4 ms·

What we are seeing is not as much a war inside the community but an assault from a set of corporations that want to harvest their ownership of a name associated

What we are seeing is not as much a war inside the community but an assault from a set of corporations that want to harvest their ownership of a name associated with a successful opensource project into making them the next Microsoft as they have to repay their investors/owners with super-normal profits a functional free market cannot actual provide. All of the recent issues have started with someone trying to reinvent Microsoft shared source idea where the focus is on code transparency not the right to modify and fork. It's a common pattern of substituting the real movement with a cargo cult copy, where the original goals is replaced by a set of consumable you have to buy, that have killed far more important movements then the opensource one in the past where orithe attack does not come openly but as astroturfing campaigns crafted to subvert real criticism and create the impression that the purveyors of cargo cult movement is trying to save the movement where as the goal is usually to carve a way for them to generate the cash their investors/creditors demand if not to become filthy rich. The opensource schism between osi and fsf was more about letting opensource escape the leadership by committee culture of academia and find a way for it to ride the corporate beasts as a symbiotic parasite through forking and re-merging. Where as the current manufactured crisis stems from the need of a bunch if startups to turn the relationship around and control the opensource project they back like a rider controls a horse which means preventing forks and independent commercial contributors. The Linux project where nobody uses the mainline kernel tree directly in production is a good example of the OSI model, here we have a bunch of companies forced to provide code upstream in order to provide a Linux product downstream to their customers in a relationship where there is not a "Linux inc" monopolizing the revenue stream generated from the end users but where all of the commercial contributors gets the revenue from their individual customers. What the likes of elastic or mongo that have been the center of controversy recently want is to become that single entity monopolizing the entire revenue stream of the opensource project they sponsor, which was also what oracle tried to become for MySQL and OpenOffice, as this is not an new conflict.

