19 ms·

Open source takes continued investment, and that must be subsidized somehow

396 points by runesoerensen 8y ago

nailer 8y ago
Nobody is complaining that Redis ia using the same 'OSS core, proprietary add ons' business model that NGINX has been using for decades. They're complaining about the weird/impossible 'clause on top of open source' and 'existing OSD' (as if there's another new one) language in Redis' announcement and the 'Commons Clause' website
- antirez 8y ago
  To be fair most of the complains were about the model. And such complains where pretty pointless since no resource to write Redis core is take in order to write Redis modules. Fortunately (haha) Redis OSS was always just me and sometimes (like now that there is Fabio part time just to OSS side) some other collaborator, very few people allocated there, plus the very important contributions from Redis Labs devs, Alibaba devs, and so forth. I agree that criticizing the Commons Clause makes more sense, I did not follow closely how the license was created, but the process was to let N vendors to use the same clause so that the basic license was still valid but with the added restriction. It was AFAIK a non evil process, but actually now that I read the complains about Commons Clause I can see more how that could be better with new names for each license that each vendor used. Maybe you just cut&paste the clause into the OSS license you are using, but then you call it <company> Commercial License.
  - nailer 8y ago
    > Maybe you just cut&paste the clause into the OSS license you are using, but then you call it <company> Commercial License. Yep, I think that would make it better too. Redis: BSD (or whatever OSS licence) Redis X module: Redis non commercial License Redis Y module: Redis non commercial License
  - wvenable 8y ago
    > To be fair most of the complains were about the model. To be fair, if they'd just said hey we're selling these proprietary licensed modules then there wouldn't be much of debate. As others have pointed out, many other OSS projects do just that. Instead mass confusion has erupted and literally every word debated ad nauseam -- including, now, the model.
jacquesm 8y ago
This is not about 'the open source community' this is just about Redis. The open source community is doing just fine (and Redis is doing just fine), no need for overbroad or inaccurate claims. Besides that the obvious point is that every open source producer is entirely free to release their product under whatever license they see fit and if you don't like it then simply don't use the product.
- pauldix 8y ago
  Of course Redis is doing just fine. But that depends on continued development (investment) and continued community involvement. To me it looked like the villagers have been gathering with pitchforks and torches for the last 24 hours and I think much of it is unfair to Redis.
  - sqrt17 8y ago
    There's Redis (OSS), Antirez (OSS developer), and RedisLabs (commercial company and employer of Antirez). RedisLabs made some extra software available (nice) under a noncommercial-only license (well duh but ok), pretending some material relation between the noncommercial-use-only license and the Apache License (not nice). The pitchforks and torches are (to 98%) about that last bit. Everyone is happy that Redis still exists and that Antirez and RedisLabs have a sustainable business around Redis. No one - and potentially especially not the Apache foundation - enjoys the bait-and-switch of using the Apache name for a proprietary shared source license.
- shawn 8y ago
  Are they doing fine? I’d like to make all of the software I write freely BSD licensed. If I do that, it seems with very high probability that it might turn out to be a time sink and a money sink with no benefit other than +reputation. Which is worthwhile, but perhaps not as worthwhile as those fat stacks. I don’t know. We’re heading for a future where the only people that can afford to write OSS projects that actually influence the world are those who work for FAANG or in academia.
  - 8y ago
rectang 8y ago
> Apache Common Clause license No. This is reprehensible garbage. This license is not endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation. EDIT: removed "proprietary"
- antirez 8y ago
  Yep this should be reworded to something like: This software is licensed under a mixed OSS/commercial license, the Apache 2 OSS license with the commercial Common Clause restricting certain freedoms.
  - rectang 8y ago
    It is not "mixed OSS/commercial", because it is not OSS. Using the text of the Apache License 2.0 as a point of departure is fine. But please make it clear what you are doing.
  - jahewson 8y ago
    The problem here is that the end result is not the Apache 2.0 license anymore. It’s something else. Using the Apache name in this context raises some serious eyebrows. By all means keep the common core concept for Redis but I urge you to get as far away from this toxic “Common Clause” pseudo-license as possible.
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    That would be actively misleading - "This software is licensed under a mixed OSS/commercial license" implies the traditional dual-licenced model where you offer both an open source licence (e.g. GPL) and a commercial licence. Those who want an open source licence can choose that one, and those who want some extra options can choose the commercial licence. That's not the case here, there's no choice to get an OSS licence. The difference between this and the restrictions in other OSS licences is that the "common clause" restricts core freedoms - if you attach it to something, that something ceases to be an open source licence, this clause transforms into a commercial licence that prohibits free use of the software. There's nothing mixed about it, it's a "not-OSS" licence.
- saidajigumi 8y ago
kodablah 8y ago
> Open core is a fairly honest way to go about developing open source software. Only if you're equally honest in admitting it's the most risky approach wrt sustainability and therefore the one most subject to strange capitalization mechanisms (and endless blog post justifications for them :-)). They go out of business all the time, leaving stale software in their wake that might have otherwise had steady maintenance if independence and growth were less paramount (like before commercialization where, in many cases, the burden was just as large). Either way, it's definitely the hardest model and if you have a piece of open source software that must have growth or you are currently no longer able to sustain it, I would try to find any other way possible to finance it...but I agree sometimes it's just not there so you build a business around it. And I'd change "developing" to "financing" since there are many more honest ways, just not at scale.
m3mpp 8y ago
What is the situation with GPL (2 or 3) for those issues with cloud providers? Is it better than BSD licenses in that regard?
- wmf 8y ago
  It's basically the same. Cloud providers will pay nothing and contribute nothing.
- Avamander 8y ago
  You'd have to use AGPL if your goal is to get something back from could providers.
saidajigumi 8y ago
I find this article's angle to be somewhat refreshing, simply because there's a segment of the OSS world that is allergic to open discussion of funding. Some of the anti-commercial arguments I've seen are absolutely fantastical, amounting to demanding OSS to be a massive entitlement to the free time of others. This also gets to the biggest criticism I have of the FSF: the only measure of success is a narrow definition of "freedom" -- with little to no discussion of what social systems, economic structures, and advocacy might be useful and/or necessary to support those aims.
- binomialxenon 8y ago
  I've also seen that many people FOSS users mainly because it's typically free of charge. It really should become more normalized to 'pay' for Free Software and give money regularly to projects the user supports and finds useful.
jondubois 8y ago
People underestimate how difficult it is to create a popular open source project. It's very competitive. You're competing not just with other open source projects but also with SaaS solutions from well-funded companies; and you have to compete with a $0 marketing budget. Also, if the project does become popular eventually (which is very unlikely), maintenance is a lot of work. To make matters worse, there is a general tendency that if things go wrong, the community will blame you but if things go well, you get almost no credit. Even if your project has several thousands of stars on GitHub, it means nothing financially. Most of these OSS authors can't afford to quit their day job even though their project may be generating millions of dollars of value for other people. Money is an important topic to open source authors because after a decade of working for free during nights and weekends, most of them would love to be able to afford to quit their day jobs to focus exclusively on their projects but they can't do that; they're tired but they have to keep soldiering on with the 80+ hour work week. Being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now. I think that any business innovation which helps keep open source projects going should be welcome.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  >after a decade of working for free during nights and weekends Think I spotted the problem. This whole thing feels like someone martyring themselves for a cause and being recognized as a hero, but then complaining that martyrs are heroes and we should be _supporting_ our heroes and not forcing them to be martyrs. But that was the whole point to begin with and why there was any opportunity for recognition at all. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
  - m3mpp 8y ago
    > You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's not that simple, what would be this industry without Linux, without the FSF, without the BSD network stack (that is in all the macs...) The growth of our industry, and probably of a good chunk of the whole economy for the last 10 years has a lot to do with those people working during nights and week-ends imo.
    - 8y ago
hashkb 8y ago
I don't think it's responsible to write about "open source" software while ignoring the legacy of "free software" which kicked off the entire movement in the first place. The pioneers of "open source" believed in utterly free software and (at least RMS) believe furthermore that cloud solutions (wherein someone else does your computing for you) are anti-free.
- Avamander 8y ago
  We do have a license that deals with anti-free cloud solutions but people feel "it's too restrictive" but it's actually only restrictive to developers who'd want to infringe users' rights. Not understanding the point behind GPL causes developers to go with MIT and BSD and then complain about other people using their software for profit and giving nothing back... that's a pity.
hueving 8y ago
>Lastly, we have consulting and support, which I think is a dead end Given that the only large company that is actually successful with open source as a business model long term (Redhat) follows this model, that shallow statement seems pretty tone-deaf.
- wmf 8y ago
  Nobody can figure out how to replicate Red Hat's business model, so for new companies it is a dead end.
wvenable 8y ago
