3 ms·

> just because for some reason we wanted to be inclusive of licenses where the source is viewable but not open for use This is not true. Recent licenses trying

> just because for some reason we wanted to be inclusive of licenses where the source is viewable but not open for use This is not true. Recent licenses trying to protect the business built on the open source code are in general, open for use: - Sentry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466967 - Elastic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781 I see these sorts of licenses becoming increasingly common in the future, which is why I think it's silly to continue excluding them from being called open source.

chc 6y ago
The primary distinction in those licenses is that they're not generally open for use — they allow a carefully chosen, closed set of use cases. As an analogy, when a bar has a TV showing some preselected channel at a preselected volume, I don't consider that TV open to my use, even though I can use it for the use case the bar specifically chose to enable. I do agree that licenses like this will become more common in the future, and that's why I think it's useful to have an identifying term for them rather than making "open-source" less precise to include them. Different words for different things is good, in my opinion.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  > they allow a carefully chosen, closed set of use cases I would argue that they prohibit far less use cases than they are open for. In any case, how would you describe these licenses? I don't feel like "source available" is an accurate descriptor in this case.
  - chc 6y ago
    I agree. My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition" arrangement is "private-use source license," but I wouldn't be so bold as to argue that's The Best Name. My point is just that I don't think broadening "open-source" is a good answer, because all that does is make it harder to talk about the differences in licenses.
    - bentlegen 6y ago
      Disclosure: I work at Sentry. > My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition" Large companies are free to use Sentry. There are Fortune 50 companies running Sentry at scale internally without paying us a cent. That's totally cool. You're also free to compete with Sentry. You're not free to repackage Sentry for the purposes of competing with us. There are lots of competing error and performance monitoring products out there that do perfectly fine without it. I should also note that many components of Sentry are distributed with OSI-approved licenses that you are free to use to compete with us. For example, our Symbolication service (https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator) ships with an MIT license, and it's an important part of our business.
      - 8note 6y ago
        What's sentry's incentive to not relicense in the future so those fortune 50 companies have to pay you instead? That seems like an obvious growth opportunity when investors need to see numbers go up
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        bentlegen 6y ago
        The incentive is that running the infrastructure required to host Sentry is challenging and requires engineering resources. You can choose to use our hosted services for a fraction of the cost (engineers are expensive). Aside, there seems to be confusion about what “relicensing” means. Even in this hypothetical scenario you’ve outlined, we can’t “relicense” already released software. Many users hosting Sentry internally are using years-old versions happily; they would continue to be able to do so. They could also choose to fork the last permissible version and maintain it themselves. Personally, I think this scenario (relicensing such that self-hosted users could no longer do so) is incredibly unlikely. I don’t believe it would really do anything to grow the company.
      - deleted 6y ago
  - foolmeonce 6y ago
    I would describe it as "Restricted use" software which has existed for decades, generally as closed source. Sure the SaaS server licenses are more or less open use with caveat, but why won't a process paralleling tivoization occur? I wouldn't find it odd for a hardware vendor to release source code, "for review" without the rights to use it on any other hardware as some do for binaries. In a way that could be worse than closed source as that is similar to the problem of suspicion of reading leaked source code, maybe you are tainted and can't actually write software licensable for competing hardware. Maybe you never read the code yet it will appear that way, but you shouldn't check. Given the oddities of IP and copyright infringement, it is often the case that only the owner benefits from a process of publishing. I.e. what good is the disclosure of a modern patent?
