AGPL will stop Amazon. It won't stop WP Engine.
There needs to be a license that enables your customers to use you freely, but not your competitors from reselling your hard work.
If you want to protect your project from being resold by potential competitors, do not release it as open source.
I think this problem might solve itself, though. Slowly but surely, companies and power users have become very wary of VC funded companies making big promises and big open source releases, with the knowledge that there is rarely a plan for sustainability and that there is a good chance if they stand on that rug it could be pulled later. Soon, if trends continue, the advantages that you once got from announcing something as open source will start to evaporate and turn into a liability as people start seeing ahead to the eventual "but of course we have to be able to monetize this eventually" stage.
The way I see it, a project can always be open sourced later on once there's a way to do it and ensure the company can remain sustainable. For the flagship product of a company, especially a VC-funded company, not starting open source is the ethical thing to do.
I can't even..
Seriously, I don't understand where your argument is coming from. Because, if you look at it from the greater good perspective, commercial open-source is one of the only venues to build high quality software that can be freely self-hosted, modified and built-upon. Yet, you basically push for people building closed source software, due to what I understand is dogmatic believe of what open-source should mean.
> If you make a license that actually discriminates on user or use case, then it's not open source.
Based on a definition, bought and sponsored by the hyperscaler lobbies. Why the hell would discriminating against hyperscaller selling the product makes it non "open-source". 99.9999% users of open-source are not hyperscaler wanting to host and sell the product and will get value from the project.
Secondly, you can call it whatever you want but "open source" licenses that discriminate against user and use case are useless. Even if I just want to use something like a data structure implementation from your "open source" release in some unrelated project, I now have to inherit all of this baggage about your competitors. That just doesn't make any sense. The endgame of that is an ecosystem of open source that ultimately serves absolutely nobody except for maybe startup PR needs.
We self-host n8n, which by definition not open-source, and love it. It serves us. Not just n8n PR. That is the case for almost all self served products for non-commercial reasons
On the other hand, I think you can release shared source and closed source software that is still plenty useful and beneficial. For example, I am a very big fan of how Unreal Engine is licensed. Yes, it isn't "open source" and it isn't marketed as such. You can't take Unreal Engine components and go use them elsewhere even if you're not competing with Epic Games. Still, they provide some extremely powerful and useful software free of charge to basically all independent game developers. I think that's fantastic.
But that's all aside from what open source is. Unreal Engine isn't open source and it doesn't do anything for the open source ecosystem. Which is fine, because the entire world doesn't revolve around open source.
You seem to believe that we shouldn't create closed source software but at the same time directly advocating for it—that's what it is that's what you're describing. If you want a more practical and less idealistic reason why it sucks when software companies prevent people like AWS from using their software, it's because the actual users of your software, the customers of AWS, wish to pay AWS to host it for them. They would like to hire the lovely folks who work at AWS to host and manage the software for them and the license prevents that. You are preventing your users from doing what they want with the software. And that's the rub, that's why it's important to not discriminate based off of use.
That just isn't going to work anymore.
The hyperscalers know this and they want you to keep building software this way. They'll write a managed version of your thing and collect all your money.
Fair source would be "customers can use this in an unlimited way as long as they don't sell a managed version".
That's what we need to do. Carve out the ability to make money for the originators doing the work.
Open source has turned us all into serfs working on giant kingdoms we don't own.
NOTE ALSO, the OSI has been so corporate captured that their definition of open source AI is not at all open. You shouldn't trust them at all.
So much this. If Open Source is a marketing term then companies are free to call whatever they do "Open Source" and the term becomes meaningless. You may as well call the software "Free Range".
On the other hand if Open Source is a defined thing, built around a specific definition, and the 4 freedoms, and so on, (hint: it is) then the marketing term could lead you places you don't want to go.
So there's a generation of programmers who want to "redefine" Open Source to suit their preferences. Dilute the definition until it's meaningless. I'm strongly against this.
To be clear everyone is welcome to use any license, with any restriction they like. But if it doesn't conform to the OSI definition don't call it Open Source.
Stop trying to turn a technical specification into a generic marketing term.
It's already gone.
OpenAI, OpenArt, OpenWeb, OpenSea, OpenGov
The OSI is fucked too. The OSI definition of "open source AI" is horrible as you can't replicate or easily modify the systems without the data and tooling that the OSI definition doesn't require.
