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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 gi

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.
- dcbadacd 7y ago
  Linux uses GPL, it kind-of forces the tit-for-tat relationship.
  - adamson 7y ago
    Sure, but in this case e.g. GPL vs BSD is only marginally relevant (any modification needs to be GPL in the GPL case) to the particular case of selling OSS software as SaaS since either license lets you package and sell the bare software.
    - Drdrdrq 7y ago
      This is exactly it. GPL worked in the past, but if we take a look at Android (which is based on Linux) we can see that it failed to protect users' freedoms completely.
      - AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
        Something that GPLv3 would have prevented.
        klipt 7y ago
        Then Android would probably have just based off BSD like iOS did.
- mavelikara 7y ago
  Amazon is, in effect, bringing attention to this issue and I am glad that they are. > 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. Even if you do thoughtfully choose a license with the express intent of commercializing the work, some competing project elsewhere - student projects, in your example - will eat your market. It is about time players entering our industry be warned of the effects of such "pissing-in-the-pool" activities.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zorpner 7y ago
What's legal and what's right are very different things. It's perfectly fine to criticize Amazon for behaving poorly even if it's something they are legally permitted to do.
momokoko 7y ago
I think you might want to look into, if you have not already, a topic referred to as "gift culture"[1] The hard reality, that someone like myself believes, is that open source works because most actors try to be considerate of others. It falls apart when everyone acts selfishly. I personally believe the world is better off because we have open source software(as generally defined by the OSI and other groups). So my concern, and I'm guessing the concern of others like the author of this article, is about losing open source as we know it today. The fear is that as actors like Amazon behave in a very anti-social and self interested way, other actors in the ecosystem will be drawn into behaving similarly. Eventually we'll return to the era when software was almost always closed. Of course, you may not find any real value in the spread of open source software. If that is the case, then I would imagine this situation seems strange to you. [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/ar01s06.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homestead...
- infinity0 7y ago
  The SSPL "debate" was indeed a shit-show hijacked by people either abusing permissive-license ideologies with a corporate interest in mind, or so blinded by that ideology that they are unable to grasp the idea that freedom is an inherently contradictory concept, and that to maximise overall freedom across space and time it is necessary to restrict freedoms that result in a restriction of more freedoms. Good on these guys, I hope they build a licensing model or some other thing that can stand up to Amazon. I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says.
  - catern 7y ago
    >I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says. Yeah, I think the issue is that these days there's a lot of open source developers, who zealously believe in open source, but are working for corporations. They have a natural incentive to maximize the usefulness of open source for corporations, whether they explicitly acknowledge that or not. On a social level, I think that's having many effects, one of which is the backlash against SSPL, which is obviously hard for mostly-proprietary corporations to comply with. Many open source programmers have built a mental model around the notion that the scripts that operate and deploy an application (service) aren't part of the application (service), and therefore don't need to be open source. But that doesn't make any sense from a software-freedom perspective! The fundamental tenets of open source are that users should be able to use, modify, and redistribute the application. If the users don't have access to the scripts that are required to actually deploy a modified version of the service, then it's not meaningfully open source. That's a new perspective, it's true, but I think the old perspective (the scripts to deploy a service don't need to be open sourced) was just wrong, it came from a long period of biased, commercial-centric thinking.
fergie 7y ago
Right. I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects, surf on the goodwill of open source, and then turn around and complain when other companies use elasticsearch as open source. The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well funded companies and self appointed governing bodies. Let’s find a way to pay hackers!
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  I think "hackers" should just ask for money for their work before you are allowed to use it, just like they did years ago - how to do this was already a problem solved even in the 90s. Sure you wont get brownie points with those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda, but at least you'll be able to get food from the supermarket. And besides, cults are only nice at the beginning when there are parties, later they start to suck when sacrifices enter in the picture.
  - toofy 7y ago
    > ...this was already a problem solved in the 90s. Sure you won’t get brownie points by those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda... The “indoctrinated” industry has created a massive community and even more massive ecosystem of interoperability which almost certainly wouldn’t exist under the walled off from everything else and “fuck everyone” nightmare of the 1990s. Those 90s walled off isolated companies were significantly more cult like and significantly less effective than the system which won out in the open market—the “GNU propaganda” as you refer to it.
- prepend 7y ago
  I think the corporate patronage is alive and well. If you look at Apache or Linux Foundation, lots of contributors are employees of large corporations. This works out ok in the sense that lots of great software is being created. I think the problem with Elastic is they have lots of VC investment pushing for a big payout, so it’s not a “pay the hackers” it’s a “make a big payout for founders and investors.” Which I’m not against and think is cool, but I don’t really care about it that much.
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
The basic argument is that Amazon is Free Riding because they get massively more out of the resource than they put in, by virtue of their scale alone. The free-rider problem occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an underprovision of those goods or services. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
- prepend 7y ago
  It’s impossible to free ride with a permissive license like the one used. It’s like complaining because Seattle sets up a free subway that supports infinite riders at $0 marginal cost and Amazon has all their employees ride it instead of making google buses. There’s also an issue that Elastic’s district was actually worse than Amazon’s new distro due to license confusion.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    > It’s impossible to free ride with a permissive license like the one used. On the contrary, permissive licenses has been quietly pushed by companies, together with replacing Free Software with Open Source, in order to exploit it.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  Amazon isn't free-riding any more than everyone else. If I can buy hardware and hire SREs to run mongod myself, I should be able to pay AWS to do the same things for me, and it's weird that the authors expect a cut in one case and not the other.
neya 7y ago