> Apache Common Clause license As other's have pointed out, but it bears repeating, this is not a thing. There is actually nothing particularly shocking about what Redis is doing here; it's been done by many open source companies in the past and present and nobody cares. Yes, it can be considered a somewhat less tasteful way to make money from an open source platform but not enough to get a big thread on HN. What they did to stir this debate is confusingly and unnecessarily tie this move to open source licensing and "commons" naming. This is what brought all this attention to something that is otherwise not very controversial.
- sologoub 8y ago
  The trick worked - people are conflating these and making it sound like it’s coming from the Apache Foundation.
  - skissane 8y ago
    I hope the Apache Foundation speaks out against this horrible potential for confusion. Could this possibly be turning into a case of trademark dilution (of the "Apache" trademark)?
    - cpkpad 8y ago
      It almost certainly is, and I sure hope the Apache Foundation starts to enforce their trademark. Otherwise, they might lose it. They have a trademark on "Apache" and even a lot of software under the "Apache Commons" brand. This is extremely confusing and clearly dilutes their branding. I have no problem with Redis Labs prioritizing (although I think an AGPL dual license would be more appropriate). I have a serious, serious problem with the intentional confusion they're spreading. On the whole, I think this will backfire. Redis Labs undercut their credibility. I'm unlikely to do business with a company I don't trust. The main value-add of being the official developer of an open source product is that trust. A lot of that is likely to spill over on Redis itself. It also does signal a financially weak position.
- danShumway 8y ago
chiefalchemist 8y ago
re: "Developers free time is where it often starts..." Words matter. We need to stop calling it free time. It's not free. Nothing is free, and certainly not a limited resource such a time. Personally I'd like to see one of the major OSS code hosts (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, etc.) incorporate payments (read: donations) into their system. If I could load say $25.00 in credits to my account I could make a donation with a click. The receiver - or anyone for that matter - could keep the "cash" or put a bounty on a bug or new feature.
- notafraudster 8y ago
  Patreon currently exists, and a lot of game emulators make use of it. There are a variety of one-off tip mechanisms too (kofi is a popular one). And feature bounties also exist (elementary, for example, uses Bountysource for a lot of their development). I think all of these things work for certain projects. They work less for mission-critical but un-flashy components (i.e. the "how do we adequately fund OpenSSL?" problem, which was solved by having big money corporates endow funding for it). They work more for user-facing stuff. So they're a good option. But I don't think they're materially superior to the other models for sustainable OSS (maintainers working on OSS projects as 20% type tasks at their day jobs; companies selling service agreements and hosted versions of OSS components; very large companies simply being public good providers). They're just another part of the puzzle. I do agree it might be slightly more convenient to offer them as part of the public-facing code repo stack. In this case, it's not clear to me Patreon style development funding would have worked near as well as Redis Labs being a corporate sponsor.
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    One emulator earning 20k (!) a month is an outlier - it's also not open source. There's still the marketing issue. If I was to work on open source full time I'd need to get about $2kAUD a month. That kind of income doesn't just happen - you've got to have an extremely popular project first. Also remember that Patreon's gotta start making money for the VCs soon so there will be user hostile changes eventually. Bring on universal basic income.
  - 8y ago
Agebor 8y ago
Maybe it's also time to realise for OSS developers that they cannot win with the cloud in the long term, so maybe it would be better to work with it. The reality in a few years time will be a multi-cloud environment where it's the cloud itself that will be commoditized. So let's make great open source projects work well with that: 1. Provide X options for deployment on many clouds/orchestrators - k8s, terraform, serverless, etc. 2. Work on top of clouds and easily integrate with them, e.g. use existing permission systems of AWS, GCloud, Azure, service discovery systems, secret management systems, parameter systems, log aggregators and many others. So in this approach, pricing would still be controlled by the OSS company, by paying for machine time or per-request.
twblalock 8y ago
I wonder how many of the people who complain about the Redis license situation are making their living writing proprietary software.
mintplant 8y ago
> which will prohibit them from being used freely by hosting and cloud providers and other software makers that profit directly from them All the pro-"Common Clause" reporting I've seen has focused exclusively on cloud providers, omitting the prohibition on even "consulting/ support services related to the Software". This reaches further than most license agreements for fully-proprietary software, to the point where I'm stunned that it's even legal. Thought experiment: is a paid employee of a company working with one of these Redis modules considered to be providing support "for a fee or other consideration"---and thus in violation of its license? Is it illegal now to teach a class on how to use RediSearch?
- driverdan 8y ago
  This is my problem as well. Freelancers and consultants would be unable to teach, install, configure, or manage anything licensed under Common Clause. It's a terrible license.
  - cpuguy83 8y ago
    I suspect in this case that it's expected that you establish a partnership agreement with the company.
    - PeterisP 8y ago
      Maybe, but that's still a very harsh restriction - in that regard pretty much every commercial product of random anti-open-source company is more free, their licences almost never require something remotely comparable to that.
error54 8y ago
If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend Henry Zhu's (Babel core team) talk from React Rally[1]. He talks candidly about the struggles of maintaining an extremely popular library and the demands and stress it puts on his life; especially now that he quit his job to work on Babel full time. If your company uses Babel (which it probably does), please donate to Henry[2] or at the least, send him a thank you for his work. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sfFX7WH1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sfFX7WH1c 2 - https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu
- acemarke 8y ago
  Henry is a wonderful person, and this talk was excellent. I second the recommendation. I posted my own thoughts about over-committing and potential burnout a few months back: https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux-writing-responsibilities-burnout-and-a-request-for-help/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux-writing-resp... . Since then, I've stepped back from trying to keep up with recurring treadmill tasks like cataloging articles and links, and am focusing my maintainer time on some specific Redux/React-Redux issues. Feeling a lot better as a result.
baybal2 8y ago
What to say, the headline is rather flamebaitish. If your opensource project can't live without "life support," it's a failed project. It means nobody wants to keep it alive. No such prerequisite is for 9 out of 10 software packages you see in any serious software repo. I now run a graphical Linux desktop with fully functioning graphical UI, all done without a dime of sponsorship money, or corporate life support of any sort. No "well funded corporation" in the world can pull out making an OS with graphical UI from scratch these days. That's simply beyond even heavyweights like google and apple with their countless battalions of coders. Now say, who has more power there? Why it is such a problem for guys making software for web ecosystem if open source desktop community can pull out doing things many many many times more hard and complex? I myself draw a mental line in between a genuine open source projects, and those which are masquerading as such. In reality, those are failing commercial enterprises trying to earn "coolness cred"
- notriddle 8y ago
  RedHat, Canonical, plus multiple other companies, put money into desktop Linux.
dwheeler 8y ago
This article seems to assume that the main problem with this "Commons" rider is a complaint about the "open core" business model. I think that assumption is false. Lots of organizations have "open core" business models, and do not get the rise that this announcement has received. The problem is that this "Commons" rider is confusing and misleading. The term "Commons" makes it sound like this is a Creative Commons license - which it is not. The term "commons" is often used to refer to open source software licenses - which this is not. The coupling with Apache makes it sound like this licensing system is from or endorsed by the Apache Foundation - which it is not. (The article uses the term "Apache Common Clause license" - the fact that author thinks that's a reasonable name, even though Apache didn't create or endorse this license, shows how confusing the situation is.) The Commons FAQ admits that the rider isn't OSS, but then suggests that the OSI definition is some minor technicality - yet the OSI definition is what practically everyone uses, and the "technicality" is at the heart of the point (that everyone can use it for any purpose). Yes, making money is hard. That problem is not limited to OSS either - most new restaurants fail within the first 2 years. I love to see new/better ways to fund OSS. Having a proprietary rider for some modules or having an open core model aren't new ideas, but if they want to do those things (and have the legal right to do), then let's see what happens! But if you're going to create a rider, it's important to actively work to not be confusing. It's hard getting consensus on anything; I think the anger here is choosing names that appear designed to be deceptive. If these names and such aren't changed, I wouldn't be surprised if the Creative Commons Corporation or Apache Foundation start considering a trademark suit to prevent confusion in the marketplace. If they weren't intended to be deceptive - and I hope they weren't - then some renaming and clarification would go a long way.
- ATsch 8y ago
  This is exactly my perspective. An announcement post that Redis modules would now be distributed under a proprietary license with shared source would have caught nobodies attention. The problem for me is with trying to paint the Commons Clause as a legitimate foss license, thereby arguably attacking the very principles of foss.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  I agree "Commons" might be unfortunate, but I understood it to stand for "license for common people" eg. those neither paying nor otherwise contributing. Maybe I'm wrong, English isn't my native language.
paulstovell 8y ago
