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Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

263 points by ihsoj 7y ago

morpheuskafka 7y ago
Amazon has continually moved to keep source open. They have actively worked to distribute Open Distro Elasticsearch (keeping it under a fully-free license), Apache Corretto (binaries for the OpenJDK to make it more accessible to end-users), etc. Using similar APIs increases consumer choice and interoperability, making it easier to go from open to hosted but also from hosted to open. These proposed licenses neither are open-source nor free software and are very poor ideas. The SSPL clearly breached the boundaries of open source and the OSI's opinion was only "premediated" in the sense that that was the agreed-upon definition.
bhickey 7y ago
More whining from Sunil Deshpande. He's upset that no one on license-discuss was dumb enough to fall for the Commons Clause or SSPL. It'll be a happy day when he gives up his anti-open source abuse campaign.
- mgfist 7y ago
  I wonder what your opinion is of Kyle Mitchell https://writing.kemitchell.com/ https://writing.kemitchell.com/
- kemitchell 7y ago
  Nobody proposed Commons Clause to OSI. And I’m not the only one who stood up for SSPL as open source.
tus87 7y ago
THESE SOFTWARES ARE NOT OPEN SOURCE YOU IDIOT.
benologist 7y ago
This article calls it a lack of leadership in open source, but the reality is Bezos is exploiting everyone using Amazon, from people selling shower curtain hooks to video encoding software, open source deployed across AWS, corrupt tax deals and more. Leadership in open source won't instill ethics or charity in the world's richest man who demands his own not-employees work so hard they must sprint to their lunch break or be fired. Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform to help them select 10,000s of products to clone and sell in direct competition to their vendors. https://www.geek.com/news/amazonbasics-is-copying-all-the-best-products-on-amazon-and-selling-them-for-less-1652879/ https://www.geek.com/news/amazonbasics-is-copying-all-the-be... They have copied software hosted on AWS in the past too, whatever proprietary software you're hosting on AWS is hemorrhaging privileged usage data they will happily use against you. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...
- qvrjuec 7y ago
  > Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform Why does this sales data belong to the companies and not Amazon, if they are using the platform? Is it unethical to copy a product or software in a non-infringing way?
  - benologist 7y ago
    I think that data belongs to the merchants, just like an S3-buckets logs belong to the developer. It has to be that way or who else has a claim on the data? HP for printing it? Microsoft because it was sent by email in Office? The EU suspects it is anti-competitive to allow Amazon as a vendor to cherrypick items to clone based on data Amazon collect as a platform. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...
    - nostrebored 7y ago
      So Amazon shouldn't be allowed to create any products, or must ignore the data it needs to plan logistics?
      - benologist 7y ago
        If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.
        sigstoat 7y ago
        > If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices... it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.
webmaven 7y ago
> "It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs." Basically, there is no such thing as an "Open Source API". APIs are not software, and we've already seen the damage that treating APIs as software (for copyright purposes) can do. The proper abstraction for APIs (and protocols, and file-formats, etc.) is the standard, which ideally admits the possibility of multiple interoperable implementations, both proprietary and open source (patents being the joker in the deck, unfortunately).
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  This. If the only thing keeping customers on my platform is an incompatible API, what does that say about me as a vendor?
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    That you’re not going hungry while one of the most valuable companies in the world doesn’t extract value from your work.
    - mwfunk 7y ago
      If someone gets into writing open source with the goal of making money off of it and gets pissed when others “extract value” from their work, that person never should have gotten into open source to begin with. In fact, for their own sake, they should probably get right the fuck out of open source pronto, because they are seriously missing all the points in spectacular fashion.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - jeena 7y ago
        I don't agree. Open Source has always been about making money. What you might mean is Free Software, which is quite different from a philosophical point of view.
PeterZaitsev 7y ago
I speak to a lot of Open Source software users in Database space and they tend to love DBaaS offered by AWS and other cloud vendors. It is not convenient for my business but that does not make it a bad thing. The competition is how great things are born. Some Open Source is being pushed towards proprietary model (Open Core, Shared Source etc) while others will find a way to have sustainable business in the new reality with Cloud Vendors.
forrestthewoods 7y ago
Unpopular Opinion: Maybe it would be a good if API’s were subject to copyright protection.
- detaro 7y ago
  Wouldn't that likely lead to all kinds of legal trouble about "your API for the same problem is to similar to ours"? Is it generally good to forbid making compatible implementations of APIs?
- tobylane 7y ago
  Wasn’t that part of why Oracle v Google was disliked?
  - forrestthewoods 7y ago
    Yes. That’s why it’s an unpopular opinion! But I’m still not sure it’s a wrong one.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  If APIs were subject to copyright protection, Linux would probably never have happened. All the commercial UNIXes were licensed descendants of the original Bell Labs UNIX code base; Linux was a unlicensed re-implementation of UNIX by Linus. [EDIT] The same goes for WINE and the various Windows APIs.
- int_19h 7y ago
  Do you want to live in a world with less interoperability all around?
Illniyar 7y ago
That's a very wide claim. Amazon may not be the most valued type of open source user, but they are on par with most open source infrastructure historically. It's as if they are trying to say that only the creators of an open source project can build a SaaS for it. Tell that to mySQL, Postgres, redis, everything apache (Hadoop, Cassandra(which is based on amazon's DynamoDB whitepaper), Kafka, Zookeeper), every programming language ever (Except maybe C#). It has always been the case that open source infrastructure was built by one group and another completely unrelated group, who are much better at cloud anything, built the SaaS offering for it. If this is Mongo again, it's probably a PR stunt by them to get their failing business model's latest failing hail marry to not completely destroy developer trust (which it will, of course, fail to do). There is really just one thing to complain about Amazon's use of open source, they aren't supporting back enough for projects they are using. That's it. They should be shunned for it, but that's not earthshattering, and it's definitely not a condemnation of other cloud vendors (Microsoft and Google) who support open source massively.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > There is really just one thing to complain about Amazon's use of open source, they aren't supporting back enough for projects they are using. That's it. They should be shunned for it, but that's not earthshattering, and it's definitely not a condemnation of other cloud vendors (Microsoft and Google) who support open source massively. That was the author's point, was it not?
- donatzsky 7y ago
  Someone clearly didn't read the article.
jmclnx 7y ago
Isn't this what GPLv3 is suppose to prevent ? Commercial Entities seems to hate it, there must be a reason, probably because they cannot 'cheat' with it.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  IANAL but as I understand it, GPLv3 prevents "tivoization" and AGPLv3 prevents running modified services without releasing the source code. Corporations particularly hate AGPLv3.
