS project, if the intention was to make money or hire other employees you fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.

If you made a project that serves your own need, decide someone else may benefit so you publish it as FOSS online and it gets massive traction how does that change your need, you probably have no reason to make it commercially viable, it is still serving the same need it always has for you.

Now if it gets forked and the fork proves to be of better quality and still serves your need then switch to the fork for your own personal need and now someone else is doing the maintenance, so you end up being the “freeloader”.

And I’ve already discussed the “burden on the maintainer”, if it’s such an issue close access to issues and pull requests. No more burden.

If Amazon had to do enough maintenance work they’d just fork it and do it on their own proprietary version. They have literally done that.

This goes back to my original point. You’re living in fantasy land.

I don’t see the problem with that. Good for them. How does that affect you?

What exactly is the nature of this fantasyland? I have to have said I wanted or expected something for that to make any sense. You make silly claims based on nothing. That is not an argument.

In fact it's the other way around. Expecting to enjoy both the benefits of OSS and the benefits of collecting rent at the same time for the same thing is the fantasyland.

The fork is typically closed source so you do not get to benefit from it and neither does the public good.

This of course means that you should never use permissive licensing since it doesn’t provide many key benefits of what people thought oss would do. You could use copyleft but i guess with llms it kinda amounts to the same

The issue is that hyperscalers will not host your product. They will fork it, close source it, and you get no benefit not even security research.

And if you use copyleft, nobody uses your product (or asks flr a commercial non FOSS license)

You confuse open source with a permissive open license.

Then sell software. I said that first thing. Where is the fantasy in that?

If you don't understand it such that you think it's a fantasy (despite the ocean of existing software as proof that is produced, and countless published manifestos from people who do it describing why they do), well that's a you problem not a me or anyone else problem.

You don't get it, that's fine, then simply don't get it, and don't participate in this activity you think is insane.

You are free to have any opinion you want about what constitutes a rational use of your time and effort.

But don't pretend you understand something that the participants do not understand. We're all eating non-fantasy food just fine, somehow.

If they try to sell their software, by your own admission, you won't consume it. That's the point. The fantasy is the idea that some of these open-source products would even work as a closed-source proprietary business model.

Then don't try to sell it. Or make something else that people can't live without and are willing to pay for and can't just pay themselves to write an equivalent instead of paying rent to you forever, whatever, what's it to me or anyone else?

Do whatever you want but it's no one else's problem if you can't figure out what.

Ya got no argument here.

I disagree with you on a lot, but you're bang on the money here.

If you want a business, build a business. One key aspect of building a business is understanding what your IP and trade secrets are, how they affect your bottom line, and then controlling them appropriately.

The point is that if there was no business behind projects like Redis and ElasticSearch you wouldn’t be using them either. You’d be using some random Microsoft or Oracle product.

I’m guessing you don’t want that either, so come up with a way to make sure Redis has the financial support it needs to hire engineers to do the full time work that part time contributors like us don’t want to.

The point is I don't have to come up with any such thing.

It is not true that if redis didn't exist then I'd be using some MS or Oracle product. I might, if it was practical. Or someone might have invented redis, or I might if that was a space that still needed filling and somehow no one else did it.

It's like saying if linux didn't exist we'd all be using NT.

That's completely ridiculous. No we would not. BSD already existed and if not that then a minix clone or someone else would have started some other unix clone. There were several small unix clones and other full OS's made by completely small developer teams by then, even single people, commercially. If a single guy can do it at all (regardles that they were doing it to sell), it means the job is not infinitely big and so perfectly doable by a few self-motivated volunteers, especially given how that kind of work has no deadline.

Except "volunteer" is the wrong word because they aren't some kind of weird saint doing something just for you or me. They are doing it for themselves, and you get to have it too.

Everything is like that. Redis is no different. There is nothing magic about redis. Things exactly like that get created when the need for them arises every day. If redis didn't exist is a nonsense invalid premis because 12 redis-alikes will always exist any time the need for it exists. It doesn't matter that I didn't already do it muyself, and I don't have to now either, and that is not just beacause redis happens to exist.

This goes back to my original point. You’re living in fantasy land.

In reality, that’s not how it works. If to use Redis your company had to assign someone to do maintenance work then you just wouldn’t be allowed to use Redis. And yes, you would be using MS Redis, because none of the clones would be secure and supported enough for you to feel good using them.

So what? What do I care if some company does not use redis or any other piece of software?

> Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support. This is what you should be really mad about. The internet giants are literally killing open source.

They would have to publish their changes if those projects used copyleft licences. Copyleft licences don't force to "contribute back", but they force disclosing the changes, that the community can then benefit from.

I like copyleft licenses!

But they don’t solve the problem of cloud providers pulling the rug out from under companies based on open source companies.

Not sure I understand your message. If you have a copyleft licence without a CLA, then the copyright is distributed between all the contributors, which makes it almost impossible to change the licence. And because it is copyleft, it means that the sources need to be distributed to the users.

So TooBigTech can build a service upon a copyleft project, but they have to distribute their changes, which means that the community can benefit from them. One example I learned about here is Grafana: AWS did not want to use their AGPL version so apparently they pay Grafana to get a commercial licence. That's of course possible only because Grafana own the copyright of the whole codebase. It wouldn't be possible with Linux, for instance, where nobody has the power to give a commercial licence and therefore it is GPLv2 for everybody.

It doesn't prevent TooBigTech from competing by serving the open source project, but that is more of an antitrust issue, I think.

Gotcha, I see what you’re saying.

I didn’t know about Grafana. That sounds awesome.

Maybe you’re right about this being an antitrust issue though.

Copyleft are sadly unclear legally which is why essentially no company uses copyleft licenses even if they should.

I mean the intend of apgl is exactly right, but in practice it means you can never ever use it in a company even if you really do not even want to change it or sell it or host it in isolation in any way.

That is really frustrating. Most internal licensing tools i have seen just literally blacklist any direct copyleft imports

> Copyleft are sadly unclear legally

Do you really mean copyleft, or do you mean the GPL family?

What about MPL and EUPL? I have heard the legal issues with GPL, never for MPL and EUPL.

Essentially yes. While weak copyleft would be fine for the use cases i have seen, the distinction and the licenses have yet to be tested in a EU court.

As a a consequence there are a numbers of legal options on the matter and as a consequence to that, it is a very hard no from most compliance deps i have seen

There is no problem to solve because there is no rug to pull out. Redis are not owed anything and no one stole anything from them.

When I try to make a business hosting copies of an http server, I am not pulling the rug out from under nginx who actually wrote the http server.

And when AWS does that better and than me, they are not pulling any rug out from under me, or at least not in any way that is special to any of the software involved, just plain old bigger businesses vs little businesses, no different than say Safelite vs Joe the Glass Guy.

Ok friend, when you come up with a business model to support OSS that doesn’t get destroyed by the internet giants let me know.

No one needs to come up with anything. OSS is already just fine. I don't know what you want, but it seems to be something you never had any right to, and no one needs to come up with anything to satisfy it.

It’s easy to say everyone else is wrong but the majority of innovation and new projects nowadays are coming from people wanting to do oss while still supporting a business with it. That is having it be more than a hobby.

Now you can say that this itself is already a misunderstanding and maybe you are right, but I think you forget also that software reality has changed and indeed there was a time when oss fulltime was viable.

Now the reality is that there is no business model other than closed source or oss with some inevitable rug pull of some sort.

And that is not what should be

Everyone else is not wrong, and I did not say they were, and so any argument you try based on that is already voided nonsense before you start.

Some people are wrong. It's easy to say that because it has always been true for everything in the world. This topic is no different.

If you want to suggest that you are not wrong, or that I am, you have to present an argument that holds water for that, not anything else.

No one owes anyone a business selling OSS, not even the author of said OSS. If you write something that you want to make money selling, then you are not interested in participating in OSS. That's it. Full stop.

Sell your software honestly.

"But I can't if it's not..." So what? Ok then don't sell it. It's no one else's problem that you have a misguided notion of why OSS exists and what it is good for and why one should spend any time or effort contributing to it.

All the other wailing and crying stems from bullshit you never had any right to in the first place. Not just legally or technically but morally and common-sensely.

> "But I can't if it's not..." So what? Ok then don't sell it.

Interestingly, when it's coming from TooBigTech, apparently they're happy to say "But we can't make viable LLMs if we don't abuse copyright" (yes, they said it). And apparently it works.

Not that I disagree with your point, though: nobody is owed a business selling OSS.

llm vendors are violating copyright. I don't know what that has to do with this conversation.

I find this interesting. In your view, who should produce oss and under what circumstances? Is sustainability of oss anything you worry about?

Anyone who wants to, for a variety of reasons. No it is not.

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