This is the best write up I have seen in a long time on this subject. Open source doesn’t exist in a vacuum without commercial influence. The best you can do is pick the influence. FAANG sponsor open source either for strategic reasons (the Kubernetes example in the blog) or as a goodwill exercise. To the kinds of engineers Facebook would love to hire to help serve ads more devilishly, React goes a long way to making the company look developer friendly. These projects get a ton of marketing support (time to promote the project, brand name, etc) that an all-volunteer nights and weekends grassroots open source project can never complete with. Then there’s open core, which seems to struggle from the difficulty that open source has a kind of altruistic halo around it, and any attempt to commercialise or restrict parts of it (especially for things that were once open) is seen as bait and switch. Yet to see an Open Core company that isn’t continuiously torn between what it takes to keep the business viable and what it takes to keep the community on their side. Consulting and support has its own downsides too. It only scales linearly as you can hire people, and the margins are much lower so it takes a lot more people - much less fun of a company to run. And it influences the project roadmap too: “yes the setup process is broken and could do with a wizard, but the complex install process drives a lot of our consulting leads”. It seems like the huge companies that were threatened by open source have been replaced by huge companies that know how to weaponise open source. Open source still wears a certain halo thanks the nights and weekends code hacker that does it for the love, but open source at any scale is as corrupt - maybe more corrupt - than any proprietary company. (Disclaimer: my company sells proprietary software but gives customers source access/right to modify and open sources many of the building blocks. As someone who wrote code for the love of it, I often feel like there’s something evil in not making everything open source. But I’m yet to see a less evil open source model)
dkhenry 8y ago
The most successful open source company of all time is RedHat. They built their core product 100% open source. I think there is a model out there where you can be open source and still provide a valuable service for customers.
- m3mpp 8y ago
  Why do you think they're the only one, don't you think maybe they enjoyed a very special set of circumstances that will, more than likely, never happen again?
  - dkhenry 8y ago
    I think the only special set of circumstances is that they were able to go public and remain independent. At this point most companies get acquired as an exit, but thats not just Open Source companies, thats almost all companies.
    - m3mpp 8y ago
      The fact that they were the first to support an infant OS that will end up powering the majority of the server out there is a stronger reason imo, but you're right, it's definitely a reason. Another one is the internet bubble of course.
      - toyg 8y ago
        IIRC they weren't the first (Caldera...?), but they were among the few that managed to survive the dot-bust. One reason they survived was that they were (then) charging less aggressively than others, at a time when money dried up everywhere. When the bloodbath was over, only them and SuSE were left standing; and SuSE was eventually swallowed and mismanaged by Novell.
capkutay 8y ago
I always found the commercial open source community to be a bit too idealistic. On one end you have developers from very wealthy companies driving these hyped up projects. Sometimes those same developers will leave that wealthy company to start the commercial vehicle for that project. They talk about the wonders of open source and free software. Obviously their next move is to monetize the project with commercial add-ons and they end up charging 6 to 8 figure price tags for 'free' software. Their enterprise customers justify this by saying 'we have the source code for the core product...its open source so we won't get locked in'. But the likely hood that some overgrown Fortune 2000 IT team will use the forked source code and not the shipped enterprise product is basically zero. At that point, the FOSS nature is just a farce. It might as well be proprietary software at that point. There's no way the same company will prioritize the community over the high paying customers. They take over the development of the core open source version. They end up hiring all the main contributors. They find new ways to monetize it. They build add-ons that are end up being essential to using the same project in production. Its no longer a community-driven engineering meritocracy, but simply an enterprise development team with a github page.
- cpkpad 8y ago
  Open edX
enitihas 8y ago
This makes me wonder, if redhat started in this cloud poly era, would it even be possible for them to succeed.
LukeShu 8y ago
> Despite that confusion, I don’t think the community’s outrage is driven largely by that. RedisLabs’ post wasn’t ambiguous about the licensing of Redis itself. Yes it was. It has since been edited to be clearer.
- orangeshark 8y ago
  The twitter post[0] announcing the Commons Clause doesn't help make it clear by saying: > Redis has adopted a new license I've been working on w/ a talented team. The Redis mentioned here. I believe, actually means Redis Labs, not Redis the project. [0]: https://twitter.com/kevinverse/status/1032068995979956224 https://twitter.com/kevinverse/status/1032068995979956224
marknadal 8y ago
> Within InfluxDB, our dividing line is that anything related to high availability or scale out clustering is kept as a closed source commercial product No, we've discussed this time and time again: Open Core = crippleware Articles like this occasionally come out and promote propaganda that masks "crippleware" with nice sounding words. - Changelog has interviewed me about this https://changelog.com/podcast/236 https://changelog.com/podcast/236 - Hackernoon has published me on this https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-parse-shutdowns-c076460058f7 https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-par... I maintain a tremendously popular Open Source project with 8.5K+ stars, and it is extraordinarily hard. (Hint: Imagine Firebase + IPFS had a lovechild, that is what it is. See my HN profile if you are curious.) I should be the first person agreeing with this - last year was one of the hardest times of my life because of doing Open Source. But this is the moral, harsh, but important: Financial hardship sucks but does not define the values of Open Source. The values of Open Source has removed financial hardship for many, and made lives better for the masses. https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 Just like you should not gamble on crypto what you cannot afford to lose... you should not Open Source what you cannot risk. Open Core = crippleware: Faux companies publicly wearing sheepskin to look like they're developer friendly, but privately are forced to shame you into the fox's den. Open Source = giving, truly. It has hurt me at times, but those values have brought more win+win to my life and others, far beyond we can count. So thank you, to all real Open Source developers out there. You are heroes.
- Avamander 8y ago
  > https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 I don't agree with the tweet at all. I too thought MIT/BSD are good licenses, until I got burned by a piece of code majorly consisting of MIT code infringing my user rights - unwarranted tracking and a few bugs I couldn't fix. I now understand why (A)GPL exists and make sure my projects infringe on no users' rights like projects containing MIT/BSD can.
amelius 8y ago
Why not use a crowd-funded model? For example, development of the Prosemirror editor (which is open-source) is funded that way: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/ I suppose this funding-model could work for maintenance work too.
ummonk 8y ago
>However, there are frequently hidden motives for these projects. For example, Google puts significant investment into Kubernetes, but it’s also in their financial best interest to do so. This, in a nutshell, is the driving force behind the EU's antitrust investigation of Android.
pauldix 8y ago
Post author here. I'm surprised at the number of comments in this thread that say it's about the messaging or the Commons Clause license. They've cleared up the confusion about what is still BSD (almost all of it) and that it's just some enterprise modules that are commons clause. If the Commons Clause license is confusing or ambiguous to you, simply treat it as a commercial license. Functionally that would be equivalent. Saying that the Commons Clause it the source of everyone's outrage is disingenuous. Would you really be less outraged if they were simply commercial licenses? I used to think this way about OSS before I actually had to run and maintain a significant project. Add to that trying to build a business and those two together have formed my current view. In my ideal world, everything would be permissively licensed, but that doesn't match with reality. And every major open source maintainer I've ever talked to has acknowledged that tradeoffs are made. Either in the form of what is open, how it's licensed, or how the project is funded.
- ABS 8y ago
  Paul I'm surprised you are surprised this is about the confusion (and FUD) the Redis Labs announcement created since that's exactly the single most repeated piece of feedback/comment in the previous two HN threads on this topic.
  - pauldix 8y ago
    If it was really about the confusion, people would stop taking them to the wood shed after they cleared things up. But that's not what's happening. People are still railing about this and talking about the "bait and switch". I haven't seen a single comment or tweet that said "ok, we understand now, thanks for clearing that up."
- shadowmint 8y ago
  I don't think many people are seriously suggesting RedisLabs don't have the right to pursue a valid business model to secure the future of themselves and redis in general; I mean, look at elastic search, that's exactly what they do with their extension pack, and it works very well for them. No one bats an eyelid about that. > If the Commons Clause license is confusing or ambiguous to you, simply treat it as a commercial license... I have to say, this really is the issue for me. It's got both Apache and Commons in the title, that probably means its even more free than the apache license right? No? Wait... so I can use it for free? Or am I reselling it? I guess I need a lawyer if I'm going to touch this stuff now right? Mmm... no. I think that we can safely put all of those modules in the 'never use for any purpose' box, thanks. This kind of thing, seems like deceptive conduct, and that's something that is anathema to stable businesses looking for infrastructure to use. Licensing is important, it should be clear and unambiguous in naming and purpose.
cavneb 8y ago
I cannot agree more. Funding must play a part in the sustainability of open source. I recommend the Lemonade Stand document by Nadia Eghbal (https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand) as well as the Sustain Report from the Sustain Summit last year (https://sustainoss.org https://sustainoss.org)
