6 ms·

My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

48 points by BeryJu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
freedomben 3y ago
Right off the bat there's a pretty serious error: > There’s been a lot of discussion about licensing in the news, with Red Hat and now Hashicorp notably adjusting their licensing models to be more “business friendly,” and Codecov (proudly, and mistakenly) pronouncing they are now “open source.” Red Hat has not adjusted any of their "licensing models." They've simply stopped publishing the RHEL sources publicly. They're still published and fully available to paying customers, who are the only ones they are legally[1] required to distribute them to. None of the licenses (GPL, MIT, etc) have any requirements to publicly distribute code. [1]: there is some dispute over whether the customer agreement violates the GPL in spirit or letter, but that's a different question. It's not a licensing thing, it's a business agreement/contract that is completely separate from the licenses. The licenses don't require you to do business with people you don't want to do business with, and they don't require you to give away your product for free.
- tomcam 3y ago
  Not arguing. But in practice there’s some number of large orgs hostile to GPL (which strikes me as bass-ackwards, but there you have it).
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Indeed, I don't understand it, especially when it's a back-end service they're running, not even something they are modifying and reselling. The GPL is completely safe for that.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      It's FUD. Microsoft in particular and proprietary software companies in general have long been scaremongering about the alleged dangers of using GPL code as a marketing tactic, and some people believe them.
- BeryJu 3y ago
  That is a very good point, I'll fix that in a bit
tomcam 3y ago
Hope this continues to work. Commercial version costs all of $.02 per external user per month. I hate auth so this seems like a no-brainer.
38 3y ago
I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL: https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php to non commercial: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a commercial license for a fee. so despite the roar of complaints from open source purists, it works for me.
- tomcam 3y ago
  Interesting. Has it been more advantageous financially?
- mrweiner 3y ago
  Do you know how that non commercial license differs from BSL? I’m getting ready to release a product and trying to figure out licensing.
- likenesstheft 3y ago
  People are upset that they can't profit off your labor without a license? Those don't sound like open source purists to me. They sound like straight up thieves lol.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > People are upset that they can't profit off your labor without a license? No, open source licenses are, in fact, licenses.
- kiba 3y ago
  A lot of discussion around has been people disingenuously calling their software open source when it isn't. I have a less of a problem with people openly restricting their software to non-commercial usage only.
- version_five 3y ago
mcguire 3y ago
Tl;dr: "I would like to justify my decision to dump the GPL for money."
- mynegation 3y ago
  Money looks like a perfectly good reason to me.
  - ta8645 3y ago
    It is, but just be honest with yourself about it, if you make that decision.
- c0l0 3y ago
  I am not sure I understand what they (the business behing "authentik") hope to gain from having their Open/Libre variant available under MIT instead of under GPLv3, when they do have a fully proprietary ("you may look at the source" or not, meh) alternative that they are trying to sell INSTEAD of the free variant? Is it because they hope that MIT-licensed software is more readily adopted by businesses, and they hope to get their foot in more doors for their proprietary "premium" version that way? Or is there something else/in addition to that that I cannot see?
- nottorp 3y ago
  But MIT is even less restrictive for a competitor. What I'm guessing is they had external contributors so the thing was about getting them to relicense under MIT.
version_five 3y ago
I'm curious about this line: As a company and a real legal entity, we would have recourse if something like AWS/Elasticsearch were to happen What does that mean? Didn't AWS just take advantage of the terms of the license and do something they were allowed to, couldn't the same thing happen here? What recourse would there be?
- freedomben 3y ago
  I had the same thought. Elastic was a real legal entity too, and clearly they didn't have recourse... There are a number of errors/incorrect info in this blog post. I don't mean to be critical, but I hope nobody is looking to this post for advice because it has some bad advice (such legal recourse, what different licenses achieve the objective of protecting from the concerned case (GPL doesn't)).
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  I read this as “we would have a way to prevent competition,” which is good for them but not users.
gowld 3y ago
Types of freedom: Gratis: Free as in beer. Libre: Free as in "freedom" (for end-users, not developers). Coexisting: Free as in culture (share and share alike, or pay up ).
freedomben 3y ago
Is GPL vs. MIT even relevant in this case? GPL only requires providing sources with the distributed binary, but for server-side code you don't distribute the binary so don't have to publish sources. The whole point behind the AGPL is to close this loophole. Further I don't think the change to GPL even fixed the author's original concern of something like AWS taking it and standing up a service on it. The GPL wouldn't prevent that because again, no binary distribution. I don't doubt that the author was told this by Sid at OCV, but it seems like a misunderstanding on both their parts of what the licenses actually require and don't require.