If AI eats software and the OSI definition of "open" AI wins, then we've already been captured by big business marketing.
Fast forward a few decades and it turns out you no longer can because any software you build in this way will be used by Amazon and they will earn the money, not you. From this PoV, pure OSS is almost hurting web-based software ecosystem development.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
> Free software can be commercial
> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.
What Amazon has done is of course bad for a lot of kinds of businesses like Elastic, but neither open source nor free software is about business models or how software development can be sustainable. For obvious reasons the perspective of VC-funded startups is overrepresented and overrated here of all places, but outside this space nobody cares. You license out your software to a community in hopes that it will help your business, and it might; you can get your software into package managers and Linux distributions easier if it is OSI/DFSG approved. The fact is, it's not a bug that this allows Amazon to go and use it and monetize it. Amazon uses and monetizes Linux and associated projects every single day, and it is ultimately beneficial to Linux and many open source projects. Best I can say is maybe you could argue Amazon can abuse their market position to compete unfairly with others, but that is truly irrespective of software licensing.
So what I make of this is simple: you shouldn't open source your flagship product unless your business model has a robust way to remain sustainable. In doing so, you are making a gamble that nobody else can monetize it better than you. Using an unfair CLA to trick people into contributing to a product that you already know with near certainty will be eventually closed source is just a dick move, and not knowing any better than to avoid this circumstance is negligent. Yes, as a proponent of the benefits of open source software, it is a bummer that we can't just have nice things. However, the last few years of CLA-based rugpulls have done great harm to people's trust in open source projects and startups based on open source, and I ultimately don't think we're better off for it.
Sure. They didn't completely align with Free Software, so they coined a new term for a new kind of license.
Current companies are free to do the same thing. If they don't like the Open Source or Free software licenses they are free to coin their own term, write their own license. Nobody has any problem with this, and every company is free to write whatever license they like.
What they don't get to do is co-opt the term "Open Source" and then change the meaning of it to something quite different. That's not ok.
I completely agree that Open Source is not necessarily a viable business strategy for most businesses. The solution to that is to not be Open Source.
For some reason, some companies though think this is not ok. They want to use the marketing term "Open Source", as if it means whatever they want it to mean. They want to build on the goodwill generated by decades of Open Source developers, and then bait-and-switch that goodwill at some point. That's no ok.
>> it turns out you no longer can because any software you build in this way will be used by Amazon and they will earn the money, not you.
You make this sound like this is something new. Whereas Open Source has always been used by big companies to make money. MacOS is based on NetBSD. That's over 25 years old now.
So yes, if you want to make a software business, and you plan to sell your product, then releasing it for free and allowing others to use it commercially is probably not a great business strategy. So if releasing it as Open Source is contrary to your business goals then, you know, don't release it as Open Source.
No true scotsman.
A: If you make a license that actually discriminates on user or use case, then it's not open source.
B: But here are n open source projects that discriminate on user or use case, e.g. everything GPL, everything with dual license, etc.
A: yeeeeeeaaaah, but those aren’t TRUE open source projects!!! A true open source project would never do that!
There are such licenses. They are just not open source.
"Open" is too binary. You can't exclude companies that would harm you.
We need "fair", "equitable", or "sustainable" (as this one is termed) licenses.
You should be able to give your customers 100% the ability to use, modify, and redistribute so long as they don't resell you.
You should be able to cut off Amazon and Google from using you.
You should be able to prevent certain uses, like managed versions of your software.
If you modify the software under what terms are your modifications distributed? Do they have to be distributed under the same terms? There is not transfer of copyright so the original authors cannot distribute the modified version commercially as part of their enterprise edition, that means that every modified version is a fork that cannot be merged back in?
As I said in another comment discouraging forks is a disadvantage for users as it leaves you dependant on one supplier.
The AGPL achieves the aim of deterring the likes of Amazon from providing the software as a service (at least without contributing their changes back, in practice the will not use it at all) without these sorts of problems.
There are such licenses only if you change the definition of "freely" to fit the narrative. Historically, "freely" (as in "free software") means granting end-user four essential software freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
If I can't redistribute ("resell") software, or can't run it and let others access it for a fee - it's not "use freely" anymore.
WP Engine is not a problem, Amazon is.
WP Engine, as I understand it, contributes next to nothing to the codebase and takes a huge bite of the overall market.
The users should not be restricted. The responsibility comes from redistribution.
rms told me - you can USE the software for any purpose.