6 ms·

Hard disagree. The OSI may have "Open Source" in its name, but we decide what "open source" means. And I agree with the 'spirit' of open source, which is base

Hard disagree. The OSI may have "Open Source" in its name, but we decide what "open source" means. And I agree with the 'spirit' of open source, which is based in RMS' inability to replace code on his printer. The right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications. This "it's not open-source unless you allow Amazon to profit from your charitable work" is horse hockey. I don't care if this is how a hardliner sees it. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive, and this is important enough that I support the migration of "open-source" to include these restrictions. Which, as they point out, affect none of the people using their code, and only the corporations (not people!) who would abuse the goodwill created by the Open Source movement.

boogies 6y ago
What about the AGPL? Wouldn’t it grant “the right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications” and provide protection from FAANG profiting without reciprocating, while being OSI and FSF approved?
- carlhjerpe 6y ago
  The problem with agpl is that no companies want to touch it. It's too restrictive if you ever want to integrate something with your internal proprietary moneymaking code.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Doesn't that accomplish the goal then? Make your project AGPL and with a commercial license, so only you will be able to make it a commercial business as other big cloud companies don't want to touch it.
    - tormeh 6y ago
      The problem is that it is not truly impossible to integrate into a commercial company. It's more that the license practically requires a lawyer to look at exactly how it'll be used and approve that use. AWS certainly does not shy away from hosting AGPL software. It does prevent AWS from taking the code and running with it though, at least not without a shim. A more permissive license can lead to the Athena/Presto situation where Athena is, to my knowledge, a proprietary fork of Presto.
      - _msw_ 6y ago
        Disclosure: I work at AWS on infrastructure services I am personally currently unaware of any AGPLv3 licensed software in use in an AWS service. That said, I would be skeptical of advice to use AGPLv3 due to any particular organization's current policy on the license. Regarding Presto, work on the service includes changes that should go upstream. For the changes that are appropriate for upstream (e.g., ones that are generally useful, not only of benefit or interest to AWS), PRs are sent. For example: https://github.com/prestosql/presto/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Apettyjamesm https://github.com/prestosql/presto/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3... Practically speaking, it is difficult to maintain a development branch of any software project with sufficient change velocity if you have a goal of continuing to integrate improvements from the upstream version.
        tormeh 6y ago
        Redis changed from AGPL to Apache 2 with something they called a Commons Clause, then finally to Redis Source Available License because of cloud providers. Don't really know exactly which event triggered the change, though. I suppose it could have been GCP or Azure instead of AWS. Regardless, AGPL is far less restrictive than people claim it is. It is a particularly strict version of the GPL, but given proper legal review it is unproblematic to use commercially, which cuts both ways as Redis found out. I think there's a serious amount of FUD around it. I suppose it's because of how rare it is. With more usage, it would probably bee seen as less dangerous.
        boogies 6y ago
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      The problem is that Amazon could still do it, they're just on that scale, while most common companies would shy away as they don't have the Amazon budget for abusing AGPL right. I hope in the future the Elastic, TimeScale, Confluent and any other "fuck Amazon" license could be merged into one and kind of standardized on as many freedoms as possible, while keeping AWS out of it.
- copascetic 6y ago
  If Timescale were AGPL Amazon would be free to just run it as a service for profit and all they need to do is publish their modifications to it, if they make any. Amazon has no problem running all kinds of other open source software for profit, and this is what TSL is specifically designed to prevent.
  - Conan_Kudo 6y ago
