10 ms·

Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation

89 points by als0 6y ago

tannhaeuser 6y ago
> The term “open source” is broadly accepted as being defined by the [Open Source Definition] No, it's not. Please don't let us go over this again and again, always citing the same historical uses of the term Open Source preceding OSI's use.
- deleted 6y ago
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- mixedCase 6y ago
  You may not like it that the term was co-opted, if indeed it was, but it's undeniable that the OSI definition is the widely accepted one. For everything else there's free, proprietary and source available. You may want to create a new term for the sets of values things like the SSPL espouse, if source available is not generous enough.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    Nope. No-one has the right to claim and redefine commonly used terms, however ethical they think their course is. Personally, I don't think there's anything ethical about dogmatically insisting on terms and holding on to discourses of decades ago, while conveniently ignoring the reality that "The Cloud" and the stagnant oligopolistic situation we're enduring is a direct consequence of F/OSS abundance. What I do care about is that software development can sustain itself, be it due to F/OSS licensing schemes or otherwise, for the simple reason that it wouldn't exist otherwise (and that I like true innovation). And for context, I've released nontrivial software under LGPL.
mjburgess 6y ago
> copyright laws exist for the express purpose of creating an artificial monopoly for your business > your monopoly over commercial exploitation Does this article need to offer some account of how these premises are true? Since it isn't clear either are. ie., the law is a guarantee of any right. If you produce some physical good your "monopoly" (ie., ownership), without the law, is only so good as your safe. It is a coincidence not some principle that physical goods require less, in-practice, deployment of the courts to enforce ownership rights. (ie., theft is rarer). It is unclear why ownership over a non-physical good is an "artificial monopoly" where as ownership over physical goods is a "natural" one which properly implies a "commercial right to profit" etc. Why in one area does one's efforts to produce imply a right to profit; and in the other, not?
- jakswa 6y ago
  The time limit on patents/copyright imply to me that they are giving you time to recoup costs and enjoy the reward of your innovation. If that's so, I'd argue that over the last century the time required to enjoy innovation (time to market saturation) has gone down. Even for physical goods? I think that the radio took decades to become widespread. The ipod took... a few years? All that to say, maybe virtual innovation takes even less time, and should have less time to enjoy monopoly? But I'm only playing your devil's advocate.
- pawelmurias 6y ago
  Physical goods aren't trivially copied, but they tend to be a lot easier to steal. Actual theft of intellectual property is practically unheard, but often easily infringed. There is a natural monopoly for the people who has physical access to them.
- adrianN 6y ago
  The cost of making a copy of a non-physical good is pretty close to zero. I can't give away my teapot while also keeping it, but I can give away a copy of a book. In the same way I can't really "steal" someone's intellectual property because it's hard to take away ideas, or every copy of a work, such that the original author no longer has access to them.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  To answer you first question, because historically "monopoly" is the term used. To have exclusive rights to produce a particular object is a monopoly over that production. One of the earliest instances of patent law is the "Statute of Monopolies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies To answer your second question, all ownership is a restriction on the actions of others, in some way. If you own a house, what that means is that everybody else is restricted from entering that house without permission. If you own a copyright monopoly, it means that everybody else is restricted from making copies of particular books without your permission. Where I would draw the line between "artificial" and "natural" monopolies is in how straightforward those restrictions are to apply. It is very easy to maintain restrictions on wearing a particular hat or entering a particular house. On the other hand, it is very hard to monitor all copies of a book to ensure that nobody is making additional copies of it. For one, exclusivity is a function of it being a physical object. For the other, exclusivity is not an inherent trait of the book, and is instead bolted on through legal measures.
roflc0ptic 6y ago
I feel like there is something I am profoundly opposed to with this article but I’m struggling to put it into words. Without being technically precise: This article is arguing against monopolization of commercial exploitation because more value is created when tools are available freely. Cool. I have to read this article in the context of Elastics recent license change, which seems to be in response to “monopolistic” practices by amazon. I don’t know if the word “monopoly” is exactly the right one, but they seem to be using their size and market share to snowball competitive advantage in a way that doesn’t necessarily add value for humanity. I’d rather Elastic hoover up the cloud money than Amazon, precisely because I think we’re better off with less centralized power. So maybe my objection is that this article seems to me to be dogmatically asserting some principles, and goring it’s own ox, ie harming the thing that those principles are attempting to protect. Admittedly this might be a misread/ignorance on my part, and maybe I’m triggered by the tone of the article, which reads quite strident to me. An important discussion, though, and glad that devault wrote it.
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  Not sure how you come to this conclusion - but I am also not sure how I came to mine: * Open Source is cool * Open Source means everyone can use your stuff and by releasing you kinda gave up your right to complain about that - it's the point of Open Source that others can use your stuff * if you want Open Source, but make sure the others who use your stuff also share your stuff, maybe use GPL, which designed for that? I do really feel for projects like elastic - but also, they all used the "wrong" license.
  - zokier 6y ago
    > * if you want Open Source, but make sure the others who use your stuff also share your stuff, maybe use GPL, which designed for that? > I do really feel for projects like elastic - but also, they all used the "wrong" license. It is worth noting that SSPL which the discussion revolves around originates from MongoDB which originally was AGPL. So they started with "right" license and still ended up switching. Part of the blame falls on AGPL not being clear enough, which led Mongo to overcorrect when creating SSPL.
PedroBatista 6y ago
Some good points but: >FOSS is eating the world, and it’s a very attractive choice for businesses for a good reason. This is the reason. It increases wealth for everyone. Does it? everyone like 100%? IMO Idealogy is "good" and necessary but if we fail to address the fact that many people who their work supports these software empires not only don't get a dime ever but also have to endure an avalanche of support tickets and your run-of-the-mill hate mail, then no fancy ideals will save this whole thing because the situation is deeply unfair. A common answer to this is: Let it burn, however the "burn" takes generations and people have to eat today and tomorrow. Also what comes next is very far from guaranteed to be better. I'm always very skeptical of everything with 100% purity, being OSS or Capitalism™ .