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I think an issue here is that open source allows you to create what you think needs to exist without worrying about extra details like how to pay for its development. You think Thing should exist, you go try to build it. The barriers to entry are low. If it succeeds and becomes popular, now it's a time sink. It's no longer something you tinker on when inspiration strikes. You have obligations. At that point, it feels like slave labor, like a thing you are required to do without pay. And you feel like if people value it, they should support it somehow. Most folks doing open source probably aren't great at monetization. If they knew how to do this as a business model from the get go, they probably would have. Relatively few people feel free at that point to just walk away and say "Not my problem. I created this for free. If you love it, you maintain it. If you need something reliable and up to date, then pay for a commercial product. I've given you all the time I'm going to give you for free. I'm on to new hobbies." No, instead they get all excited that people want it, resentful that people won't pay for it, and they rightly recognize that it has value. Now they want to be compensated. And the world has Nobel Prizes intended to encourage people to create brilliant new breakthroughs to benefit humanity without necessarily knowing how to monetize it, so we have this idea embedded in our collective subconscious that if we do a good thing, it ought to be rewarded. I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years. I've thought a lot about such issues. I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize their thing if it gets popular. But we could also work on the cultural side of this and help people understand that you need to think about how much you are willing to give and that if your thing gets popular, making money with it is an additional job to do, not an entitlement. And if you are bitter that it doesn't pay, one legitimate option is to walk away or only give it however much time you actually enjoy giving it and not one minute more.
- zapita 8y ago
  Thank you for a very thoughtful and insightful post. I think you very eloquently described an important dynamic that plays out in open-source when a project takes off. I think it’s really worth investing time in studying this problem and looking for solutions, because the impact of open source on the economy and society is huge, and still growing at a rapid clip. So how these issues play out - who participates in open-source, how resources get allocated, how future inventors are incentivized and past inventors are rewarded - will impact everyone, not just direct open source contributors.
no_wizard 8y ago
I been stirring on this since the Redis incident yesterday. Here’s what I don’t like about it, in essence. If we are going to have a (and I think sometimes justifiably so) position of companies are using our OSS product to make millions but don’t contribute back us of justification, there are really two things that come to mind to me that are highlighted 1. Thst culturally we have a bias orientation of take vs give. If so many companies can get away with this because their customers don’t care, I think that shows we have a long way to go toward promoting an equitable culture. It’s not a a government thing mind you. I think OSS organizations need to spend more time educating their target audience of how to have this balance we all seek of making sure huge corporations aren’t rent seeking on the backs of hard working volunteers. It is a problem, I think, in many industries and not just ours, which brings me to point number two. 2. You owe it to everyone I think that if this is your stance, name the perpetrators Why no list of companies one by one? What they are doing isn’t illegal but if collectively enough of their base is upset about it to move away from them to different ones that is the sort of selective ness we want right? That is if your argument is a cogent one and not just a way for you to monopolize dollars in your dominant position as the provider of that software. In essence, if there alleged companies have done this alleged wrong, lay it or for everyone to see. If your argument is succinct and worthy it’ll stand on its own two feet
angel_j 8y ago
Simple answer: license OSS non-free for commercial use.
EGreg 8y ago
1. This is the promise of cryptocurrencies: the authors get paid once from presales of whatever thing people would spend money on, and then the system eventually is turned over to the participants. That's one of the great use cases of cryptocurrencies - finally a way to monetize open source projects! (https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf illustrates this). 2. I would like to see a world where Universal Basic Income pays for all the basic necessities of life for everyone. Then you won't get such unnecessary sentiments like "they would like to quit their job to work on their project full time, but can't". People would do things like write music, practice religion, learn new subjects, engage in philosophy, raise children and take care of elderly parents, all things that aren't rewarded well by the current economic system.
molteanu 8y ago
I was thinking about this in the past, but seeing the comments here, by DoreenMichele and jondubois, for example, both of whom seem to agree that being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now, only reinforces my hypothesis that maybe this OSS has a lot of marketing behind it. I don't mean a certain project, but the very idea of it. Because, in the end, it just means the people basically have a second job, only it pays nothing. It means extra work is being done, tools are being created and the people who know how to monetize it, do, while the poor souls how keep soldiering on with the 80+ hour work week get only the "fame". So isn't it possible that powerful corporations pushed and continue to push this OSS ideal, the ideal that you do meaningful work, that you'll bask in glory at the end of it, that your name will be carried on by armies of software developers until the end of time? Isn't it possible for all of this, or at least partially, to be just marketing coming out from the hands of people who really know how to tickle our emotions? How much would git or linux or emacs cost to develop? Instead, they are developed/maintained partly by armies of "passionate" developers who get zilch for they work. But they are used by money-loving corporations for free. Now isn't that convenient.
- adim_web 8y ago
  It's not really that simple. Writing free software is not zero sum (you either make money or you don't). The process of writing software is also a process where you learn things (which can be rewarding in itself, and learning from other free software is easier) that you can later apply even in your daily job. It's important not to treat free software like a money making machine. Providing value is more important than extracting money. For example Google uses a lot of open source software created by third parties and they make money, but they also provide a lot of services for free. As long as it remains a fair deal, it's not that important that a corporation extracts value from software created by others (as the money may go to people who maintain, test and provide patches). Remember that if you create some piece of free software that a corporation can use, so can somebody who doesn't have the money to buy a license, and that person may be a future developer who's going to write software for you.
einhverfr 8y ago
I have made my living doing open source software development for a number of years now. My perspective here is a little different than the article's. There are, in reality, three ways that open source software comes to be. The first two are heavily subsidized (educational/academic proof of concept and internal projects by larger companies which are open sourced to cut maintenance costs). In the first case, academia subsidizes the software and in the second case the software exists open source to try to reduce the burdens on one company. Kafka, etc. are good examples of the second. There is a third approach which I have also used which is the the customer-sponsored-development model. This works well with a certain kind of application aimed at vertical markets in business. Here you expect those who need new features or support accounts to subsidize maintenance. This is also how a lot of larger open source software projects that escape academia effectively work. In all cases there are two distinct issues. The first is subsidizing the initial development. This has to be subsidized somehow because often times getting to a minimum viable project is a lot bigger than folks expect. Academia and big business are the two major ways these often happen here. But then the second is subsidizing continued development and maintenance. Here there are different approaches. One can use pay-for-development/support models or expect users to contribute patches (depending on the context of the open source project either one might actually be viable and beneficial and the difference is who is paying the paycheck, and what the relationship is between the user and developer).
deleted 8y ago
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eadmund 8y ago
Sure, I completely agree. The thing is, anything using the so-called 'Commons Clause'[0] is no longer Open Source. Let me repeat that: if it's using the so-called 'Commons Clause,' it's neither Open Source nor Free Software. You can't burn a village to save it; nor can you invest in open source by closing it. Yes, the goal of figuring out how to support free software developers is a noble one, but denying users Freedom Zero[1] is hardly the correct way to go about doing so. [0]: I write 'so-called "Commons Clause"' because it's really an anti-commons clause: by using it, the software is removed from the commons. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
- hassy 8y ago
  Redis is still very much open source and free; the difference is that there will exist some amount of code under Commons Clause which will support its further development. Moreover, nobody is forcing anyone else to use any of that Commons Clause code.
cavneb 8y ago
I just want to point out that there are a handful of initiatives trying to help fund the maintainer. I run the CodeFund platform. We provide ethical advertising on documentation websites and give up to 70% of all revenue to the developers. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s made an impact with quite a few OSS projects. There are other channels as well. Open Collective has been doing an amazing job as well as Carbon Ads.
throw2016 8y ago
Open source was mainly powered by academics and motivated by ideology. It was never about income or personal benefit. The current software gold rush in SV like any gold rush is driven by greed and dreams of wealth and has no place for ideology. It is all about taking whatever spades are available. They don't even care about open source, if they had to pay for the spades they would, it just that open source happened to be around. Once this 'taker generation' gets to their 40s and 50s they will start thinking more seriously about the ideology and start contributing back. What else will they do, coders need to code. And the cycle will continue. The only thing to watch out for are increasingly complex 'open source' projects backed by corporates. These are just like closed source projects in that they not amenable to the individual or small team incremental dynamic of open source.
dragonwriter 8y ago
Open source is subsidized somehow. I get that done tech infrastructure startups are frustrated that users demand open source, open source let's established firms sell services, and the commotion from established firms makes it more difficult for the infra firm to establish a most and extract revenues...but, I don't see why users should compromise on their preferences just to make it easier for those startups to make the kind of returns investors demand. “My business model doesn't provide enough money” -> “the market should change its demands” is... interesting reasoning.