There's a famous project that did something similar to this. It's WURFL. The creator behind the project got offended when a big co (Google I assume, not sure) who forked his project and never paid him anything at all. I believe it was under a different, very permissive license. When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license screwing companies who depended on his database. Luckily, someone cloned the project on Github, but he took it also down with a DMCA. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/01/wurfl-and-database-copyright/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/01/wurfl-and-database-copyrigh... I really hate people who don't understand what open source really means and get offended when someone uses their work in a way that doesn't violate the license, but doesn't give back.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license screwing companies who depended on his database. Luckily, someone cloned the project on Github, but he took it also down with a DMCA. I don't understand this. If the old version was licensed permissively what argument does he have to take down a copy of it with DMCA? And the original companies using it wouldn't care - of course they'd have their own vendored copy internally - they don't need GitHub to keep using it.
tolmasky 7y ago
This is also incredibly worrying for the original goal of open source which was individual user's rights. I think it will be very difficult to make a license that cleanly allows me a personal user to change/use/distribute the source, but not a big business like Amazon. And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I use for my real estate business or something. With open source, the requirements are really easy, as soon as there is a door for someone to get a cut of what you make, we get into the territory of whether you become a big enough target to start demanding a cut from. And then it's up to the courts to decide. That might be great from the author's point of view, but I think completely goes against the whole point of the software user's freedom. For example, is it that far fetched that at some point someone will come up with the abstract argument that your blogging service is really actually just a fancy interface to your MongoDB instance -- and thus you should pay up since you are a MongoDB provider.
- Drdrdrq 7y ago
  > And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I use for my real estate business or something. Just to be clear, if you are referring to Commons Clause, you can freely use the software for real estate or whatever, you just can't sell the router itself, software itself, or offer paid consulting / support / hosting for the software (well you can, but you need to obtain a commercial license - which is fair enough, since you are making money off the software, not off you real estate business). This is a common misconception about Commons Clause. You can use it for commercial purposes. Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it. As for blogging example, the concern is imho not justified. Hybrid licenses need support of community as much as open source ones and such behaviour would be suicide. It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early... There aren't many projects using Commons Clause yet for example.
  - tolmasky 7y ago
    > Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it. I think we're agreeing here: no one actually knows the boundaries of this. I'm simply not interested in being the guinea pig of where the line is of "the services that base on it". In my experience the actual deciding factor for this is when you become successful enough and worthwhile to sue. Then it's up to some judge in Texas to decide whether my service is "based on" this technology? I mean, I can't run my services at all without Linux -- I think they'd have a really good argument that my entire business is "based on it". You and I may see how this is silly, that's not sufficient for making me feel safe in a legal environment that currently rewards patent trolls for example. > It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early... If we're in "warrant territory" of explicitly stating up front every possible "OK use case" to make the user feel safe, then its either going to have so many allowable use cases as to be self-defeating, or not possibly able to predict really exciting unexpected uses and rule itself out from those domains. At the absolute minimum, I'm going to start to actually have to read over the license with a lawyer now (as opposed to one common understanding of something like MIT), since I can't imagine a "one size fits all" of acceptable explicitly spelled out use cases when the whole point of these licenses is to carve out meaningful profit areas for the project itself - something that in my opinion is going to vary greatly project to project depending on the unique features it provides.
ajross 7y ago
In practice, lots of initial authors choose licenses out of tribal affiliation and not simple logic or strategy. People who are inclined to distrust the FSF are likely to pick a permissive license even though the truth is they expect things that can only be guaranteed by a copyleft license. Conversely the LGPL and family exists in some sense because the free software community tried to apply copyleft to project that can really only be successful with a permissive license.
Thorrez 7y ago
The article says that even a non-permissive license (such as GPL) won't stop Amazon from taking your code and running it as their own service.
clarry 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. I want you to have the right to be an asshole, but I'd prefer it if you were not an asshole. I don't want to enforce my preferences through contracts, licenses, and law. I might still call you out if you're an asshole. How hard is it to understand this worldview? A world of freedom, where people do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and not because they are given no other choice.
evrydayhustling 7y ago
Yeah, this strikes me as someone trying to legislate a business model into working: engage open source contributors for all features but also have an exclusive rights to sell them in an Enterprise offering without competing with Amazon. The stronger part of the argument is that Amazon is being anticompetitive by using their privileged role as AWS' hardware operator to compete with app providers in on higher layers. Maybe in a few years we will have a lawsuit related to the one Apple is facing now about ios apps.
ken 7y ago
Likewise, I don't understand your position. Just because something is legal doesn't mean we're not allowed to complain. Besides the legal contract, the social contract can be just as important. For example, my country has freedom of speech and assembly and so forth, and it's easy to see cases where someone exercises their legal rights in ways that are supremely annoying to others, and not in any way productive for society. When we see people abusing the system, we speak out about it. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. What's the alternative? Disallow freedom of speech? Sometimes we might feel tempted, but it turns out that that has all kinds of terrible problems. As they say: this is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. There are many cases where doing the minimum that the law allows is fine and accepted. (Most people don't intentionally overpay their income tax.) There are other cases where doing something that's merely not technically illegal is frowned upon by social convention. What we're seeing is the corporate world (legal minimum) and the individual world (social contract) colliding. Who wins? So far, the corporations are. It's easy to say "You should have picked a different license, then!" after the fact, but maybe there isn't a license which would have worked better. Maybe this is the best of several bad options. (Maybe using a more restrictive license would have caused the company to ignore the software entirely and write their own completely proprietary alternative, for example.) Maybe using the internet soapbox to plead for leadership is actually the optimal strategy. The GNU GPL was an amazingly clever hack to use the legal system to assist enforcing a social contract, but I don't think we can expect to find solutions like that in every case.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
A lot of people has been mislead (by some propaganda) to think that "permissive" licenses would be enough to build a collaborative ecosystem. Now they are starting to realize they were naive.