    But that's the trade: you either pay with time+effort or with money. What everyone seems to miss here is that the GNU Affero General Public License offers the ability for people to make that choice. Cloud providers would be forced into an ugly situation if almost every single XaaS codebase switched to AGPL. Their business model depends on being able to make minor investments to provide things people want as a service and not share it with the community. However, if the AGPL was normalized and used more often, cloud providers would be in a situation where they'd either have to A) build everything of theirs on their own if they don't like the license or B) use the software people want, release their improvements back to the community, and everyone benefits. It's amazing how everyone has forgotten why Linux won over all the other server, mobile, and edge platforms, and is slowly inching to dominate everything else. The terms underlying most of the core Linux system software, including the kernel obviously, require things incorporating it to be released with usable sources to the public. That is what enabled individuals to sustain a project and make it into the successful juggernaut it is today. But because Google has managed to poison the well with AGPL, we're in a situation today where "business-friendly" permissive licenses like the Apache Software License are used and companies are surprised when they get sucked dry by cloud providers abusing the properties of that license. Companies building open source software should expect one of two things: money or code. Both are intrinsically quite valuable to them, and they should take care to nurture that those are the two valid options.
StavrosK 6y ago
I would tend to agree. Saying "our software is free for anyone to do anything they want with, except Amazon to profit from" may not be free in letter, but I certainly see it free in spirit. I fear we're letting perfect be the enemy of the good here, and letting the FOSS ecosystem wither and lose incalculable value by letting trillion-dollar corporations exploit the hard work of people for free. If the choice is between "cheap Timescale on AWS run by Amazon" and "slightly less cheap Timescale on AWS run by Timescale", I'll take the latter. I think banning FAANG from competing with the single source of revenue these FOSS companies have is a small price to pay to ensure a thriving FOSS ecosystem, and I think insisting on absolute freedom is killing the ecosystem.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  The trillion dollar companies don't get it "for free", they still have to pay employees, contractors and consultants to actually run the software. And as you know, the salaries tend to be a lot higher at bigger companies. Pick your poison.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    If you give me a couch for free but I have to bring a truck to take it away on, does that make it not-free?
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      If you had to pay to rent a truck and also pay to hire workers to move it in and out of the truck and then up 10 floors to your apartment, then yes, it wasn't free, there is a real cost to you. A cost that you saved me because I didn't have to pay someone to take it to the landfill. So I would actually be saving money despite that it looks like I gave it to you "for free". And if I was really crafty I'd have suggested for you to use a particular moving company and then I'd have charged them a referral fee. (Of course this is a somewhat cynical view, and this isn't even getting into the other costs associated with second hand furniture -- anything with upholstery carries a risk of containing mold or vermin and you may need to pay more to get it cleaned/sanitized)
rectang 6y ago
You'd be in good company with Microsoft circa 2001 with their (source-available) Shared Source Initiative, because your argument is the same one that people have been making back then and ever since: that banning field-of-use restrictions imposes too much of a burden on commercial entities. But disallowing such field-of-use restrictions is exactly what makes open source collaboration between otherwise competing companies possible. It is a fundamental difference between Open Source and Source Available licenses.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Can you elaborate? What collaboration do you mean?
  - StopHammoTime 6y ago
