5 ms·

This, 1000 times. We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully

by amenod 8y ago

This, 1000 times. We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully supported by wider community). The most curious thing about this is that when a company behind a successful OSS project decides to change a license that would extract some of that value back to the actual creators and maintainers of OSS, they get the backlash from OSS community [0][1]. Ironic, given that the same authors openly post the donations received that amount to... well not peanuts exactly, but not something comparable to an average programmer's pay either. Not all feedback is like this, of course - some recognize the unfairness in the system and support the search for change. What I currently miss most is some viable 3rd option - not open source, not closed source, but something in between. Apart from GPL & co., and MIT / BSD / Apache, we need a sort of license that would allow creators to extract some part of money from their work. Or at least allow them to sell services, based on their product, without fear of being undercut by competitors who don't bother developing. Why develop when you can take the best OSS product, integrate it to your infrastructure and sell the service? Current situation with "middle-ground" licenses is: - Fair Source license is very well written, but is unfortunately only applicable to a very narrow use-case (user-facing apps), and bigtech can still undercut you at hosting (though you do get some royalties... probably) - Commons Clause seems a bit vague about the term "Sell", has a very unfortunate name, and their main proponent already chose another license... too bad, because the idea is great. - Zero License is too complex (for me at least) - Business Source License looks promising, though I am not thrilled about the prospect of turning my software to GPL after 3 years (AGPL with closed loopholes would be a better choice). If someone knows of a better license in the spirit of Commons Clause, I'm all ears. [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-open-source-definitely-maybe/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-i... [1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destroy-open-source.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destr...

