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It is open source for me as I will never earn more than US $25 million in annual revenue. If I ever do, I will gladly pay them. I disagree with the idea that t

It is open source for me as I will never earn more than US $25 million in annual revenue. If I ever do, I will gladly pay them. I disagree with the idea that the only correct definition of open source is the one that favors big tech monopolists. Times have changed compared to when the open source movement started. Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. They are not the first company to adapt their license to the changing circumstances, see Elastic.

arinlen 4y ago
> Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.
- cardanome 4y ago
  Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? > Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. Your comment makes zero sense. FLOSS is about ensuring the right to use, fix, and alter software. It's not about people with a axe to grind about competitors providing a better service. The only weapon I see here is people trying to abuse the concept of FLOSS to complain about their inability to profit from other people's software because others do a better job.
    - cardanome 4y ago
      > about competitors providing a better service The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers. Are you not aware how monopolists work?
      - zozbot234 4y ago
        And yet there's plenty of competition in the network infrastructure market, including by smaller players. You think DigitalOcean and Hetzner are not in a closely related market to AWS or Azure?
      - arinlen 4y ago
        > The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. It looks to me that AWS only has around 30% of the cloud market, and CloudFlare is outcompeting AWS in some market segments oddly enough due to things like CloudFlare Worker's, which are developed from the V8 engine which is as FLOSS as it gets. It looks like behind the thin veil of a badly formed "unfair competition" argument, there's only an irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        I think "smaller" there is supposed to mean "on the small end" and not a direct comparison to Amazon. CloudFlare is not an example of such a company. > irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party It's the rational concern that major developers of widely-used software should be paid.
    - piaste 4y ago
      > The whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important. The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code. But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect. If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
- piaste 4y ago
  The cloud giants have gigantic moats in terms of infrastructure, marketing, process, and so on. Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day. But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    > if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
    - piaste 4y ago
      Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price". The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform. One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
      - yawaramin 4y ago
        > One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.
PeterZaitsev 4y ago
Time have changed and it is well possible there is a need and room for source available licenses. Open Source is established term which offers specific freedoms which brings specific benefits (and challenges) to businesses. While many Venture funded companies might want you to believe they are being unfairly taken advantage by the clouds it is not the full story. Elastic for example relies on A LOT of code contributed by community, which were contributing because they could use end result under Open Source License. Elastic changing the license changed relations here to you contribute to create the product BUT you do not get all the rights to use it any more. In Elastic case in particular large number of cloud solutions were build which embed their solution (arguably same as Elastic embedds Lucene) who could not use Elastic after license change.
- indrora 4y ago
  We've had Source-Available licenses for years (MS-PL for instance, as well as many various ones from Sun/Oracle, etc.) There's basically been a resounding "Meh" about them and the people who work on software that adopts them generally move to an open fork or the project perishes (see also the fate of Solaris, Illumos, and Oracle.)
  - orra 4y ago
    Quite. Proprietary source available projects are 'meh'. In the past few years, it seems several notable company-backed projects have switched from the Apache licence, to some proprietary licence. I'd much prefer if instead they tried switching to a strong copyleft licence. (Granted, 'delayed open source' is far better than 'never open source'.)
anonymoushn 4y ago
If you earn $25 million in annual revenue and have tiny margins or many cores, you may not be capable of paying $2000/year/core.
zxspectrum1982 4y ago
At my previous company, we evaluated Akka to solve some queuing problems in one of our products. Akka would have become one more embedded component of a much larger product, selling >30M USD/year. At the current price tag (USD $1995/core), Akka would have been prohibitively expensive. Akka pricing does not make sense for OEMs. Luckily, other features were always more prioritary than moving to Akka, otherwise we'd be in trouble.

arinlen 4y ago

> Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.

cardanome 4y ago
Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.
- arinlen 4y ago
  > Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? > Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. Your comment makes zero sense. FLOSS is about ensuring the right to use, fix, and alter software. It's not about people with a axe to grind about competitors providing a better service. The only weapon I see here is people trying to abuse the concept of FLOSS to complain about their inability to profit from other people's software because others do a better job.
  - cardanome 4y ago
    > about competitors providing a better service The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers. Are you not aware how monopolists work?
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      And yet there's plenty of competition in the network infrastructure market, including by smaller players. You think DigitalOcean and Hetzner are not in a closely related market to AWS or Azure?
    - arinlen 4y ago
      > The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. It looks to me that AWS only has around 30% of the cloud market, and CloudFlare is outcompeting AWS in some market segments oddly enough due to things like CloudFlare Worker's, which are developed from the V8 engine which is as FLOSS as it gets. It looks like behind the thin veil of a badly formed "unfair competition" argument, there's only an irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        I think "smaller" there is supposed to mean "on the small end" and not a direct comparison to Amazon. CloudFlare is not an example of such a company. > irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party It's the rational concern that major developers of widely-used software should be paid.
  - piaste 4y ago
    > The whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important. The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code. But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect. If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
piaste 4y ago
The cloud giants have gigantic moats in terms of infrastructure, marketing, process, and so on. Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day. But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
  - piaste 4y ago
    Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price". The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform. One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
    - yawaramin 4y ago
      > One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.

PeterZaitsev 4y ago

Time have changed and it is well possible there is a need and room for source available licenses. Open Source is established term which offers specific freedoms which brings specific benefits (and challenges) to businesses. While many Venture funded companies might want you to believe they are being unfairly taken advantage by the clouds it is not the full story. Elastic for example relies on A LOT of code contributed by community, which were contributing because they could use end result under Open Source License. Elastic changing the license changed relations here to you contribute to create the product BUT you do not get all the rights to use it any more. In Elastic case in particular large number of cloud solutions were build which embed their solution (arguably same as Elastic embedds Lucene) who could not use Elastic after license change.

indrora 4y ago
We've had Source-Available licenses for years (MS-PL for instance, as well as many various ones from Sun/Oracle, etc.) There's basically been a resounding "Meh" about them and the people who work on software that adopts them generally move to an open fork or the project perishes (see also the fate of Solaris, Illumos, and Oracle.)
- orra 4y ago
  Quite. Proprietary source available projects are 'meh'. In the past few years, it seems several notable company-backed projects have switched from the Apache licence, to some proprietary licence. I'd much prefer if instead they tried switching to a strong copyleft licence. (Granted, 'delayed open source' is far better than 'never open source'.)

anonymoushn 4y ago

If you earn $25 million in annual revenue and have tiny margins or many cores, you may not be capable of paying $2000/year/core.

zxspectrum1982 4y ago

At my previous company, we evaluated Akka to solve some queuing problems in one of our products. Akka would have become one more embedded component of a much larger product, selling >30M USD/year. At the current price tag (USD $1995/core), Akka would have been prohibitively expensive. Akka pricing does not make sense for OEMs. Luckily, other features were always more prioritary than moving to Akka, otherwise we'd be in trouble.