  - appleflaxen 7y ago
    what's the difference? unmodified vs. modified code?
- oytis 7y ago
  Depends. Some commercial entities deliberately choose GPLv3 to sell unrestricted version in addition to distributing the GPLed one for free.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  No, that would be AGPL, and freeloaders hate it.
jsty 7y ago
Open Source has been so well understood to mean a certain set of things within the technology industry now that making changes to that definition would just cause unnecessary confusion (beyond what already exists between OSS and FOSS ...). Quite possibly the author is just annoyed his portfolio companies get pushback when taking about "source available" or proprietary licenses to potential customers, but leaping from there to "our customers want open source, thus open source must change to mean what we want to give our customers" is fairly dramatic. Honestly, I think this editorial could have done with toning down the rhetoric a bit - calling people / groups names ("wonk tank") and generally implying those with the opposing view are irredeemably "short-sighted" isn't particularly persuasive and just detracts from the author's points.
SquishyPanda23 7y ago
I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.
- sheetjs 7y ago
  The article title is actually "Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses", OP was editorializing. In fact, your sentiment is explicitly stated in the article: > Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    The article talks about people switching to source-available licenses as if it were a bad thing. I'm unconvinced. If you have commercial ambitions and are uncomfortable with Amazon using your software, maybe open source is the wrong choice for you?
  - dang 7y ago
    The submitted title was "Amazon has exhibited offensive and aggressive behaviors toward open source", which was taken from the body of the article. That's not necessarily editorializing, if the language is representative. But we've changed it back to the original article title now.
- adamson 7y ago
  I don't think it's that hard to understand. To some degree, Amazon's behavior is exploiting an idealism that has given us software such as Linux that we're all benefitting from today, and it's easy to see why a starry-eyed engineer would want to carry on that legacy and create a project such as Redis with a permissive license. What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return.") is obvious in hindsight, and should go without saying if you start a project with the express intent of commercializing it. However, in many cases, it's not the obvious decision for reasons related to the project's genesis (e.g. Spark or Mesos being student projects), and in others, it's not the route taken because of an idealistic impulse that I think would be really unfortunate to see squashed.
hannob 7y ago
For people who haven't followed this: The headline is as misleading as it can be. The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source, because he doesn't like what that entails (as it also means "amazon enjoys the same freedoms as everyone else"). But they like to confuse it as much as they can. This would be much less of an issue if these people were upfront: "We don't like Open Source, so we try something else". But they don't want to do that because they know Open Source has a good reputation, so they try confusion and deception.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Agreed - this is a but misleading.
- adamson 7y ago
  I don't see this. Are you saying the author has a bone to pick with Amazon in particular or that he has a stake in seeing OSS-based cloud services become non-OSS because he has money at stake in selling those services? None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software.
  - Reelin 7y ago
    > None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software. Actually... The Fair Source License (Sourcegraph, https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/) explicitly does restrict those things. The RSAL (Redis, https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-labs-modules-license-changes/ https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-labs-modules-license-change...) kind of does, but only under some circumstances. > The only restriction is that the application cannot be a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine. The Confluent Community License (https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat...) only says you can't run it directly as a SaaS offering, which is better but I'm a bit uncertain where the line would be drawn in terms of product functionality. The Commons Clause (https://commonsclause.com/ https://commonsclause.com/) explicitly prevents you from selling the software, including hosting, consulting, support, etc. As with the Confluent license it isn't entirely clear where the line is drawn in terms of product functionality. The SSPL (mongoDB, https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq#when-to-use https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...) is in fact an open source license as far as I'm concerned, but OSI hasn't (won't?) recognize it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jupp0r 7y ago
So Amazon is not a good citizen open-source wise. Some companies doing this has been the state of affairs as long as open source exists, and the world has not ended. Eventually the cost of maintaining forks will force them to engage with the community. Customers will want newer features available upstream. Amazon will contribute things back that make their own life easier. Other companies will struggle with open source business models. Engineers will favor companies that open source interesting projects. Everybody will be fine.
- doliveira 7y ago
  The cynicism that pours into threads like these is kind of depressing, though. People are increasingly more tolerant to predatory business practices.
danShumway 7y ago
We have two contrasting terms that work perfectly well right now: Open Source, a set of licenses that allow users to run and modify software for personal or commercial purposes without your permission. and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things you don't like with it. These two terms already perfectly encapsulate the entire range of new licenses that are being proposed for databases like Mongo. But a nontrivial number of proponents for SSPL dislike this distinction because they want the goodwill and reputation that comes from being able to say, "we're Open Source." They want to be categorized the same way as MIT or GPL licenses, even though they fundamentally disagree with the worldview behind them. > The OSI believes it owns the definition of open source and refuses to update the definition of open source, which is short-sighted and dangerous. No. The OSI believes that Open Source has a widely agreed-upon definition, and that definition shouldn't be hijacked just because it's inconvenient for some company's software monetization strategy. The level of condescension in this article is really infuriating. Literally nothing is preventing any developer or company from using the SSPL right now: nobody will judge you, nobody will call you evil, the only thing the Open Source community is requesting is that you do not call it Open Source. Open Source was not invented so you could use it as a PR strategy. We don't need your help.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things you don't like with it. GPL is source available, then?
  - skybrian 7y ago
    As far as I know GPL complies with the open source definition. You can run the software for any purpose, including selling commercial services. Source available licenses would be appropriate if you want to restrict use. (For example by Amazon.)
  - 7y ago
tolmasky 7y ago