mythz 8y ago
Definitely agree that the best way to force cloud companies into revenue sharing back would be for OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427
- amenod 8y ago
  That would be awesome. The thing that each of these licenses lacks is recognition. When someone says it's GPL, every developer knows what the tradeoffs are. With Fair Source 25 license? Not so much.
- 0815test 8y ago
  Haven't we tried this already? The AGPL is a bona-fide OSS license, and is standard enough that it's actually endorsed by the FSF for public-facing services, in addition to being OSI-certified. Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly - which is what we were going for, right? Yet many "OSS-lite" companies have rejected it as not going far enough. It's mind-boggling.
  - amenod 8y ago
    > Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly I don't think they do, actually? MongoDB felt a need to change their license from AGPL to SSPL. That said, I'm on "not going far enough" side of the argument. I don't care if they distribute their code, I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties. Alternatively, they are free to develop their own product. Note that that doesn't go for users - users are free to install and use the software as they see fit. But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me.
    - UncleEntity 8y ago
      > I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties. Which is basically rent seeking which is what this whole thread is complaining about. And, incidentally, the whole problem copywrite was invented to solve -- you get a "time limited" monopoly on the distribution of your work. > But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me. <bad car analogy warning> This is like car companies saying you are free to race their cars as long as you never outcompete them on the track...
jrudolph 8y ago
I think AGPL is a fairly good choice for anything that's potentially used as a hosted service. All the big enterprises I've worked with so far have a policy that forbids AGPL'd software and rather purchase commercial licenses. SMEs & Startups may make different choices but depending on your product they may not represent the relevant majority of the market anyway. Ayende from RavenDB (which is a great no-nonsense document DB) has written an interesting blog series [0] on how they approach OSS while still making money from it and keeping their interests aligned with users and customers. TL;DR they license the full server and all modules as AGPL, offer free community (commercial) license that don't skimp on core features (clustering, authn/z), treat support as a cost-center. Appears to work well for them and I personally find their mode of operation sympathetic. [0] https://ayende.com/blog/posts/series/186113-A/making-money-from-open-source-software https://ayende.com/blog/posts/series/186113-A/making-money-f...
cthalupa 8y ago
Well, let's take a look at ElasticSearch, since that's the current hot topic. If Lucene followed the same logic being espoused here, then ElasticSearch as we know it wouldn't exist, because they wouldn't be able to use Lucene, which is an incredibly core component to ES. Elastic employs several people to work on Lucene full time at this point, so they're "giving back" in that regard, but they're still making money off of pre-existing open source. What is the litmus test for this being okay? No one seems to be upset at Elastic for making money off Lucene, but the idea of the big cloud vendors making money off of ES is upsetting to a lot of people. If Amazon or Microsoft employed a handful of people to work on ElasticSearch full time does it become okay then?
- mythz 8y ago
  There's no line after, there will only ever be the 3 multi-billion dollar cloud monopolies at the end of the food chain, the toll booth collecting rent for hosting others OSS efforts.
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    So, I guess the question is: What about Open Source makes you believe this is the bad outcome? The cloud companies make their money providing the physical infrastructure, their expertise in working with the product, support, etc. when hosting it for you. You're not paying them to have access to ElasticSearch - you've already got ElasticSearch. Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic? Why shouldn't they have the option of getting their hosting from someone that they already get other hosted services from? If there had been a similar attitude behind the development of open source webservers, the web as we know it would almost certainly not exist today. If httpd had been licensed in such a way that you couldn't make money off of providing it as a hosted service, and no open source alternative had come into existence, I doubt we'd all be sitting on HN right now. It never got concentrated like it has today with the big three, but nothing in the license prevented it from occurring.
    - mythz 8y ago
      Cloud providers were only possible because they can host OSS without licensing restriction or costs, they've worked out that they could charge for computing by providing hosting and is where they've put their billion dollar Cap-Ex into building impenetrable moats. Hosting OSS isn't the only thing that creates value, but it's where most of the revenue is now being derived since no-one pays for OSS, only to host it. The generated wealth is then be used to finance other proprietary and OSS efforts that can outspend and out resource anyone else they choose to compete with, who need to rely on a different source and business model for their sustainable income. Cloud hosting is the primary business model that allows investing in developing OSS as they'll still get paid in the end, in this way OSS bringing the cost of software down to zero becomes a loss-leading marketing expense (and competitive advantage) that allows mass free bait distribution of their software which everyone else is at a disadvantage to compete against. Essentially OSS is strengthening cloud monopolies by bringing the cost of software development to zero with the majority of wealth created going to making major tech cloud providers more wealthy and powerful each passing year. > Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic? Because AWS didn't put any of the investment in creating it, they're reaping the benefits from Elastic's investments and can undercut them since they don't have to fund any of the development and have access to an bigger economy of scale no-one else has access to.
prepend 8y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to say we “need” these non-OSS licenses as they exist. People are free to use them for their projects. More power to them. Assuming that all OSS projects are exploited or missing out is wrong. The reason apl/mit are so popular is because they encourage use. I suspect that projects that try to use common core or whatnot will not meet with success because of the limitations of those licenses. Although I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.

by amenod 8y ago

mythz 8y ago

Definitely agree that the best way to force cloud companies into revenue sharing back would be for OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427

amenod 8y ago
That would be awesome. The thing that each of these licenses lacks is recognition. When someone says it's GPL, every developer knows what the tradeoffs are. With Fair Source 25 license? Not so much.
0815test 8y ago
Haven't we tried this already? The AGPL is a bona-fide OSS license, and is standard enough that it's actually endorsed by the FSF for public-facing services, in addition to being OSI-certified. Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly - which is what we were going for, right? Yet many "OSS-lite" companies have rejected it as not going far enough. It's mind-boggling.
- amenod 8y ago
  > Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly I don't think they do, actually? MongoDB felt a need to change their license from AGPL to SSPL. That said, I'm on "not going far enough" side of the argument. I don't care if they distribute their code, I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties. Alternatively, they are free to develop their own product. Note that that doesn't go for users - users are free to install and use the software as they see fit. But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me.
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    > I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties. Which is basically rent seeking which is what this whole thread is complaining about. And, incidentally, the whole problem copywrite was invented to solve -- you get a "time limited" monopoly on the distribution of your work. > But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me. <bad car analogy warning> This is like car companies saying you are free to race their cars as long as you never outcompete them on the track...

