7 ms·

How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

54 points by jarin 16y ago

shib71 16y ago
1. It is absurd to expect to be able to make money from the work they are doing. That said, they may need to make accommodations to allow commercial plugins / complementary services. 2. The "you give your contribution to us" clause is standard in any open source project. How, for example, will they be able to update the project license if they don't own the copyright?
- jarin 16y ago
  1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't? 2. That's not the problem. The problem is making developers sign a contract just to contribute to the project.
  - gloob 16y ago
    1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't? When you can demonstrate to me how the existence of GPL-licensed web servers prevents the creation and sale of proprietary web servers, and additionally demonstrate to me that people will not pay other people to host stuff for them, I will accept that you "aren't allowed to" make money off of this.
  - jlcgull 16y ago
    1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't? Where is your great, timely, mind-share grabbing, relevant-to-the-times project? I would like to contribute money towards it. Otherwise, stop sounding like such a h8r !
  - mcantelon 16y ago
    Diaspora is delivering on their promises to their contributors. There is no problem. Fundraise for your own project and you can run it in any way you see fit. Write the code yourself and you can license it in any way you see fit. The Affero licensing prevents some commercial venture from using their code as a foundation, creating a hosted service, tacking on some proprietary candy that locks users in, and out-marketing them. I'm fine with them safeguarding against that.
  - fleitz 16y ago
    2. Open Source projects require that you sign your copyright away and assign it to them or offer them a license on compatible terms with their license. Signing a contract to assign your rights or offer your contribution under AGPL is standard fare. How many open source projects did you contribute to where you DIDN'T have to assign your rights? 1. They didn't "make" $200,000, they got $200,000 in donations, and yes, people should be allowed to accept donations. If you don't like the terms, don't donate. I'm sure the Diaspora guys would love it if someone put up another kickstarter page accepting donations towards contributing to the Diaspora code base.
    - aplusbi 16y ago
      >How many open source projects did you contribute to where you DIDN'T have to assign your rights? The Linux kernel doesn't require copyright transfers. Most open source projects don't either (though many require a contributor license agreement).
      - shib71 16y ago
        Linux is well established - the licensing terms are unlikely to change and the community understands (independant of the legal agreement, which they mostly don't) that once they contribute code it is out of their hands. The business of Diaspora is just as green as the code of Diaspora, and requiring copyright transfer is a very sensible way of anticipating the inevitable pivots.
guelo 16y ago
I can't stand anti free software zealots like this guy.
- jarin 16y ago
  I'm not anti-Free Software. I'm all for it. I make my living off of it, and I contribute regularly to open source projects. I'm anti-Overly-Restrictive-and-Innovation-Stifling-Licenses. You'll note that I recommended that the BSD license would be way more appropriate for this project.
  - zdw 16y ago
    Snarky translation: I'm all for embrace and extend of other peoples, just like late 90's Microsoft. Look at how well that worked for everyone. BSD licenses are great and all, but often lead to a situation where the original developers get used with little to no compensation in return in terms of code improvement or financial benefit. A great example of how annoying this can be to the original developers - look at the bottom paragraph of http://openssh.org/ http://openssh.org/ My take on the whole thing - they should have published a spec, with hard and fast guidelines for interaction and preferably a protocol verification test suite, rather than code. Then release an implementation with a license that is GPL or proprietary or whatever - just make it so that 3rd parties can write interoperable code if they want. To put this succinctly, we need the "HTTP" of social media, not the "Apache" of social media.
    - jarin 16y ago
      That's a good point, and I totally agree that would be a good solution. It needs more than just one working implementation out there, or it will just turn into Google Wave part 2. The good thing is the Diaspora protocol is much simpler than the Wave protocol, so hopefully it won't take very long before good alternative implementations start showing up.
    - raganwald 16y ago
      To put this succinctly, we need the "HTTP" of social media, not the "Apache" of social media. That is very deep and it applies to a LOT of different "markets," not just social networking. A truly open standard API for interoperability is a very different thing from a truly open standard implementation.
dasht 16y ago
Heh. The reasons given also explain why the GNU project has failed to release any influential software like GCC, the various GNU shell utilities, GNU Emacs, GDB and other such insignificant projects.
- lzw 16y ago
  No denying the influence of GNU, but have you noticed that commercially tolerant licenses are becoming more popular and businesses are some of the biggest producers of new major open source projects?
  - baddox 16y ago
    What are some examples of such licenses?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - blhack 16y ago
      The BSD license.
    - jarin 16y ago
      Apache 2.0, Mozilla Public License, MIT License, BSD License