- danaris 6y ago
  I can't say for sure that this was the author's intention, but I suspect what they mean is that when you write code for profit, that's just helping you—anyone else who wants to use your code, whether as code or as a program, then needs to pay you for the privilege. When you write OSS code, it increases what's available for everyone, without cost. It's no longer zero-sum; it's actively increasing what's accessible to all without having to give something else up in exchange.
  - Ajedi32 6y ago
    Writing code for profit isn't zero-sum. Even if someone is paying you for the privilege of using a piece software, they're doing so because they believe the value of what they're getting to be greater than what they're paying for it. Nearly all economic activity works that way; increasing the total wealth available to society. Though yes, there's a pretty strong argument to be made that FOSS achieves that particular goal more effectively than paid software.
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- throwaway029001 6y ago
  FOSS is eating the world, and SaaS corporations are eating FOSS.
hardwaresofton 6y ago
An angle I don't see often enough -- the recent thread on Elastic's change in license was full of a lot of people bashing AWS, and as much as I dislike their practices, you can't blame sharks for doing what sharks do. If you don't want your software to be usable by everyone for whatever purpose (even purposes you disagree with), then don't publish it under F/OSS or similar permissive licenses -- let everyone know your intentions from the start. As much as I dislike AWS's heft (which I think allows it to muscle in on spaces it isn't the best at, and people will happily choose worse products because they're "backed" by AWS), I also think there's a lot of value in the F/OSS world to be exploited, and I'd like to do the exploiting someday. I'll leave it to others on whether it's right to draw the line at size of corporation, but I'd be just as "in the wrong" as AWS is. There's no reason both the community and the corporate interests trying to profit (entrepreneurs who want to offer hosted versions included) can't have a symbiotic rather than parasitic relationship -- all it takes is returning some of the revenue to the appropriate open source projects and supporting them. Postgres and the related companies have been making it work for a long time now. I think part of what's exacerbating this parasitic relationship might be the VC model -- if you make some open-core software, take a bunch of VC money (or don't and simply overstretch your reach), and now need to find some hypergrowth (tm) to keep the house of cards the right side up, maybe it makes more sense that the relationship would be more parasitic than symbiotic. A lot of newer developers are about to find out the difference between F/OSS and shareware.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  You want to 'exploit' F/OSS? That's kind of a sick way to phrase it, no? This is one of the largest, kindest shares of modern human knowledge/artwork in history. Don't _exploit_ the generosity of other people. Use it and contribute back to it. Framing it as something to exploit really emphasizes the need for the GPL.
  - mettamage 6y ago
    I wouldn't take the term so strongly. The way I see it in the way my grandparent meant it, exploitation is a capitalistic word and frame/narrative. For example, all companies are exploiting employees (by gaining a profit on them) and certain business opportunities in some shape or form. That doesn't mean it's necessarily bad as "giving back" might be part of that exploitation. Many businesses have incentives to keep the exploitation sustainable. If you have an issue with this, then you have an issue with capitalism, IMO. And that's fine, but I wouldn't frame it as having an issue against exploitation.
bjornsing 6y ago
I must say the older I get, the more unfair I perceive this to be. It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free, and then have the commercial benefits go to huge public companies like Google. It also seems to annihilate most challenging and interesting software work, because the expectation is now that that will be done for free and given away on GitHub. This would all be fine if we lived in a socialist world, but we don’t. My lawyer still charges me $200 per hour for a few fake hours before giving me the template document he has on his hard drive. My accountant operates very much the same. In this context it feels like more open source just makes the world more unfair. What are the best alternatives to this model? Isn’t there something in the Source Available direction that can make sense? We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free I hate to make a really obvious point, but if this seems like a bad deal to you, then .. don't take it? While there's lots of room for debate over "I need this job because I need the money, even though the job is bad", in this case it's very simple: there's no money. So you don't have to take the job. The modal open source project receives no money. Then there's a long tail of projects that get just enough donations to keep going, a few ones that have secured a commercial sponsor, and then one or two big enough to have a "foundation" (Mozilla, Apache). > We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please?
  - danaris 6y ago
    Without attempting to put words in bjornsing's mouth, the difference that seems most relevant to me is the degree of consolidation in the corporate sphere. Since 1989, we have seen a truly staggering wave of mergers, buyouts, and corporate consolidations of all kinds, creating so many more mega-conglomerates (like Alphabet, the big cable companies, etc) than we had before. So if you wrote a piece of (good) open source code in 1989, chances were not too bad that it would get picked up and used competitively by a wide range of small-to-medium companies. If you wrote that same piece of code today, the chances are much higher that it would either be ignored altogether, or picked up and used anticompetitively by these megacorporations.
hvasilev 6y ago
In reality you just provide value to many other people, without them ever contributing back (either money or actual work, the big companies are just not structured for such contributions). Also the licensing protection is a myth. If people don't like your license they can partially / fully rip off your work in numerous ways without you being able to have any claim on it. The second that you provide source code, they have all the power.
- musingsole 6y ago
  > The second that you provide source code, they have all the power. It's an illusion that you had much power at all before that release anyway. Code is only valuable when used in the right place on the right data for the right people. Otherwise, it's just more meaningless binary floating in the void. A developer's particular source isn't all that interesting. In theory, with the same idea kernel, another developer could build a similar thing. The only value someone's new, closed source project has is that it works right now. That's the only leverage in a negotiation. All of these talks over OSS have programmers power-tripping over their supposed influence in the world.
mooreds 6y ago
It feels like he is arguing that Elastic should have used a more free license, like a variant of the GPL that forced AWS to contribute back, rather than the Apache2 license. That made me think. We don't object all that much when people change prices for their software; we realize that it is just an experiment with what the market will bear. I feel like the source code license is becoming something similar (as long as you own all the code). Apache2 for mass adoption, GPL for less adoption, but some more control, dual licensing for more flexibility, commercial only licensing if you want to maintain total control. It is common for someone to start out pricing something low to see if they can get adoption and then increasing prices as people see more value. Could the same thing happen with licenses: start with Apache2, then change to one of the more restrictive models?