If you make your project open source, your goal should be maximizing people using it, not maximizing how much you profit from it. I know they may seem identical, but they aren't: Apple makes a lot of money by making software that has huge roadblocks to using it. And as many people are now realizing, open source has the ability to not make lots of money by making it incredibly easy for anyone to use. We all benefit greatly from Linux, and I think most people have not contributed back to it in any meaningful way, monetary or otherwise. A lot of these projects only exist because they were built on top of other Open Source solutions with no expectation to give them any sort of "cut". Had Linus decided he actually wanted to start a hardware business and then got angry that IBM was better at putting Linux on metal than he was, it would be similar to this situation and I think most of us would be unhappy about a bunch of turmoil resulting from that. But when it's someone else's ideas that are being used for free, they always seem obvious and fundamental, when its your own, it's unique and unfair. As others have said here, it is OK to say "wait a minute, I want something different", and then do something different. What is not OK is wanting to water down the definition of the term open source so that whatever thing you want to do still gets to use it. The OSI's position here is perfectly reasonable -- that doesn't mean you can't invent some new kind of license or relationship. People forget that OSI had to work to get into industry in the first place, it wasn't automatically accepted. It is somewhat funny and ironic that others now want to benefit from this work while doing something completely different.
- pfortuny 7y ago
  The simplest example of this is TeX and MetaFont, MetaPost. The only aim of Knuth was getting people to use them. One was, the other two not so much. And he has not complained that I know of.
  - wmf 7y ago
    Knuth is subsidized by Stanford (and maybe book royalties); not everyone is so lucky.
- roenxi 7y ago
  > If you make your project open source, your goal should be maximizing people using it, not maximizing how much you profit from it. Dangerous ground telling people what their goals should be. There is no reason a person shouldn't try to maximise their profits from open source strategies. The Linux example is not a strong one - lots of the kernel devs are for-profit and Linus Torvalds made a fortune [0] - likely linked to his involvement in Linux. With benefit of hindsight it is hard to see how he could have better optimised for profit. The key insight for commercial OSS is that maximising profit does not necessarily mean maximising your paying userbase size. 10 users paying $10,000 a month easily trumps 1000 users paying $10. And going OSS as a commercial strategy (eg, Red Hat's classic model) gives competitive advantages if you can lever it - no risk of being undercut by a cheaper software package, ability be very selective in who you offer support to and an obvious strategy for wheedling in to new markets. In the initial rush where computers were being changed out every 5 years (pre 2003 era), having software to sell was where the advantage was. Now the industries are starting to mature and that is no longer as obvious it once was. The money seems to be in support and ongoing relationship fees, which are very amenable to OSS. So basically, if someone's goal is to maximise profits they should consider making their software open source. Especially if they are breaking in to an incumbent's market. [0] https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/tech-millionaire/linus-torvalds-net-worth/ https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/...
OrgNet 7y ago
Hopefully, this is illegal in two-party consent states (for audio recordings)... but I bet that they will get those laws repealed.
brentonator 7y ago
What a lot of people overlook is when Amazon takes something (DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility) on internally is they are re-inventing the way the database works in such a way it's dubious if the community would benefit. I do think it would have been better to see this go the Postgres route where they could have continued to contribute to the core product but I believe MongoDB saw competition against their MongoDB Cloud product and decided to change the licensing. This neccessitated the need for a hard fork since they were not interested in working together. An AWS Q&A stated they are working on a completely independent code base that is API compatible with MongoDB 3.6, so there is nothing to contribute back to the MongoDB open-source code base. DocumentDB much like Amazon Aurora has pivoted much of the database internals to depend on the AWS ecosystem. The whole concept of replica-sets on MongoDB are very rigid and inflexible compared to the elegance made possible by EBS and Amazon engineers. MongoDB replication is measured in seconds meanwhile DocumentDB replication is "usually less than 100 milliseconds". This makes read replicas in DocumentDB more relevant for all kinds of real-time tasks vs MongoDB.
jcoffland 7y ago
Open-Source is alive, well and functioning as intended. Tens of thousands of Open-Source projects are producing the software that is driving most of today's tech. To a venture capitalist, Open-Source is a marketing strategy. VCs would like to profit from the popularity of Open-Source by inserting themselves in the cash flow. But the cash flows in Open-Source are periphery. And the periphery is a humble position for a VC.
narnianal 7y ago
Interesting how human nature always wants to blame everything on one source. AWS might be bad, no argument against it. But the truth is there is more and more speaking about the end of open source as we know it. E.g. smartphones (the most used end-user computer nowadays) being walled gardens. So walled, that not even a giant like Huawei can easily continue to use Google's OS. E.g. Trade war makes every side being less open towards all other sides. E.g. at least one huge Open Source proponent being sold to a company that is known for not handling open source too well. E.g. big corps like Google having found a way to misuse stuff that is seemingly open source as marketing tools to spread there proprietary actual products. E.g. with at least many big corps believing that the cloud has beaten on-prem, and who knows what is behind these APIs. Maybe they don't even use Linux and TCP/IP anymore. E.g. with the rise of AI and machine learning software itself maybe(!) not being the most important tech development factor anymore. E.g. with Valve not having won the gaming platform war against Microsoft. E.g. with Microsoft claiming to integrate more and more with open source (but then how much control are they starting to wield, having a shitload of coders, money and users to field for their personal cause).
karmakaze 7y ago
The problem isn't really here. The problem is that everyone wants a permissive abusable license when AGPL would be just fine. If everyone here complaining just used AGPL then we wouldn't have this Amazon situation. People want to have their cake and eat it too. They started with an MIT license because it gets more uptake then whine when the license terms are being followed. But then it wouldn't be widely used. The solution to that is for everyone to use AGPL then the open-source playing field is level again.
- hendzen 7y ago
  Mongodb already used AGPL prior to switching to the SSPL...
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    The problem is that only MongoDB did it, not the majority of the FLOSS ecosystem.
    - kemitchell 7y ago
      That’s not what Mongo said. They called out specific issues with AGPLv3’s terms. http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003603.html http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  AGPL is vulnerable to certain workarounds in the same way that GPL was. The CC class of non-commercial licenses might be more applicable, but that may harm adoption. EDIT: honestly not sure why this is so heavily downvoted (-7 as of the edit), the whole point of SSPL and other licenses is to address the "workarounds" that Amazon and others have discovered in AGPL
  - boramalper 7y ago
    I’m not sure if CC is meant for software either (except for CC0 perhaps). For instance, does non-commercial mean (1) you cannot use [the output of] the program for any commercial purposes, or does it mean (2) you cannot sell the program itself (and its derivatives). The difference is subtle but AGPL permits (1) whilst practically forbidding (2) by enforcing copyleft; hence it fits the OSS criteria whereas CC NC wouldn’t if both (1) and (2) are true.