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I've noticed the polar opposite in my field (enterprise security): major open source providers pulling back on source code rights because of rampant abuse.
  - bitdiddle 16y ago
    Do you have any numbers to support this assertion?
- bconway 16y ago
  None of the projects listed above are AGPL-licensed. AGPL is egregious in its viral nature.
aditya 16y ago
Maybe if the author started with the premise that Diaspora is more about offering an open source, secure and decentralized alternative to Facebook rather than zomg facebook killer h8 gpl mindset they might understand the situation better? Diaspora is about choice, not market share.
- jarin 16y ago
  Yeah maybe I got confused at the part where they said "We think we can replace today's centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network." http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...
- dasil003 16y ago
  Unfortunately social networking is about market share.
  - pwpwp 16y ago
    At the moment, yes. Once it's decentralized, not.
kevintwohy 16y ago
A better title might have been "Some thoughts on the Diaspora software license and contributor agreement." It's alpha software. It's not perfect. They're not going to get everything right on the first go, be it software bugs or maybe-too-restrictive licensing. Let's give it more than 24 hours before declaring it 'dead.'
naner 16y ago
Really this is the least of their problems.
TamDenholm 16y ago
Use an extremely restrictive and viral license that will force companies and "serious" developers to release the source code of derivative works. Wasn't that kinda the entire point of diaspora, to be open, this is really just the guys ensuring that it stays that way. Sure it sucks that you need to sign a contract but in order to maintain that it remains open, it needs to be restricted. Yes i know how that sounds.
kuahyeow 16y ago
I like to compare it with WordPress, what with wordpress.com and wordpress MU, etc. Rails and AGPL vs PHP and GPLv2. Admittedly Diaspora are two steps up on the language and license stakes but I don't think that's a real road-block. That's probably just small stakes. If it's popular enough, site providers will fall over themselves to enable 'installation' of Diaspora. People (theme designers mostly) complain about GPL in WordPress too, but lots of web designers are making custom WordPress sites and making money off it too.
- jarin 16y ago
  Rails is MIT-licensed: http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/railties/MIT-LICENSE http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/railties/MIT-LICEN...
  - kuahyeow 16y ago
    Diasport is AGPL http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/COPYRIGHT http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/COPYRIGHT
tingley 16y ago
Reason #2 ("they make you sign the contributor agreement") is basically a declaration that the author doesn't understand US copyright law. If you are serious about keeping your code free, up to and including the ability to enforce its license in court, there are legal reasons to do this. At least, so says the FSF (and so do the IP lawyers I've talked to about it): http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
- aplusbi 16y ago
  And if you are serious about relicensing your code under a commercial license in the future, there are legal reasons to do this. The gnu project is pretty trustworthy, but how much do you trust diaspora?
- jarin 16y ago
  Actually, the contributor agreement is about getting the open source community to contribute a large percentage of the work and aggregating the copyright so they can sell it to other companies via dual-licensing, without giving the contributors the right to do the same thing.
mcmc 16y ago
I ran a non-profit called ossline for a while (www.ossline.org) which helped open source projects with contributor license agreements, so I am familiar with the issues. I don't understand this "no way in hell I am signing a contract just to contribute to an open source project" sentiment. It is trivially easy to do (see Node.js's CLA which is an entirely electronic form,) and it gives the users all sorts of additional protections that traditional open source licenses can't otherwise provide, such as patent royalty protections. The downside of these CLA agreements is that it allows the controllers of the project to re-release code under a less stringent license, and in some cases a commercial license. I can see someone becoming upset that code they worked on in a GPL project was later released as BSD, but that doesn't seem to be an issue with the OP. All in all, the only reasonable take away here can be summarized in a sentence: "Diaspora may have a more limited uptake by corporations who are hesitant to open source proprietary additions to the software." Certainly nothing to write a rant over.
moe 16y ago
Do we really need to reach out to the license to declare this project DOA? This is a hacker community, right? For me the technical "architecture" did it. A rails-app, of all things, to serve as some sort of "superpeer" for what cries to be a P2P system? Really? And their answer to their stated goal of "privacy aware, personally controlled" is to store the data not in one opaque box (facebook) but to distribute it over many opaque boxes, under the control of random people, without some sort of end-to-end encryption involved? Really? Sorry, but not only does real P2P technology exist, there are even free and mature implementations out there for most of the primitives that a distributed facebook would require. Why not plug together what's needed and invent what's missing? We have mature DHT impls like Kademlia (edonkey), Chord, freenet. Look at the concept of Web-of-Trust and RSA/PGP for identity management in a distributed system. Look at jabber for messaging and presence. Something is seriously, fundamentally wrong when your answer to "distributed system" comes out as "Rails".