    Uhh, kubernetes would be an immediate example. A massive piece of software that has been adapted into every major cloud provider, with all those cloud providers working on that same piece of software. While Google may have done it to make their own Cloud offering better, it ultimately has succeeded in saturating the container compute market and with their own success has brought plenty of competition.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      On the contrary, Google made Kubernetes precisely so they could commoditize every other cloud provider and then offer the strongest Kubernetes provider there is. When AWS is just a layer under Kubernetes, you can move your entire infrastructure to GCP by pushing your Kubernetes config to a different endpoint. They succeeded quite well in that.
Spivak 6y ago
I'm really surprised that people are trying to make open source something it's not because closed source has become such a boogyman. There is a very real practical need for companies that write software to use Copyright to protect their business -- there's nothing evil about it! It's what Copyright is for! This kind of "screw the big guys" is something I can totally get behind -- power to them for setting the terms of their relationship with them but it's not and shouldn't be open source. And that should be okay. The right to run a piece of software for any purpose whatsoever is fundamental to the spirit of open source.
pessimizer 6y ago
RMS created Free Software, not Open Source. Open Source is something that the OSI made up.
- ptman 6y ago
  IIRC OSI didn't make it up. OSI was created to codify the existing use of the term
marcinzm 6y ago
You statement on what is open source: >The right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications. Description of the license from the linked articles: > Rights still disallowed under Timescale License: > No right to distribute modified Source > No right to distribute modified Binaries, unless as part of a Value Added Product I'm very confused on how you're reconciling your stated view on the definition of open source and the directly conflicting text of this license.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  That's fair, I didn't look closely enough at the specific terms to make sure it conformed to my view of "open-source". I specifically disagreed with the parent comment and others, which declare that "it's not open source unless [Amazon is free to profit from the software]".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
danShumway 6y ago
> but we decide what "open source" means Well, "we" in the Open Source movement decided that it means not restricting what users do with their code. I don't understand what's so hard about this. Overwhelmingly, the biggest players in the Open Source ecosystem have consistently been saying, "call it whatever you want, just be clear that you're not the same as us." And the response from a lot of people has been, "no, you have to let us call ourselves the same as you." Source Available has been a term for a really long time, and its generally understood what it means, and plenty of people use the term with plenty of good will. This shouldn't be a controversy, it's such a straightforward, easy concession. There's nothing wrong with being Source Available. So why do we need to come up with a new term that describes the freedoms we've been consistently preaching for decades just because a couple of for-profit companies want the good will that we've generated? This isn't language evolving over time, it's people outside the community trying to decide how we're allowed to define ourselves within in the community. Yes, language is descriptive, but that doesn't mean you can just redefine anything you want any time you want. Even more than that, the fact that language is descriptive does not mean it's a bad thing for communities to try and publicize and preserve the descriptive language that already exists. Open Source advocates are hardliners on this issue specifically because we recognize that language is descriptive, and that our ability to preserve the meaning of the words that describe our community is dependent on us taking the time to educate and correct people who are genericizing those terms.
- ericb 6y ago
  > Well, "we" in the Open Source movement decided that it means not restricting what users do with their code. The "GPL" is way more onerous. You see, one can only be truly unrestricted by being restricted into taking certain actions. Nothing Orwellian to see here.
  - thristian 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
ifmpx 6y ago
Then I'm afraid you're just wrong. Open source is a well-defined term with a well-defined meaning. In fact, it was coined precisely because "Free Software" was considered to be too ambiguous. Words have meaning. You can't just change the meaning of a well defined term to suite your views.