- cheph 6y ago
  > That made me think. We don't object all that much when people change prices for their software; we realize that it is just an experiment with what the market will bear. Why would we though? What entitles you to the fruits of someone else's labour? Do you object much when someone charges prices for food, cellphones, cars? This just does not make sense. Where does this implicit entitlement to someone else's work come from?
- pjc50 6y ago
  This is fine if there are no other contributors, but if you're switching to a closed license to get paid, you need to pay all the contributors to make it "fair".
  - mooreds 6y ago
    I think that is true, unless everyone has signed an agreement specifying that such a switch is ok and that they give up all the rights to their code. Contracts are contracts. I have no idea if the contributors to elastic have done this, however.
cheph 6y ago
> This is a rejection of how intellectual property typically works — copyright laws exist for the express purpose of creating an artificial monopoly for your business, and FOSS licenses exist for the express purpose of breaking it. Wrong. Copyright laws exists because we operate on the assumption that people own the fruits of their labour and have exclusive rights to those fruits unless they state otherwise. It is as much an artificial monopoly as property rights of your phone is an artificial monopoly ... in that neither is because that is not what monopoly means.
- gpm 6y ago
  Copyright laws "provide a temporary monopoly to promote the useful arts and sciences" in the united states. Any purpose other than that would be unconstitutional.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
A different way of thinking of it would be to increase the value your software has for your users by allowing them to freely tinker with it and add to it. Of course user value and shareholder value are at odds here. Most users won't actually tinker with the software, but some will. But that only happens if they have the freedom to do so. It's an essential property of long lived OSS projects. E.g. Linux, Mysql, Postgres, Python, etc. all have developer communities spanning many companies. Some are more dominant than others of course, and this changes over time. Companies going bankrupt is not fatal to these projects. Developers move between companies but keep on working on the software. E.g. Guido van Rossum worked for Google, Drop Box, and recently for Microsoft. None of these companies own Python or seek to control it but all of them benefit from it. The thing that goes wrong in so-called OSS companies that attempt to monopolize the rights to their software (by e.g. insisting on copyright transfers for contributors) is that it leads to developer communities that are mostly just employees of that single company. Of course, most bigger commercial entities would probably not commit a lot of resources to delivering and transferring IP to another company; for free. This kind of requires a more robust setup with proper governance. Such projects do exist, and most of them are backed by (very) successful companies who indeed don't get to monopolize the projects they are involved with. That kind of is the whole point. The problem that the likes of Mongo and Elastic have is that they compete directly with such projects and need to add (proprietary) value every year to ensure that these projects don't catch up to the point where users can choose to simply switch to those and not really lose out. Elastic has plenty of OSS competition. There's of course Solr; which is based on the same OSS core (Lucene). Then there are several databases that integrate Lucene. The whole observable software movement has spawned several competing stacks (e.g. Grafana) for Kibana as well. Even Mongo has search features integrated (through Lucene). Likewise Mongo has to deal with other databases constantly adding features. Particularly postgres is very competitive and has added lots of features in the last ten years that were once key selling points for mongo.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  From a business point of view, successful OSS tends to have the form of companies collaborating to solve a problem they have in common. The equality stand is harmonic with this goal, and completely antagonistic to open core business models. That's why people can move between companies and continue working on the same code, because it is solving a internal problems on many different companies. And the companies don't block sharing the improvements because the problems the software solves is internal. Anyway, that business model does not lead to creating companies. It's more prone to creating foundations.
bluefox 6y ago
> It increases wealth for everyone. Yeah, "everyone" but the original author, in most cases. That's usually how things go when you give something for free. Also, "wealth" is very broadly defined here. We're all "rich" with free software, yes, but still can't buy a hotdog with all that "wealth".
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  Perhaps the hotdog is slightly cheaper than it otherwise would have been, because the hotdog manufacturing company used a bit of open source software to save on production costs. "Wealth" is more than just raw cash. But yeah, the total wealth generated for the software's author personally is probably minuscule.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    More likely the hotdog corp made more profit and chose not to pass it on to the consumer/employees.
    - Ajedi32 6y ago
      That's only sustainable in a world with no competition. Otherwise hotdog corp's competitor can take advantage of that same open source software to reduce their prices and customers will buy those hot dogs instead.
      - Chris2048 6y ago
        If that where true everything would be sold at minimal profit margins. In reality, established competitors avoid price-competition in favour of competing on brand/product/location etc. The competition argument fails to take into account significant business overheads that allow the largest of corps to compete only among themselves.
        Ajedi32 6y ago
        Yes, that was a simplified example. Maybe ACME Hotdogs uses the money they saved to drop their prices, but Hotdogs Inc. instead decides to use it to open stores in more locations, Big Food Corp. decides to use it to pay their executives large bonuses, and Weiner Dogs LLC decides to spend more on R&D to make a tastier hot dog. In the end, consumers will decide which of those approaches results in the better value for them and reward that company with more of their business. And regardless of whether that choice results in a cheaper hotdog, a tastier one, or just a more convenient location to buy it from, they're better off (wealthier) for it.
CSDude 6y ago
The funny thing all about AWS/ES drama is AWS Elasticsearch is 1.5x price. It puts a stupid ELB-load balancer that cannot detect timely if the backend services are unhealthy. Updates don't provide rolling update capability, its always blue green. Updates takes hours depending on your data size. And during this shuffle, your CPU usages are top. The nodes get down for inexplicable reasons and not replaced for many minutes. Your retries don't cut it because of that non-smart load balancer. It limits the disk size by instance types so you have no option but to scale horizontally.I just want bigger disks, you don't know my indicies, how I use them, don't put arbitrary limits. It's just a convenience for procurement and VPCs, nothing more.
Proven 6y ago