- limmeau 16y ago
  I don't think social networks need the same architecture as file-sharing networks. I want the data I publish on my social network node to be available 24/7 to my network friends. Since neither I nor most of my friends have a server at home, that means hosting the data on some server in some hosting center. So Rails isn't a necessarily stupid idea for a social network consisting of people like me.
  - moe 16y ago
    Since neither I nor most of my friends have a server at home, that means hosting the data on some server in some hosting center. No. P2P networks like freenet and edonkey already distribute content over many nodes, just with different goals and priorities. It would be possible to adapt these mechanisms to ensure that data you push to the network actually stays in the network for a reasonable period of client-downtime. I could think of various ways to achieve this technically (n-copies, caching superpeers, and each of your friends would naturally hold on a copy anyways). One important bit to realize here is that the data volume is rather small because only meta-data (friends-graph, profile, wall, messages, etc.) needs to be handled in a truly distributed fashion. Big chunks, such as images, could and should mostly remain on centralized services for the time being. Another important thing to realize is, that the privacy in such a network could be made to be much better than on any remotely hosted solution because you can implement end-to-end encryption. All data on the network would naturally be transmitted and stored only in encrypted form. You would reveal chosen pieces to your friends by sharing the respective keys with them. So Rails isn't a necessarily stupid idea for a social network consisting of people like me. People like you (the end-user) aren't even supposed to install diaspora on their machines. Instead (if I understood them right) you are supposed to sign up on someone else's diaspora installation and generally trust all diaspora nodes in the network because your data travels freely between them. Disclaimer: If this description is wrong then someone please correct me. There's some conflicting information about what diaspora is and what it wants to be. Rails surely has its place in many applications. But for this one it just screams "We have no clue what we're doing" to me.
obiefernandez 16y ago
A good, recent article about contributor vs. participant agreements. (Also a good primer on the subject) http://opensource.com/law/10/9/copyright-aggregation http://opensource.com/law/10/9/copyright-aggregation
- jarin 16y ago
  It seems like the sole reason for aggregating copyright in this manner is to be able to dual-license the source code to companies. So basically the community is more than welcome to help improve Diaspora (and by releasing at such an early Alpha stage, it's all but certain that large amounts, if not the majority of the code will be written by the community), but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it.
  - mindcrime 16y ago
    > but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it. That doesn't follow. Anybody can take the AGPL'd codebase and make money off of it. It's not necessary to distribute something as closed source in order to make money, ya know. That said, I hate the AGPL, simply because I disagree with trying to redefine "providing a service using Software X" as "distributing Software X." I'd have preferred to see them go with the plain old GPL, if they wanted a "viral" license. But whatever... it's their project.
    - jarin 16y ago
      I'd be ok with the regular GPL at this point.
NationalHQ 16y ago
I'm sure theirs will look nothing like mine
mathgladiator 16y ago
It seemed to me that Diaspora is trying to hold the code and project together, and the open source community isn't exactly the best for holding code together. We have forks all over the place. I've got a fork, you've got a fork; we all have forks and no spoons. Is it better for the world for the open source community to fork left and right and ultimately risk fragmenting the market to fail to compete against facebook, or is it better for the open source community to work together as a singular voice and produce something spectacular? I remain neutral in the answer, and I think Diaspora has a difficult path ahead of it. It would be more interesting in my mind if the community actually worked together rather than forking to compete against Facebook. What if this was the opportunity for the open source community to rise up as a single voice and strike Facebook down? Afterall, we failed against Microsoft. Can we learn from our marketing and sales mistakes with Desktop Linux to strike a blow to closed source software? I don't know if it this project or some future project. I don't know if it is the slow march that will prevail. All I know is that the more we fragment, the easier we are to discount. Well, I'm going to shave my beard now.
- jarin 16y ago
  I totally agree, and I think the best way to get the community to work together and prevent forks is with a less restrictive license and no contributor agreement.
  - mathgladiator 16y ago
    And unfortunately for us, it is not a decision that we get to make which is where I sense some of the anger stemmed from in the article.
  - jarin 16y ago
    I hope it didn't come across as nerd raging. Well, I guess it was nerd raging, but I really do want the project to succeed.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    During the Unix Wars, we lost about a decade of progress entombed in parasitic forks as Microsoft ran away with the whole market. Is there any reason to hope that applying the BSD license to Diaspora would not give it the same Achilles' heel?
jaekwon 16y ago
