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> How do you describe a license that let's you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering
by cyphar 8y ago
> How do you describe a license that let's you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product?
A proprietary software license. Let's not forget the infamous "don't be evil" clause.
> The "open source companies are all failing"-meme isn't factually correct.
Several of the companies you have mentioned (including yourselves) are no longer "open source companies" since you now develop proprietary software. You might not consider this a failure (maybe a "pivot"), but you are no longer an "open source company".
Don't get me wrong, I completely believe that there is a financial problem caused by cloud providers not paying you for your development work. And I understand the frustration and lack of fairness in such a dynamic. But that doesn't change that you now develop proprietary software.
> I don't think the current crop of licenses was handed down from the mountain on Stone Tablets by our elders to be revered and not questioned.
Nobody is claiming that, and those licenses have changed over the years. But the changes have always come from the community. MPLv2 was written so that it could be integrated with GPL code. The GPLv3 was written to deal with concerns about locked-down hardware. The AGPLv3 was based on a community fork of GPLv2.
The new proprietary licenses are coming from companies that wish to protect their businesses. This is clearly a different dynamic, and I think it's quite unfair to paint your critics with the brush of being unquestioningly reverent of our elders -- when in fact we are seeing that the existing, gradual evolution of licenses by the community has been co-opted by companies wishing to protect their own interests.
- boredandroid 8y agoConfluent continues to fund the development of quite a lot of Apache 2.0 code and that is a huge part of our business and strategy. Perhaps your point is that if a company produces any non-open source code they are not an open source company?
- csande17 8y agoMicrosoft and Oracle also fund the development of a lot of open source code, but I think it'd be a bit of a stretch to call them open source companies.
- nqzero 8y agoyou're creating a false dichotomy neither open source nor proprietary represents a single thing and there's a continuum between the two extremes this license is clearly somewhere near the middle
- WhatIsDukkha 8y agoWhy are you assuming there is a middle ground? Many things in life have no real middle ground. These "middle ground" licenses have yet to show a useful non-toxic instance that actually served their communities. You have the burden of proof here.
- sparkie 8y agoMiddle ground exists because it is ultimately for a court to decide whether or not something is a copyright violation. These things aren't black and white. A license is a piece of legal advice which suggests the decision a court might make if it were to be taken to one, based on past judicial decisions. When it comes to new technologies and new distribution methods (or distribution loopholes), there's not much precedent to go off. The uncertainty here is the middle ground.
- WhatIsDukkha 8y agoYou are focused on enforcement which (might be interesting in an internet lawyering way) is irrelevant if noone uses the codebases in the first place because of the license makes it unuseful for users and coders. Almost all of these "middle ground" license cannot be combined with the normal licenses that have huge functioning communities.
- nqzero 8y ago> You have the burden of proof here. even transistors, the basic underpinning of our digital worlds, have middle ground - it's the norm, not the exception, and dichotomies are almost entirely a human fiction to make things more computationally tractable the burden is yours