This article is completely wrong. First and foremost you don't ever have to buy a piece of software or a license or use it if you think you're being exploited. Everyone in free world does it because they think they are becoming wealthier or otherwise better off by spending money to improve their life. Second, you don't get any monopoly on exploitation whatsoever. Only the government has monopoly over exploitation - they can force you to buy crap you otherwise wouldn't because it makes you poorer or worse off.
bitwize 6y ago
There is strong support for accepting a broader definition of open source, one that accounts for ethical concerns including what other people use your software for (e.g., warfare, ICE) and whether you are compelled to allow competitors to eat your lunch by deploying your software as a service if you want to be true-Scotsman OSS. Over time this support will grow, until the voices who advocate hewing to the narrow 1990s OSI definition will be in the minority. It's time to move beyond pedantry in open source and address the concerns of real-world software authors.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Strong, perhaps, but not broad. Open source doesn't work like this. What you argue for may have merit, but it's not open source. Just give it a new name and allow it to flourish under that name. I've recommended "fair source" ror "ethical source" before, for example. Someday we may find that this new movement makes open source obsolete! But until then, terms are important, and the members of the open source community would appreciate it if you respected that.
- arp242 6y ago
  I, for one, am rather glad that the first computers were used in warfare to defeat the Nazis, with both the British and Americans employing computers for this. Of course, not all warfare is the second world war; in fact, most of it isn't. But I think a blanket opposition to "software used in warfare" is too simplistic. The real problems are when a country starts a war for unjust reasons, and this is a political problem, not a technological one. In many ways a sufficiently powerful military (and warfare, or the threat thereof) is vital to protect safety and basic rights. The development of the atom bomb is how it's been used over the decades is something we can have plenty of moral questions about, but the thing is that after the development of physics up to a point, an atom bomb was kind of an obvious thing, and the same technology has also been used for many other non-warfare purposes. Technologically speaking, you can't really have one without the other (but you can make a political choice to do so). In short, I understand why people are concerned about these kind of things, but I think solving them on a technological level is the wrong approach.
m12k 6y ago
No discussion of this would be complete without referencing Spolsky's "Commoditize your Complements" blog post [1]. Open sourcing something is an act of commoditization - and that's great for businesses to do if the thing they are commoditizing complements their core business. E.g. you sell consultancy around X, so you open source X (cf Magento, RHEL). But if what you actually sell is X, then open sourcing it is shooting yourself in the foot. And sadly, if what you're selling is 'deployment of X', then there's a risk AWS will just come along and sell the same thing - because they're in the business of commoditizing deployment. Basically if you want to build a business around an open source project, you need to figure out a business model where you get paid for some part of the equation that hasn't been commoditized yet. I really hope the OSS community figures that out, because I'd love for OSS development to be good business. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- jka 6y ago
  Software quality assurance, features and support are important and viable avenues to monetize even the most openly-licensed project. All of those require motivated contributors, either from the community or from the developer's in-house team. What we might see play out here is competition over the market's perception of different distributions of the software, and attempts to build contributor communities that are able to back up each side's claims by supplying genuine value and improvements. Marketing and perception management have in recent history often been correlated somewhat with the size of each competitor's budget.
timdaub 6y ago
I like the article here as it makes a powerful argument about open source. FOSS is eating the software world. In Social Architecture, Peter Hintjens (ZeroMQ) has another way of putting it. Paraphrased he says that: Open sourcing a particular product can be a "market breaker". Imagine someone all of a sudden open sourced a great Photoshop alternative with a nice community. Suddenly, the for-profit market would collapse as photo editing became free over night. That's open source eating software. On the other hand, (1) licensing your software under the GPL family without asking for contributor licensing agreements and by (2) claiming your trademark (in his case: ZeroMQ) is the control mechanism that defends your product against exploitation. (1) GPL as it allows to create a piece of software that has a huge number of owners and hence becomes impossible to capture by anyone. And also because GPL may force an exploiter to contribute back (APGL). (2) Trademarks so that nobody can come along and offer a "ZeroMQ service" without your consent. Post Script: I love Peter's argument for choosing GPL (1), which is that it creates a huge number of owners for the software. Imagine being an infrequent ZeroMQ contributor and now AWS comes along and hosts your product. Then, essentially, they're messing with YOUR intellectual property. I think this dimension is often overlooked. I'd love to see a contributor class action lawsuit one day :D
- deleted 6y ago
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yepthatsreality 6y ago
There's a lesson in all of this ring-around-the-rosy-FOSS-and-Amazon-business in continued investment of infrastructure in large corporations that allow this level of power and the ability to unfairly punish those creating the software they deploy. I'm sure we'll continue ignore it for easy to use control panels.
mimixco 6y ago
After two decades in the proprietary software business, I chose a FOSS model for our current product. To succeed at scale with this model, you have to give up the idea of selling units and hope that people start using your free units as much as possible. This is pretty much the reverse of traditional product sales. The most successful FOSS-based companies over the long haul figure out how to create an *ecosystem* around the use cases for the FOSS. The more users and the more use cases, the more people in the ecosystem. The more people in the ecosystem, the more potential customers there are for the company's paid products and services, like consulting, setup, customization, documentation, and training. This is exactly the model Red Hat uses and they are the largest and most successful FOSS company in the world. In many ways, Apple is also a FOSS-based company in that everything they sell in MacOS had its origins in the free, open source BSD Unix distribution. Google, too, makes a fortune from FOSS since Android is also built on old Unix code and ideas. Nothing prevents anyone from taking those free original materials and making their own enterprise, ecosystem, or economy out of them -- and that's the true power of FOSS. "Giving back code" is overrated and often useless. Google doesn't want your code. The way that FOSS gives back is by enabling other commercial entities to make money quickly and without worrying about licensing or paying anyone for code bits they use in other products. This is a *huge* and important contribution to society. At its core, FOSS is not about a community; it's about enabling commercialization and paid products! Free, community users are just riding on the back of that elephant. Unless you reach elephant size, FOSS projects will likely never earn enough money to sustain a business.