boogies 6y ago

What about the AGPL? Wouldn’t it grant “the right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications” and provide protection from FAANG profiting without reciprocating, while being OSI and FSF approved?

carlhjerpe 6y ago
The problem with agpl is that no companies want to touch it. It's too restrictive if you ever want to integrate something with your internal proprietary moneymaking code.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Doesn't that accomplish the goal then? Make your project AGPL and with a commercial license, so only you will be able to make it a commercial business as other big cloud companies don't want to touch it.
  - tormeh 6y ago
    The problem is that it is not truly impossible to integrate into a commercial company. It's more that the license practically requires a lawyer to look at exactly how it'll be used and approve that use. AWS certainly does not shy away from hosting AGPL software. It does prevent AWS from taking the code and running with it though, at least not without a shim. A more permissive license can lead to the Athena/Presto situation where Athena is, to my knowledge, a proprietary fork of Presto.
    - _msw_ 6y ago
      Disclosure: I work at AWS on infrastructure services I am personally currently unaware of any AGPLv3 licensed software in use in an AWS service. That said, I would be skeptical of advice to use AGPLv3 due to any particular organization's current policy on the license. Regarding Presto, work on the service includes changes that should go upstream. For the changes that are appropriate for upstream (e.g., ones that are generally useful, not only of benefit or interest to AWS), PRs are sent. For example: https://github.com/prestosql/presto/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Apettyjamesm https://github.com/prestosql/presto/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3... Practically speaking, it is difficult to maintain a development branch of any software project with sufficient change velocity if you have a goal of continuing to integrate improvements from the upstream version.
      - tormeh 6y ago
        Redis changed from AGPL to Apache 2 with something they called a Commons Clause, then finally to Redis Source Available License because of cloud providers. Don't really know exactly which event triggered the change, though. I suppose it could have been GCP or Azure instead of AWS. Regardless, AGPL is far less restrictive than people claim it is. It is a particularly strict version of the GPL, but given proper legal review it is unproblematic to use commercially, which cuts both ways as Redis found out. I think there's a serious amount of FUD around it. I suppose it's because of how rare it is. With more usage, it would probably bee seen as less dangerous.
        boogies 6y ago
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    The problem is that Amazon could still do it, they're just on that scale, while most common companies would shy away as they don't have the Amazon budget for abusing AGPL right. I hope in the future the Elastic, TimeScale, Confluent and any other "fuck Amazon" license could be merged into one and kind of standardized on as many freedoms as possible, while keeping AWS out of it.
copascetic 6y ago
If Timescale were AGPL Amazon would be free to just run it as a service for profit and all they need to do is publish their modifications to it, if they make any. Amazon has no problem running all kinds of other open source software for profit, and this is what TSL is specifically designed to prevent.
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  But that's the trade: you either pay with time+effort or with money. What everyone seems to miss here is that the GNU Affero General Public License offers the ability for people to make that choice. Cloud providers would be forced into an ugly situation if almost every single XaaS codebase switched to AGPL. Their business model depends on being able to make minor investments to provide things people want as a service and not share it with the community. However, if the AGPL was normalized and used more often, cloud providers would be in a situation where they'd either have to A) build everything of theirs on their own if they don't like the license or B) use the software people want, release their improvements back to the community, and everyone benefits. It's amazing how everyone has forgotten why Linux won over all the other server, mobile, and edge platforms, and is slowly inching to dominate everything else. The terms underlying most of the core Linux system software, including the kernel obviously, require things incorporating it to be released with usable sources to the public. That is what enabled individuals to sustain a project and make it into the successful juggernaut it is today. But because Google has managed to poison the well with AGPL, we're in a situation today where "business-friendly" permissive licenses like the Apache Software License are used and companies are surprised when they get sucked dry by cloud providers abusing the properties of that license. Companies building open source software should expect one of two things: money or code. Both are intrinsically quite valuable to them, and they should take care to nurture that those are the two valid options.

StavrosK 6y ago

I would tend to agree. Saying "our software is free for anyone to do anything they want with, except Amazon to profit from" may not be free in letter, but I certainly see it free in spirit. I fear we're letting perfect be the enemy of the good here, and letting the FOSS ecosystem wither and lose incalculable value by letting trillion-dollar corporations exploit the hard work of people for free. If the choice is between "cheap Timescale on AWS run by Amazon" and "slightly less cheap Timescale on AWS run by Timescale", I'll take the latter. I think banning FAANG from competing with the single source of revenue these FOSS companies have is a small price to pay to ensure a thriving FOSS ecosystem, and I think insisting on absolute freedom is killing the ecosystem.

cycloptic 6y ago
The trillion dollar companies don't get it "for free", they still have to pay employees, contractors and consultants to actually run the software. And as you know, the salaries tend to be a lot higher at bigger companies. Pick your poison.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  If you give me a couch for free but I have to bring a truck to take it away on, does that make it not-free?
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    If you had to pay to rent a truck and also pay to hire workers to move it in and out of the truck and then up 10 floors to your apartment, then yes, it wasn't free, there is a real cost to you. A cost that you saved me because I didn't have to pay someone to take it to the landfill. So I would actually be saving money despite that it looks like I gave it to you "for free". And if I was really crafty I'd have suggested for you to use a particular moving company and then I'd have charged them a referral fee. (Of course this is a somewhat cynical view, and this isn't even getting into the other costs associated with second hand furniture -- anything with upholstery carries a risk of containing mold or vermin and you may need to pay more to get it cleaned/sanitized)

rectang 6y ago

You'd be in good company with Microsoft circa 2001 with their (source-available) Shared Source Initiative, because your argument is the same one that people have been making back then and ever since: that banning field-of-use restrictions imposes too much of a burden on commercial entities. But disallowing such field-of-use restrictions is exactly what makes open source collaboration between otherwise competing companies possible. It is a fundamental difference between Open Source and Source Available licenses.

