3 ms·

> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? Open source originated in the 1980s and 1990s in largely academi

by api 6y ago

> So open source means only licenses that are most favourable to the big tech monopolists now? Open source originated in the 1980s and 1990s in largely academic circles. It gained mainstream popularity as an alternative to closed source "shrink wrap" software and closed shareware. Back then the legitimate fear was that closed-source vendors would lock everyone in and end up effectively owning the entire computing ecosystem and the Internet. By the mid-late 1990s Microsoft was well on its way to having a total OS monopoly on PCs and increasingly servers, and were it not for Linux and many other projects this likely would have come to pass. Good news: open source mostly won! We now have a fairly open compute ecosystem. Even Windows was dragged into adopting more Posix-like standards, and the Mac is just a proprietary GUI and set of system services running on top of a mostly open BSD kernel. It's borderline trivial to port most software between Windows, Mac, BSD, and Linux, so we avoided OS lock-in! Then along came the SaaS business model and closed Internet silos. Cloud-hosted SaaS just totally upends everything. Now open source doesn't really matter from a freedom perspective. The cloud has all your data, and by keeping select bits of code (or even just the system configuration) secret and locked inside cloud servers vendors can achieve DRM that is effectively impossible to circumvent. You can't even run the software yourself, and even if you could your data isn't yours. Having the source is meaningless. It's a model that's more closed than closed, and not only is it compatible with classical open source but is actually fed and sustained by it. Open source is free labor for closed cloud SaaS. The OSI is fully industry captured and isn't interested in challenging this, which is why large projects are adopting non-OSI-compliant licenses.

chc 6y ago
I don't think your conclusion follows. Elastic effectively saying "Nobody can provide our software as a service" doesn't increase the openness of the overall system — it reduces the openness of the system in order to benefit Elastic, which would like a monopoly on providing Elasticsearch as a service.
- api 6y ago
  From the user's perspective there is little difference. SaaS means you don't control the data or runtime. If others want to host Elastic as SaaS they just have to negotiate a license. At least the authors of the software are supported. In this case the authors being supported by their ownership of SaaS rights are releasing the source to their product under terms that allow you to run it yourself for reasons other than providing it as SaaS. That means you can in fact control the runtime and the data if you want to do that. The alternative is to have someone else sell it as SaaS and not compensate the authors, running the risk that the open source will be abandoned. This is the SaaS equivalent of embrace-extend-extinguish.

by api 6y ago

chc 6y ago

I don't think your conclusion follows. Elastic effectively saying "Nobody can provide our software as a service" doesn't increase the openness of the overall system — it reduces the openness of the system in order to benefit Elastic, which would like a monopoly on providing Elasticsearch as a service.

api 6y ago
From the user's perspective there is little difference. SaaS means you don't control the data or runtime. If others want to host Elastic as SaaS they just have to negotiate a license. At least the authors of the software are supported. In this case the authors being supported by their ownership of SaaS rights are releasing the source to their product under terms that allow you to run it yourself for reasons other than providing it as SaaS. That means you can in fact control the runtime and the data if you want to do that. The alternative is to have someone else sell it as SaaS and not compensate the authors, running the risk that the open source will be abandoned. This is the SaaS equivalent of embrace-extend-extinguish.