89 points by als0 6y ago

> The term “open source” is broadly accepted as being defined by the [Open Source Definition] No, it's not. Please don't let us go over this again and again, always citing the same historical uses of the term Open Source preceding OSI's use.

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mixedCase 6y ago
You may not like it that the term was co-opted, if indeed it was, but it's undeniable that the OSI definition is the widely accepted one. For everything else there's free, proprietary and source available. You may want to create a new term for the sets of values things like the SSPL espouse, if source available is not generous enough.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Nope. No-one has the right to claim and redefine commonly used terms, however ethical they think their course is. Personally, I don't think there's anything ethical about dogmatically insisting on terms and holding on to discourses of decades ago, while conveniently ignoring the reality that "The Cloud" and the stagnant oligopolistic situation we're enduring is a direct consequence of F/OSS abundance. What I do care about is that software development can sustain itself, be it due to F/OSS licensing schemes or otherwise, for the simple reason that it wouldn't exist otherwise (and that I like true innovation). And for context, I've released nontrivial software under LGPL.

mjburgess 6y ago

> copyright laws exist for the express purpose of creating an artificial monopoly for your business > your monopoly over commercial exploitation Does this article need to offer some account of how these premises are true? Since it isn't clear either are. ie., the law is a guarantee of any right. If you produce some physical good your "monopoly" (ie., ownership), without the law, is only so good as your safe. It is a coincidence not some principle that physical goods require less, in-practice, deployment of the courts to enforce ownership rights. (ie., theft is rarer). It is unclear why ownership over a non-physical good is an "artificial monopoly" where as ownership over physical goods is a "natural" one which properly implies a "commercial right to profit" etc. Why in one area does one's efforts to produce imply a right to profit; and in the other, not?

jakswa 6y ago
The time limit on patents/copyright imply to me that they are giving you time to recoup costs and enjoy the reward of your innovation. If that's so, I'd argue that over the last century the time required to enjoy innovation (time to market saturation) has gone down. Even for physical goods? I think that the radio took decades to become widespread. The ipod took... a few years? All that to say, maybe virtual innovation takes even less time, and should have less time to enjoy monopoly? But I'm only playing your devil's advocate.
pawelmurias 6y ago
Physical goods aren't trivially copied, but they tend to be a lot easier to steal. Actual theft of intellectual property is practically unheard, but often easily infringed. There is a natural monopoly for the people who has physical access to them.
adrianN 6y ago
The cost of making a copy of a non-physical good is pretty close to zero. I can't give away my teapot while also keeping it, but I can give away a copy of a book. In the same way I can't really "steal" someone's intellectual property because it's hard to take away ideas, or every copy of a work, such that the original author no longer has access to them.
MereInterest 6y ago
To answer you first question, because historically "monopoly" is the term used. To have exclusive rights to produce a particular object is a monopoly over that production. One of the earliest instances of patent law is the "Statute of Monopolies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies To answer your second question, all ownership is a restriction on the actions of others, in some way. If you own a house, what that means is that everybody else is restricted from entering that house without permission. If you own a copyright monopoly, it means that everybody else is restricted from making copies of particular books without your permission. Where I would draw the line between "artificial" and "natural" monopolies is in how straightforward those restrictions are to apply. It is very easy to maintain restrictions on wearing a particular hat or entering a particular house. On the other hand, it is very hard to monitor all copies of a book to ensure that nobody is making additional copies of it. For one, exclusivity is a function of it being a physical object. For the other, exclusivity is not an inherent trait of the book, and is instead bolted on through legal measures.

roflc0ptic 6y ago

I feel like there is something I am profoundly opposed to with this article but I’m struggling to put it into words. Without being technically precise: This article is arguing against monopolization of commercial exploitation because more value is created when tools are available freely. Cool. I have to read this article in the context of Elastics recent license change, which seems to be in response to “monopolistic” practices by amazon. I don’t know if the word “monopoly” is exactly the right one, but they seem to be using their size and market share to snowball competitive advantage in a way that doesn’t necessarily add value for humanity. I’d rather Elastic hoover up the cloud money than Amazon, precisely because I think we’re better off with less centralized power. So maybe my objection is that this article seems to me to be dogmatically asserting some principles, and goring it’s own ox, ie harming the thing that those principles are attempting to protect. Admittedly this might be a misread/ignorance on my part, and maybe I’m triggered by the tone of the article, which reads quite strident to me. An important discussion, though, and glad that devault wrote it.

turbinerneiter 6y ago
Not sure how you come to this conclusion - but I am also not sure how I came to mine: * Open Source is cool * Open Source means everyone can use your stuff and by releasing you kinda gave up your right to complain about that - it's the point of Open Source that others can use your stuff * if you want Open Source, but make sure the others who use your stuff also share your stuff, maybe use GPL, which designed for that? I do really feel for projects like elastic - but also, they all used the "wrong" license.
- zokier 6y ago
  > * if you want Open Source, but make sure the others who use your stuff also share your stuff, maybe use GPL, which designed for that? > I do really feel for projects like elastic - but also, they all used the "wrong" license. It is worth noting that SSPL which the discussion revolves around originates from MongoDB which originally was AGPL. So they started with "right" license and still ended up switching. Part of the blame falls on AGPL not being clear enough, which led Mongo to overcorrect when creating SSPL.