samcodes 7y ago
When I open source code, I use MIT. I have introduced open source strategies at places I work, and guided teams through the process. Ok now that I've established my OSS cred: I'd be really interested in a license that is effectively MIT, _except_ for the 20 largest software companies, for whom there is no license and any use is restricted (you'd need to clearly define what makes a company a software company, and what it means to be the largest, but that's what lawyers are for). They could pay for a commerical license if the customer demand was high enough. This seems like it would address the main issue as I see it, that is, I want almost everyone to be able to use my software to build cool shit and make money... But if you're FAANG or some shit, come on. The rules are different.
- rmrfrmrf 7y ago
  If we're getting into company-specific bans, I'd much rather be using the one that banned Palantir than one that bans FAANG, and the one that banned Palantir resulted in a massive backlash.
- gary__ 7y ago
  This could put off anyone who thinks they could be acquired by such companies from using your software as well. How can anyone know who is going to make it onto the blacklist for the next version etc. Seems quite the can of worms.
- GordonS 7y ago
  I quite like what TimescaleDB have done here - their TSL licence prohibits you from selling TimescaleDB as a service, but allows you to build new services that use TimescaleDB as a backend. I'm not sure how applicable this model might be outside of databases though.
- hollerith 7y ago
  >that's what lawyers are for One of the reasons the standard open-sources licenses such as the GPL and the permissive licenses are as popular as they are is the lowness of the probability that lawyers will ever be involved. There was widespread use of GPL software in the 1980s and early 1990s for about 15 years IIRC before the first lawsuit involving GPLed software. Stallman and his legal advisor Eben Moglen did a great job in reducing ambiguity when writing the text of version 2 of the GPL and in explaining the ramifications of the license to developers and prospective users.
rmrfrmrf 7y ago
The author is suggesting to curb source-available licenses by modifying open source licences to become... source-available licenses.
liara_k 7y ago
For a few years I've wondered about the viability of a "source-available" license with a lot of user-friendly terms (like being able to distribute modified versions which anyone else can use as long as they themselves have a license for the original work, etc...) and a built-in GPL/BSD/etc... conversion after N years. IMHO, the maximalist position of the RMS camp, while rightfully paranoid about the dangers of fully proprietary software, isn't the optimal solution. Yes, certain kinds of open source projects have been extremely successful, but a lot of this has been driven by corporate interests (i.e., people working on open source projects as a part of their work) and the software that gets built reflects and reinforces these interests. I'd be happy to pay to have the latest version of some really useful software that respects my rights in lots of other ways (e.g., more control over and access to my data in the app, and be able to tinker/adapt it as I see fit, with full source), particularly if the alternative is that this software doesn't exist. If feels like, at least in some software domains, that the alternative are either (1) user hostile proprietary software or (2) nowhere close to the proprietary alternative in terms of features and robustness. Obviously that's not the case for stuff like databases and operating system kernels, but that's what it often feels like out of these back-end type packages.
iamnothere 7y ago
Amazon isn't perfect in some areas, but I think FreeRTOS should be pointed out. This is a pretty valuable contribution in the embedded/IoT space. https://www.freertos.org/ https://www.freertos.org/
ChuckMcM 7y ago
These are the bullets from the article: It takes open-source code produced by others, runs it as a commercial service and gives nothing back to the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open source, thereby intercepting the monetization of the open source. It forks projects and forcibly wrestles control away from the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open-source projects, as it did in the case of Elasticsearch. It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs. Check, check, check. Remember RMS' screed? "Only the writing of software should be paid for, the using of it is an inherent right of everyone and should not make any remuneration requirements on the user." Back when he wrote that he was mad because companiies wrote code and charged big fees just to use it. He felt that was unfair. But now the shoe is on the other foot, and big companies are just "users" they aren't writing the software, so why should they pay for it? And while RMS was happy to have an architect use CAD software that someone else paid to have written, to design the houses that they sold for big bucks to their own clients, I don't think he thought it all the way through. The missing bit here is that the "using of software" has a value. Whether you are using a better C compiler than your competitors so your compiled code runs faster than theirs, or you are using a distributed database to offer a scaled up database service that is impractical for an individual to equip and maintain. The whole reason people paid for software in the first place is because it accelerated the value they could create. And when that delta in value, that was worth significant money to them. Still is. That is why electronic CAD software still gets big bucks from its users, the same with packages like Adobe studio. And guess what? When you use someone's software, and you are getting additional value that is accruing to you, if you didn't pay anything to the person who created it and maintains it, they feel cheated. Surprised? I am not. When the software manufacturers of old found people that used their software without paying for it, they called them Pirates, and Crooks, and all manner of ill names. They turned to technology, and licensing legalize, to create ways they could pursue those people to make them pay. Not unlike the folks at Redis changing their licenses to make it harder for people like Amazon to "pirate" their software. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. There is nothing "free" about Free Software as RMS envisions it, it is just a structural way for the users of the software to rip off the people who wrote it by capturing all of the value gained by using that software to develop or provide a product or service. It has always been true that software vendors were often extortionate in their pricing while escaping all liability by disclaiming the software did anything. If you fixed that problem, then we will be in a much better place.
oytis 7y ago
There is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is called dual licensing. In my opinion, this is a more severe abuse of open source than what Amazon does. When RMS introduced GPL the idea was to make everyone share their code, and make the world a happy place full of free Software. Dual licensing abuses this sincere intent to induce fear in commercial users and make them pay. So using a dual-licensing scheme prevents people from considering authors of SSPL the new leaders of the open-source community.
- bradrydzewski 7y ago
  You might find it interesting that Stallman supports selling exceptions to the GPL (i.e. dual licensing). You can read more about it on the FSF blog [1] but the post ends with the following: > I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed. [1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
  - oytis 7y ago
    OK, if RMS approves it, it's not an abuse, who am I to argue? Still, the goal of open-source, copyleft and permissive flavours alike, is to "get programs freed", not to establish a fairer distribution of the cash flow. So when someone introduces a new superrestrictive license and starts selling exceptions right away, their earnesty can naturally be questioned.