StavrosK 6y ago
Can you elaborate? What collaboration do you mean?
- StopHammoTime 6y ago
  Uhh, kubernetes would be an immediate example. A massive piece of software that has been adapted into every major cloud provider, with all those cloud providers working on that same piece of software. While Google may have done it to make their own Cloud offering better, it ultimately has succeeded in saturating the container compute market and with their own success has brought plenty of competition.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    On the contrary, Google made Kubernetes precisely so they could commoditize every other cloud provider and then offer the strongest Kubernetes provider there is. When AWS is just a layer under Kubernetes, you can move your entire infrastructure to GCP by pushing your Kubernetes config to a different endpoint. They succeeded quite well in that.

Spivak 6y ago

I'm really surprised that people are trying to make open source something it's not because closed source has become such a boogyman. There is a very real practical need for companies that write software to use Copyright to protect their business -- there's nothing evil about it! It's what Copyright is for! This kind of "screw the big guys" is something I can totally get behind -- power to them for setting the terms of their relationship with them but it's not and shouldn't be open source. And that should be okay. The right to run a piece of software for any purpose whatsoever is fundamental to the spirit of open source.

pessimizer 6y ago

RMS created Free Software, not Open Source. Open Source is something that the OSI made up.

ptman 6y ago
IIRC OSI didn't make it up. OSI was created to codify the existing use of the term

marcinzm 6y ago

You statement on what is open source: >The right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications. Description of the license from the linked articles: > Rights still disallowed under Timescale License: > No right to distribute modified Source > No right to distribute modified Binaries, unless as part of a Value Added Product I'm very confused on how you're reconciling your stated view on the definition of open source and the directly conflicting text of this license.

rabidrat 6y ago
That's fair, I didn't look closely enough at the specific terms to make sure it conformed to my view of "open-source". I specifically disagreed with the parent comment and others, which declare that "it's not open source unless [Amazon is free to profit from the software]".

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

danShumway 6y ago

> but we decide what "open source" means Well, "we" in the Open Source movement decided that it means not restricting what users do with their code. I don't understand what's so hard about this. Overwhelmingly, the biggest players in the Open Source ecosystem have consistently been saying, "call it whatever you want, just be clear that you're not the same as us." And the response from a lot of people has been, "no, you have to let us call ourselves the same as you." Source Available has been a term for a really long time, and its generally understood what it means, and plenty of people use the term with plenty of good will. This shouldn't be a controversy, it's such a straightforward, easy concession. There's nothing wrong with being Source Available. So why do we need to come up with a new term that describes the freedoms we've been consistently preaching for decades just because a couple of for-profit companies want the good will that we've generated? This isn't language evolving over time, it's people outside the community trying to decide how we're allowed to define ourselves within in the community. Yes, language is descriptive, but that doesn't mean you can just redefine anything you want any time you want. Even more than that, the fact that language is descriptive does not mean it's a bad thing for communities to try and publicize and preserve the descriptive language that already exists. Open Source advocates are hardliners on this issue specifically because we recognize that language is descriptive, and that our ability to preserve the meaning of the words that describe our community is dependent on us taking the time to educate and correct people who are genericizing those terms.

ericb 6y ago
> Well, "we" in the Open Source movement decided that it means not restricting what users do with their code. The "GPL" is way more onerous. You see, one can only be truly unrestricted by being restricted into taking certain actions. Nothing Orwellian to see here.
- thristian 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ifmpx 6y ago

Then I'm afraid you're just wrong. Open source is a well-defined term with a well-defined meaning. In fact, it was coined precisely because "Free Software" was considered to be too ambiguous. Words have meaning. You can't just change the meaning of a well defined term to suite your views.