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Yup, this is a huge thing. Get students to use the code, get comfortable with it, then when they write something for their local city or whatever, now that local city is potentially in violation. It’s kind of like that thing where software vendors give cheap or free licenses to educational users in order to get them hooked and then charge whatever company they might work for an arm and a leg to keep using it.
- konjin 6y ago
  >Different words for different things is good, in my opinion. And yet people are fighting tooth and nail to redefine open source to mean OSI approved licence instead of using OSI approved license to mean OSI approved license. >To see why just change the thread title: What’s up with these new non-OSI approved licenses? It's an article that you can have a reasonable debate about without stacking the deck against the people you're arguing against. Which is why the people who make money by stacking the deck are so dead set to redefine the word to mean exactly what makes them the most money.
  - davidw 6y ago
    "Open source" and "free software" have always been mostly interchangeable and have since their inception not simply meant "source available". The people trying to redefine anything are those ignorant of the history here.
    - konjin 6y ago
      >"Open source" and "free software" have always been mostly interchangeable and have since their inception not simply meant "source available". Free software was coined in the 80s. I wasn't there for that. Open source was coined in the 90s because we didn't want people to think that software which let you see the code was free of charge. Then when they sold out a bunch of tech bros from SV decided that they knew best and redefined open source to mean whatever made their valuations go to the moon. The plan did work as expected because dot com crash. The people around the OSI have always been share croppers that have been trying to get paid for other peoples work.
      - gowld 6y ago
        Writing "tech bro" and "sharecropper" makes it easy for people to stop trying to look for meaning in your writing. Also, while I'm sure it's unintentional, your backwards of "sharecropper" smells racist.(It actually means paying someone for the right to do you your own work, and was an attempted to recreate slavery after slavery was banned in USA).
ralph84 6y ago
> licenses trying to protect the business built on the open source code A fundamental aspect of open source is that there is no limit to the number of businesses that can be built on it. If a single company wants a monopoly on building a business on the software, we have a term for that: proprietary software.
- Guthur 6y ago
  This exactly, people are crying "big tech, boo hoo", but the fact is these technology companies like elastic search and co thought they could make open source work for their business model but they struggled in the face of competition and so got defensive. And this is the fundamental issue, can they build a strong company based on this software, it's potentially possible but that seem to think they can't be competitive hence the license moves.
  - hnedeotes 6y ago
    They made a product in which they spent resources and time and provided as open source, then another company which has many more resources took their open sourced code (which legally they could), did some work (or not) on it and provided exactly the same service, behind their now closed source branch. Not only did this company have much more resources to allocate to it they didn't need to bear the discovery and development costs and took an already proved idea. It is legal, it was a good business move by amazon but it definitively sucked for those who had invested in building that software. So yeah, in a way I can understand that now anyone risking their business in creating software or services based on those might be going, "yeah no thanks, you can't fork our work and sell it". Specially when companies are gigantic and a 0.01% of their budget equates to the whole budget of the company who produced the original source. You can't really "not struggle" in the face of the competition. I have to dig more into GPL licensing but anyway, there certainly needs to be some licenses that are not "f$#%% me any way you want" for people doing open source products.
    - jacoblambda 6y ago
      The license these businesses should be using is AGPL, clean and simple. Run the software under AGPL and dual license it under a closed or restricted usage license if a customer doesn't want to use the AGPL license. Instead we have people electing to create restrictive licenses with varying degrees of "use the software however you like unless we don't like you or your business" baked into them. The dual full free + restrictive license model has worked very well in the past for FOSS based companies. Let people who are fine contributing back to your project and/or open their project up use it however they please and let everyone who doesn't like those terms pay for it like standard commercial software instead.