396 points by runesoerensen 8y ago

Nobody is complaining that Redis ia using the same 'OSS core, proprietary add ons' business model that NGINX has been using for decades. They're complaining about the weird/impossible 'clause on top of open source' and 'existing OSD' (as if there's another new one) language in Redis' announcement and the 'Commons Clause' website

antirez 8y ago
To be fair most of the complains were about the model. And such complains where pretty pointless since no resource to write Redis core is take in order to write Redis modules. Fortunately (haha) Redis OSS was always just me and sometimes (like now that there is Fabio part time just to OSS side) some other collaborator, very few people allocated there, plus the very important contributions from Redis Labs devs, Alibaba devs, and so forth. I agree that criticizing the Commons Clause makes more sense, I did not follow closely how the license was created, but the process was to let N vendors to use the same clause so that the basic license was still valid but with the added restriction. It was AFAIK a non evil process, but actually now that I read the complains about Commons Clause I can see more how that could be better with new names for each license that each vendor used. Maybe you just cut&paste the clause into the OSS license you are using, but then you call it <company> Commercial License.
- nailer 8y ago
  > Maybe you just cut&paste the clause into the OSS license you are using, but then you call it <company> Commercial License. Yep, I think that would make it better too. Redis: BSD (or whatever OSS licence) Redis X module: Redis non commercial License Redis Y module: Redis non commercial License
- wvenable 8y ago
  > To be fair most of the complains were about the model. To be fair, if they'd just said hey we're selling these proprietary licensed modules then there wouldn't be much of debate. As others have pointed out, many other OSS projects do just that. Instead mass confusion has erupted and literally every word debated ad nauseam -- including, now, the model.

jacquesm 8y ago

This is not about 'the open source community' this is just about Redis. The open source community is doing just fine (and Redis is doing just fine), no need for overbroad or inaccurate claims. Besides that the obvious point is that every open source producer is entirely free to release their product under whatever license they see fit and if you don't like it then simply don't use the product.

pauldix 8y ago
Of course Redis is doing just fine. But that depends on continued development (investment) and continued community involvement. To me it looked like the villagers have been gathering with pitchforks and torches for the last 24 hours and I think much of it is unfair to Redis.
- sqrt17 8y ago
  There's Redis (OSS), Antirez (OSS developer), and RedisLabs (commercial company and employer of Antirez). RedisLabs made some extra software available (nice) under a noncommercial-only license (well duh but ok), pretending some material relation between the noncommercial-use-only license and the Apache License (not nice). The pitchforks and torches are (to 98%) about that last bit. Everyone is happy that Redis still exists and that Antirez and RedisLabs have a sustainable business around Redis. No one - and potentially especially not the Apache foundation - enjoys the bait-and-switch of using the Apache name for a proprietary shared source license.
shawn 8y ago
Are they doing fine? I’d like to make all of the software I write freely BSD licensed. If I do that, it seems with very high probability that it might turn out to be a time sink and a money sink with no benefit other than +reputation. Which is worthwhile, but perhaps not as worthwhile as those fat stacks. I don’t know. We’re heading for a future where the only people that can afford to write OSS projects that actually influence the world are those who work for FAANG or in academia.
- 8y ago

rectang 8y ago

> Apache Common Clause license No. This is reprehensible garbage. This license is not endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation. EDIT: removed "proprietary"

antirez 8y ago
Yep this should be reworded to something like: This software is licensed under a mixed OSS/commercial license, the Apache 2 OSS license with the commercial Common Clause restricting certain freedoms.
- rectang 8y ago
  It is not "mixed OSS/commercial", because it is not OSS. Using the text of the Apache License 2.0 as a point of departure is fine. But please make it clear what you are doing.
- jahewson 8y ago
  The problem here is that the end result is not the Apache 2.0 license anymore. It’s something else. Using the Apache name in this context raises some serious eyebrows. By all means keep the common core concept for Redis but I urge you to get as far away from this toxic “Common Clause” pseudo-license as possible.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  That would be actively misleading - "This software is licensed under a mixed OSS/commercial license" implies the traditional dual-licenced model where you offer both an open source licence (e.g. GPL) and a commercial licence. Those who want an open source licence can choose that one, and those who want some extra options can choose the commercial licence. That's not the case here, there's no choice to get an OSS licence. The difference between this and the restrictions in other OSS licences is that the "common clause" restricts core freedoms - if you attach it to something, that something ceases to be an open source licence, this clause transforms into a commercial licence that prohibits free use of the software. There's nothing mixed about it, it's a "not-OSS" licence.
saidajigumi 8y ago

kodablah 8y ago

> Open core is a fairly honest way to go about developing open source software. Only if you're equally honest in admitting it's the most risky approach wrt sustainability and therefore the one most subject to strange capitalization mechanisms (and endless blog post justifications for them :-)). They go out of business all the time, leaving stale software in their wake that might have otherwise had steady maintenance if independence and growth were less paramount (like before commercialization where, in many cases, the burden was just as large). Either way, it's definitely the hardest model and if you have a piece of open source software that must have growth or you are currently no longer able to sustain it, I would try to find any other way possible to finance it...but I agree sometimes it's just not there so you build a business around it. And I'd change "developing" to "financing" since there are many more honest ways, just not at scale.

m3mpp 8y ago

What is the situation with GPL (2 or 3) for those issues with cloud providers? Is it better than BSD licenses in that regard?

wmf 8y ago
It's basically the same. Cloud providers will pay nothing and contribute nothing.
Avamander 8y ago
You'd have to use AGPL if your goal is to get something back from could providers.

saidajigumi 8y ago

I find this article's angle to be somewhat refreshing, simply because there's a segment of the OSS world that is allergic to open discussion of funding. Some of the anti-commercial arguments I've seen are absolutely fantastical, amounting to demanding OSS to be a massive entitlement to the free time of others. This also gets to the biggest criticism I have of the FSF: the only measure of success is a narrow definition of "freedom" -- with little to no discussion of what social systems, economic structures, and advocacy might be useful and/or necessary to support those aims.

binomialxenon 8y ago
I've also seen that many people FOSS users mainly because it's typically free of charge. It really should become more normalized to 'pay' for Free Software and give money regularly to projects the user supports and finds useful.

jondubois 8y ago

People underestimate how difficult it is to create a popular open source project. It's very competitive. You're competing not just with other open source projects but also with SaaS solutions from well-funded companies; and you have to compete with a $0 marketing budget. Also, if the project does become popular eventually (which is very unlikely), maintenance is a lot of work. To make matters worse, there is a general tendency that if things go wrong, the community will blame you but if things go well, you get almost no credit. Even if your project has several thousands of stars on GitHub, it means nothing financially. Most of these OSS authors can't afford to quit their day job even though their project may be generating millions of dollars of value for other people. Money is an important topic to open source authors because after a decade of working for free during nights and weekends, most of them would love to be able to afford to quit their day jobs to focus exclusively on their projects but they can't do that; they're tired but they have to keep soldiering on with the 80+ hour work week. Being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now. I think that any business innovation which helps keep open source projects going should be welcome.

Benjammer 8y ago
>after a decade of working for free during nights and weekends Think I spotted the problem. This whole thing feels like someone martyring themselves for a cause and being recognized as a hero, but then complaining that martyrs are heroes and we should be _supporting_ our heroes and not forcing them to be martyrs. But that was the whole point to begin with and why there was any opportunity for recognition at all. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- m3mpp 8y ago
  > You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's not that simple, what would be this industry without Linux, without the FSF, without the BSD network stack (that is in all the macs...) The growth of our industry, and probably of a good chunk of the whole economy for the last 10 years has a lot to do with those people working during nights and week-ends imo.
  - 8y ago

hashkb 8y ago

I don't think it's responsible to write about "open source" software while ignoring the legacy of "free software" which kicked off the entire movement in the first place. The pioneers of "open source" believed in utterly free software and (at least RMS) believe furthermore that cloud solutions (wherein someone else does your computing for you) are anti-free.