263 points by ihsoj 7y ago

Amazon has continually moved to keep source open. They have actively worked to distribute Open Distro Elasticsearch (keeping it under a fully-free license), Apache Corretto (binaries for the OpenJDK to make it more accessible to end-users), etc. Using similar APIs increases consumer choice and interoperability, making it easier to go from open to hosted but also from hosted to open. These proposed licenses neither are open-source nor free software and are very poor ideas. The SSPL clearly breached the boundaries of open source and the OSI's opinion was only "premediated" in the sense that that was the agreed-upon definition.

bhickey 7y ago

More whining from Sunil Deshpande. He's upset that no one on license-discuss was dumb enough to fall for the Commons Clause or SSPL. It'll be a happy day when he gives up his anti-open source abuse campaign.

mgfist 7y ago
I wonder what your opinion is of Kyle Mitchell https://writing.kemitchell.com/ https://writing.kemitchell.com/
kemitchell 7y ago
Nobody proposed Commons Clause to OSI. And I’m not the only one who stood up for SSPL as open source.

tus87 7y ago

THESE SOFTWARES ARE NOT OPEN SOURCE YOU IDIOT.

benologist 7y ago

This article calls it a lack of leadership in open source, but the reality is Bezos is exploiting everyone using Amazon, from people selling shower curtain hooks to video encoding software, open source deployed across AWS, corrupt tax deals and more. Leadership in open source won't instill ethics or charity in the world's richest man who demands his own not-employees work so hard they must sprint to their lunch break or be fired. Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform to help them select 10,000s of products to clone and sell in direct competition to their vendors. https://www.geek.com/news/amazonbasics-is-copying-all-the-best-products-on-amazon-and-selling-them-for-less-1652879/ https://www.geek.com/news/amazonbasics-is-copying-all-the-be... They have copied software hosted on AWS in the past too, whatever proprietary software you're hosting on AWS is hemorrhaging privileged usage data they will happily use against you. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...

qvrjuec 7y ago
> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform Why does this sales data belong to the companies and not Amazon, if they are using the platform? Is it unethical to copy a product or software in a non-infringing way?
- benologist 7y ago
  I think that data belongs to the merchants, just like an S3-buckets logs belong to the developer. It has to be that way or who else has a claim on the data? HP for printing it? Microsoft because it was sent by email in Office? The EU suspects it is anti-competitive to allow Amazon as a vendor to cherrypick items to clone based on data Amazon collect as a platform. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...
  - nostrebored 7y ago
    So Amazon shouldn't be allowed to create any products, or must ignore the data it needs to plan logistics?
    - benologist 7y ago
      If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.
      - sigstoat 7y ago
        > If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices... it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.

webmaven 7y ago

> "It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs." Basically, there is no such thing as an "Open Source API". APIs are not software, and we've already seen the damage that treating APIs as software (for copyright purposes) can do. The proper abstraction for APIs (and protocols, and file-formats, etc.) is the standard, which ideally admits the possibility of multiple interoperable implementations, both proprietary and open source (patents being the joker in the deck, unfortunately).

erik_seaberg 7y ago
This. If the only thing keeping customers on my platform is an incompatible API, what does that say about me as a vendor?
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  That you’re not going hungry while one of the most valuable companies in the world doesn’t extract value from your work.
  - mwfunk 7y ago
    If someone gets into writing open source with the goal of making money off of it and gets pissed when others “extract value” from their work, that person never should have gotten into open source to begin with. In fact, for their own sake, they should probably get right the fuck out of open source pronto, because they are seriously missing all the points in spectacular fashion.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jeena 7y ago
      I don't agree. Open Source has always been about making money. What you might mean is Free Software, which is quite different from a philosophical point of view.

PeterZaitsev 7y ago

I speak to a lot of Open Source software users in Database space and they tend to love DBaaS offered by AWS and other cloud vendors. It is not convenient for my business but that does not make it a bad thing. The competition is how great things are born. Some Open Source is being pushed towards proprietary model (Open Core, Shared Source etc) while others will find a way to have sustainable business in the new reality with Cloud Vendors.

forrestthewoods 7y ago

Unpopular Opinion: Maybe it would be a good if API’s were subject to copyright protection.

detaro 7y ago
Wouldn't that likely lead to all kinds of legal trouble about "your API for the same problem is to similar to ours"? Is it generally good to forbid making compatible implementations of APIs?
tobylane 7y ago
Wasn’t that part of why Oracle v Google was disliked?
- forrestthewoods 7y ago
  Yes. That’s why it’s an unpopular opinion! But I’m still not sure it’s a wrong one.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
If APIs were subject to copyright protection, Linux would probably never have happened. All the commercial UNIXes were licensed descendants of the original Bell Labs UNIX code base; Linux was a unlicensed re-implementation of UNIX by Linus. [EDIT] The same goes for WINE and the various Windows APIs.
int_19h 7y ago
Do you want to live in a world with less interoperability all around?

Illniyar 7y ago

That's a very wide claim. Amazon may not be the most valued type of open source user, but they are on par with most open source infrastructure historically. It's as if they are trying to say that only the creators of an open source project can build a SaaS for it. Tell that to mySQL, Postgres, redis, everything apache (Hadoop, Cassandra(which is based on amazon's DynamoDB whitepaper), Kafka, Zookeeper), every programming language ever (Except maybe C#). It has always been the case that open source infrastructure was built by one group and another completely unrelated group, who are much better at cloud anything, built the SaaS offering for it. If this is Mongo again, it's probably a PR stunt by them to get their failing business model's latest failing hail marry to not completely destroy developer trust (which it will, of course, fail to do). There is really just one thing to complain about Amazon's use of open source, they aren't supporting back enough for projects they are using. That's it. They should be shunned for it, but that's not earthshattering, and it's definitely not a condemnation of other cloud vendors (Microsoft and Google) who support open source massively.

luckylion 7y ago
> There is really just one thing to complain about Amazon's use of open source, they aren't supporting back enough for projects they are using. That's it. They should be shunned for it, but that's not earthshattering, and it's definitely not a condemnation of other cloud vendors (Microsoft and Google) who support open source massively. That was the author's point, was it not?
donatzsky 7y ago
Someone clearly didn't read the article.

jmclnx 7y ago

Isn't this what GPLv3 is suppose to prevent ? Commercial Entities seems to hate it, there must be a reason, probably because they cannot 'cheat' with it.

darkpuma 7y ago
IANAL but as I understand it, GPLv3 prevents "tivoization" and AGPLv3 prevents running modified services without releasing the source code. Corporations particularly hate AGPLv3.
- appleflaxen 7y ago
  what's the difference? unmodified vs. modified code?
oytis 7y ago
Depends. Some commercial entities deliberately choose GPLv3 to sell unrestricted version in addition to distributing the GPLed one for free.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
No, that would be AGPL, and freeloaders hate it.

jsty 7y ago

Open Source has been so well understood to mean a certain set of things within the technology industry now that making changes to that definition would just cause unnecessary confusion (beyond what already exists between OSS and FOSS ...). Quite possibly the author is just annoyed his portfolio companies get pushback when taking about "source available" or proprietary licenses to potential customers, but leaping from there to "our customers want open source, thus open source must change to mean what we want to give our customers" is fairly dramatic. Honestly, I think this editorial could have done with toning down the rhetoric a bit - calling people / groups names ("wonk tank") and generally implying those with the opposing view are irredeemably "short-sighted" isn't particularly persuasive and just detracts from the author's points.

