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Open source may be a moral system, but Karl Popper had a thing or two to say about actors who take advantage of the morality of a system for immoral ends. At so

Open source may be a moral system, but Karl Popper had a thing or two to say about actors who take advantage of the morality of a system for immoral ends. At some point, whether you or I appreciate it, the open source world was bound to have to reinvent a solution to that.

danShumway 6y ago
There is a solution to that already, it's called using source available licensing instead of Open Source. But the point of Open Source is that reciprocity of code/money/value is not required. That's literally the scenario that many of us are trying to build. It feels like the difference here is that you're looking at "someone builds a giant public hosting service off of our code" as an immoral end. But I'm saying that's not immoral, that is an acceptable result. It's obviously not the result Elastic wanted, and I empathize with that, but... I don't know, maybe we need to educate people more about what Open Source actually means. Maybe we need to encourage more people to use source available licenses if there's a disconnect in how people understand the actual goals of the movement. We believe that people have an intrinsic, moral right to share and reuse code. Not just good citizens who help build up the system and support us -- everybody.
- eropple 6y ago
  I will define freeloading by those with the capacity to do otherwise as immoral any day of the week (and AWS functionally does a lot of that), yes, and I will define it in those moral terms regardless of the legal letter of a license. There is an implicit social contract that open source software absolutely and without question relies upon--and yes, large actors owe more in response than small ones in that calculus. When the social contract is abrogated by an actor who is beyond the capacity for shame or for criticism to change their ways--that's absolutely a problem. This shift of what open source means away from "Amazon, please co-opt and strangle at your leisure" is inevitable, and I don't really think it's wrong. (I also don't like Elastic as a company, to be clear, and wouldn't shed many tears if they disappeared tomorrow, there's just a hierarchy of dirtbags and they're not near the top.) As far as encouraging those source-available licenses--that sounds great, except that, in my experience, people with the temerity to offer source-available licenses get treated like shit anyway because they aren't giving away the farm. So I don't know where we go there, either.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    Reusing code is not freeloading in the Open Source (capitalized) movement -- at least, not the kind of freeloading that we'd like to discourage. I don't know what else I can do as an Open Source developer in my projects and my terminology to imply that when I say, "you can reuse my code for any reason" I actually mean it. I guess traditional Open Source advocates could abandon the entire term and go off and create a brand new movement where we try to make that even more explicit, but people are just going to follow us there and then try to coopt the term again. > people with the temerity to offer source-available licenses get treated like shit anyway because they aren't giving away the farm I will call out people who are doing that. But really, the only comments I have about source available products are: A) they don't offer all of the advantages of Open Source (although they offer many more benefits than fully closed-source software), and I think that pointing that out is not a moral judgement, just a statement of fact about what the licenses do and do not allow. B) people who offer source available licenses need to stop saying that they're basically the same as Open Source, or that they're just a subset of Open Source, or that they exist because Open Source has lost its way. Because the licenses are not the same. All other debates aside, both us at this point in the conversation recognize this, right? You and I are disagreeing about a fundamental philosophy on what rights and moral responsibilities people have around code. You fundamentally disagree with me about whether or not large companies have the right to completely freely reuse permissive code, or whether they have an obligation to pay for it. That disagreement is so large that it affects our attitudes about whether offering large-scale commercial hosting of an Open Source product is moral. And it's fine that you and I disagree on that point, but we can look at that disagreement and say that clearly your goals when licensing software are different than mine. So to me, it seems pretty reasonable that people who have this fundamental disagreement with the OSI should acknowledge that instead of acting like the Open Source movement is broken. It's not broken, it disagrees with you about the goals are in making code available to other people. It's not people being stubborn, it's not that the OSI doesn't understand the consequences of Open Source, it's that it does understand the consequences of Open Source and it disagrees with you about what consequences are desirable. The Open Source movement doesn't need shared source advocates to 'save' us, we need them to acknowledge that their goals are different than ours.
shawnz 6y ago
What's the immoral end? That more people are taking advantage of the technology offered in Elasticsearch? To me that seems like a moral and intentional end. Or is the problem that Elastic can't effectively monopolize that technology which they purposely offered to the world for free? Well, of course not... how can both of those be true at the same time? The choice to release a product as open source is to intentionally prevent it from being monopolized.

