6 ms·

What license to use to prevent AWS et al. from selling my project as a service?

35 points by ent101 5y ago

mimixco 5y ago
One easy way is not to offer a license at all. Just like when you visit a news website, for example. No license is being given to you. You're just a consumer of the website. If you're selling a SaaS, all your work is copyright unless you license it to someone, so just don't. If you're selling something that can be built or downloaded on someone else's computer, there are lots of proprietary licenses you can use and even some open source ones. I hate AGPL, for example, but it is a license that would prevent AWS from selling your software as a service without disclosing a lot of stuff they won't disclose (their other software that makes AWS run).
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I think the core issue is that a lot of projects want to have their cake, eat it too, but prevent Amazon from eating any. They want the feel-good tailwind and community aspects of marketing the project as "we're open source" without, well, actually being open source.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    That's not really fair. You can want to have an "open enough" collaborative community without a trillion dollar company ($cloud_provider) steamrolling you and your work. Open source is a religion, fair code or source available licensing is a pragmatic compromise to balance community contributions and usage with a reasonable mechanism to encourage or require economic support. Lot of open source folks going hungry and having to beg to get any income. Let the religious preach while the pragmatic get paid and cover their rent and grocery bills.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      The median number of contributors to GitHub repos is 1. One. The "community" of open source is mostly a myth. Big important FOSS projects are paid for by FAANG companies who use that software. They can't rely on a "community" to fix bugs, so they pay people for that.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - nathanaldensr 5y ago
        Do you have a source for the "median" claim? I'm really interested to see the data!
      - atkailash 5y ago
        Even if this is true, the sheer number of dotfiles and such type of repos is probably the biggest factor to this. Or people using it for random stuff. A repo doesn’t mean it is intended to have community contribution.
    - pritambaral 5y ago
      That's exactly fair. MongoDB Inc. et. al. love to take others' contributions alongwith their rights too. This applies to everyone who demands a copyright assignment or exemption. They don't "collaborate" with the public to build something for the public, they take public contributions to enrich only themselves. Open Source allows us to build software greater than any single contributor. Any single contributor can go out of business and the software still has a chance of surviving. Any single contributor can decide to take their work a different direction and other people can still build what they want with it. We've seen this happen so many times, over and over, and the world is in a much better place because that happened. Closed, source-available, software vendors are the anti-thesis of that. They want others to participate and contribute, but they want to keep all the rights and benefits to themselves. If they go out of business, or just decide to drop development on a piece of software, the software dies. If they decide they don't want a certain feature in that software, you've got no recourse. That's them having the cake. But if I offer them some code under the same license they hold everyone else to, using the same copyright rules they use against everyone else, they demand I sign over my rights and use a different license. Were MongoDB to accept a patch, under their own SSPL, under fair collaborative conditions, they'd have to actually abide by the intentionally-insane conditions of their SSPL. But that's impossible, so do they stop taking public contributions? Absolutely not. They take contributions, when accompanied by the contributors rights, just fine. This is them eating it too. This environment actively discourages collaboration. The parasitic demand for copyright assignment deters me from even touching the concept of improving their code. When I have a client with an insurmountable database problem that could be solved by going to the source code, I'm glad when it's a database that has an actually collaborative approach, like Postgres or ClickHouse. In cases of both those databases, I've been able to actually collaborate with the maintainers and improve the software. When a client has an SSPL version of Mongo? I can't even take a look at the source code. That last client had actually already paid MongoDB Inc. to come in and have a look at the problem. 10K USD later, the consultant gives up and says, "I'm sorry, this will never work." At least the guy was honest, as opposed to the company, which in their report says, "We promise we can bring down your latencies to single-digit milliseconds. Just move to Atlas." What can the client do? Nothing. What can I do? I have some ideas, if I could modify the source code of the DB to add some acceleration engines specifically for this client. But I can't. Not out of technical limitations, but legal. Because of a hostile license that was itself plagiarized (illegally) from the AGPL. So the client moves to ClickHouse, and along the way ClickHouse gets some improvements.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    Yes, well since many companies (notably Google and probably Amazon, too) have absolute bans on AGPL software, I don't think it's working out. The "religion" of open source is wonky. The truth is that the real value of software is nothing because it costs nothing to reproduce. The real value of software is in people who host it for you, configure it for you, and support you in using it. That, you can charge for. This is the basis of Red Hat's business model which isn't the least bit snarky and, demonstrably, worth paying for.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      You have just assigned zero or near-zero value to software, art (prints etc), music recordings, video recordings, books, sheet music, etc. Most copyrighted works. Plenty of companies make money selling software, and purchasing hosting and support is often not possible or not required. Your own company even does this, I see you sell a lifetime license to the desktop version.