I'm not familiar with the AGPL. Does this mean that I cannot modify the Diaspora source code to run on my server for my business needs, without giving join ownership of my modifications to Diaspora? / without releasing the modifications to the public? OK that's a letdown.
- drdaeman 16y ago
  Yes, it means that you have to allow your users to access any modifications you did and freely use and redistribute them further under AGPL. The only problem I see here is site design - companies certainly won't like that their corporate style will be used freely. Hope this'll be worked around somehow (trademarking?) About the code itself - Diaspora is a distributed system, so IMHO it's quite absurd to attract users with some proprietary installation-unique features. Diaspora is more of a network, not a product. Imagine some ISP creating their own proprietary extensions to the TCP procotol - sounds weird, right?
  - jarin 16y ago
    Actually it's not so absurd to want to build in proprietary features. Let's say Yahoo! wants to create their own seed for their users, but they want to tie the user accounts to their internal, confidential authentication systems. It is both completely disadvantageous for Yahoo and has absolutely no benefit for the OSS community for Yahoo to adopt Diaspora in that scenario. And I'm sure there are a lot of companies and developers out there who have unique features to add to their seeds that have absolutely no relevance to the main codebase or other developers.
    - drdaeman 16y ago
      I see no real problem with this. They just have to write dummy AGPLed adapter module, querying proprietary RPC service (or they can even use OpenID/OAuth internally). There won't be anything confidential more than curious user can find out, inspecting his browser's requests with completely proprietary service.
cies 16y ago
AGPL + contrib agreement is a way to ensure that commercial investments in open source projects are more likely. everyone may use and modify it, but has to disclose its modifications. (since its AGPL'ed) contributions that find their way back into the parent project (dispora) must sign the contrib agreement so that diaspora can license it commercially under terms they pick. this allows them to potentially make some money selling commercial licenses. investors need this security because they do not want to invest in a product that everyone exploit equally. i think the model is valid and fair. it work for the company i currently work for (zarafa.com). jarin has the right to not like the license, sure. but if he used his patches to serve a diaspora instance from heroku to anyone besides him self he should (AGPL) disclose those patches. of course this does not mean he should sign the contrib agreement, but that would limit the impact of his work... jarin calls diaspora dead. i think thats unfair. they did a great job and it will be nice reference material for a rails3+mongodb+haml+jquery+websocket project. good choise of technology in my eyes! (thank $DEITY for not going with php)
loup-vaillant 16y ago
This guy apparently haven't heard about the freedom box.[1] It's not out, but it's doable, and once we have it, self hosted Diaspora seed will be a matter of plug and play. Therefore, we have no need for huge, scalable seeds. And despite the AGPL, profitable companies can make money out of Diaspora: contribute => make the freedom box more attractive => sell more freedom boxes. Pure software companies can be paid by hardware companies to do this job, everyone's happy. Equating profitable with "proprietarizeable" is quite a stretch. I feel like I'm stating the obvious, here. Could I be missing something? [1]: http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
- jarin 16y ago
  Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    Free? Free? Let me put it this way. Say you have a Facebook account. Say you use it as intended: by doing most of your (semi) private communication through it. Now, how much would I have to pay you for you to surrender a copy of your Facebook account, with your wall, your past conversations, and a copy of what your friends let you see? Promise, I won't do anything bad, but please sign this little paper that let me to, just in case. That's the real price of using Facebook. Either you really think your price is $0, or you didn't think this through (most people don't, which is why I think Facebook is so popular). My price is $you_can't_afford_it. (Edit: I forgot to mention advertisements, but I don't know how much they really cost me.)
    - jarin 16y ago
      Diaspora is asking users to do the exact same thing: give up their Facebook accounts and start over on Diaspora. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a serious incentive for users to move over. "It's open source" is not going to cut it for anyone but a subset of techies. Data portability probably won't be a big incentive for most people either, considering you can't even get them to back up their hard drives. Although I think it is a pretty cool idea (and I would like to have one), I have serious doubts that "you can pay us for a thing that you plug into your wall and your profile lives on it" will be much of a sales point for most people either.
tmugavero 16y ago
I appreciate what they are doing and really want this to succeed, but with this (maybe a little premature?) release it seems they are alienating their early adopters right off the bat with licensing questions and shaky code (and bad press). Sure it's pre-alpha, but once someone has an opinion it's hard to change their mind later, even if their first impression was based on false information. Their biggest challenge however isn't code but rather getting the 500+ million people who don't care about private seeds to go through some clunky prohibitive process and start all over again. That's not to mention getting the millions of websites already building on top of FB to change.