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.

dcbadacd 7y ago
Linux uses GPL, it kind-of forces the tit-for-tat relationship.
- adamson 7y ago
  Sure, but in this case e.g. GPL vs BSD is only marginally relevant (any modification needs to be GPL in the GPL case) to the particular case of selling OSS software as SaaS since either license lets you package and sell the bare software.
  - Drdrdrq 7y ago
    This is exactly it. GPL worked in the past, but if we take a look at Android (which is based on Linux) we can see that it failed to protect users' freedoms completely.
    - AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
      Something that GPLv3 would have prevented.
      - klipt 7y ago
        Then Android would probably have just based off BSD like iOS did.
mavelikara 7y ago
Amazon is, in effect, bringing attention to this issue and I am glad that they are. > 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. Even if you do thoughtfully choose a license with the express intent of commercializing the work, some competing project elsewhere - student projects, in your example - will eat your market. It is about time players entering our industry be warned of the effects of such "pissing-in-the-pool" activities.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zorpner 7y ago

What's legal and what's right are very different things. It's perfectly fine to criticize Amazon for behaving poorly even if it's something they are legally permitted to do.

momokoko 7y ago

I think you might want to look into, if you have not already, a topic referred to as "gift culture"[1] The hard reality, that someone like myself believes, is that open source works because most actors try to be considerate of others. It falls apart when everyone acts selfishly. I personally believe the world is better off because we have open source software(as generally defined by the OSI and other groups). So my concern, and I'm guessing the concern of others like the author of this article, is about losing open source as we know it today. The fear is that as actors like Amazon behave in a very anti-social and self interested way, other actors in the ecosystem will be drawn into behaving similarly. Eventually we'll return to the era when software was almost always closed. Of course, you may not find any real value in the spread of open source software. If that is the case, then I would imagine this situation seems strange to you. [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/ar01s06.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homestead...

