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Comment by pzo | Hacker News Reader

FWIW They change license 2 weeks ago from Apache 2.0 to non commercial. Understand they need to pay the bills but lost trust with such move. Will stick with react-native-ai [0] that is extension of vercel aisdk but with also local inference on edge devices

[0] react-native-ai.dev

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Open source for the PR, then switching to non-open licensing is a cowardly, bullshit move.

https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus/commit/b1b5650d1132...

Use open source and stick with it, or don't touch it at all, and tell any VC shitheels saying otherwise to pound sand.

If your business is so fragile or unoriginal that it can't survive being open source, then it will fail anyway. If you make it open source, embrace the ethos and build community, then your product or service will be stronger for it. If the big players clone your work, you get instant underdog credibility and notoriety.

Chatgpt could spit me the same optimizations they're doing in a few minutes. They're very generic optimizations that anyone who wants to work on mobile should do. Looks like they're planning to troll the competition with lawsuits using this license.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Honestly, I’d be annoyed too and it might sound like an excuse, but our circumstance was quite unique, it was a difficult decision at that time being an open-source contributor myself.

It’s still free for the community, just that corporations need a license. Should we make this clearer in the license?

Yes.

Just say that in the license.

Done, thanks, let us know anything else.

Nice job on taking feedback.

They updated but not to something they write here sugarcoating like they only try to limit corporations abuse. It’s not that paid license is for corporations only, it’s still non commercial for everyone including community.

Understandable, though to explain, Cactus is still free for personal & small projects if you fall into that category. We’re early and would definitely consider your concerns on license in our next steps, thanks.

For fear of having dang show up and scold me, I'll just add the factual statement that I will never ever believe any open source claim in any Launch HN ever. I can now save myself the trouble of checking, because I can be certain it's untrue

I already knew to avoid "please share your thoughts," although I guess I am kind of violating that one by even commenting

I agree, I've seen so many products start open source to gain traction, get into YC, and then either go closed source or change the license. That's a bait and switch and I appreciate the comment pointing it out.

I downloaded Cactus a couple months back because I saw a comment, but bait and switch like this makes we want to look for an actual open source solution.

The license change doesn’t affect you based on your explanation actually, the licence has been updated with clearer words. We really appreciate you as a user, please share any more feedback you have, thanks.

I don’t appreciate you dismissing my claim. When I installed Cactus chat months ago, the company was claiming that Cactus chat would allow users to connect to other apps on their device and allow them to be controlled by AI.

Your license change goes against that. You say it’s free for personal use but how many times do people create something for personal use and monetize it later? What if I use Cactus chat to control a commercial app? Does that make Cactus chat use “commercial”?

It’s absolutely fine to share your thoughts, that’s the point of this post, we want to understand where people’s heads are at, it’s what determines our next decisions. What do you really think? I’m genuinely asking so I don’t think mods will react.

Here’s an example of what I want to do: ship our application entirely open source/free (AGPL3), but with options for interested parties who want to pay us for support/consulting to do so. Likewise, we want interested parties who want to build their own proprietary app on top of our stack to be able to do so.

Mixing in a “you have to pay if you’re a corporation” licence makes this difficult if not impossible, particularly if we wanted deep integration with eg Cactus. We don’t want to police a “corporation” who wants to use our open source software.

Thanks for pointing this out, another factor for us to figure out. We waive the license for such cases, wanna get in touch? I don’t think your consumers have to worry about the license.

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