54 points by jarin 16y ago

1. It is absurd to expect to be able to make money from the work they are doing. That said, they may need to make accommodations to allow commercial plugins / complementary services. 2. The "you give your contribution to us" clause is standard in any open source project. How, for example, will they be able to update the project license if they don't own the copyright?

jarin 16y ago
1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't? 2. That's not the problem. The problem is making developers sign a contract just to contribute to the project.
- gloob 16y ago
  1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't? When you can demonstrate to me how the existence of GPL-licensed web servers prevents the creation and sale of proprietary web servers, and additionally demonstrate to me that people will not pay other people to host stuff for them, I will accept that you "aren't allowed to" make money off of this.
- jlcgull 16y ago
  1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't? Where is your great, timely, mind-share grabbing, relevant-to-the-times project? I would like to contribute money towards it. Otherwise, stop sounding like such a h8r !
- mcantelon 16y ago
  Diaspora is delivering on their promises to their contributors. There is no problem. Fundraise for your own project and you can run it in any way you see fit. Write the code yourself and you can license it in any way you see fit. The Affero licensing prevents some commercial venture from using their code as a foundation, creating a hosted service, tacking on some proprietary candy that locks users in, and out-marketing them. I'm fine with them safeguarding against that.
- fleitz 16y ago
  2. Open Source projects require that you sign your copyright away and assign it to them or offer them a license on compatible terms with their license. Signing a contract to assign your rights or offer your contribution under AGPL is standard fare. How many open source projects did you contribute to where you DIDN'T have to assign your rights? 1. They didn't "make" $200,000, they got $200,000 in donations, and yes, people should be allowed to accept donations. If you don't like the terms, don't donate. I'm sure the Diaspora guys would love it if someone put up another kickstarter page accepting donations towards contributing to the Diaspora code base.
  - aplusbi 16y ago
    >How many open source projects did you contribute to where you DIDN'T have to assign your rights? The Linux kernel doesn't require copyright transfers. Most open source projects don't either (though many require a contributor license agreement).
    - shib71 16y ago
      Linux is well established - the licensing terms are unlikely to change and the community understands (independant of the legal agreement, which they mostly don't) that once they contribute code it is out of their hands. The business of Diaspora is just as green as the code of Diaspora, and requiring copyright transfer is a very sensible way of anticipating the inevitable pivots.

guelo 16y ago

I can't stand anti free software zealots like this guy.

jarin 16y ago
I'm not anti-Free Software. I'm all for it. I make my living off of it, and I contribute regularly to open source projects. I'm anti-Overly-Restrictive-and-Innovation-Stifling-Licenses. You'll note that I recommended that the BSD license would be way more appropriate for this project.
- zdw 16y ago
  Snarky translation: I'm all for embrace and extend of other peoples, just like late 90's Microsoft. Look at how well that worked for everyone. BSD licenses are great and all, but often lead to a situation where the original developers get used with little to no compensation in return in terms of code improvement or financial benefit. A great example of how annoying this can be to the original developers - look at the bottom paragraph of http://openssh.org/ http://openssh.org/ My take on the whole thing - they should have published a spec, with hard and fast guidelines for interaction and preferably a protocol verification test suite, rather than code. Then release an implementation with a license that is GPL or proprietary or whatever - just make it so that 3rd parties can write interoperable code if they want. To put this succinctly, we need the "HTTP" of social media, not the "Apache" of social media.
  - jarin 16y ago
    That's a good point, and I totally agree that would be a good solution. It needs more than just one working implementation out there, or it will just turn into Google Wave part 2. The good thing is the Diaspora protocol is much simpler than the Wave protocol, so hopefully it won't take very long before good alternative implementations start showing up.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    To put this succinctly, we need the "HTTP" of social media, not the "Apache" of social media. That is very deep and it applies to a LOT of different "markets," not just social networking. A truly open standard API for interoperability is a very different thing from a truly open standard implementation.

dasht 16y ago

Heh. The reasons given also explain why the GNU project has failed to release any influential software like GCC, the various GNU shell utilities, GNU Emacs, GDB and other such insignificant projects.

lzw 16y ago
No denying the influence of GNU, but have you noticed that commercially tolerant licenses are becoming more popular and businesses are some of the biggest producers of new major open source projects?
- baddox 16y ago
  What are some examples of such licenses?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - blhack 16y ago
    The BSD license.
  - jarin 16y ago
    Apache 2.0, Mozilla Public License, MIT License, BSD License
- tptacek 16y ago
  I've noticed the polar opposite in my field (enterprise security): major open source providers pulling back on source code rights because of rampant abuse.
- bitdiddle 16y ago
  Do you have any numbers to support this assertion?
bconway 16y ago
None of the projects listed above are AGPL-licensed. AGPL is egregious in its viral nature.

