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> With many open source licenses we have almost nothing in the way of protecting the principles, because licenses like MIT basically say "I do not care.". What

> With many open source licenses we have almost nothing in the way of protecting the principles, because licenses like MIT basically say "I do not care.". What's wrong with that? It's perfectly okay to say "I don't care". I do release all my code under MIT because I care about attribution. I don't mind if people want to use it in commercial or closed source applications, nor if they want to modify it somehow. I distribute code because that makes _me_ happy, not because I want to share an ideological statement about how others should distribute their code (or not).

zelphirkalt 6y ago
It is not unethical to do what you do. I would say, that perhaps it is only a little short sighted. I don't mean this in a negative insulting way and I will explain why I think so. The problem is rather, what it means in the long run. The point is, that this kind of only caring about for example attribution makes the ecosystem exploitable. It does not uphold ideals or enforce principles. Without upholding ideals and enforcing principles, how do we expect our principles to be followed in the future? If there is no legal obligation to do anything, which capitalistic (We need to maximize our profit! Ethical principles? Nah, come on ...) big company is willing to go the extra mile to respect the principles of some open source community, perhaps even at the expense of making more profit from a closed source solution? And I mean going the extra mile, without seeing it as an opportunity to use the very action as another means of promoting oneself. Simply going the extra mile, because it is the fair thing to do. As I see it, as long as there is a chance to deviate from following the principles (no copyleft), someone somewhere will do so. Heck, even with such obligation to adhere to principles some people will deviate from the path. The tendency is always towards the wrong direction, if we do not enforce our principles of openness and such. It is an uphill battle. The whole ecosystem goes towards a not so open direction, by these initially small "missteps". Especially when a a big company with a lot of developers takes stuff and makes proprietary stuff out of it, as its product, which usually initially has more functionality than its open source counterpart, users will quickly switch to the non-open proprietary version. They do so because they want that new shiny functionality immediately. The slightest inconvenience is sufficient for many users to drive them towards proprietary software. They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing. Until they are sufficient users to create a bubble, in which the open source ideas are no longer existent. Then however, the network effects are already strong. "But all my friends use X. No on uses Y. I cannot convince them all to switch from X to Y!" Example: There are loaaads of at least open source (and some also free software) messengers out there. All people need to do is to use them. But the network effect and features like integration with (a)social media are so convenient for them, that they give up on their freedoms and use things like Whatsapp or Facebook.
- rkagerer 6y ago
  I care, and I want the world to be able to do whatever they want with code I gift to it. MIT is beautiful is its concision, and reasonably reflects the "use however you want but don't blame me" legalese I used to custom craft before I found it.
- cinquemb 6y ago
  > They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing. Man, I get this now esp with AWS services and everyone recommending how "easy" it is to x with y service, and why it we should use to too and it will magically solve all the problems… and I'm like: "no, i'm going to use this open source software that we'll have the code for and be able to tweak to do whatever we want to do and see how it all works (oh and is free to use), and unless you are going to be willing to hack around all the edge cases yourself that with y service without me getting involved at all" and then that usually works, though I suspect once I leave, the costs of running infrastructure are going to go through to roof and no one else is going to have any clue as to why that's so (but more likely, think that its impossible to have it any other way than paying to have y)… Moments like these are great opportunities for folks that just don't accept "the non-open proprietary" by default, but its only an opportunity because most choose to accept "the non-open proprietary" by default… we all have to pay for the choices we make… some just want to pay more to not have to think about things… tradeoffs.
  - Galanwe 6y ago
    To answer on your AWS example. Honestly, it really depends on which stage of life your company is at, and the resources you can allocate to infrastructure work. At the very beginning of my company, we did exactly what you mentioned here. - Pay for a managed NAT gateway? No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance. - Pay for a managed NFS? No thanks I can do it myself - Pay for managed VPN? No thanks I can setup IPsec myself - etc. With time though, as the company starts to gain money, and the number of users increase, we switched back to more managed services. The key here is that you want to refocus your infrastructures efforts on more business centric issues. Also, most of the time, the time spent to maintain a service is exponential with its scaling. NFS is a good example here. Setting up a number of NFS shares for 5/10 users is fine. Once you get 20+ NFS users, you just better focus on your real company product rather spend month and money on maintaining NFS yourself.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