      - mimixco 5y ago
        Software was originally free. It was necessary to use the machines so it was supplied by their makers. (I worked at IBM when this began to change.) It was also all open source before that went away in favor of closed and proprietary licenses, which customers pushed back on greatly. While some companies do make money selling software, they're fewer and further between than ever. Most of the money in the software business is in hosting, service, support, or advertising. The biggest players in our industry make more money from that stuff than from selling licenses. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon are all software-based businesses but software licenses aren't their source of revenue. The vast majority of software is worth nothing. Statistically, most computer programs will only be used by one person -- the person who wrote them. There are millions of GitHub repos full of software with absolutely zero monetary value, as evidenced by the fact that no one pays for it. A tiny, tiny fraction of software programs reach "escape velocity" and become important enough to pay for, and to pay people to work on. This is definitely the exception and not the norm. None of this is a condemnation of software or other copyrighted works. I'm a published author and artist as well as a software developer and I definitely get it. As for our desktop software, we charge for the fact that we packaged it into the desktop version. That's human work and it was quite difficult. If you don't need that, you can get (and setup) an almost identical product for free.
perrohunter 5y ago
AGPL all the way. The best way to keep things opensource and have large corporations pay you to use your sofwtare.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  Is it? AGPL prevents the operating company from hosting modified version of the application without releasing changed code but doesn’t prevent actual hosting.
  - lucasyvas 5y ago
    This might as well be the same thing. GPL variants are viral and the big corporation lawyers won't touch it with a mile long stick as a result. It's a perfectly competitive license and fair. If they change your code and offer it as a service, they must publish the changes which will benefit you, the original author. There's also a chance it will require they open source some of their other code as AGPL. It's the perfect trap and most corporations won't touch it. What constitutes a change is very fuzzy since it covers access over a network.
    - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
      Thanks for more details. I do understand how AGPL and GPL work. Both are strong copyleft license. My experience with AGPL is: lawyers would review the request to use AGPL code on a case-by-case basis because of the risk of having to expose modifications to the source code and would always make a decision based on the context of usage. AGPL and GPL are definitely a problem in embedded world but not so for hosted systems. I would argue that, for a player committed to host an AGPL licensed system, it narrows down to properly fencing the system from proprietary systems. I personally maintain an AGPL based project but I treat the "lawyers will not touch it" as a case of "security by obscurity". There's nothing fuzzy about access over the network: > The GNU Affero General Public License is based on the GNU GPL, but has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. We recommend that people consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#AGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#AGPL If a corporation hosts an unmodified or even modified version of the AGPL system, where they can afford to share their modifications, they can still leverage their scale / network effect and take the creator out of business.
yodon 5y ago
If your project is so successful that AWS starts selling it as a service you're in the top 0.00001% of open source projects. You're doing great and it's a great problem to have. Don't let the fear of a what if 0.00001% problem stop you from getting started.
- yuppie_scum 5y ago
  OP doesn’t state that this project is necessarily open source..
  - hodgesrm 5y ago
    Looks as if the Reddit title was shortened in a lossy way to meet HN posting length. It was originally "What license should I use to prevent AWS e. al. from selling my open-source software as a service?"
- zepolen 5y ago
  Sounds like you're talking from experience, which project did you have that was in the top 0.00001% and got sold by AWS?
  - DougN7 5y ago
    Doesn’t sound like he/she is talking from experience at all but rather a reasonable observation. Why the challenging tone?
hedora 5y ago
The Business Source License is designed for this sort of use case. It’s not technically open source, but is just about as close as you can get if you want to restrict usage of your open source project.
hodgesrm 5y ago
> What license to use to prevent AWS et al. from selling my project as a service? It's perhaps more useful to start instead with "what business can I build that will compete effectively with SaaS services?" SaaS is now the standard way to deploy enterprise software. If you have a successful OSS project in the enterprise space and don't figure this out, somebody else will do it for you. Amazon is just one of many potential competitors. I get worried about collaborating with or using any OSS-based service that does not get this.