Avamander 8y ago
We do have a license that deals with anti-free cloud solutions but people feel "it's too restrictive" but it's actually only restrictive to developers who'd want to infringe users' rights. Not understanding the point behind GPL causes developers to go with MIT and BSD and then complain about other people using their software for profit and giving nothing back... that's a pity.

hueving 8y ago

>Lastly, we have consulting and support, which I think is a dead end Given that the only large company that is actually successful with open source as a business model long term (Redhat) follows this model, that shallow statement seems pretty tone-deaf.

wmf 8y ago
Nobody can figure out how to replicate Red Hat's business model, so for new companies it is a dead end.

wvenable 8y ago

> Apache Common Clause license As other's have pointed out, but it bears repeating, this is not a thing. There is actually nothing particularly shocking about what Redis is doing here; it's been done by many open source companies in the past and present and nobody cares. Yes, it can be considered a somewhat less tasteful way to make money from an open source platform but not enough to get a big thread on HN. What they did to stir this debate is confusingly and unnecessarily tie this move to open source licensing and "commons" naming. This is what brought all this attention to something that is otherwise not very controversial.

sologoub 8y ago
The trick worked - people are conflating these and making it sound like it’s coming from the Apache Foundation.
- skissane 8y ago
  I hope the Apache Foundation speaks out against this horrible potential for confusion. Could this possibly be turning into a case of trademark dilution (of the "Apache" trademark)?
  - cpkpad 8y ago
    It almost certainly is, and I sure hope the Apache Foundation starts to enforce their trademark. Otherwise, they might lose it. They have a trademark on "Apache" and even a lot of software under the "Apache Commons" brand. This is extremely confusing and clearly dilutes their branding. I have no problem with Redis Labs prioritizing (although I think an AGPL dual license would be more appropriate). I have a serious, serious problem with the intentional confusion they're spreading. On the whole, I think this will backfire. Redis Labs undercut their credibility. I'm unlikely to do business with a company I don't trust. The main value-add of being the official developer of an open source product is that trust. A lot of that is likely to spill over on Redis itself. It also does signal a financially weak position.
danShumway 8y ago

chiefalchemist 8y ago

re: "Developers free time is where it often starts..." Words matter. We need to stop calling it free time. It's not free. Nothing is free, and certainly not a limited resource such a time. Personally I'd like to see one of the major OSS code hosts (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, etc.) incorporate payments (read: donations) into their system. If I could load say $25.00 in credits to my account I could make a donation with a click. The receiver - or anyone for that matter - could keep the "cash" or put a bounty on a bug or new feature.

notafraudster 8y ago
Patreon currently exists, and a lot of game emulators make use of it. There are a variety of one-off tip mechanisms too (kofi is a popular one). And feature bounties also exist (elementary, for example, uses Bountysource for a lot of their development). I think all of these things work for certain projects. They work less for mission-critical but un-flashy components (i.e. the "how do we adequately fund OpenSSL?" problem, which was solved by having big money corporates endow funding for it). They work more for user-facing stuff. So they're a good option. But I don't think they're materially superior to the other models for sustainable OSS (maintainers working on OSS projects as 20% type tasks at their day jobs; companies selling service agreements and hosted versions of OSS components; very large companies simply being public good providers). They're just another part of the puzzle. I do agree it might be slightly more convenient to offer them as part of the public-facing code repo stack. In this case, it's not clear to me Patreon style development funding would have worked near as well as Redis Labs being a corporate sponsor.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  One emulator earning 20k (!) a month is an outlier - it's also not open source. There's still the marketing issue. If I was to work on open source full time I'd need to get about $2kAUD a month. That kind of income doesn't just happen - you've got to have an extremely popular project first. Also remember that Patreon's gotta start making money for the VCs soon so there will be user hostile changes eventually. Bring on universal basic income.
- 8y ago

Agebor 8y ago

Maybe it's also time to realise for OSS developers that they cannot win with the cloud in the long term, so maybe it would be better to work with it. The reality in a few years time will be a multi-cloud environment where it's the cloud itself that will be commoditized. So let's make great open source projects work well with that: 1. Provide X options for deployment on many clouds/orchestrators - k8s, terraform, serverless, etc. 2. Work on top of clouds and easily integrate with them, e.g. use existing permission systems of AWS, GCloud, Azure, service discovery systems, secret management systems, parameter systems, log aggregators and many others. So in this approach, pricing would still be controlled by the OSS company, by paying for machine time or per-request.

twblalock 8y ago

I wonder how many of the people who complain about the Redis license situation are making their living writing proprietary software.

mintplant 8y ago

> which will prohibit them from being used freely by hosting and cloud providers and other software makers that profit directly from them All the pro-"Common Clause" reporting I've seen has focused exclusively on cloud providers, omitting the prohibition on even "consulting/ support services related to the Software". This reaches further than most license agreements for fully-proprietary software, to the point where I'm stunned that it's even legal. Thought experiment: is a paid employee of a company working with one of these Redis modules considered to be providing support "for a fee or other consideration"---and thus in violation of its license? Is it illegal now to teach a class on how to use RediSearch?

driverdan 8y ago
This is my problem as well. Freelancers and consultants would be unable to teach, install, configure, or manage anything licensed under Common Clause. It's a terrible license.
- cpuguy83 8y ago
  I suspect in this case that it's expected that you establish a partnership agreement with the company.
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    Maybe, but that's still a very harsh restriction - in that regard pretty much every commercial product of random anti-open-source company is more free, their licences almost never require something remotely comparable to that.

error54 8y ago

If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend Henry Zhu's (Babel core team) talk from React Rally[1]. He talks candidly about the struggles of maintaining an extremely popular library and the demands and stress it puts on his life; especially now that he quit his job to work on Babel full time. If your company uses Babel (which it probably does), please donate to Henry[2] or at the least, send him a thank you for his work. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sfFX7WH1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sfFX7WH1c 2 - https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu

acemarke 8y ago
Henry is a wonderful person, and this talk was excellent. I second the recommendation. I posted my own thoughts about over-committing and potential burnout a few months back: https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux-writing-responsibilities-burnout-and-a-request-for-help/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux-writing-resp... . Since then, I've stepped back from trying to keep up with recurring treadmill tasks like cataloging articles and links, and am focusing my maintainer time on some specific Redux/React-Redux issues. Feeling a lot better as a result.

baybal2 8y ago

What to say, the headline is rather flamebaitish. If your opensource project can't live without "life support," it's a failed project. It means nobody wants to keep it alive. No such prerequisite is for 9 out of 10 software packages you see in any serious software repo. I now run a graphical Linux desktop with fully functioning graphical UI, all done without a dime of sponsorship money, or corporate life support of any sort. No "well funded corporation" in the world can pull out making an OS with graphical UI from scratch these days. That's simply beyond even heavyweights like google and apple with their countless battalions of coders. Now say, who has more power there? Why it is such a problem for guys making software for web ecosystem if open source desktop community can pull out doing things many many many times more hard and complex? I myself draw a mental line in between a genuine open source projects, and those which are masquerading as such. In reality, those are failing commercial enterprises trying to earn "coolness cred"

notriddle 8y ago
RedHat, Canonical, plus multiple other companies, put money into desktop Linux.

dwheeler 8y ago

This article seems to assume that the main problem with this "Commons" rider is a complaint about the "open core" business model. I think that assumption is false. Lots of organizations have "open core" business models, and do not get the rise that this announcement has received. The problem is that this "Commons" rider is confusing and misleading. The term "Commons" makes it sound like this is a Creative Commons license - which it is not. The term "commons" is often used to refer to open source software licenses - which this is not. The coupling with Apache makes it sound like this licensing system is from or endorsed by the Apache Foundation - which it is not. (The article uses the term "Apache Common Clause license" - the fact that author thinks that's a reasonable name, even though Apache didn't create or endorse this license, shows how confusing the situation is.) The Commons FAQ admits that the rider isn't OSS, but then suggests that the OSI definition is some minor technicality - yet the OSI definition is what practically everyone uses, and the "technicality" is at the heart of the point (that everyone can use it for any purpose). Yes, making money is hard. That problem is not limited to OSS either - most new restaurants fail within the first 2 years. I love to see new/better ways to fund OSS. Having a proprietary rider for some modules or having an open core model aren't new ideas, but if they want to do those things (and have the legal right to do), then let's see what happens! But if you're going to create a rider, it's important to actively work to not be confusing. It's hard getting consensus on anything; I think the anger here is choosing names that appear designed to be deceptive. If these names and such aren't changed, I wouldn't be surprised if the Creative Commons Corporation or Apache Foundation start considering a trademark suit to prevent confusion in the marketplace. If they weren't intended to be deceptive - and I hope they weren't - then some renaming and clarification would go a long way.

