4 ms·

> you can’t harm competing services providers without harming end users. > the overt motive is to enhance monetization by preventing licensees from competing w

> you can’t harm competing services providers without harming end users. > the overt motive is to enhance monetization by preventing licensees from competing with them to sell services: it is to create a moat enabling monopolization and monopoly rents. Here's the problem: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are already able to charge something approaching monopoly rents because they have built a moat that others can't dream to cross. Heck, try to even build two services that talk to each other between the moats and you will get hit with massive data-egress charges. And they do this by monetizing free products with no compensation to the developer. If you are Redis, your hosted product, whose core you developed, is less competitive than that of the cloud providers who didn't contribute anything to the project. At the same time, the parent tech behemoths are engaged in all sorts of other bad behavior that only massive tech companies can get away with. This state of affairs seriously threatens the open-source ecosystem and the source-available licenses are targeted to righting this imbalance. Again, are they perfect? No. If you are making money selling the software without modification, is it reasonable to ask for royalties to go to the developers? I think, on balance, that is reasonable. If not source-available licensing, what is the better solution to the problem?

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Here's the problem: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are already able to charge something approaching monopoly rents because they have built a moat that others can't dream to cross. Even if that was true and they acted like a coordinated oligopoly rather than actively competing, including on price, more monopolies in adjacent markets make things worse, not better, for everyone (customers especially) except the additional monopolists. > If you are Redis, your hosted product, whose core you developed, is less competitive than that of the cloud providers who didn't contribute anything to the project. Yes, that F/OSS licensing advantages the firms that have the best infrastructure for monetizing services has been widely observed since it was just Free Software because OSI didn't exist yet, before cloud dominance that was mostly about professional services. And, yes, proprietary (and sometimes source-available) licenses which don't deliver the value of open source to end users have always been the “solution” to that. What's novel recently is a bunch of firms ignoring well-known facts about the economic incentives around F/OSS, trying to build rapid-growth startups around F/OSS with no plan at all to address the strengths necessary to monetize F/OSS, then whining about the well-known advantages of established firms to pivot to proprietary licensing, then having the unmitigated gall to pretend their proprietary licenses provides the customer benefits of F/OSS licensing (which center on the fact that F/OSS doesn't create a vendor monopoly), despite the fact that not providing those benefits is central to the business reason for which they have adopted the proprietary license.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Here's the problem: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are already able to charge something approaching monopoly rents because they have built a moat that others can't dream to cross. Even if that was true and they acted like a coordinated oligopoly rather than actively competing, including on price, more monopolies in adjacent markets make things worse, not better, for everyone (customers especially) except the additional monopolists. > If you are Redis, your hosted product, whose core you developed, is less competitive than that of the cloud providers who didn't contribute anything to the project. Yes, that F/OSS licensing advantages the firms that have the best infrastructure for monetizing services has been widely observed since it was just Free Software because OSI didn't exist yet, before cloud dominance that was mostly about professional services. And, yes, proprietary (and sometimes source-available) licenses which don't deliver the value of open source to end users have always been the “solution” to that. What's novel recently is a bunch of firms ignoring well-known facts about the economic incentives around F/OSS, trying to build rapid-growth startups around F/OSS with no plan at all to address the strengths necessary to monetize F/OSS, then whining about the well-known advantages of established firms to pivot to proprietary licensing, then having the unmitigated gall to pretend their proprietary licenses provides the customer benefits of F/OSS licensing (which center on the fact that F/OSS doesn't create a vendor monopoly), despite the fact that not providing those benefits is central to the business reason for which they have adopted the proprietary license.