35 points by ent101 5y ago

One easy way is not to offer a license at all. Just like when you visit a news website, for example. No license is being given to you. You're just a consumer of the website. If you're selling a SaaS, all your work is copyright unless you license it to someone, so just don't. If you're selling something that can be built or downloaded on someone else's computer, there are lots of proprietary licenses you can use and even some open source ones. I hate AGPL, for example, but it is a license that would prevent AWS from selling your software as a service without disclosing a lot of stuff they won't disclose (their other software that makes AWS run).

sokoloff 5y ago
I think the core issue is that a lot of projects want to have their cake, eat it too, but prevent Amazon from eating any. They want the feel-good tailwind and community aspects of marketing the project as "we're open source" without, well, actually being open source.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  That's not really fair. You can want to have an "open enough" collaborative community without a trillion dollar company ($cloud_provider) steamrolling you and your work. Open source is a religion, fair code or source available licensing is a pragmatic compromise to balance community contributions and usage with a reasonable mechanism to encourage or require economic support. Lot of open source folks going hungry and having to beg to get any income. Let the religious preach while the pragmatic get paid and cover their rent and grocery bills.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    The median number of contributors to GitHub repos is 1. One. The "community" of open source is mostly a myth. Big important FOSS projects are paid for by FAANG companies who use that software. They can't rely on a "community" to fix bugs, so they pay people for that.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nathanaldensr 5y ago
      Do you have a source for the "median" claim? I'm really interested to see the data!
    - atkailash 5y ago
      Even if this is true, the sheer number of dotfiles and such type of repos is probably the biggest factor to this. Or people using it for random stuff. A repo doesn’t mean it is intended to have community contribution.
  - pritambaral 5y ago
    That's exactly fair. MongoDB Inc. et. al. love to take others' contributions alongwith their rights too. This applies to everyone who demands a copyright assignment or exemption. They don't "collaborate" with the public to build something for the public, they take public contributions to enrich only themselves. Open Source allows us to build software greater than any single contributor. Any single contributor can go out of business and the software still has a chance of surviving. Any single contributor can decide to take their work a different direction and other people can still build what they want with it. We've seen this happen so many times, over and over, and the world is in a much better place because that happened. Closed, source-available, software vendors are the anti-thesis of that. They want others to participate and contribute, but they want to keep all the rights and benefits to themselves. If they go out of business, or just decide to drop development on a piece of software, the software dies. If they decide they don't want a certain feature in that software, you've got no recourse. That's them having the cake. But if I offer them some code under the same license they hold everyone else to, using the same copyright rules they use against everyone else, they demand I sign over my rights and use a different license. Were MongoDB to accept a patch, under their own SSPL, under fair collaborative conditions, they'd have to actually abide by the intentionally-insane conditions of their SSPL. But that's impossible, so do they stop taking public contributions? Absolutely not. They take contributions, when accompanied by the contributors rights, just fine. This is them eating it too. This environment actively discourages collaboration. The parasitic demand for copyright assignment deters me from even touching the concept of improving their code. When I have a client with an insurmountable database problem that could be solved by going to the source code, I'm glad when it's a database that has an actually collaborative approach, like Postgres or ClickHouse. In cases of both those databases, I've been able to actually collaborate with the maintainers and improve the software. When a client has an SSPL version of Mongo? I can't even take a look at the source code. That last client had actually already paid MongoDB Inc. to come in and have a look at the problem. 10K USD later, the consultant gives up and says, "I'm sorry, this will never work." At least the guy was honest, as opposed to the company, which in their report says, "We promise we can bring down your latencies to single-digit milliseconds. Just move to Atlas." What can the client do? Nothing. What can I do? I have some ideas, if I could modify the source code of the DB to add some acceleration engines specifically for this client. But I can't. Not out of technical limitations, but legal. Because of a hostile license that was itself plagiarized (illegally) from the AGPL. So the client moves to ClickHouse, and along the way ClickHouse gets some improvements.
- mimixco 5y ago
  Yes, well since many companies (notably Google and probably Amazon, too) have absolute bans on AGPL software, I don't think it's working out. The "religion" of open source is wonky. The truth is that the real value of software is nothing because it costs nothing to reproduce. The real value of software is in people who host it for you, configure it for you, and support you in using it. That, you can charge for. This is the basis of Red Hat's business model which isn't the least bit snarky and, demonstrably, worth paying for.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    You have just assigned zero or near-zero value to software, art (prints etc), music recordings, video recordings, books, sheet music, etc. Most copyrighted works. Plenty of companies make money selling software, and purchasing hosting and support is often not possible or not required. Your own company even does this, I see you sell a lifetime license to the desktop version.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      Software was originally free. It was necessary to use the machines so it was supplied by their makers. (I worked at IBM when this began to change.) It was also all open source before that went away in favor of closed and proprietary licenses, which customers pushed back on greatly. While some companies do make money selling software, they're fewer and further between than ever. Most of the money in the software business is in hosting, service, support, or advertising. The biggest players in our industry make more money from that stuff than from selling licenses. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon are all software-based businesses but software licenses aren't their source of revenue. The vast majority of software is worth nothing. Statistically, most computer programs will only be used by one person -- the person who wrote them. There are millions of GitHub repos full of software with absolutely zero monetary value, as evidenced by the fact that no one pays for it. A tiny, tiny fraction of software programs reach "escape velocity" and become important enough to pay for, and to pay people to work on. This is definitely the exception and not the norm. None of this is a condemnation of software or other copyrighted works. I'm a published author and artist as well as a software developer and I definitely get it. As for our desktop software, we charge for the fact that we packaged it into the desktop version. That's human work and it was quite difficult. If you don't need that, you can get (and setup) an almost identical product for free.