steveklabnik 8y ago
Thanks for this comment! I think that your sentiment is not unusual, and exactly is what I'm talking about. I'm not sure I fully agree with everything you're saying, exactly, but I do think that it's a good illustration of how things, as they are, are not working for everyone.
- bmer 8y ago
  I wonder if the "third movement" will take a similar form to that held by many Rust projects: openly available source + structure to encourage and maintain contributions (mentorship programs, openly available discussion of design possibilities, things like the Rust Code of Conduct which have learned from internet-based communities of the last 3 decades?). Would it be fair to argue that a flaw of the FSF is that it focuses on making free software (per FSF definition), but does not focus on how to encourage the maintenance and development of free software? It doesn't seem to focus on the creation of contributors: i.e. teaching new people how to fish, in the free software way, and thus it is a movement that is vulnerable to the ravages of time?
  - 0815test 8y ago
    This was THE major contribution of the "Open Source" movement to FLOSS dev practices: the open Bazaar vs. the Cathedral. FSF was Cathedral-like (shaped by the model of academia) and really struggled to adopt the more effective and more open dev methodologies that were first demonstrated by e.g. Linux and other net-driven projects - it's why the Hurd kernel is still not out today, after 30 years or so of development effort. Teaching newbies how to "fish" in the OSS community is also something that saw a lot of focus as soon as the issue became clear in the 1990s, as the microcomputer community started getting internet links and interacting with the pre-existing free-software and hacker communities. We see a summary of this viewpoint e.g. in ESR's "Hacker-HOWTO" http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
    - chx 8y ago
      Be extremely careful with ESR's documents. This one links to How To Ask Smart Questions which I have "subscribed" to myself in the past but now I see very serious problems with it: > What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. There's no reason to jump down a new user's throat. If you are annoyed by a question, move on, let others deal with it if they so want. Or improve it. You could adopt Sai Baba's philosophy: Before you speak, ask yourself: is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence? Or you can just go with Ellen Page's: This world would be a whole lot better if we just made an effort to be less horrible to one another. You could read https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2018/a-case-study-in-not-being-a-jerk-in-open-source https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2018/a-case-study-in... as well.
jdsully 8y ago
With Linux we at least get the source out of these third party companies (most of the time). The nonstable driver interface is a major driver of that since Linux famously refuses to enforce its license. The problem is with the BSD licenses where people can take and not give back. It’s not a matter of who gets paid - but whether the primary beneficiaries are giving back their source code. They are the ones most incentivized to write new code.
- Stranger43 8y ago
  Yes and the problem here is that people who are not okay with proprietary forks choose an BSD license in order to seem cool, attract users or provide their own proprietary fork based on contributed code. The controversy is not that some companies migrate to GPL or AGPL licenses but that some companies want to take a two sided contributor/maintainer relationship and turn it into an one sided contract by adding clauses that lets them prevent forking the core into product that compete with their own proprietary derivatives, which no OSI aproved license does. As the FSF did actually release open source license that deal with the issue of cloud providers forking an opensource project without contributing code back in 2002(the actual current AGPLv2 license is from 2007) it's nonsense to say that you cannot close that hole with a OSI approved license.
  - jdsully 8y ago
    Yes but historically it was the owner of the trademark that was able to reap the bulk of any revenue. Normally the trademark was owned by the developers behind the project. Proprietary forks happened but because they didn't have the name recognition they were niche. It seems the convenience of hosting services on the same infrastructure you already run everything else on (the cloud) outstrips the value of the trademark. This is new uncharted territory. So while it was always allowed by the license - in practice it was not as big a problem as it is today.
    - Stranger43 8y ago
      Except that it's not that uncommon, The Oracle/Novell conflict that gave us LibreOffice is an example of the trademark owner being derived of significant revenue by a more competent contributor who when the owner tried to take back control forked the project so successfully that the trademark on openoffice became almost worthless over the span of a few years. The hosting providers have always absorbed a huge amount of the revenue from opensource web infrastructure without a direct payment line back to the trademark holder, as companies like SUSE and RedHat acts as successful middlemen and co-developers of a lot of frameworks they don't have the trademark on. The idea that owning a trademark on an opensource project entitle you to the bulk of the revenue started in the VC circus about a decade ago prior to that you did it for other reasons or as a part of an consultancy operation in collaboration with a wider community. The OpenSource by license but build by a single company model expecting to operate on the shareware model of the 1980ies PC industry is what's new not the existence of non-paying hosting companies or large enterprises as potential rivals for support revenue.
na85 8y ago
One point I think the article missed was the advent of the web, which has rendered a lot of these debates moot - when everything is X-as-a-Service then the only thing running on my machine is some bloated javascript written by someone who thinks they're an engineer because they graduated a boot camp. I mention this because ultimately, and this is the point I think is missing from the article, whether $serverside_framework is libre or proprietary makes no difference - the company is going to get rich selling my personal data either way. That is to say, to a lot of people for whom computing is synonymous with the web, the distinction between free software/open-source software and proprietary is blurred because less and less code runs on our devices now. The stale, tired lecture that Stallman's been giving for the last 15 years about ethics isn't persuasive any more because the really odious code isn't running on my machine. Whether facebook's codebase respects their engineering team's collective freedoms or not simply has no bearing on my experience as a user. I'm getting exploited either way.
- Jedd 8y ago
  You are conflating two very distinct problems. But Eben Moglen and rms have been warning about both problems since before you evidently noticed the second one.
  - na85 8y ago
    >But Eben Moglen and rms have been warning about both problems since before you evidently noticed the second one. Much like your snide reply, I think Free Software suffers from a public relations problem. A toenail-eating kook giving the same lecture about the four freedoms for 15 years doesn't persuade many people as you noted in the quote above, otherwise they'd have achieved something with all that "warning" they've been doing.
    - Jedd 8y ago
      I think you may be projecting wrt any snide. I understand that you think the FSF has a public relations problem, and that's okay. As TFA pointed out, plenty of people don't understand the history of 'free software' or even 'open source', despite the latter's stated intent was to remove the ambiguity of the former. Eben and Richard put a lot of thought into the development of GPLv3, specifically around its applicability to SaaS. Your earlier comment suggested you believe they did not - though there's plenty of interviews with, and comments from, Eben around precisely these considerations back in 2007 when GPLv3 was released. Other licences - the Affero GPL variants are the obvious examples - can be applied to software where the author(s) wish to prevent SaaS (mis)use, but for various reasons these are not as widely utilised. Affero v2 was released, not by coincidence, shortly after GPLv3. You have conflated ethics with code, misheard rms & Eben's repeated warnings (the famous 'you get some php doodads and spying for free all the time' for example), made some ad hominem attacks on person(s) who've expressed laudable and consistent ethical position for over three decades, and failed to comprehend that Facebook (etc) are only in control of your personal data because you have provided it to them.