jrudolph 8y ago

I think AGPL is a fairly good choice for anything that's potentially used as a hosted service. All the big enterprises I've worked with so far have a policy that forbids AGPL'd software and rather purchase commercial licenses. SMEs & Startups may make different choices but depending on your product they may not represent the relevant majority of the market anyway. Ayende from RavenDB (which is a great no-nonsense document DB) has written an interesting blog series [0] on how they approach OSS while still making money from it and keeping their interests aligned with users and customers. TL;DR they license the full server and all modules as AGPL, offer free community (commercial) license that don't skimp on core features (clustering, authn/z), treat support as a cost-center. Appears to work well for them and I personally find their mode of operation sympathetic. [0] https://ayende.com/blog/posts/series/186113-A/making-money-from-open-source-software https://ayende.com/blog/posts/series/186113-A/making-money-f...

cthalupa 8y ago

Well, let's take a look at ElasticSearch, since that's the current hot topic. If Lucene followed the same logic being espoused here, then ElasticSearch as we know it wouldn't exist, because they wouldn't be able to use Lucene, which is an incredibly core component to ES. Elastic employs several people to work on Lucene full time at this point, so they're "giving back" in that regard, but they're still making money off of pre-existing open source. What is the litmus test for this being okay? No one seems to be upset at Elastic for making money off Lucene, but the idea of the big cloud vendors making money off of ES is upsetting to a lot of people. If Amazon or Microsoft employed a handful of people to work on ElasticSearch full time does it become okay then?

mythz 8y ago
There's no line after, there will only ever be the 3 multi-billion dollar cloud monopolies at the end of the food chain, the toll booth collecting rent for hosting others OSS efforts.
- cthalupa 8y ago
  So, I guess the question is: What about Open Source makes you believe this is the bad outcome? The cloud companies make their money providing the physical infrastructure, their expertise in working with the product, support, etc. when hosting it for you. You're not paying them to have access to ElasticSearch - you've already got ElasticSearch. Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic? Why shouldn't they have the option of getting their hosting from someone that they already get other hosted services from? If there had been a similar attitude behind the development of open source webservers, the web as we know it would almost certainly not exist today. If httpd had been licensed in such a way that you couldn't make money off of providing it as a hosted service, and no open source alternative had come into existence, I doubt we'd all be sitting on HN right now. It never got concentrated like it has today with the big three, but nothing in the license prevented it from occurring.
  - mythz 8y ago
    Cloud providers were only possible because they can host OSS without licensing restriction or costs, they've worked out that they could charge for computing by providing hosting and is where they've put their billion dollar Cap-Ex into building impenetrable moats. Hosting OSS isn't the only thing that creates value, but it's where most of the revenue is now being derived since no-one pays for OSS, only to host it. The generated wealth is then be used to finance other proprietary and OSS efforts that can outspend and out resource anyone else they choose to compete with, who need to rely on a different source and business model for their sustainable income. Cloud hosting is the primary business model that allows investing in developing OSS as they'll still get paid in the end, in this way OSS bringing the cost of software down to zero becomes a loss-leading marketing expense (and competitive advantage) that allows mass free bait distribution of their software which everyone else is at a disadvantage to compete against. Essentially OSS is strengthening cloud monopolies by bringing the cost of software development to zero with the majority of wealth created going to making major tech cloud providers more wealthy and powerful each passing year. > Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic? Because AWS didn't put any of the investment in creating it, they're reaping the benefits from Elastic's investments and can undercut them since they don't have to fund any of the development and have access to an bigger economy of scale no-one else has access to.

prepend 8y ago

I don’t think it’s fair to say we “need” these non-OSS licenses as they exist. People are free to use them for their projects. More power to them. Assuming that all OSS projects are exploited or missing out is wrong. The reason apl/mit are so popular is because they encourage use. I suspect that projects that try to use common core or whatnot will not meet with success because of the limitations of those licenses. Although I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.