PedroBatista 6y ago

Some good points but: >FOSS is eating the world, and it’s a very attractive choice for businesses for a good reason. This is the reason. It increases wealth for everyone. Does it? everyone like 100%? IMO Idealogy is "good" and necessary but if we fail to address the fact that many people who their work supports these software empires not only don't get a dime ever but also have to endure an avalanche of support tickets and your run-of-the-mill hate mail, then no fancy ideals will save this whole thing because the situation is deeply unfair. A common answer to this is: Let it burn, however the "burn" takes generations and people have to eat today and tomorrow. Also what comes next is very far from guaranteed to be better. I'm always very skeptical of everything with 100% purity, being OSS or Capitalism™ .

danaris 6y ago
I can't say for sure that this was the author's intention, but I suspect what they mean is that when you write code for profit, that's just helping you—anyone else who wants to use your code, whether as code or as a program, then needs to pay you for the privilege. When you write OSS code, it increases what's available for everyone, without cost. It's no longer zero-sum; it's actively increasing what's accessible to all without having to give something else up in exchange.
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  Writing code for profit isn't zero-sum. Even if someone is paying you for the privilege of using a piece software, they're doing so because they believe the value of what they're getting to be greater than what they're paying for it. Nearly all economic activity works that way; increasing the total wealth available to society. Though yes, there's a pretty strong argument to be made that FOSS achieves that particular goal more effectively than paid software.
- deleted 6y ago
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throwaway029001 6y ago
FOSS is eating the world, and SaaS corporations are eating FOSS.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

An angle I don't see often enough -- the recent thread on Elastic's change in license was full of a lot of people bashing AWS, and as much as I dislike their practices, you can't blame sharks for doing what sharks do. If you don't want your software to be usable by everyone for whatever purpose (even purposes you disagree with), then don't publish it under F/OSS or similar permissive licenses -- let everyone know your intentions from the start. As much as I dislike AWS's heft (which I think allows it to muscle in on spaces it isn't the best at, and people will happily choose worse products because they're "backed" by AWS), I also think there's a lot of value in the F/OSS world to be exploited, and I'd like to do the exploiting someday. I'll leave it to others on whether it's right to draw the line at size of corporation, but I'd be just as "in the wrong" as AWS is. There's no reason both the community and the corporate interests trying to profit (entrepreneurs who want to offer hosted versions included) can't have a symbiotic rather than parasitic relationship -- all it takes is returning some of the revenue to the appropriate open source projects and supporting them. Postgres and the related companies have been making it work for a long time now. I think part of what's exacerbating this parasitic relationship might be the VC model -- if you make some open-core software, take a bunch of VC money (or don't and simply overstretch your reach), and now need to find some hypergrowth (tm) to keep the house of cards the right side up, maybe it makes more sense that the relationship would be more parasitic than symbiotic. A lot of newer developers are about to find out the difference between F/OSS and shareware.

fartcannon 6y ago
You want to 'exploit' F/OSS? That's kind of a sick way to phrase it, no? This is one of the largest, kindest shares of modern human knowledge/artwork in history. Don't _exploit_ the generosity of other people. Use it and contribute back to it. Framing it as something to exploit really emphasizes the need for the GPL.
- mettamage 6y ago
  I wouldn't take the term so strongly. The way I see it in the way my grandparent meant it, exploitation is a capitalistic word and frame/narrative. For example, all companies are exploiting employees (by gaining a profit on them) and certain business opportunities in some shape or form. That doesn't mean it's necessarily bad as "giving back" might be part of that exploitation. Many businesses have incentives to keep the exploitation sustainable. If you have an issue with this, then you have an issue with capitalism, IMO. And that's fine, but I wouldn't frame it as having an issue against exploitation.

bjornsing 6y ago

I must say the older I get, the more unfair I perceive this to be. It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free, and then have the commercial benefits go to huge public companies like Google. It also seems to annihilate most challenging and interesting software work, because the expectation is now that that will be done for free and given away on GitHub. This would all be fine if we lived in a socialist world, but we don’t. My lawyer still charges me $200 per hour for a few fake hours before giving me the template document he has on his hard drive. My accountant operates very much the same. In this context it feels like more open source just makes the world more unfair. What are the best alternatives to this model? Isn’t there something in the Source Available direction that can make sense? We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published.

pjc50 6y ago
> It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free I hate to make a really obvious point, but if this seems like a bad deal to you, then .. don't take it? While there's lots of room for debate over "I need this job because I need the money, even though the job is bad", in this case it's very simple: there's no money. So you don't have to take the job. The modal open source project receives no money. Then there's a long tail of projects that get just enough donations to keep going, a few ones that have secured a commercial sponsor, and then one or two big enough to have a "foundation" (Mozilla, Apache). > We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please?
- danaris 6y ago
  Without attempting to put words in bjornsing's mouth, the difference that seems most relevant to me is the degree of consolidation in the corporate sphere. Since 1989, we have seen a truly staggering wave of mergers, buyouts, and corporate consolidations of all kinds, creating so many more mega-conglomerates (like Alphabet, the big cable companies, etc) than we had before. So if you wrote a piece of (good) open source code in 1989, chances were not too bad that it would get picked up and used competitively by a wide range of small-to-medium companies. If you wrote that same piece of code today, the chances are much higher that it would either be ignored altogether, or picked up and used anticompetitively by these megacorporations.

hvasilev 6y ago

In reality you just provide value to many other people, without them ever contributing back (either money or actual work, the big companies are just not structured for such contributions). Also the licensing protection is a myth. If people don't like your license they can partially / fully rip off your work in numerous ways without you being able to have any claim on it. The second that you provide source code, they have all the power.

musingsole 6y ago
> The second that you provide source code, they have all the power. It's an illusion that you had much power at all before that release anyway. Code is only valuable when used in the right place on the right data for the right people. Otherwise, it's just more meaningless binary floating in the void. A developer's particular source isn't all that interesting. In theory, with the same idea kernel, another developer could build a similar thing. The only value someone's new, closed source project has is that it works right now. That's the only leverage in a negotiation. All of these talks over OSS have programmers power-tripping over their supposed influence in the world.

mooreds 6y ago

It feels like he is arguing that Elastic should have used a more free license, like a variant of the GPL that forced AWS to contribute back, rather than the Apache2 license. That made me think. We don't object all that much when people change prices for their software; we realize that it is just an experiment with what the market will bear. I feel like the source code license is becoming something similar (as long as you own all the code). Apache2 for mass adoption, GPL for less adoption, but some more control, dual licensing for more flexibility, commercial only licensing if you want to maintain total control. It is common for someone to start out pricing something low to see if they can get adoption and then increasing prices as people see more value. Could the same thing happen with licenses: start with Apache2, then change to one of the more restrictive models?