steveklabnik 8y ago

Thanks for this comment! I think that your sentiment is not unusual, and exactly is what I'm talking about. I'm not sure I fully agree with everything you're saying, exactly, but I do think that it's a good illustration of how things, as they are, are not working for everyone.

bmer 8y ago
I wonder if the "third movement" will take a similar form to that held by many Rust projects: openly available source + structure to encourage and maintain contributions (mentorship programs, openly available discussion of design possibilities, things like the Rust Code of Conduct which have learned from internet-based communities of the last 3 decades?). Would it be fair to argue that a flaw of the FSF is that it focuses on making free software (per FSF definition), but does not focus on how to encourage the maintenance and development of free software? It doesn't seem to focus on the creation of contributors: i.e. teaching new people how to fish, in the free software way, and thus it is a movement that is vulnerable to the ravages of time?
- 0815test 8y ago
  This was THE major contribution of the "Open Source" movement to FLOSS dev practices: the open Bazaar vs. the Cathedral. FSF was Cathedral-like (shaped by the model of academia) and really struggled to adopt the more effective and more open dev methodologies that were first demonstrated by e.g. Linux and other net-driven projects - it's why the Hurd kernel is still not out today, after 30 years or so of development effort. Teaching newbies how to "fish" in the OSS community is also something that saw a lot of focus as soon as the issue became clear in the 1990s, as the microcomputer community started getting internet links and interacting with the pre-existing free-software and hacker communities. We see a summary of this viewpoint e.g. in ESR's "Hacker-HOWTO" http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
  - chx 8y ago
    Be extremely careful with ESR's documents. This one links to How To Ask Smart Questions which I have "subscribed" to myself in the past but now I see very serious problems with it: > What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. There's no reason to jump down a new user's throat. If you are annoyed by a question, move on, let others deal with it if they so want. Or improve it. You could adopt Sai Baba's philosophy: Before you speak, ask yourself: is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence? Or you can just go with Ellen Page's: This world would be a whole lot better if we just made an effort to be less horrible to one another. You could read https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2018/a-case-study-in-not-being-a-jerk-in-open-source https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2018/a-case-study-in... as well.

jdsully 8y ago

With Linux we at least get the source out of these third party companies (most of the time). The nonstable driver interface is a major driver of that since Linux famously refuses to enforce its license. The problem is with the BSD licenses where people can take and not give back. It’s not a matter of who gets paid - but whether the primary beneficiaries are giving back their source code. They are the ones most incentivized to write new code.

