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> 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

> 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. Some people feel just as strongly about imposing field-of-use restrictions to exclude military entities as you do about excluding "trillion dollar companies". Others feel strongly about excluding all commerical usage. But "Open Source" means no field-of-use restrictions — so although any of you are free to craft your own licenses excluding X, Y, or Z, you don't get to call those licenses "Open Source". > 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. No economic value is lost. Timescale is free to publish their own software offings with their own licensing; those offerings merely exist outside the Open Source ecosystem. Open Source is plenty successful. It does not need to destroy itself in order to encompass all things. Besides, "letting trillion-dollar corporations exploit the hard work of people for free" is what Open Source has always done. Everybody gets to use it for free — trillion dollar corporations, governments, religious organizations, activists, convicts... everybody!

jeffffff 6y ago
by that argument copyleft licenses aren't open source either? from a practical perspective this license is strictly more permissive than AGPL in that it only excludes cloud companies rather than all non-OSS companies.
- copascetic 6y ago
  How so? Corporations can use and sell software and run services for money that use copyleft software if they want to if they abide by the terms of the license, and some do, whereas the TSL specifically disallows this. How does AGPL exclude "all non-OSS companies"? These companies are choosing not to use AGPL software; that doesn't make AGPL not an open source license. The AGPL doesn't even require source code publication when run over the network unless you modified the code, so if Timescale were licensed with AGPL, Amazon could directly offer Timescale as a service and not even need to provide a source code download link. AGPL obviously does not exclude other companies from merely using the software in other ways, so I really don't see how the TSL is "strictly more permissive".
sroussey 6y ago
> But "Open Source" means no field-of-use restrictions — so although any of you are free to craft your own licenses excluding X, Y, or Z, you don't get to call those licenses "Open Source". Sounds like public domain. What’s the difference between the two then?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Sounds like public domain. What’s the difference between the two then? Public domain, other than by copyright expiration or (in the US) federal government creation is actually not clearly possible to create in a legally unambiguous way in many regimes with automatic copyright and no direct provision for unilateral transfer to the public domain; the most permissive open source licenses approximate it while providing better legal clarity. Open source licenses often seek to protect the originator from liability they might otherwise incur from chain-of-commerce relationships, making it safer for them to make the software available without fee, and to prevent misattribution of origin. Other open source licenses, while not having field of use limits, seek to assure that derivatives are also offered on similarly-free terms. There's quite a variety, within the bounds of certain essential guarantees that are central to the common value proposition.

jeffffff 6y ago

by that argument copyleft licenses aren't open source either? from a practical perspective this license is strictly more permissive than AGPL in that it only excludes cloud companies rather than all non-OSS companies.

copascetic 6y ago
How so? Corporations can use and sell software and run services for money that use copyleft software if they want to if they abide by the terms of the license, and some do, whereas the TSL specifically disallows this. How does AGPL exclude "all non-OSS companies"? These companies are choosing not to use AGPL software; that doesn't make AGPL not an open source license. The AGPL doesn't even require source code publication when run over the network unless you modified the code, so if Timescale were licensed with AGPL, Amazon could directly offer Timescale as a service and not even need to provide a source code download link. AGPL obviously does not exclude other companies from merely using the software in other ways, so I really don't see how the TSL is "strictly more permissive".

sroussey 6y ago

> But "Open Source" means no field-of-use restrictions — so although any of you are free to craft your own licenses excluding X, Y, or Z, you don't get to call those licenses "Open Source". Sounds like public domain. What’s the difference between the two then?

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Sounds like public domain. What’s the difference between the two then? Public domain, other than by copyright expiration or (in the US) federal government creation is actually not clearly possible to create in a legally unambiguous way in many regimes with automatic copyright and no direct provision for unilateral transfer to the public domain; the most permissive open source licenses approximate it while providing better legal clarity. Open source licenses often seek to protect the originator from liability they might otherwise incur from chain-of-commerce relationships, making it safer for them to make the software available without fee, and to prevent misattribution of origin. Other open source licenses, while not having field of use limits, seek to assure that derivatives are also offered on similarly-free terms. There's quite a variety, within the bounds of certain essential guarantees that are central to the common value proposition.