cheph 6y ago
> That made me think. We don't object all that much when people change prices for their software; we realize that it is just an experiment with what the market will bear. Why would we though? What entitles you to the fruits of someone else's labour? Do you object much when someone charges prices for food, cellphones, cars? This just does not make sense. Where does this implicit entitlement to someone else's work come from?
pjc50 6y ago
This is fine if there are no other contributors, but if you're switching to a closed license to get paid, you need to pay all the contributors to make it "fair".
- mooreds 6y ago
  I think that is true, unless everyone has signed an agreement specifying that such a switch is ok and that they give up all the rights to their code. Contracts are contracts. I have no idea if the contributors to elastic have done this, however.

cheph 6y ago

> This is a rejection of how intellectual property typically works — copyright laws exist for the express purpose of creating an artificial monopoly for your business, and FOSS licenses exist for the express purpose of breaking it. Wrong. Copyright laws exists because we operate on the assumption that people own the fruits of their labour and have exclusive rights to those fruits unless they state otherwise. It is as much an artificial monopoly as property rights of your phone is an artificial monopoly ... in that neither is because that is not what monopoly means.

gpm 6y ago
Copyright laws "provide a temporary monopoly to promote the useful arts and sciences" in the united states. Any purpose other than that would be unconstitutional.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

A different way of thinking of it would be to increase the value your software has for your users by allowing them to freely tinker with it and add to it. Of course user value and shareholder value are at odds here. Most users won't actually tinker with the software, but some will. But that only happens if they have the freedom to do so. It's an essential property of long lived OSS projects. E.g. Linux, Mysql, Postgres, Python, etc. all have developer communities spanning many companies. Some are more dominant than others of course, and this changes over time. Companies going bankrupt is not fatal to these projects. Developers move between companies but keep on working on the software. E.g. Guido van Rossum worked for Google, Drop Box, and recently for Microsoft. None of these companies own Python or seek to control it but all of them benefit from it. The thing that goes wrong in so-called OSS companies that attempt to monopolize the rights to their software (by e.g. insisting on copyright transfers for contributors) is that it leads to developer communities that are mostly just employees of that single company. Of course, most bigger commercial entities would probably not commit a lot of resources to delivering and transferring IP to another company; for free. This kind of requires a more robust setup with proper governance. Such projects do exist, and most of them are backed by (very) successful companies who indeed don't get to monopolize the projects they are involved with. That kind of is the whole point. The problem that the likes of Mongo and Elastic have is that they compete directly with such projects and need to add (proprietary) value every year to ensure that these projects don't catch up to the point where users can choose to simply switch to those and not really lose out. Elastic has plenty of OSS competition. There's of course Solr; which is based on the same OSS core (Lucene). Then there are several databases that integrate Lucene. The whole observable software movement has spawned several competing stacks (e.g. Grafana) for Kibana as well. Even Mongo has search features integrated (through Lucene). Likewise Mongo has to deal with other databases constantly adding features. Particularly postgres is very competitive and has added lots of features in the last ten years that were once key selling points for mongo.

marcosdumay 6y ago
From a business point of view, successful OSS tends to have the form of companies collaborating to solve a problem they have in common. The equality stand is harmonic with this goal, and completely antagonistic to open core business models. That's why people can move between companies and continue working on the same code, because it is solving a internal problems on many different companies. And the companies don't block sharing the improvements because the problems the software solves is internal. Anyway, that business model does not lead to creating companies. It's more prone to creating foundations.

bluefox 6y ago

> It increases wealth for everyone. Yeah, "everyone" but the original author, in most cases. That's usually how things go when you give something for free. Also, "wealth" is very broadly defined here. We're all "rich" with free software, yes, but still can't buy a hotdog with all that "wealth".

Ajedi32 6y ago
Perhaps the hotdog is slightly cheaper than it otherwise would have been, because the hotdog manufacturing company used a bit of open source software to save on production costs. "Wealth" is more than just raw cash. But yeah, the total wealth generated for the software's author personally is probably minuscule.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  More likely the hotdog corp made more profit and chose not to pass it on to the consumer/employees.
  - Ajedi32 6y ago
    That's only sustainable in a world with no competition. Otherwise hotdog corp's competitor can take advantage of that same open source software to reduce their prices and customers will buy those hot dogs instead.
    - Chris2048 6y ago
      If that where true everything would be sold at minimal profit margins. In reality, established competitors avoid price-competition in favour of competing on brand/product/location etc. The competition argument fails to take into account significant business overheads that allow the largest of corps to compete only among themselves.
      - Ajedi32 6y ago
        Yes, that was a simplified example. Maybe ACME Hotdogs uses the money they saved to drop their prices, but Hotdogs Inc. instead decides to use it to open stores in more locations, Big Food Corp. decides to use it to pay their executives large bonuses, and Weiner Dogs LLC decides to spend more on R&D to make a tastier hot dog. In the end, consumers will decide which of those approaches results in the better value for them and reward that company with more of their business. And regardless of whether that choice results in a cheaper hotdog, a tastier one, or just a more convenient location to buy it from, they're better off (wealthier) for it.

CSDude 6y ago

The funny thing all about AWS/ES drama is AWS Elasticsearch is 1.5x price. It puts a stupid ELB-load balancer that cannot detect timely if the backend services are unhealthy. Updates don't provide rolling update capability, its always blue green. Updates takes hours depending on your data size. And during this shuffle, your CPU usages are top. The nodes get down for inexplicable reasons and not replaced for many minutes. Your retries don't cut it because of that non-smart load balancer. It limits the disk size by instance types so you have no option but to scale horizontally.I just want bigger disks, you don't know my indicies, how I use them, don't put arbitrary limits. It's just a convenience for procurement and VPCs, nothing more.