aditya 16y ago

Maybe if the author started with the premise that Diaspora is more about offering an open source, secure and decentralized alternative to Facebook rather than zomg facebook killer h8 gpl mindset they might understand the situation better? Diaspora is about choice, not market share.

jarin 16y ago
Yeah maybe I got confused at the part where they said "We think we can replace today's centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network." http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...
dasil003 16y ago
Unfortunately social networking is about market share.
- pwpwp 16y ago
  At the moment, yes. Once it's decentralized, not.

kevintwohy 16y ago

A better title might have been "Some thoughts on the Diaspora software license and contributor agreement." It's alpha software. It's not perfect. They're not going to get everything right on the first go, be it software bugs or maybe-too-restrictive licensing. Let's give it more than 24 hours before declaring it 'dead.'

naner 16y ago

Really this is the least of their problems.

TamDenholm 16y ago

Use an extremely restrictive and viral license that will force companies and "serious" developers to release the source code of derivative works. Wasn't that kinda the entire point of diaspora, to be open, this is really just the guys ensuring that it stays that way. Sure it sucks that you need to sign a contract but in order to maintain that it remains open, it needs to be restricted. Yes i know how that sounds.

kuahyeow 16y ago

I like to compare it with WordPress, what with wordpress.com and wordpress MU, etc. Rails and AGPL vs PHP and GPLv2. Admittedly Diaspora are two steps up on the language and license stakes but I don't think that's a real road-block. That's probably just small stakes. If it's popular enough, site providers will fall over themselves to enable 'installation' of Diaspora. People (theme designers mostly) complain about GPL in WordPress too, but lots of web designers are making custom WordPress sites and making money off it too.

jarin 16y ago
Rails is MIT-licensed: http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/railties/MIT-LICENSE http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/railties/MIT-LICEN...
- kuahyeow 16y ago
  Diasport is AGPL http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/COPYRIGHT http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/COPYRIGHT

tingley 16y ago

Reason #2 ("they make you sign the contributor agreement") is basically a declaration that the author doesn't understand US copyright law. If you are serious about keeping your code free, up to and including the ability to enforce its license in court, there are legal reasons to do this. At least, so says the FSF (and so do the IP lawyers I've talked to about it): http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

aplusbi 16y ago
And if you are serious about relicensing your code under a commercial license in the future, there are legal reasons to do this. The gnu project is pretty trustworthy, but how much do you trust diaspora?
jarin 16y ago
Actually, the contributor agreement is about getting the open source community to contribute a large percentage of the work and aggregating the copyright so they can sell it to other companies via dual-licensing, without giving the contributors the right to do the same thing.

mcmc 16y ago

I ran a non-profit called ossline for a while (www.ossline.org) which helped open source projects with contributor license agreements, so I am familiar with the issues. I don't understand this "no way in hell I am signing a contract just to contribute to an open source project" sentiment. It is trivially easy to do (see Node.js's CLA which is an entirely electronic form,) and it gives the users all sorts of additional protections that traditional open source licenses can't otherwise provide, such as patent royalty protections. The downside of these CLA agreements is that it allows the controllers of the project to re-release code under a less stringent license, and in some cases a commercial license. I can see someone becoming upset that code they worked on in a GPL project was later released as BSD, but that doesn't seem to be an issue with the OP. All in all, the only reasonable take away here can be summarized in a sentence: "Diaspora may have a more limited uptake by corporations who are hesitant to open source proprietary additions to the software." Certainly nothing to write a rant over.

moe 16y ago

Do we really need to reach out to the license to declare this project DOA? This is a hacker community, right? For me the technical "architecture" did it. A rails-app, of all things, to serve as some sort of "superpeer" for what cries to be a P2P system? Really? And their answer to their stated goal of "privacy aware, personally controlled" is to store the data not in one opaque box (facebook) but to distribute it over many opaque boxes, under the control of random people, without some sort of end-to-end encryption involved? Really? Sorry, but not only does real P2P technology exist, there are even free and mature implementations out there for most of the primitives that a distributed facebook would require. Why not plug together what's needed and invent what's missing? We have mature DHT impls like Kademlia (edonkey), Chord, freenet. Look at the concept of Web-of-Trust and RSA/PGP for identity management in a distributed system. Look at jabber for messaging and presence. Something is seriously, fundamentally wrong when your answer to "distributed system" comes out as "Rails".