Stranger43 8y ago
Yes and the problem here is that people who are not okay with proprietary forks choose an BSD license in order to seem cool, attract users or provide their own proprietary fork based on contributed code. The controversy is not that some companies migrate to GPL or AGPL licenses but that some companies want to take a two sided contributor/maintainer relationship and turn it into an one sided contract by adding clauses that lets them prevent forking the core into product that compete with their own proprietary derivatives, which no OSI aproved license does. As the FSF did actually release open source license that deal with the issue of cloud providers forking an opensource project without contributing code back in 2002(the actual current AGPLv2 license is from 2007) it's nonsense to say that you cannot close that hole with a OSI approved license.
- jdsully 8y ago
  Yes but historically it was the owner of the trademark that was able to reap the bulk of any revenue. Normally the trademark was owned by the developers behind the project. Proprietary forks happened but because they didn't have the name recognition they were niche. It seems the convenience of hosting services on the same infrastructure you already run everything else on (the cloud) outstrips the value of the trademark. This is new uncharted territory. So while it was always allowed by the license - in practice it was not as big a problem as it is today.
  - Stranger43 8y ago
    Except that it's not that uncommon, The Oracle/Novell conflict that gave us LibreOffice is an example of the trademark owner being derived of significant revenue by a more competent contributor who when the owner tried to take back control forked the project so successfully that the trademark on openoffice became almost worthless over the span of a few years. The hosting providers have always absorbed a huge amount of the revenue from opensource web infrastructure without a direct payment line back to the trademark holder, as companies like SUSE and RedHat acts as successful middlemen and co-developers of a lot of frameworks they don't have the trademark on. The idea that owning a trademark on an opensource project entitle you to the bulk of the revenue started in the VC circus about a decade ago prior to that you did it for other reasons or as a part of an consultancy operation in collaboration with a wider community. The OpenSource by license but build by a single company model expecting to operate on the shareware model of the 1980ies PC industry is what's new not the existence of non-paying hosting companies or large enterprises as potential rivals for support revenue.

na85 8y ago

One point I think the article missed was the advent of the web, which has rendered a lot of these debates moot - when everything is X-as-a-Service then the only thing running on my machine is some bloated javascript written by someone who thinks they're an engineer because they graduated a boot camp. I mention this because ultimately, and this is the point I think is missing from the article, whether $serverside_framework is libre or proprietary makes no difference - the company is going to get rich selling my personal data either way. That is to say, to a lot of people for whom computing is synonymous with the web, the distinction between free software/open-source software and proprietary is blurred because less and less code runs on our devices now. The stale, tired lecture that Stallman's been giving for the last 15 years about ethics isn't persuasive any more because the really odious code isn't running on my machine. Whether facebook's codebase respects their engineering team's collective freedoms or not simply has no bearing on my experience as a user. I'm getting exploited either way.

Jedd 8y ago
You are conflating two very distinct problems. But Eben Moglen and rms have been warning about both problems since before you evidently noticed the second one.
- na85 8y ago
  >But Eben Moglen and rms have been warning about both problems since before you evidently noticed the second one. Much like your snide reply, I think Free Software suffers from a public relations problem. A toenail-eating kook giving the same lecture about the four freedoms for 15 years doesn't persuade many people as you noted in the quote above, otherwise they'd have achieved something with all that "warning" they've been doing.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    I think you may be projecting wrt any snide. I understand that you think the FSF has a public relations problem, and that's okay. As TFA pointed out, plenty of people don't understand the history of 'free software' or even 'open source', despite the latter's stated intent was to remove the ambiguity of the former. Eben and Richard put a lot of thought into the development of GPLv3, specifically around its applicability to SaaS. Your earlier comment suggested you believe they did not - though there's plenty of interviews with, and comments from, Eben around precisely these considerations back in 2007 when GPLv3 was released. Other licences - the Affero GPL variants are the obvious examples - can be applied to software where the author(s) wish to prevent SaaS (mis)use, but for various reasons these are not as widely utilised. Affero v2 was released, not by coincidence, shortly after GPLv3. You have conflated ethics with code, misheard rms & Eben's repeated warnings (the famous 'you get some php doodads and spying for free all the time' for example), made some ad hominem attacks on person(s) who've expressed laudable and consistent ethical position for over three decades, and failed to comprehend that Facebook (etc) are only in control of your personal data because you have provided it to them.