Proven 6y ago

This article is completely wrong. First and foremost you don't ever have to buy a piece of software or a license or use it if you think you're being exploited. Everyone in free world does it because they think they are becoming wealthier or otherwise better off by spending money to improve their life. Second, you don't get any monopoly on exploitation whatsoever. Only the government has monopoly over exploitation - they can force you to buy crap you otherwise wouldn't because it makes you poorer or worse off.

bitwize 6y ago

There is strong support for accepting a broader definition of open source, one that accounts for ethical concerns including what other people use your software for (e.g., warfare, ICE) and whether you are compelled to allow competitors to eat your lunch by deploying your software as a service if you want to be true-Scotsman OSS. Over time this support will grow, until the voices who advocate hewing to the narrow 1990s OSI definition will be in the minority. It's time to move beyond pedantry in open source and address the concerns of real-world software authors.

ddevault 6y ago
Strong, perhaps, but not broad. Open source doesn't work like this. What you argue for may have merit, but it's not open source. Just give it a new name and allow it to flourish under that name. I've recommended "fair source" ror "ethical source" before, for example. Someday we may find that this new movement makes open source obsolete! But until then, terms are important, and the members of the open source community would appreciate it if you respected that.
arp242 6y ago
I, for one, am rather glad that the first computers were used in warfare to defeat the Nazis, with both the British and Americans employing computers for this. Of course, not all warfare is the second world war; in fact, most of it isn't. But I think a blanket opposition to "software used in warfare" is too simplistic. The real problems are when a country starts a war for unjust reasons, and this is a political problem, not a technological one. In many ways a sufficiently powerful military (and warfare, or the threat thereof) is vital to protect safety and basic rights. The development of the atom bomb is how it's been used over the decades is something we can have plenty of moral questions about, but the thing is that after the development of physics up to a point, an atom bomb was kind of an obvious thing, and the same technology has also been used for many other non-warfare purposes. Technologically speaking, you can't really have one without the other (but you can make a political choice to do so). In short, I understand why people are concerned about these kind of things, but I think solving them on a technological level is the wrong approach.

m12k 6y ago

No discussion of this would be complete without referencing Spolsky's "Commoditize your Complements" blog post [1]. Open sourcing something is an act of commoditization - and that's great for businesses to do if the thing they are commoditizing complements their core business. E.g. you sell consultancy around X, so you open source X (cf Magento, RHEL). But if what you actually sell is X, then open sourcing it is shooting yourself in the foot. And sadly, if what you're selling is 'deployment of X', then there's a risk AWS will just come along and sell the same thing - because they're in the business of commoditizing deployment. Basically if you want to build a business around an open source project, you need to figure out a business model where you get paid for some part of the equation that hasn't been commoditized yet. I really hope the OSS community figures that out, because I'd love for OSS development to be good business. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

jka 6y ago
Software quality assurance, features and support are important and viable avenues to monetize even the most openly-licensed project. All of those require motivated contributors, either from the community or from the developer's in-house team. What we might see play out here is competition over the market's perception of different distributions of the software, and attempts to build contributor communities that are able to back up each side's claims by supplying genuine value and improvements. Marketing and perception management have in recent history often been correlated somewhat with the size of each competitor's budget.

timdaub 6y ago

I like the article here as it makes a powerful argument about open source. FOSS is eating the software world. In Social Architecture, Peter Hintjens (ZeroMQ) has another way of putting it. Paraphrased he says that: Open sourcing a particular product can be a "market breaker". Imagine someone all of a sudden open sourced a great Photoshop alternative with a nice community. Suddenly, the for-profit market would collapse as photo editing became free over night. That's open source eating software. On the other hand, (1) licensing your software under the GPL family without asking for contributor licensing agreements and by (2) claiming your trademark (in his case: ZeroMQ) is the control mechanism that defends your product against exploitation. (1) GPL as it allows to create a piece of software that has a huge number of owners and hence becomes impossible to capture by anyone. And also because GPL may force an exploiter to contribute back (APGL). (2) Trademarks so that nobody can come along and offer a "ZeroMQ service" without your consent. Post Script: I love Peter's argument for choosing GPL (1), which is that it creates a huge number of owners for the software. Imagine being an infrequent ZeroMQ contributor and now AWS comes along and hosts your product. Then, essentially, they're messing with YOUR intellectual property. I think this dimension is often overlooked. I'd love to see a contributor class action lawsuit one day :D

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yepthatsreality 6y ago

There's a lesson in all of this ring-around-the-rosy-FOSS-and-Amazon-business in continued investment of infrastructure in large corporations that allow this level of power and the ability to unfairly punish those creating the software they deploy. I'm sure we'll continue ignore it for easy to use control panels.

mimixco 6y ago

After two decades in the proprietary software business, I chose a FOSS model for our current product. To succeed at scale with this model, you have to give up the idea of selling units and hope that people start using your free units as much as possible. This is pretty much the reverse of traditional product sales. The most successful FOSS-based companies over the long haul figure out how to create an *ecosystem* around the use cases for the FOSS. The more users and the more use cases, the more people in the ecosystem. The more people in the ecosystem, the more potential customers there are for the company's paid products and services, like consulting, setup, customization, documentation, and training. This is exactly the model Red Hat uses and they are the largest and most successful FOSS company in the world. In many ways, Apple is also a FOSS-based company in that everything they sell in MacOS had its origins in the free, open source BSD Unix distribution. Google, too, makes a fortune from FOSS since Android is also built on old Unix code and ideas. Nothing prevents anyone from taking those free original materials and making their own enterprise, ecosystem, or economy out of them -- and that's the true power of FOSS. "Giving back code" is overrated and often useless. Google doesn't want your code. The way that FOSS gives back is by enabling other commercial entities to make money quickly and without worrying about licensing or paying anyone for code bits they use in other products. This is a *huge* and important contribution to society. At its core, FOSS is not about a community; it's about enabling commercialization and paid products! Free, community users are just riding on the back of that elephant. Unless you reach elephant size, FOSS projects will likely never earn enough money to sustain a business.