limmeau 16y ago
I don't think social networks need the same architecture as file-sharing networks. I want the data I publish on my social network node to be available 24/7 to my network friends. Since neither I nor most of my friends have a server at home, that means hosting the data on some server in some hosting center. So Rails isn't a necessarily stupid idea for a social network consisting of people like me.
- moe 16y ago
  Since neither I nor most of my friends have a server at home, that means hosting the data on some server in some hosting center. No. P2P networks like freenet and edonkey already distribute content over many nodes, just with different goals and priorities. It would be possible to adapt these mechanisms to ensure that data you push to the network actually stays in the network for a reasonable period of client-downtime. I could think of various ways to achieve this technically (n-copies, caching superpeers, and each of your friends would naturally hold on a copy anyways). One important bit to realize here is that the data volume is rather small because only meta-data (friends-graph, profile, wall, messages, etc.) needs to be handled in a truly distributed fashion. Big chunks, such as images, could and should mostly remain on centralized services for the time being. Another important thing to realize is, that the privacy in such a network could be made to be much better than on any remotely hosted solution because you can implement end-to-end encryption. All data on the network would naturally be transmitted and stored only in encrypted form. You would reveal chosen pieces to your friends by sharing the respective keys with them. So Rails isn't a necessarily stupid idea for a social network consisting of people like me. People like you (the end-user) aren't even supposed to install diaspora on their machines. Instead (if I understood them right) you are supposed to sign up on someone else's diaspora installation and generally trust all diaspora nodes in the network because your data travels freely between them. Disclaimer: If this description is wrong then someone please correct me. There's some conflicting information about what diaspora is and what it wants to be. Rails surely has its place in many applications. But for this one it just screams "We have no clue what we're doing" to me.

obiefernandez 16y ago

A good, recent article about contributor vs. participant agreements. (Also a good primer on the subject) http://opensource.com/law/10/9/copyright-aggregation http://opensource.com/law/10/9/copyright-aggregation

jarin 16y ago
It seems like the sole reason for aggregating copyright in this manner is to be able to dual-license the source code to companies. So basically the community is more than welcome to help improve Diaspora (and by releasing at such an early Alpha stage, it's all but certain that large amounts, if not the majority of the code will be written by the community), but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it.
- mindcrime 16y ago
  > but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it. That doesn't follow. Anybody can take the AGPL'd codebase and make money off of it. It's not necessary to distribute something as closed source in order to make money, ya know. That said, I hate the AGPL, simply because I disagree with trying to redefine "providing a service using Software X" as "distributing Software X." I'd have preferred to see them go with the plain old GPL, if they wanted a "viral" license. But whatever... it's their project.
  - jarin 16y ago
    I'd be ok with the regular GPL at this point.

NationalHQ 16y ago

I'm sure theirs will look nothing like mine

mathgladiator 16y ago

It seemed to me that Diaspora is trying to hold the code and project together, and the open source community isn't exactly the best for holding code together. We have forks all over the place. I've got a fork, you've got a fork; we all have forks and no spoons. Is it better for the world for the open source community to fork left and right and ultimately risk fragmenting the market to fail to compete against facebook, or is it better for the open source community to work together as a singular voice and produce something spectacular? I remain neutral in the answer, and I think Diaspora has a difficult path ahead of it. It would be more interesting in my mind if the community actually worked together rather than forking to compete against Facebook. What if this was the opportunity for the open source community to rise up as a single voice and strike Facebook down? Afterall, we failed against Microsoft. Can we learn from our marketing and sales mistakes with Desktop Linux to strike a blow to closed source software? I don't know if it this project or some future project. I don't know if it is the slow march that will prevail. All I know is that the more we fragment, the easier we are to discount. Well, I'm going to shave my beard now.

jarin 16y ago
I totally agree, and I think the best way to get the community to work together and prevent forks is with a less restrictive license and no contributor agreement.
- mathgladiator 16y ago
  And unfortunately for us, it is not a decision that we get to make which is where I sense some of the anger stemmed from in the article.
- jarin 16y ago
  I hope it didn't come across as nerd raging. Well, I guess it was nerd raging, but I really do want the project to succeed.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  During the Unix Wars, we lost about a decade of progress entombed in parasitic forks as Microsoft ran away with the whole market. Is there any reason to hope that applying the BSD license to Diaspora would not give it the same Achilles' heel?