danShumway 6y ago

There is a solution to that already, it's called using source available licensing instead of Open Source. But the point of Open Source is that reciprocity of code/money/value is not required. That's literally the scenario that many of us are trying to build. It feels like the difference here is that you're looking at "someone builds a giant public hosting service off of our code" as an immoral end. But I'm saying that's not immoral, that is an acceptable result. It's obviously not the result Elastic wanted, and I empathize with that, but... I don't know, maybe we need to educate people more about what Open Source actually means. Maybe we need to encourage more people to use source available licenses if there's a disconnect in how people understand the actual goals of the movement. We believe that people have an intrinsic, moral right to share and reuse code. Not just good citizens who help build up the system and support us -- everybody.

eropple 6y ago
I will define freeloading by those with the capacity to do otherwise as immoral any day of the week (and AWS functionally does a lot of that), yes, and I will define it in those moral terms regardless of the legal letter of a license. There is an implicit social contract that open source software absolutely and without question relies upon--and yes, large actors owe more in response than small ones in that calculus. When the social contract is abrogated by an actor who is beyond the capacity for shame or for criticism to change their ways--that's absolutely a problem. This shift of what open source means away from "Amazon, please co-opt and strangle at your leisure" is inevitable, and I don't really think it's wrong. (I also don't like Elastic as a company, to be clear, and wouldn't shed many tears if they disappeared tomorrow, there's just a hierarchy of dirtbags and they're not near the top.) As far as encouraging those source-available licenses--that sounds great, except that, in my experience, people with the temerity to offer source-available licenses get treated like shit anyway because they aren't giving away the farm. So I don't know where we go there, either.
- danShumway 6y ago
  Reusing code is not freeloading in the Open Source (capitalized) movement -- at least, not the kind of freeloading that we'd like to discourage. I don't know what else I can do as an Open Source developer in my projects and my terminology to imply that when I say, "you can reuse my code for any reason" I actually mean it. I guess traditional Open Source advocates could abandon the entire term and go off and create a brand new movement where we try to make that even more explicit, but people are just going to follow us there and then try to coopt the term again. > people with the temerity to offer source-available licenses get treated like shit anyway because they aren't giving away the farm I will call out people who are doing that. But really, the only comments I have about source available products are: A) they don't offer all of the advantages of Open Source (although they offer many more benefits than fully closed-source software), and I think that pointing that out is not a moral judgement, just a statement of fact about what the licenses do and do not allow. B) people who offer source available licenses need to stop saying that they're basically the same as Open Source, or that they're just a subset of Open Source, or that they exist because Open Source has lost its way. Because the licenses are not the same. All other debates aside, both us at this point in the conversation recognize this, right? You and I are disagreeing about a fundamental philosophy on what rights and moral responsibilities people have around code. You fundamentally disagree with me about whether or not large companies have the right to completely freely reuse permissive code, or whether they have an obligation to pay for it. That disagreement is so large that it affects our attitudes about whether offering large-scale commercial hosting of an Open Source product is moral. And it's fine that you and I disagree on that point, but we can look at that disagreement and say that clearly your goals when licensing software are different than mine. So to me, it seems pretty reasonable that people who have this fundamental disagreement with the OSI should acknowledge that instead of acting like the Open Source movement is broken. It's not broken, it disagrees with you about the goals are in making code available to other people. It's not people being stubborn, it's not that the OSI doesn't understand the consequences of Open Source, it's that it does understand the consequences of Open Source and it disagrees with you about what consequences are desirable. The Open Source movement doesn't need shared source advocates to 'save' us, we need them to acknowledge that their goals are different than ours.

shawnz 6y ago

What's the immoral end? That more people are taking advantage of the technology offered in Elasticsearch? To me that seems like a moral and intentional end. Or is the problem that Elastic can't effectively monopolize that technology which they purposely offered to the world for free? Well, of course not... how can both of those be true at the same time? The choice to release a product as open source is to intentionally prevent it from being monopolized.