infinity0 7y ago
The SSPL "debate" was indeed a shit-show hijacked by people either abusing permissive-license ideologies with a corporate interest in mind, or so blinded by that ideology that they are unable to grasp the idea that freedom is an inherently contradictory concept, and that to maximise overall freedom across space and time it is necessary to restrict freedoms that result in a restriction of more freedoms. Good on these guys, I hope they build a licensing model or some other thing that can stand up to Amazon. I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says.
- catern 7y ago
  >I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says. Yeah, I think the issue is that these days there's a lot of open source developers, who zealously believe in open source, but are working for corporations. They have a natural incentive to maximize the usefulness of open source for corporations, whether they explicitly acknowledge that or not. On a social level, I think that's having many effects, one of which is the backlash against SSPL, which is obviously hard for mostly-proprietary corporations to comply with. Many open source programmers have built a mental model around the notion that the scripts that operate and deploy an application (service) aren't part of the application (service), and therefore don't need to be open source. But that doesn't make any sense from a software-freedom perspective! The fundamental tenets of open source are that users should be able to use, modify, and redistribute the application. If the users don't have access to the scripts that are required to actually deploy a modified version of the service, then it's not meaningfully open source. That's a new perspective, it's true, but I think the old perspective (the scripts to deploy a service don't need to be open sourced) was just wrong, it came from a long period of biased, commercial-centric thinking.

fergie 7y ago

Right. I think it’s a bit rich of companies such as Elastic to extend existing open source projects, surf on the goodwill of open source, and then turn around and complain when other companies use elasticsearch as open source. The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well funded companies and self appointed governing bodies. Let’s find a way to pay hackers!

badsectoracula 7y ago
I think "hackers" should just ask for money for their work before you are allowed to use it, just like they did years ago - how to do this was already a problem solved even in the 90s. Sure you wont get brownie points with those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda, but at least you'll be able to get food from the supermarket. And besides, cults are only nice at the beginning when there are parties, later they start to suck when sacrifices enter in the picture.
- toofy 7y ago
  > ...this was already a problem solved in the 90s. Sure you won’t get brownie points by those indoctrinated by the GNU propaganda... The “indoctrinated” industry has created a massive community and even more massive ecosystem of interoperability which almost certainly wouldn’t exist under the walled off from everything else and “fuck everyone” nightmare of the 1990s. Those 90s walled off isolated companies were significantly more cult like and significantly less effective than the system which won out in the open market—the “GNU propaganda” as you refer to it.
prepend 7y ago
I think the corporate patronage is alive and well. If you look at Apache or Linux Foundation, lots of contributors are employees of large corporations. This works out ok in the sense that lots of great software is being created. I think the problem with Elastic is they have lots of VC investment pushing for a big payout, so it’s not a “pay the hackers” it’s a “make a big payout for founders and investors.” Which I’m not against and think is cool, but I don’t really care about it that much.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

The basic argument is that Amazon is Free Riding because they get massively more out of the resource than they put in, by virtue of their scale alone. The free-rider problem occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an underprovision of those goods or services. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

prepend 7y ago
It’s impossible to free ride with a permissive license like the one used. It’s like complaining because Seattle sets up a free subway that supports infinite riders at $0 marginal cost and Amazon has all their employees ride it instead of making google buses. There’s also an issue that Elastic’s district was actually worse than Amazon’s new distro due to license confusion.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  > It’s impossible to free ride with a permissive license like the one used. On the contrary, permissive licenses has been quietly pushed by companies, together with replacing Free Software with Open Source, in order to exploit it.
erik_seaberg 7y ago
Amazon isn't free-riding any more than everyone else. If I can buy hardware and hire SREs to run mongod myself, I should be able to pay AWS to do the same things for me, and it's weird that the authors expect a cut in one case and not the other.

neya 7y ago

There's a famous project that did something similar to this. It's WURFL. The creator behind the project got offended when a big co (Google I assume, not sure) who forked his project and never paid him anything at all. I believe it was under a different, very permissive license. When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license screwing companies who depended on his database. Luckily, someone cloned the project on Github, but he took it also down with a DMCA. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/01/wurfl-and-database-copyright/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/01/wurfl-and-database-copyrigh... I really hate people who don't understand what open source really means and get offended when someone uses their work in a way that doesn't violate the license, but doesn't give back.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license screwing companies who depended on his database. Luckily, someone cloned the project on Github, but he took it also down with a DMCA. I don't understand this. If the old version was licensed permissively what argument does he have to take down a copy of it with DMCA? And the original companies using it wouldn't care - of course they'd have their own vendored copy internally - they don't need GitHub to keep using it.

tolmasky 7y ago

This is also incredibly worrying for the original goal of open source which was individual user's rights. I think it will be very difficult to make a license that cleanly allows me a personal user to change/use/distribute the source, but not a big business like Amazon. And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I use for my real estate business or something. With open source, the requirements are really easy, as soon as there is a door for someone to get a cut of what you make, we get into the territory of whether you become a big enough target to start demanding a cut from. And then it's up to the courts to decide. That might be great from the author's point of view, but I think completely goes against the whole point of the software user's freedom. For example, is it that far fetched that at some point someone will come up with the abstract argument that your blogging service is really actually just a fancy interface to your MongoDB instance -- and thus you should pay up since you are a MongoDB provider.

