4 ms·

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

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
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    - 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.

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.