It is not unethical to do what you do. I would say, that perhaps it is only a little short sighted. I don't mean this in a negative insulting way and I will explain why I think so. The problem is rather, what it means in the long run. The point is, that this kind of only caring about for example attribution makes the ecosystem exploitable. It does not uphold ideals or enforce principles. Without upholding ideals and enforcing principles, how do we expect our principles to be followed in the future? If there is no legal obligation to do anything, which capitalistic (We need to maximize our profit! Ethical principles? Nah, come on ...) big company is willing to go the extra mile to respect the principles of some open source community, perhaps even at the expense of making more profit from a closed source solution? And I mean going the extra mile, without seeing it as an opportunity to use the very action as another means of promoting oneself. Simply going the extra mile, because it is the fair thing to do. As I see it, as long as there is a chance to deviate from following the principles (no copyleft), someone somewhere will do so. Heck, even with such obligation to adhere to principles some people will deviate from the path. The tendency is always towards the wrong direction, if we do not enforce our principles of openness and such. It is an uphill battle. The whole ecosystem goes towards a not so open direction, by these initially small "missteps". Especially when a a big company with a lot of developers takes stuff and makes proprietary stuff out of it, as its product, which usually initially has more functionality than its open source counterpart, users will quickly switch to the non-open proprietary version. They do so because they want that new shiny functionality immediately. The slightest inconvenience is sufficient for many users to drive them towards proprietary software. They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing. Until they are sufficient users to create a bubble, in which the open source ideas are no longer existent. Then however, the network effects are already strong. "But all my friends use X. No on uses Y. I cannot convince them all to switch from X to Y!" Example: There are loaaads of at least open source (and some also free software) messengers out there. All people need to do is to use them. But the network effect and features like integration with (a)social media are so convenient for them, that they give up on their freedoms and use things like Whatsapp or Facebook.

rkagerer 6y ago
I care, and I want the world to be able to do whatever they want with code I gift to it. MIT is beautiful is its concision, and reasonably reflects the "use however you want but don't blame me" legalese I used to custom craft before I found it.
cinquemb 6y ago
> They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing. Man, I get this now esp with AWS services and everyone recommending how "easy" it is to x with y service, and why it we should use to too and it will magically solve all the problems… and I'm like: "no, i'm going to use this open source software that we'll have the code for and be able to tweak to do whatever we want to do and see how it all works (oh and is free to use), and unless you are going to be willing to hack around all the edge cases yourself that with y service without me getting involved at all" and then that usually works, though I suspect once I leave, the costs of running infrastructure are going to go through to roof and no one else is going to have any clue as to why that's so (but more likely, think that its impossible to have it any other way than paying to have y)… Moments like these are great opportunities for folks that just don't accept "the non-open proprietary" by default, but its only an opportunity because most choose to accept "the non-open proprietary" by default… we all have to pay for the choices we make… some just want to pay more to not have to think about things… tradeoffs.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  To answer on your AWS example. Honestly, it really depends on which stage of life your company is at, and the resources you can allocate to infrastructure work. At the very beginning of my company, we did exactly what you mentioned here. - Pay for a managed NAT gateway? No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance. - Pay for a managed NFS? No thanks I can do it myself - Pay for managed VPN? No thanks I can setup IPsec myself - etc. With time though, as the company starts to gain money, and the number of users increase, we switched back to more managed services. The key here is that you want to refocus your infrastructures efforts on more business centric issues. Also, most of the time, the time spent to maintain a service is exponential with its scaling. NFS is a good example here. Setting up a number of NFS shares for 5/10 users is fine. Once you get 20+ NFS users, you just better focus on your real company product rather spend month and money on maintaining NFS yourself.