SquishyPanda23 7y ago

I don't understand this sentiment. The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return. If you don't want others to have that right, then choose a different license. But don't grant the right and then complain when people exercise it.

sheetjs 7y ago
The article title is actually "Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses", OP was editorializing. In fact, your sentiment is explicitly stated in the article: > Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow.
- skybrian 7y ago
  The article talks about people switching to source-available licenses as if it were a bad thing. I'm unconvinced. If you have commercial ambitions and are uncomfortable with Amazon using your software, maybe open source is the wrong choice for you?
- dang 7y ago
  The submitted title was "Amazon has exhibited offensive and aggressive behaviors toward open source", which was taken from the body of the article. That's not necessarily editorializing, if the language is representative. But we've changed it back to the original article title now.
adamson 7y ago
I don't think it's that hard to understand. To some degree, Amazon's behavior is exploiting an idealism that has given us software such as Linux that we're all benefitting from today, and it's easy to see why a starry-eyed engineer would want to carry on that legacy and create a project such as Redis with a permissive license. What you say ("The whole point of choosing a permissive license is that you want others to have the right to profit off of your work and give you nothing in return.") is obvious in hindsight, and should go without saying if you start a project with the express intent of commercializing it. However, in many cases, it's not the obvious decision for reasons related to the project's genesis (e.g. Spark or Mesos being student projects), and in others, it's not the route taken because of an idealistic impulse that I think would be really unfortunate to see squashed.

hannob 7y ago

For people who haven't followed this: The headline is as misleading as it can be. The whole agenda of the guy writing this is to move open source projects to being no longer open source, because he doesn't like what that entails (as it also means "amazon enjoys the same freedoms as everyone else"). But they like to confuse it as much as they can. This would be much less of an issue if these people were upfront: "We don't like Open Source, so we try something else". But they don't want to do that because they know Open Source has a good reputation, so they try confusion and deception.

bduerst 7y ago
Agreed - this is a but misleading.
adamson 7y ago
I don't see this. Are you saying the author has a bone to pick with Amazon in particular or that he has a stake in seeing OSS-based cloud services become non-OSS because he has money at stake in selling those services? None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software.
- Reelin 7y ago
  > None of the proposed licenses significantly curtail the possibility of having internal deployments of software or linking against the software in commercial software. Actually... The Fair Source License (Sourcegraph, https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/) explicitly does restrict those things. The RSAL (Redis, https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-labs-modules-license-changes/ https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-labs-modules-license-change...) kind of does, but only under some circumstances. > The only restriction is that the application cannot be a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine. The Confluent Community License (https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat...) only says you can't run it directly as a SaaS offering, which is better but I'm a bit uncertain where the line would be drawn in terms of product functionality. The Commons Clause (https://commonsclause.com/ https://commonsclause.com/) explicitly prevents you from selling the software, including hosting, consulting, support, etc. As with the Confluent license it isn't entirely clear where the line is drawn in terms of product functionality. The SSPL (mongoDB, https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq#when-to-use https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...) is in fact an open source license as far as I'm concerned, but OSI hasn't (won't?) recognize it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jupp0r 7y ago

So Amazon is not a good citizen open-source wise. Some companies doing this has been the state of affairs as long as open source exists, and the world has not ended. Eventually the cost of maintaining forks will force them to engage with the community. Customers will want newer features available upstream. Amazon will contribute things back that make their own life easier. Other companies will struggle with open source business models. Engineers will favor companies that open source interesting projects. Everybody will be fine.

doliveira 7y ago
The cynicism that pours into threads like these is kind of depressing, though. People are increasingly more tolerant to predatory business practices.

danShumway 7y ago

We have two contrasting terms that work perfectly well right now: Open Source, a set of licenses that allow users to run and modify software for personal or commercial purposes without your permission. and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things you don't like with it. These two terms already perfectly encapsulate the entire range of new licenses that are being proposed for databases like Mongo. But a nontrivial number of proponents for SSPL dislike this distinction because they want the goodwill and reputation that comes from being able to say, "we're Open Source." They want to be categorized the same way as MIT or GPL licenses, even though they fundamentally disagree with the worldview behind them. > The OSI believes it owns the definition of open source and refuses to update the definition of open source, which is short-sighted and dangerous. No. The OSI believes that Open Source has a widely agreed-upon definition, and that definition shouldn't be hijacked just because it's inconvenient for some company's software monetization strategy. The level of condescension in this article is really infuriating. Literally nothing is preventing any developer or company from using the SSPL right now: nobody will judge you, nobody will call you evil, the only thing the Open Source community is requesting is that you do not call it Open Source. Open Source was not invented so you could use it as a PR strategy. We don't need your help.

