4 ms·

Speaking as not a lawyer: there is lots of abuse of OSS infrastructure from big tech corps — because the AGPL isn't equipped for everything-as-a-service eating

by mrkurt 8y ago

Speaking as not a lawyer: there is lots of abuse of OSS infrastructure from big tech corps — because the AGPL isn't equipped for everything-as-a-service eating software licensing. If "abuse" were license violations, they wouldn't have to use a new license. Abuse is often legal.

DannyBee 8y ago
What is your definition of "abuse"? This feels a lot like when i hear about "GPL" abuse when it was specifically not designed for what people think is abuse (and that's not my view but stallman's). Similarly, AGPL was not designed to require every piece of software around a piece of AGPL software to be open sourced. Deliberately so. Not doing so is not "abuse". You may have different goals, and that's actually fine! But it doesn't make following the license and what it was meant for abuse. I'll also point out: In the history of my work on open source, by far the largest legal abusers of open source are startups. By many orders of magnitude. This is real abuse in the sense of clear license non-compliance. I worked on M&A at a variety of companies that acquired all sorts of different kind/stages of startups. They rarely are compliant with even simple notice licenses (IE don't bother to post notices), let alone any of the more restrictive licenses. Large corps often have legal departments that try to understand and consider and figure out what to do, even if they do it wrong. So to me, every time i hear "large company open source abusers" i kind of laugh, because IMHO getting the startups to stop abusing open source would have a much more significant difference on OSS than getting 2 or 3 large companies to stop "abusing" it.
- mrkurt 8y ago
  Abuse is taking all the free candy at a doctor's office. It might just violate a norm without breaking a law, but it's still abuse. It's situational, but if you define abuse as "breaking a contract or law" we're not going to agree on anything about this. MongoDB has _always_ wanted to make money when other people make money reselling their work. The AGPL doesn't really do what they needed, but their intent has been clear since day one.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    Let's be real concrete here with no analogies: I asked you to define what you see as abuse? Give me concrete examples. I explicitly pointed out to you a social norm, not a violation of contract. I did not define it as breaking a contract or law. I defined it in terms of the social norm that was set by the creator of the license, or the "spirit" of the license. I want to understand what you see as "violation of that spirit", not the legal definition. As mentioned, most definitions i've seen here are explicitly not what the creator of the license intended (again, not what they wrote down, but what they intended). It's hard to see something that doesn't violate the spirit of the license as abuse. For example, i often hear about "not contributing back" to GPL projects. RMS explicitly was okay with "not contributing back" in the broader sense, as long as they released their source code. He had no expectation he would get anything other than a pile of source that he would have to deal with. He just wanted to be able to hack it, so as long as it had the right stuff, he didn't expect others to care. He thought it would be nice for sure, but it's not "abuse". (A great concrete example of abuse is usually binary kernel blobs that have deliberate shim interfaces. This clearly violates the spirit of the license even if the license says it may be okay.) So far i haven't seen what you have defined as abuse especially by "large companies". Additionally, I pointed out to you the notion that large corporations are the ones doing the abusing is wrong under almost all definitions of abuse, spirit, legal, aspirational, you name it.
  - cdibona 8y ago
    Who are you to decide what is the norm being violated? What I mean by that was the entire point of open source and free software licensing is to codify the 'norms' that the authors found important. Companies like Google, MS, Amazon are not violating norms but complying with them. When companies like MongoDB abandon these licenses its because they're incompatible with their business model. Open Source is fine for them while they're making a market and developing a programmer user base, becoming popular with people who will not bother with a new proprietary database, mind you, but once they're 'popular' and need to increase revenue, the license gets replaced with a familiar , proprietary, one.
  - chaostheory 8y ago
    > Abuse is taking all the free candy at a doctor's office. This is a bad analogy for software, since software is not a finite resource. Anyone can make a near infinite number of copies. Don't blame 3rd parties when you realized that an open source license is the wrong license for your product.
anarazel 8y ago
> because the AGPL isn't equipped for everything-as-a-service eating software licensing The AGPL is just generally a ridiculously badly written license.

by mrkurt 8y ago

DannyBee 8y ago

What is your definition of "abuse"? This feels a lot like when i hear about "GPL" abuse when it was specifically not designed for what people think is abuse (and that's not my view but stallman's). Similarly, AGPL was not designed to require every piece of software around a piece of AGPL software to be open sourced. Deliberately so. Not doing so is not "abuse". You may have different goals, and that's actually fine! But it doesn't make following the license and what it was meant for abuse. I'll also point out: In the history of my work on open source, by far the largest legal abusers of open source are startups. By many orders of magnitude. This is real abuse in the sense of clear license non-compliance. I worked on M&A at a variety of companies that acquired all sorts of different kind/stages of startups. They rarely are compliant with even simple notice licenses (IE don't bother to post notices), let alone any of the more restrictive licenses. Large corps often have legal departments that try to understand and consider and figure out what to do, even if they do it wrong. So to me, every time i hear "large company open source abusers" i kind of laugh, because IMHO getting the startups to stop abusing open source would have a much more significant difference on OSS than getting 2 or 3 large companies to stop "abusing" it.

mrkurt 8y ago
Abuse is taking all the free candy at a doctor's office. It might just violate a norm without breaking a law, but it's still abuse. It's situational, but if you define abuse as "breaking a contract or law" we're not going to agree on anything about this. MongoDB has _always_ wanted to make money when other people make money reselling their work. The AGPL doesn't really do what they needed, but their intent has been clear since day one.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Let's be real concrete here with no analogies: I asked you to define what you see as abuse? Give me concrete examples. I explicitly pointed out to you a social norm, not a violation of contract. I did not define it as breaking a contract or law. I defined it in terms of the social norm that was set by the creator of the license, or the "spirit" of the license. I want to understand what you see as "violation of that spirit", not the legal definition. As mentioned, most definitions i've seen here are explicitly not what the creator of the license intended (again, not what they wrote down, but what they intended). It's hard to see something that doesn't violate the spirit of the license as abuse. For example, i often hear about "not contributing back" to GPL projects. RMS explicitly was okay with "not contributing back" in the broader sense, as long as they released their source code. He had no expectation he would get anything other than a pile of source that he would have to deal with. He just wanted to be able to hack it, so as long as it had the right stuff, he didn't expect others to care. He thought it would be nice for sure, but it's not "abuse". (A great concrete example of abuse is usually binary kernel blobs that have deliberate shim interfaces. This clearly violates the spirit of the license even if the license says it may be okay.) So far i haven't seen what you have defined as abuse especially by "large companies". Additionally, I pointed out to you the notion that large corporations are the ones doing the abusing is wrong under almost all definitions of abuse, spirit, legal, aspirational, you name it.
- cdibona 8y ago
  Who are you to decide what is the norm being violated? What I mean by that was the entire point of open source and free software licensing is to codify the 'norms' that the authors found important. Companies like Google, MS, Amazon are not violating norms but complying with them. When companies like MongoDB abandon these licenses its because they're incompatible with their business model. Open Source is fine for them while they're making a market and developing a programmer user base, becoming popular with people who will not bother with a new proprietary database, mind you, but once they're 'popular' and need to increase revenue, the license gets replaced with a familiar , proprietary, one.
- chaostheory 8y ago
  > Abuse is taking all the free candy at a doctor's office. This is a bad analogy for software, since software is not a finite resource. Anyone can make a near infinite number of copies. Don't blame 3rd parties when you realized that an open source license is the wrong license for your product.

anarazel 8y ago

> because the AGPL isn't equipped for everything-as-a-service eating software licensing The AGPL is just generally a ridiculously badly written license.