ATsch 8y ago
This is exactly my perspective. An announcement post that Redis modules would now be distributed under a proprietary license with shared source would have caught nobodies attention. The problem for me is with trying to paint the Commons Clause as a legitimate foss license, thereby arguably attacking the very principles of foss.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I agree "Commons" might be unfortunate, but I understood it to stand for "license for common people" eg. those neither paying nor otherwise contributing. Maybe I'm wrong, English isn't my native language.

paulstovell 8y ago

This is the best write up I have seen in a long time on this subject. Open source doesn’t exist in a vacuum without commercial influence. The best you can do is pick the influence. FAANG sponsor open source either for strategic reasons (the Kubernetes example in the blog) or as a goodwill exercise. To the kinds of engineers Facebook would love to hire to help serve ads more devilishly, React goes a long way to making the company look developer friendly. These projects get a ton of marketing support (time to promote the project, brand name, etc) that an all-volunteer nights and weekends grassroots open source project can never complete with. Then there’s open core, which seems to struggle from the difficulty that open source has a kind of altruistic halo around it, and any attempt to commercialise or restrict parts of it (especially for things that were once open) is seen as bait and switch. Yet to see an Open Core company that isn’t continuiously torn between what it takes to keep the business viable and what it takes to keep the community on their side. Consulting and support has its own downsides too. It only scales linearly as you can hire people, and the margins are much lower so it takes a lot more people - much less fun of a company to run. And it influences the project roadmap too: “yes the setup process is broken and could do with a wizard, but the complex install process drives a lot of our consulting leads”. It seems like the huge companies that were threatened by open source have been replaced by huge companies that know how to weaponise open source. Open source still wears a certain halo thanks the nights and weekends code hacker that does it for the love, but open source at any scale is as corrupt - maybe more corrupt - than any proprietary company. (Disclaimer: my company sells proprietary software but gives customers source access/right to modify and open sources many of the building blocks. As someone who wrote code for the love of it, I often feel like there’s something evil in not making everything open source. But I’m yet to see a less evil open source model)

dkhenry 8y ago

The most successful open source company of all time is RedHat. They built their core product 100% open source. I think there is a model out there where you can be open source and still provide a valuable service for customers.

m3mpp 8y ago
Why do you think they're the only one, don't you think maybe they enjoyed a very special set of circumstances that will, more than likely, never happen again?
- dkhenry 8y ago
  I think the only special set of circumstances is that they were able to go public and remain independent. At this point most companies get acquired as an exit, but thats not just Open Source companies, thats almost all companies.
  - m3mpp 8y ago
    The fact that they were the first to support an infant OS that will end up powering the majority of the server out there is a stronger reason imo, but you're right, it's definitely a reason. Another one is the internet bubble of course.
    - toyg 8y ago
      IIRC they weren't the first (Caldera...?), but they were among the few that managed to survive the dot-bust. One reason they survived was that they were (then) charging less aggressively than others, at a time when money dried up everywhere. When the bloodbath was over, only them and SuSE were left standing; and SuSE was eventually swallowed and mismanaged by Novell.

capkutay 8y ago

I always found the commercial open source community to be a bit too idealistic. On one end you have developers from very wealthy companies driving these hyped up projects. Sometimes those same developers will leave that wealthy company to start the commercial vehicle for that project. They talk about the wonders of open source and free software. Obviously their next move is to monetize the project with commercial add-ons and they end up charging 6 to 8 figure price tags for 'free' software. Their enterprise customers justify this by saying 'we have the source code for the core product...its open source so we won't get locked in'. But the likely hood that some overgrown Fortune 2000 IT team will use the forked source code and not the shipped enterprise product is basically zero. At that point, the FOSS nature is just a farce. It might as well be proprietary software at that point. There's no way the same company will prioritize the community over the high paying customers. They take over the development of the core open source version. They end up hiring all the main contributors. They find new ways to monetize it. They build add-ons that are end up being essential to using the same project in production. Its no longer a community-driven engineering meritocracy, but simply an enterprise development team with a github page.

cpkpad 8y ago
Open edX

enitihas 8y ago

This makes me wonder, if redhat started in this cloud poly era, would it even be possible for them to succeed.

LukeShu 8y ago

> Despite that confusion, I don’t think the community’s outrage is driven largely by that. RedisLabs’ post wasn’t ambiguous about the licensing of Redis itself. Yes it was. It has since been edited to be clearer.

orangeshark 8y ago
The twitter post[0] announcing the Commons Clause doesn't help make it clear by saying: > Redis has adopted a new license I've been working on w/ a talented team. The Redis mentioned here. I believe, actually means Redis Labs, not Redis the project. [0]: https://twitter.com/kevinverse/status/1032068995979956224 https://twitter.com/kevinverse/status/1032068995979956224

marknadal 8y ago

> Within InfluxDB, our dividing line is that anything related to high availability or scale out clustering is kept as a closed source commercial product No, we've discussed this time and time again: Open Core = crippleware Articles like this occasionally come out and promote propaganda that masks "crippleware" with nice sounding words. - Changelog has interviewed me about this https://changelog.com/podcast/236 https://changelog.com/podcast/236 - Hackernoon has published me on this https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-parse-shutdowns-c076460058f7 https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-par... I maintain a tremendously popular Open Source project with 8.5K+ stars, and it is extraordinarily hard. (Hint: Imagine Firebase + IPFS had a lovechild, that is what it is. See my HN profile if you are curious.) I should be the first person agreeing with this - last year was one of the hardest times of my life because of doing Open Source. But this is the moral, harsh, but important: Financial hardship sucks but does not define the values of Open Source. The values of Open Source has removed financial hardship for many, and made lives better for the masses. https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 Just like you should not gamble on crypto what you cannot afford to lose... you should not Open Source what you cannot risk. Open Core = crippleware: Faux companies publicly wearing sheepskin to look like they're developer friendly, but privately are forced to shame you into the fox's den. Open Source = giving, truly. It has hurt me at times, but those values have brought more win+win to my life and others, far beyond we can count. So thank you, to all real Open Source developers out there. You are heroes.

Avamander 8y ago
> https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656 I don't agree with the tweet at all. I too thought MIT/BSD are good licenses, until I got burned by a piece of code majorly consisting of MIT code infringing my user rights - unwarranted tracking and a few bugs I couldn't fix. I now understand why (A)GPL exists and make sure my projects infringe on no users' rights like projects containing MIT/BSD can.

amelius 8y ago

Why not use a crowd-funded model? For example, development of the Prosemirror editor (which is open-source) is funded that way: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/ I suppose this funding-model could work for maintenance work too.

ummonk 8y ago

>However, there are frequently hidden motives for these projects. For example, Google puts significant investment into Kubernetes, but it’s also in their financial best interest to do so. This, in a nutshell, is the driving force behind the EU's antitrust investigation of Android.

pauldix 8y ago

Post author here. I'm surprised at the number of comments in this thread that say it's about the messaging or the Commons Clause license. They've cleared up the confusion about what is still BSD (almost all of it) and that it's just some enterprise modules that are commons clause. If the Commons Clause license is confusing or ambiguous to you, simply treat it as a commercial license. Functionally that would be equivalent. Saying that the Commons Clause it the source of everyone's outrage is disingenuous. Would you really be less outraged if they were simply commercial licenses? I used to think this way about OSS before I actually had to run and maintain a significant project. Add to that trying to build a business and those two together have formed my current view. In my ideal world, everything would be permissively licensed, but that doesn't match with reality. And every major open source maintainer I've ever talked to has acknowledged that tradeoffs are made. Either in the form of what is open, how it's licensed, or how the project is funded.

ABS 8y ago
Paul I'm surprised you are surprised this is about the confusion (and FUD) the Redis Labs announcement created since that's exactly the single most repeated piece of feedback/comment in the previous two HN threads on this topic.
- pauldix 8y ago
  If it was really about the confusion, people would stop taking them to the wood shed after they cleared things up. But that's not what's happening. People are still railing about this and talking about the "bait and switch". I haven't seen a single comment or tweet that said "ok, we understand now, thanks for clearing that up."
shadowmint 8y ago
I don't think many people are seriously suggesting RedisLabs don't have the right to pursue a valid business model to secure the future of themselves and redis in general; I mean, look at elastic search, that's exactly what they do with their extension pack, and it works very well for them. No one bats an eyelid about that. > If the Commons Clause license is confusing or ambiguous to you, simply treat it as a commercial license... I have to say, this really is the issue for me. It's got both Apache and Commons in the title, that probably means its even more free than the apache license right? No? Wait... so I can use it for free? Or am I reselling it? I guess I need a lawyer if I'm going to touch this stuff now right? Mmm... no. I think that we can safely put all of those modules in the 'never use for any purpose' box, thanks. This kind of thing, seems like deceptive conduct, and that's something that is anathema to stable businesses looking for infrastructure to use. Licensing is important, it should be clear and unambiguous in naming and purpose.

cavneb 8y ago

I cannot agree more. Funding must play a part in the sustainability of open source. I recommend the Lemonade Stand document by Nadia Eghbal (https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand) as well as the Sustain Report from the Sustain Summit last year (https://sustainoss.org https://sustainoss.org)