luckylion 7y ago
> and Source Available, a set of licenses that allow users to see and modify your source code provided they meet some kind of criteria you set up, such as not using the code for commercial purposes or not doing things you don't like with it. GPL is source available, then?
- skybrian 7y ago
  As far as I know GPL complies with the open source definition. You can run the software for any purpose, including selling commercial services. Source available licenses would be appropriate if you want to restrict use. (For example by Amazon.)
- 7y ago

tolmasky 7y ago

If you make your project open source, your goal should be maximizing people using it, not maximizing how much you profit from it. I know they may seem identical, but they aren't: Apple makes a lot of money by making software that has huge roadblocks to using it. And as many people are now realizing, open source has the ability to not make lots of money by making it incredibly easy for anyone to use. We all benefit greatly from Linux, and I think most people have not contributed back to it in any meaningful way, monetary or otherwise. A lot of these projects only exist because they were built on top of other Open Source solutions with no expectation to give them any sort of "cut". Had Linus decided he actually wanted to start a hardware business and then got angry that IBM was better at putting Linux on metal than he was, it would be similar to this situation and I think most of us would be unhappy about a bunch of turmoil resulting from that. But when it's someone else's ideas that are being used for free, they always seem obvious and fundamental, when its your own, it's unique and unfair. As others have said here, it is OK to say "wait a minute, I want something different", and then do something different. What is not OK is wanting to water down the definition of the term open source so that whatever thing you want to do still gets to use it. The OSI's position here is perfectly reasonable -- that doesn't mean you can't invent some new kind of license or relationship. People forget that OSI had to work to get into industry in the first place, it wasn't automatically accepted. It is somewhat funny and ironic that others now want to benefit from this work while doing something completely different.

pfortuny 7y ago
The simplest example of this is TeX and MetaFont, MetaPost. The only aim of Knuth was getting people to use them. One was, the other two not so much. And he has not complained that I know of.
- wmf 7y ago
  Knuth is subsidized by Stanford (and maybe book royalties); not everyone is so lucky.
roenxi 7y ago
> If you make your project open source, your goal should be maximizing people using it, not maximizing how much you profit from it. Dangerous ground telling people what their goals should be. There is no reason a person shouldn't try to maximise their profits from open source strategies. The Linux example is not a strong one - lots of the kernel devs are for-profit and Linus Torvalds made a fortune [0] - likely linked to his involvement in Linux. With benefit of hindsight it is hard to see how he could have better optimised for profit. The key insight for commercial OSS is that maximising profit does not necessarily mean maximising your paying userbase size. 10 users paying $10,000 a month easily trumps 1000 users paying $10. And going OSS as a commercial strategy (eg, Red Hat's classic model) gives competitive advantages if you can lever it - no risk of being undercut by a cheaper software package, ability be very selective in who you offer support to and an obvious strategy for wheedling in to new markets. In the initial rush where computers were being changed out every 5 years (pre 2003 era), having software to sell was where the advantage was. Now the industries are starting to mature and that is no longer as obvious it once was. The money seems to be in support and ongoing relationship fees, which are very amenable to OSS. So basically, if someone's goal is to maximise profits they should consider making their software open source. Especially if they are breaking in to an incumbent's market. [0] https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/tech-millionaire/linus-torvalds-net-worth/ https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/...

OrgNet 7y ago

Hopefully, this is illegal in two-party consent states (for audio recordings)... but I bet that they will get those laws repealed.

brentonator 7y ago

What a lot of people overlook is when Amazon takes something (DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility) on internally is they are re-inventing the way the database works in such a way it's dubious if the community would benefit. I do think it would have been better to see this go the Postgres route where they could have continued to contribute to the core product but I believe MongoDB saw competition against their MongoDB Cloud product and decided to change the licensing. This neccessitated the need for a hard fork since they were not interested in working together. An AWS Q&A stated they are working on a completely independent code base that is API compatible with MongoDB 3.6, so there is nothing to contribute back to the MongoDB open-source code base. DocumentDB much like Amazon Aurora has pivoted much of the database internals to depend on the AWS ecosystem. The whole concept of replica-sets on MongoDB are very rigid and inflexible compared to the elegance made possible by EBS and Amazon engineers. MongoDB replication is measured in seconds meanwhile DocumentDB replication is "usually less than 100 milliseconds". This makes read replicas in DocumentDB more relevant for all kinds of real-time tasks vs MongoDB.

jcoffland 7y ago

Open-Source is alive, well and functioning as intended. Tens of thousands of Open-Source projects are producing the software that is driving most of today's tech. To a venture capitalist, Open-Source is a marketing strategy. VCs would like to profit from the popularity of Open-Source by inserting themselves in the cash flow. But the cash flows in Open-Source are periphery. And the periphery is a humble position for a VC.

narnianal 7y ago

Interesting how human nature always wants to blame everything on one source. AWS might be bad, no argument against it. But the truth is there is more and more speaking about the end of open source as we know it. E.g. smartphones (the most used end-user computer nowadays) being walled gardens. So walled, that not even a giant like Huawei can easily continue to use Google's OS. E.g. Trade war makes every side being less open towards all other sides. E.g. at least one huge Open Source proponent being sold to a company that is known for not handling open source too well. E.g. big corps like Google having found a way to misuse stuff that is seemingly open source as marketing tools to spread there proprietary actual products. E.g. with at least many big corps believing that the cloud has beaten on-prem, and who knows what is behind these APIs. Maybe they don't even use Linux and TCP/IP anymore. E.g. with the rise of AI and machine learning software itself maybe(!) not being the most important tech development factor anymore. E.g. with Valve not having won the gaming platform war against Microsoft. E.g. with Microsoft claiming to integrate more and more with open source (but then how much control are they starting to wield, having a shitload of coders, money and users to field for their personal cause).

karmakaze 7y ago

The problem isn't really here. The problem is that everyone wants a permissive abusable license when AGPL would be just fine. If everyone here complaining just used AGPL then we wouldn't have this Amazon situation. People want to have their cake and eat it too. They started with an MIT license because it gets more uptake then whine when the license terms are being followed. But then it wouldn't be widely used. The solution to that is for everyone to use AGPL then the open-source playing field is level again.

hendzen 7y ago
Mongodb already used AGPL prior to switching to the SSPL...
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  The problem is that only MongoDB did it, not the majority of the FLOSS ecosystem.
  - kemitchell 7y ago
    That’s not what Mongo said. They called out specific issues with AGPLv3’s terms. http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003603.html http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...
TAForObvReasons 7y ago
AGPL is vulnerable to certain workarounds in the same way that GPL was. The CC class of non-commercial licenses might be more applicable, but that may harm adoption. EDIT: honestly not sure why this is so heavily downvoted (-7 as of the edit), the whole point of SSPL and other licenses is to address the "workarounds" that Amazon and others have discovered in AGPL
- boramalper 7y ago
  I’m not sure if CC is meant for software either (except for CC0 perhaps). For instance, does non-commercial mean (1) you cannot use [the output of] the program for any commercial purposes, or does it mean (2) you cannot sell the program itself (and its derivatives). The difference is subtle but AGPL permits (1) whilst practically forbidding (2) by enforcing copyleft; hence it fits the OSS criteria whereas CC NC wouldn’t if both (1) and (2) are true.