jaekwon 16y ago

I'm not familiar with the AGPL. Does this mean that I cannot modify the Diaspora source code to run on my server for my business needs, without giving join ownership of my modifications to Diaspora? / without releasing the modifications to the public? OK that's a letdown.

drdaeman 16y ago
Yes, it means that you have to allow your users to access any modifications you did and freely use and redistribute them further under AGPL. The only problem I see here is site design - companies certainly won't like that their corporate style will be used freely. Hope this'll be worked around somehow (trademarking?) About the code itself - Diaspora is a distributed system, so IMHO it's quite absurd to attract users with some proprietary installation-unique features. Diaspora is more of a network, not a product. Imagine some ISP creating their own proprietary extensions to the TCP procotol - sounds weird, right?
- jarin 16y ago
  Actually it's not so absurd to want to build in proprietary features. Let's say Yahoo! wants to create their own seed for their users, but they want to tie the user accounts to their internal, confidential authentication systems. It is both completely disadvantageous for Yahoo and has absolutely no benefit for the OSS community for Yahoo to adopt Diaspora in that scenario. And I'm sure there are a lot of companies and developers out there who have unique features to add to their seeds that have absolutely no relevance to the main codebase or other developers.
  - drdaeman 16y ago
    I see no real problem with this. They just have to write dummy AGPLed adapter module, querying proprietary RPC service (or they can even use OpenID/OAuth internally). There won't be anything confidential more than curious user can find out, inspecting his browser's requests with completely proprietary service.

cies 16y ago

AGPL + contrib agreement is a way to ensure that commercial investments in open source projects are more likely. everyone may use and modify it, but has to disclose its modifications. (since its AGPL'ed) contributions that find their way back into the parent project (dispora) must sign the contrib agreement so that diaspora can license it commercially under terms they pick. this allows them to potentially make some money selling commercial licenses. investors need this security because they do not want to invest in a product that everyone exploit equally. i think the model is valid and fair. it work for the company i currently work for (zarafa.com). jarin has the right to not like the license, sure. but if he used his patches to serve a diaspora instance from heroku to anyone besides him self he should (AGPL) disclose those patches. of course this does not mean he should sign the contrib agreement, but that would limit the impact of his work... jarin calls diaspora dead. i think thats unfair. they did a great job and it will be nice reference material for a rails3+mongodb+haml+jquery+websocket project. good choise of technology in my eyes! (thank $DEITY for not going with php)

loup-vaillant 16y ago

This guy apparently haven't heard about the freedom box.[1] It's not out, but it's doable, and once we have it, self hosted Diaspora seed will be a matter of plug and play. Therefore, we have no need for huge, scalable seeds. And despite the AGPL, profitable companies can make money out of Diaspora: contribute => make the freedom box more attractive => sell more freedom boxes. Pure software companies can be paid by hardware companies to do this job, everyone's happy. Equating profitable with "proprietarizeable" is quite a stretch. I feel like I'm stating the obvious, here. Could I be missing something? [1]: http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

jarin 16y ago
Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  Free? Free? Let me put it this way. Say you have a Facebook account. Say you use it as intended: by doing most of your (semi) private communication through it. Now, how much would I have to pay you for you to surrender a copy of your Facebook account, with your wall, your past conversations, and a copy of what your friends let you see? Promise, I won't do anything bad, but please sign this little paper that let me to, just in case. That's the real price of using Facebook. Either you really think your price is $0, or you didn't think this through (most people don't, which is why I think Facebook is so popular). My price is $you_can't_afford_it. (Edit: I forgot to mention advertisements, but I don't know how much they really cost me.)
  - jarin 16y ago
    Diaspora is asking users to do the exact same thing: give up their Facebook accounts and start over on Diaspora. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a serious incentive for users to move over. "It's open source" is not going to cut it for anyone but a subset of techies. Data portability probably won't be a big incentive for most people either, considering you can't even get them to back up their hard drives. Although I think it is a pretty cool idea (and I would like to have one), I have serious doubts that "you can pay us for a thing that you plug into your wall and your profile lives on it" will be much of a sales point for most people either.

tmugavero 16y ago

I appreciate what they are doing and really want this to succeed, but with this (maybe a little premature?) release it seems they are alienating their early adopters right off the bat with licensing questions and shaky code (and bad press). Sure it's pre-alpha, but once someone has an opinion it's hard to change their mind later, even if their first impression was based on false information. Their biggest challenge however isn't code but rather getting the 500+ million people who don't care about private seeds to go through some clunky prohibitive process and start all over again. That's not to mention getting the millions of websites already building on top of FB to change.