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> It feels weirdly appropriative for proprietary devs to step in and champion themselves as the real defenders of freedom A proprietary developer offering some

by api 5y ago

> It feels weirdly appropriative for proprietary devs to step in and champion themselves as the real defenders of freedom A proprietary developer offering something that gives the user full control of their data and full privacy is championing freedom more than an open source developer who uses FOSS as a lever to herd people into a surveillance capitalist we-own-your-data ecosystem. Cloud is the new closed.

danShumway 5y ago
What does this have to do with whether Non-Commercial licenses are Open Source? The FOSS movement has been incredibly clear about the threat of cloud software for years now, they were warning about this before it was a mainstream argument. And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud, and Non-Commercial licenses have nothing to do with how Non-Commercial content is distributed. There is no provision in a Non-Commercial license that says that I have to make the media I build with it available for download. If your chief objection is SAAS, then it seems more than licenses, you would be arguing that software like Mongo is inherently Non-Free simply by virtue of being a database designed for use in the cloud. Mongo's existence is funneling more users into the cloud than any license it uses. There are licenses (like AGPL, and CC SA) that can be classified as Free licenses and that do contain provisions to prevent companies from locking software and content up in a way that users can't distribute, modify, or consume in privacy-respecting ways. Those licenses preserve ownership without being Non-Free. A Non-Commercial license doesn't do any of that stuff.
- api 5y ago
  > And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud Yes they do, but to understand why you have to look at the software economy from a whole-system point of view and pay particular attention to incentives. It's that if the only way to make money in software is cloud SaaS, that's where all the incentives flow and that's where the center of gravity goes. This is a whole-system incentives problem. Right now virtually all the incentives in software are tilted toward SaaS, cloud lock-in, and surveillance, because the other competing business model of pay-for-software has been destroyed. Mongo is also a bad example since as you point out it's software designed almost exclusively for use by cloud services. Things have gone so far down the road it's hard for me to think of good examples. The best I can do is Steam, but that's not really a great example either. It's closer than MongoDB.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > Right now virtually all the incentives in software are tilted toward SaaS, cloud lock-in, and surveillance, because the other competing business model of pay-for-software has been destroyed. The problem is that Non-Commercial licenses also do nothing to help with this situation either, because they explicitly ban traditional funding sources like pay-for-software. I agree with you that current funding incentives push people towards the cloud. I don't see how Non-Commercial licenses help with that at all -- Non-Commercial licenses make it harder to just sell downloadable software that you run locally and privately on your computer. If the current incentive problem around funding is pushing people to adopt SaaS models and treat their software as a funnel into unrelated services, why champion a license makes that incentive problem even worse?

by api 5y ago

danShumway 5y ago

What does this have to do with whether Non-Commercial licenses are Open Source? The FOSS movement has been incredibly clear about the threat of cloud software for years now, they were warning about this before it was a mainstream argument. And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud, and Non-Commercial licenses have nothing to do with how Non-Commercial content is distributed. There is no provision in a Non-Commercial license that says that I have to make the media I build with it available for download. If your chief objection is SAAS, then it seems more than licenses, you would be arguing that software like Mongo is inherently Non-Free simply by virtue of being a database designed for use in the cloud. Mongo's existence is funneling more users into the cloud than any license it uses. There are licenses (like AGPL, and CC SA) that can be classified as Free licenses and that do contain provisions to prevent companies from locking software and content up in a way that users can't distribute, modify, or consume in privacy-respecting ways. Those licenses preserve ownership without being Non-Free. A Non-Commercial license doesn't do any of that stuff.

api 5y ago
> And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud Yes they do, but to understand why you have to look at the software economy from a whole-system point of view and pay particular attention to incentives. It's that if the only way to make money in software is cloud SaaS, that's where all the incentives flow and that's where the center of gravity goes. This is a whole-system incentives problem. Right now virtually all the incentives in software are tilted toward SaaS, cloud lock-in, and surveillance, because the other competing business model of pay-for-software has been destroyed. Mongo is also a bad example since as you point out it's software designed almost exclusively for use by cloud services. Things have gone so far down the road it's hard for me to think of good examples. The best I can do is Steam, but that's not really a great example either. It's closer than MongoDB.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > Right now virtually all the incentives in software are tilted toward SaaS, cloud lock-in, and surveillance, because the other competing business model of pay-for-software has been destroyed. The problem is that Non-Commercial licenses also do nothing to help with this situation either, because they explicitly ban traditional funding sources like pay-for-software. I agree with you that current funding incentives push people towards the cloud. I don't see how Non-Commercial licenses help with that at all -- Non-Commercial licenses make it harder to just sell downloadable software that you run locally and privately on your computer. If the current incentive problem around funding is pushing people to adopt SaaS models and treat their software as a funnel into unrelated services, why champion a license makes that incentive problem even worse?