perrohunter 5y ago

AGPL all the way. The best way to keep things opensource and have large corporations pay you to use your sofwtare.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
Is it? AGPL prevents the operating company from hosting modified version of the application without releasing changed code but doesn’t prevent actual hosting.
- lucasyvas 5y ago
  This might as well be the same thing. GPL variants are viral and the big corporation lawyers won't touch it with a mile long stick as a result. It's a perfectly competitive license and fair. If they change your code and offer it as a service, they must publish the changes which will benefit you, the original author. There's also a chance it will require they open source some of their other code as AGPL. It's the perfect trap and most corporations won't touch it. What constitutes a change is very fuzzy since it covers access over a network.
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    Thanks for more details. I do understand how AGPL and GPL work. Both are strong copyleft license. My experience with AGPL is: lawyers would review the request to use AGPL code on a case-by-case basis because of the risk of having to expose modifications to the source code and would always make a decision based on the context of usage. AGPL and GPL are definitely a problem in embedded world but not so for hosted systems. I would argue that, for a player committed to host an AGPL licensed system, it narrows down to properly fencing the system from proprietary systems. I personally maintain an AGPL based project but I treat the "lawyers will not touch it" as a case of "security by obscurity". There's nothing fuzzy about access over the network: > The GNU Affero General Public License is based on the GNU GPL, but has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. We recommend that people consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#AGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#AGPL If a corporation hosts an unmodified or even modified version of the AGPL system, where they can afford to share their modifications, they can still leverage their scale / network effect and take the creator out of business.

yodon 5y ago

If your project is so successful that AWS starts selling it as a service you're in the top 0.00001% of open source projects. You're doing great and it's a great problem to have. Don't let the fear of a what if 0.00001% problem stop you from getting started.

yuppie_scum 5y ago
OP doesn’t state that this project is necessarily open source..
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  Looks as if the Reddit title was shortened in a lossy way to meet HN posting length. It was originally "What license should I use to prevent AWS e. al. from selling my open-source software as a service?"
zepolen 5y ago
Sounds like you're talking from experience, which project did you have that was in the top 0.00001% and got sold by AWS?
- DougN7 5y ago
  Doesn’t sound like he/she is talking from experience at all but rather a reasonable observation. Why the challenging tone?

hedora 5y ago

The Business Source License is designed for this sort of use case. It’s not technically open source, but is just about as close as you can get if you want to restrict usage of your open source project.

hodgesrm 5y ago

> What license to use to prevent AWS et al. from selling my project as a service? It's perhaps more useful to start instead with "what business can I build that will compete effectively with SaaS services?" SaaS is now the standard way to deploy enterprise software. If you have a successful OSS project in the enterprise space and don't figure this out, somebody else will do it for you. Amazon is just one of many potential competitors. I get worried about collaborating with or using any OSS-based service that does not get this.