samcodes 7y ago

When I open source code, I use MIT. I have introduced open source strategies at places I work, and guided teams through the process. Ok now that I've established my OSS cred: I'd be really interested in a license that is effectively MIT, _except_ for the 20 largest software companies, for whom there is no license and any use is restricted (you'd need to clearly define what makes a company a software company, and what it means to be the largest, but that's what lawyers are for). They could pay for a commerical license if the customer demand was high enough. This seems like it would address the main issue as I see it, that is, I want almost everyone to be able to use my software to build cool shit and make money... But if you're FAANG or some shit, come on. The rules are different.

rmrfrmrf 7y ago
If we're getting into company-specific bans, I'd much rather be using the one that banned Palantir than one that bans FAANG, and the one that banned Palantir resulted in a massive backlash.
gary__ 7y ago
This could put off anyone who thinks they could be acquired by such companies from using your software as well. How can anyone know who is going to make it onto the blacklist for the next version etc. Seems quite the can of worms.
GordonS 7y ago
I quite like what TimescaleDB have done here - their TSL licence prohibits you from selling TimescaleDB as a service, but allows you to build new services that use TimescaleDB as a backend. I'm not sure how applicable this model might be outside of databases though.
hollerith 7y ago
>that's what lawyers are for One of the reasons the standard open-sources licenses such as the GPL and the permissive licenses are as popular as they are is the lowness of the probability that lawyers will ever be involved. There was widespread use of GPL software in the 1980s and early 1990s for about 15 years IIRC before the first lawsuit involving GPLed software. Stallman and his legal advisor Eben Moglen did a great job in reducing ambiguity when writing the text of version 2 of the GPL and in explaining the ramifications of the license to developers and prospective users.

rmrfrmrf 7y ago

The author is suggesting to curb source-available licenses by modifying open source licences to become... source-available licenses.

liara_k 7y ago

For a few years I've wondered about the viability of a "source-available" license with a lot of user-friendly terms (like being able to distribute modified versions which anyone else can use as long as they themselves have a license for the original work, etc...) and a built-in GPL/BSD/etc... conversion after N years. IMHO, the maximalist position of the RMS camp, while rightfully paranoid about the dangers of fully proprietary software, isn't the optimal solution. Yes, certain kinds of open source projects have been extremely successful, but a lot of this has been driven by corporate interests (i.e., people working on open source projects as a part of their work) and the software that gets built reflects and reinforces these interests. I'd be happy to pay to have the latest version of some really useful software that respects my rights in lots of other ways (e.g., more control over and access to my data in the app, and be able to tinker/adapt it as I see fit, with full source), particularly if the alternative is that this software doesn't exist. If feels like, at least in some software domains, that the alternative are either (1) user hostile proprietary software or (2) nowhere close to the proprietary alternative in terms of features and robustness. Obviously that's not the case for stuff like databases and operating system kernels, but that's what it often feels like out of these back-end type packages.

iamnothere 7y ago

Amazon isn't perfect in some areas, but I think FreeRTOS should be pointed out. This is a pretty valuable contribution in the embedded/IoT space. https://www.freertos.org/ https://www.freertos.org/

ChuckMcM 7y ago

These are the bullets from the article: It takes open-source code produced by others, runs it as a commercial service and gives nothing back to the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open source, thereby intercepting the monetization of the open source. It forks projects and forcibly wrestles control away from the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open-source projects, as it did in the case of Elasticsearch. It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs. Check, check, check. Remember RMS' screed? "Only the writing of software should be paid for, the using of it is an inherent right of everyone and should not make any remuneration requirements on the user." Back when he wrote that he was mad because companiies wrote code and charged big fees just to use it. He felt that was unfair. But now the shoe is on the other foot, and big companies are just "users" they aren't writing the software, so why should they pay for it? And while RMS was happy to have an architect use CAD software that someone else paid to have written, to design the houses that they sold for big bucks to their own clients, I don't think he thought it all the way through. The missing bit here is that the "using of software" has a value. Whether you are using a better C compiler than your competitors so your compiled code runs faster than theirs, or you are using a distributed database to offer a scaled up database service that is impractical for an individual to equip and maintain. The whole reason people paid for software in the first place is because it accelerated the value they could create. And when that delta in value, that was worth significant money to them. Still is. That is why electronic CAD software still gets big bucks from its users, the same with packages like Adobe studio. And guess what? When you use someone's software, and you are getting additional value that is accruing to you, if you didn't pay anything to the person who created it and maintains it, they feel cheated. Surprised? I am not. When the software manufacturers of old found people that used their software without paying for it, they called them Pirates, and Crooks, and all manner of ill names. They turned to technology, and licensing legalize, to create ways they could pursue those people to make them pay. Not unlike the folks at Redis changing their licenses to make it harder for people like Amazon to "pirate" their software. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. There is nothing "free" about Free Software as RMS envisions it, it is just a structural way for the users of the software to rip off the people who wrote it by capturing all of the value gained by using that software to develop or provide a product or service. It has always been true that software vendors were often extortionate in their pricing while escaping all liability by disclaiming the software did anything. If you fixed that problem, then we will be in a much better place.

oytis 7y ago

There is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is called dual licensing. In my opinion, this is a more severe abuse of open source than what Amazon does. When RMS introduced GPL the idea was to make everyone share their code, and make the world a happy place full of free Software. Dual licensing abuses this sincere intent to induce fear in commercial users and make them pay. So using a dual-licensing scheme prevents people from considering authors of SSPL the new leaders of the open-source community.

bradrydzewski 7y ago
You might find it interesting that Stallman supports selling exceptions to the GPL (i.e. dual licensing). You can read more about it on the FSF blog [1] but the post ends with the following: > I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed. [1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
- oytis 7y ago
  OK, if RMS approves it, it's not an abuse, who am I to argue? Still, the goal of open-source, copyleft and permissive flavours alike, is to "get programs freed", not to establish a fairer distribution of the cash flow. So when someone introduces a new superrestrictive license and starts selling exceptions right away, their earnesty can naturally be questioned.