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I think an issue here is that open source allows you to create what you think needs to exist without worrying about extra details like how to pay for its development. You think Thing should exist, you go try to build it. The barriers to entry are low. If it succeeds and becomes popular, now it's a time sink. It's no longer something you tinker on when inspiration strikes. You have obligations. At that point, it feels like slave labor, like a thing you are required to do without pay. And you feel like if people value it, they should support it somehow. Most folks doing open source probably aren't great at monetization. If they knew how to do this as a business model from the get go, they probably would have. Relatively few people feel free at that point to just walk away and say "Not my problem. I created this for free. If you love it, you maintain it. If you need something reliable and up to date, then pay for a commercial product. I've given you all the time I'm going to give you for free. I'm on to new hobbies." No, instead they get all excited that people want it, resentful that people won't pay for it, and they rightly recognize that it has value. Now they want to be compensated. And the world has Nobel Prizes intended to encourage people to create brilliant new breakthroughs to benefit humanity without necessarily knowing how to monetize it, so we have this idea embedded in our collective subconscious that if we do a good thing, it ought to be rewarded. I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years. I've thought a lot about such issues. I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize their thing if it gets popular. But we could also work on the cultural side of this and help people understand that you need to think about how much you are willing to give and that if your thing gets popular, making money with it is an additional job to do, not an entitlement. And if you are bitter that it doesn't pay, one legitimate option is to walk away or only give it however much time you actually enjoy giving it and not one minute more.

zapita 8y ago
Thank you for a very thoughtful and insightful post. I think you very eloquently described an important dynamic that plays out in open-source when a project takes off. I think it’s really worth investing time in studying this problem and looking for solutions, because the impact of open source on the economy and society is huge, and still growing at a rapid clip. So how these issues play out - who participates in open-source, how resources get allocated, how future inventors are incentivized and past inventors are rewarded - will impact everyone, not just direct open source contributors.

no_wizard 8y ago

I been stirring on this since the Redis incident yesterday. Here’s what I don’t like about it, in essence. If we are going to have a (and I think sometimes justifiably so) position of companies are using our OSS product to make millions but don’t contribute back us of justification, there are really two things that come to mind to me that are highlighted 1. Thst culturally we have a bias orientation of take vs give. If so many companies can get away with this because their customers don’t care, I think that shows we have a long way to go toward promoting an equitable culture. It’s not a a government thing mind you. I think OSS organizations need to spend more time educating their target audience of how to have this balance we all seek of making sure huge corporations aren’t rent seeking on the backs of hard working volunteers. It is a problem, I think, in many industries and not just ours, which brings me to point number two. 2. You owe it to everyone I think that if this is your stance, name the perpetrators Why no list of companies one by one? What they are doing isn’t illegal but if collectively enough of their base is upset about it to move away from them to different ones that is the sort of selective ness we want right? That is if your argument is a cogent one and not just a way for you to monopolize dollars in your dominant position as the provider of that software. In essence, if there alleged companies have done this alleged wrong, lay it or for everyone to see. If your argument is succinct and worthy it’ll stand on its own two feet

angel_j 8y ago

Simple answer: license OSS non-free for commercial use.

EGreg 8y ago

1. This is the promise of cryptocurrencies: the authors get paid once from presales of whatever thing people would spend money on, and then the system eventually is turned over to the participants. That's one of the great use cases of cryptocurrencies - finally a way to monetize open source projects! (https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf illustrates this). 2. I would like to see a world where Universal Basic Income pays for all the basic necessities of life for everyone. Then you won't get such unnecessary sentiments like "they would like to quit their job to work on their project full time, but can't". People would do things like write music, practice religion, learn new subjects, engage in philosophy, raise children and take care of elderly parents, all things that aren't rewarded well by the current economic system.

molteanu 8y ago

I was thinking about this in the past, but seeing the comments here, by DoreenMichele and jondubois, for example, both of whom seem to agree that being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now, only reinforces my hypothesis that maybe this OSS has a lot of marketing behind it. I don't mean a certain project, but the very idea of it. Because, in the end, it just means the people basically have a second job, only it pays nothing. It means extra work is being done, tools are being created and the people who know how to monetize it, do, while the poor souls how keep soldiering on with the 80+ hour work week get only the "fame". So isn't it possible that powerful corporations pushed and continue to push this OSS ideal, the ideal that you do meaningful work, that you'll bask in glory at the end of it, that your name will be carried on by armies of software developers until the end of time? Isn't it possible for all of this, or at least partially, to be just marketing coming out from the hands of people who really know how to tickle our emotions? How much would git or linux or emacs cost to develop? Instead, they are developed/maintained partly by armies of "passionate" developers who get zilch for they work. But they are used by money-loving corporations for free. Now isn't that convenient.

adim_web 8y ago
It's not really that simple. Writing free software is not zero sum (you either make money or you don't). The process of writing software is also a process where you learn things (which can be rewarding in itself, and learning from other free software is easier) that you can later apply even in your daily job. It's important not to treat free software like a money making machine. Providing value is more important than extracting money. For example Google uses a lot of open source software created by third parties and they make money, but they also provide a lot of services for free. As long as it remains a fair deal, it's not that important that a corporation extracts value from software created by others (as the money may go to people who maintain, test and provide patches). Remember that if you create some piece of free software that a corporation can use, so can somebody who doesn't have the money to buy a license, and that person may be a future developer who's going to write software for you.

einhverfr 8y ago

I have made my living doing open source software development for a number of years now. My perspective here is a little different than the article's. There are, in reality, three ways that open source software comes to be. The first two are heavily subsidized (educational/academic proof of concept and internal projects by larger companies which are open sourced to cut maintenance costs). In the first case, academia subsidizes the software and in the second case the software exists open source to try to reduce the burdens on one company. Kafka, etc. are good examples of the second. There is a third approach which I have also used which is the the customer-sponsored-development model. This works well with a certain kind of application aimed at vertical markets in business. Here you expect those who need new features or support accounts to subsidize maintenance. This is also how a lot of larger open source software projects that escape academia effectively work. In all cases there are two distinct issues. The first is subsidizing the initial development. This has to be subsidized somehow because often times getting to a minimum viable project is a lot bigger than folks expect. Academia and big business are the two major ways these often happen here. But then the second is subsidizing continued development and maintenance. Here there are different approaches. One can use pay-for-development/support models or expect users to contribute patches (depending on the context of the open source project either one might actually be viable and beneficial and the difference is who is paying the paycheck, and what the relationship is between the user and developer).

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eadmund 8y ago

Sure, I completely agree. The thing is, anything using the so-called 'Commons Clause'[0] is no longer Open Source. Let me repeat that: if it's using the so-called 'Commons Clause,' it's neither Open Source nor Free Software. You can't burn a village to save it; nor can you invest in open source by closing it. Yes, the goal of figuring out how to support free software developers is a noble one, but denying users Freedom Zero[1] is hardly the correct way to go about doing so. [0]: I write 'so-called "Commons Clause"' because it's really an anti-commons clause: by using it, the software is removed from the commons. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

hassy 8y ago
Redis is still very much open source and free; the difference is that there will exist some amount of code under Commons Clause which will support its further development. Moreover, nobody is forcing anyone else to use any of that Commons Clause code.

cavneb 8y ago

I just want to point out that there are a handful of initiatives trying to help fund the maintainer. I run the CodeFund platform. We provide ethical advertising on documentation websites and give up to 70% of all revenue to the developers. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s made an impact with quite a few OSS projects. There are other channels as well. Open Collective has been doing an amazing job as well as Carbon Ads.

throw2016 8y ago

Open source was mainly powered by academics and motivated by ideology. It was never about income or personal benefit. The current software gold rush in SV like any gold rush is driven by greed and dreams of wealth and has no place for ideology. It is all about taking whatever spades are available. They don't even care about open source, if they had to pay for the spades they would, it just that open source happened to be around. Once this 'taker generation' gets to their 40s and 50s they will start thinking more seriously about the ideology and start contributing back. What else will they do, coders need to code. And the cycle will continue. The only thing to watch out for are increasingly complex 'open source' projects backed by corporates. These are just like closed source projects in that they not amenable to the individual or small team incremental dynamic of open source.

dragonwriter 8y ago

Open source is subsidized somehow. I get that done tech infrastructure startups are frustrated that users demand open source, open source let's established firms sell services, and the commotion from established firms makes it more difficult for the infra firm to establish a most and extract revenues...but, I don't see why users should compromise on their preferences just to make it easier for those startups to make the kind of returns investors demand. “My business model doesn't provide enough money” -> “the market should change its demands” is... interesting reasoning.