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> 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
by 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?