chc 6y ago

The primary distinction in those licenses is that they're not generally open for use — they allow a carefully chosen, closed set of use cases. As an analogy, when a bar has a TV showing some preselected channel at a preselected volume, I don't consider that TV open to my use, even though I can use it for the use case the bar specifically chose to enable. I do agree that licenses like this will become more common in the future, and that's why I think it's useful to have an identifying term for them rather than making "open-source" less precise to include them. Different words for different things is good, in my opinion.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> they allow a carefully chosen, closed set of use cases I would argue that they prohibit far less use cases than they are open for. In any case, how would you describe these licenses? I don't feel like "source available" is an accurate descriptor in this case.
- chc 6y ago
  I agree. My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition" arrangement is "private-use source license," but I wouldn't be so bold as to argue that's The Best Name. My point is just that I don't think broadening "open-source" is a good answer, because all that does is make it harder to talk about the differences in licenses.
  - bentlegen 6y ago
    Disclosure: I work at Sentry. > My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition" Large companies are free to use Sentry. There are Fortune 50 companies running Sentry at scale internally without paying us a cent. That's totally cool. You're also free to compete with Sentry. You're not free to repackage Sentry for the purposes of competing with us. There are lots of competing error and performance monitoring products out there that do perfectly fine without it. I should also note that many components of Sentry are distributed with OSI-approved licenses that you are free to use to compete with us. For example, our Symbolication service (https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator) ships with an MIT license, and it's an important part of our business.
    - 8note 6y ago
      What's sentry's incentive to not relicense in the future so those fortune 50 companies have to pay you instead? That seems like an obvious growth opportunity when investors need to see numbers go up
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - bentlegen 6y ago
        The incentive is that running the infrastructure required to host Sentry is challenging and requires engineering resources. You can choose to use our hosted services for a fraction of the cost (engineers are expensive). Aside, there seems to be confusion about what “relicensing” means. Even in this hypothetical scenario you’ve outlined, we can’t “relicense” already released software. Many users hosting Sentry internally are using years-old versions happily; they would continue to be able to do so. They could also choose to fork the last permissible version and maintain it themselves. Personally, I think this scenario (relicensing such that self-hosted users could no longer do so) is incredibly unlikely. I don’t believe it would really do anything to grow the company.
    - deleted 6y ago
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  I would describe it as "Restricted use" software which has existed for decades, generally as closed source. Sure the SaaS server licenses are more or less open use with caveat, but why won't a process paralleling tivoization occur? I wouldn't find it odd for a hardware vendor to release source code, "for review" without the rights to use it on any other hardware as some do for binaries. In a way that could be worse than closed source as that is similar to the problem of suspicion of reading leaked source code, maybe you are tainted and can't actually write software licensable for competing hardware. Maybe you never read the code yet it will appear that way, but you shouldn't check. Given the oddities of IP and copyright infringement, it is often the case that only the owner benefits from a process of publishing. I.e. what good is the disclosure of a modern patent?
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Yup, this is a huge thing. Get students to use the code, get comfortable with it, then when they write something for their local city or whatever, now that local city is potentially in violation. It’s kind of like that thing where software vendors give cheap or free licenses to educational users in order to get them hooked and then charge whatever company they might work for an arm and a leg to keep using it.
konjin 6y ago
>Different words for different things is good, in my opinion. And yet people are fighting tooth and nail to redefine open source to mean OSI approved licence instead of using OSI approved license to mean OSI approved license. >To see why just change the thread title: What’s up with these new non-OSI approved licenses? It's an article that you can have a reasonable debate about without stacking the deck against the people you're arguing against. Which is why the people who make money by stacking the deck are so dead set to redefine the word to mean exactly what makes them the most money.
- davidw 6y ago
  "Open source" and "free software" have always been mostly interchangeable and have since their inception not simply meant "source available". The people trying to redefine anything are those ignorant of the history here.
  - konjin 6y ago
    >"Open source" and "free software" have always been mostly interchangeable and have since their inception not simply meant "source available". Free software was coined in the 80s. I wasn't there for that. Open source was coined in the 90s because we didn't want people to think that software which let you see the code was free of charge. Then when they sold out a bunch of tech bros from SV decided that they knew best and redefined open source to mean whatever made their valuations go to the moon. The plan did work as expected because dot com crash. The people around the OSI have always been share croppers that have been trying to get paid for other peoples work.
    - gowld 6y ago
      Writing "tech bro" and "sharecropper" makes it easy for people to stop trying to look for meaning in your writing. Also, while I'm sure it's unintentional, your backwards of "sharecropper" smells racist.(It actually means paying someone for the right to do you your own work, and was an attempted to recreate slavery after slavery was banned in USA).

ralph84 6y ago

> licenses trying to protect the business built on the open source code A fundamental aspect of open source is that there is no limit to the number of businesses that can be built on it. If a single company wants a monopoly on building a business on the software, we have a term for that: proprietary software.

Guthur 6y ago
This exactly, people are crying "big tech, boo hoo", but the fact is these technology companies like elastic search and co thought they could make open source work for their business model but they struggled in the face of competition and so got defensive. And this is the fundamental issue, can they build a strong company based on this software, it's potentially possible but that seem to think they can't be competitive hence the license moves.
- hnedeotes 6y ago
  They made a product in which they spent resources and time and provided as open source, then another company which has many more resources took their open sourced code (which legally they could), did some work (or not) on it and provided exactly the same service, behind their now closed source branch. Not only did this company have much more resources to allocate to it they didn't need to bear the discovery and development costs and took an already proved idea. It is legal, it was a good business move by amazon but it definitively sucked for those who had invested in building that software. So yeah, in a way I can understand that now anyone risking their business in creating software or services based on those might be going, "yeah no thanks, you can't fork our work and sell it". Specially when companies are gigantic and a 0.01% of their budget equates to the whole budget of the company who produced the original source. You can't really "not struggle" in the face of the competition. I have to dig more into GPL licensing but anyway, there certainly needs to be some licenses that are not "f$#%% me any way you want" for people doing open source products.
  - jacoblambda 6y ago
    The license these businesses should be using is AGPL, clean and simple. Run the software under AGPL and dual license it under a closed or restricted usage license if a customer doesn't want to use the AGPL license. Instead we have people electing to create restrictive licenses with varying degrees of "use the software however you like unless we don't like you or your business" baked into them. The dual full free + restrictive license model has worked very well in the past for FOSS based companies. Let people who are fine contributing back to your project and/or open their project up use it however they please and let everyone who doesn't like those terms pay for it like standard commercial software instead.