Drdrdrq 7y ago
> And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I use for my real estate business or something. Just to be clear, if you are referring to Commons Clause, you can freely use the software for real estate or whatever, you just can't sell the router itself, software itself, or offer paid consulting / support / hosting for the software (well you can, but you need to obtain a commercial license - which is fair enough, since you are making money off the software, not off you real estate business). This is a common misconception about Commons Clause. You can use it for commercial purposes. Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it. As for blogging example, the concern is imho not justified. Hybrid licenses need support of community as much as open source ones and such behaviour would be suicide. It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early... There aren't many projects using Commons Clause yet for example.
- tolmasky 7y ago
  > Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it. I think we're agreeing here: no one actually knows the boundaries of this. I'm simply not interested in being the guinea pig of where the line is of "the services that base on it". In my experience the actual deciding factor for this is when you become successful enough and worthwhile to sue. Then it's up to some judge in Texas to decide whether my service is "based on" this technology? I mean, I can't run my services at all without Linux -- I think they'd have a really good argument that my entire business is "based on it". You and I may see how this is silly, that's not sufficient for making me feel safe in a legal environment that currently rewards patent trolls for example. > It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early... If we're in "warrant territory" of explicitly stating up front every possible "OK use case" to make the user feel safe, then its either going to have so many allowable use cases as to be self-defeating, or not possibly able to predict really exciting unexpected uses and rule itself out from those domains. At the absolute minimum, I'm going to start to actually have to read over the license with a lawyer now (as opposed to one common understanding of something like MIT), since I can't imagine a "one size fits all" of acceptable explicitly spelled out use cases when the whole point of these licenses is to carve out meaningful profit areas for the project itself - something that in my opinion is going to vary greatly project to project depending on the unique features it provides.

ajross 7y ago

In practice, lots of initial authors choose licenses out of tribal affiliation and not simple logic or strategy. People who are inclined to distrust the FSF are likely to pick a permissive license even though the truth is they expect things that can only be guaranteed by a copyleft license. Conversely the LGPL and family exists in some sense because the free software community tried to apply copyleft to project that can really only be successful with a permissive license.

Thorrez 7y ago

The article says that even a non-permissive license (such as GPL) won't stop Amazon from taking your code and running it as their own service.

clarry 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. I want you to have the right to be an asshole, but I'd prefer it if you were not an asshole. I don't want to enforce my preferences through contracts, licenses, and law. I might still call you out if you're an asshole. How hard is it to understand this worldview? A world of freedom, where people do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and not because they are given no other choice.

evrydayhustling 7y ago

Yeah, this strikes me as someone trying to legislate a business model into working: engage open source contributors for all features but also have an exclusive rights to sell them in an Enterprise offering without competing with Amazon. The stronger part of the argument is that Amazon is being anticompetitive by using their privileged role as AWS' hardware operator to compete with app providers in on higher layers. Maybe in a few years we will have a lawsuit related to the one Apple is facing now about ios apps.

ken 7y ago

Likewise, I don't understand your position. Just because something is legal doesn't mean we're not allowed to complain. Besides the legal contract, the social contract can be just as important. For example, my country has freedom of speech and assembly and so forth, and it's easy to see cases where someone exercises their legal rights in ways that are supremely annoying to others, and not in any way productive for society. When we see people abusing the system, we speak out about it. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. What's the alternative? Disallow freedom of speech? Sometimes we might feel tempted, but it turns out that that has all kinds of terrible problems. As they say: this is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. There are many cases where doing the minimum that the law allows is fine and accepted. (Most people don't intentionally overpay their income tax.) There are other cases where doing something that's merely not technically illegal is frowned upon by social convention. What we're seeing is the corporate world (legal minimum) and the individual world (social contract) colliding. Who wins? So far, the corporations are. It's easy to say "You should have picked a different license, then!" after the fact, but maybe there isn't a license which would have worked better. Maybe this is the best of several bad options. (Maybe using a more restrictive license would have caused the company to ignore the software entirely and write their own completely proprietary alternative, for example.) Maybe using the internet soapbox to plead for leadership is actually the optimal strategy. The GNU GPL was an amazingly clever hack to use the legal system to assist enforcing a social contract, but I don't think we can expect to find solutions like that in every case.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

A lot of people has been mislead (by some propaganda) to think that "permissive" licenses would be enough to build a collaborative ecosystem. Now they are starting to realize they were naive.