- trane_project 3y ago
  The whole thing about how GPL propagates to unrelated works that happen to use a GPL licensed software is a misunderstanding. One that the FSF foundation is happy to propagate, but not one that would hold in court. The concept of derived work in copyright law has nothing to do with how the binaries are linked together nor is an entire work derived from a GPL library just because they happen to call it at one point. Lawyers look at this very differently. See https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366
  - dahdum 3y ago
    I don’t see definitive statements in that article. It’s a lawyer stating opinion, using qualifiers like “in most cases” and “I would argue”. Most concerning is: > This is a complex topic that courts and lawyers disagree on I would argue, in most cases, the benefits aren’t worth the risk, nor the legal fees spent to ascertain and manage that risk.
- gowld 3y ago
  The link "Changed to GPL v3" was actually "change to Enterprise Edition license. So that's a bizarre comment to make in the blog post. https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/commit/4671d4afb4d32988ca0058a33888862bd9652b16#diff-03ba86a206c08bbe3ba78915054abb45db356f300a459ef86205059793012067 https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/commit/4671d4afb4d3...
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
I looked at OP's account. No comments at all, and every submission leads to his own website. Many of them marked as [dead]. I thought this was strictly against HN guidelines?
- gowld 3y ago
  "Guidelines" are never "strict." Guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." OP has made 5 submissions in 7 months. All for blog posts tangential to their product, not even direct product offerings, not even directly pitching their product. (I read the posts and still don't know what they actually sell.) Nothingburger.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Actually OP has made 12. Only 4 of them escaped death. This is clearly a case of using HN only for self-promotion. I wouldn't suggest we should stop them as it doesn't cross into abusive IMHO, but it does seem against the guidelines. It may not be reason to take action but doesn't seem like a nothingburger either.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Probably 80% of my submissions are “Show HN” links to my work. It’s me saying “hey look at this cool/silly thing I just made!”. I don’t necessarily ask for feedback when I do that, although I do appreciate it.
gowld 3y ago
The article is confusing. The difference between MIT and GPL is that MIT favors immediate users who are developers, and GPL favors end-users. These interests are always in tension, and one of them just be chosen as favored. In both cases, the original authors are giving up their rights for the benefit of users. So no one has standing to attack the original authors. If you use the original software, you can enjoy it either way. If you are in business, MIT is better for you. If you are a user of an intermediary, that's for you and the intermediary to deal with, no the original author. If you are afraid of the intermediary being evil, than go directly to the original source, or find a GPL or MIT(!) intermediary.
mcdonje 3y ago
>The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add... That's the entire point of copyleft licenses. Businesses want to benefit from the community without giving back.
- fancyfredbot 3y ago
  Copyleft doesn't seem to cause businesses to give more back, but does seem to prevent them from benefiting from the community, which is a shame.
  - mcdonje 3y ago
    It doesn't prevent them from benefiting from the community. They're deciding they don't want to be beholden to a license that requires them to contribute back, and they're blaming the license itself for their selfishness.
  - ryukafalz 3y ago
    How many drivers are available as FOSS in the Linux kernel? Now how many drivers for the same hardware are available as FOSS for Windows? Do you think so many of those Linux drivers would have their code available if the kernel weren't copyleft licensed?
    - fancyfredbot 3y ago
      I wasn't thinking of hardware vendors, but you are right that here the copyleft license works well. The reason I think is that in this case the companies are making their money from selling hardware not drivers.
benterix 3y ago
The author talks about several very different issues: (1) him switching between GPL and MIT, both of which are open source licenses, (2) Hashicorp switching to BSL, which is not an open source license (by the OSI definition), (3) Red Hat providing sources as per GPL requirements to paid customers only and stopping to provide it to the whole world (there is more to it when you remember how red Hat started, why CentOS appeared, how it they were bought etc.). There is only some superficial similarity between these two (as the author says, nobody objected when they switched from GPL to MIT).
weare138 3y ago
I'm not sure what the overall point here is. The headline and article are framed in a way that makes it seem switching from GPLv3 was the catalyst for increased profitability but this is never clarified or quantified: Two years later, Sid at Open Core Ventures (OCV) contacted me about creating a company, building on the features and functionality of authentik. It was a dream opportunity: work full time on my hobby project and make 25% more in the process. But I had to let go of the GPL license. It seems the investors stipulated the license change to secure funding versus the change itself resulting in increased profitability. And the justification seems based on speculation about marketability: The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add, and they will sooner find a competitor with a more permissive license than adopt your software. This is obviously not ideal when you’re trying to get traction and grow a business. OCV proposed we switch back to MIT. Obviously something like the MIT license is more attractive to corporations. Now they can just steal all your hard work, integrate your code into their commercial product and not even have to pay or so much as credit you now. I'm sorry, it sounds you may have just been hustled out of your app.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  It sounds like he was paid, and gets to work on his app. It may not be maximizing the value, but it seems to be similar to accepting a job at a company. He has steady income instead of long term rights. Perfectly reasonable choice. So would putting a second license for paying customers as an available choice.
pxc 3y ago
> Initially, authentik used the MIT license. When Elastic called out AWS for trademark abuse (offering Elasticsearch as an AWS service without collaborating with Elastic), I changed it to GPLv3 because I didn’t like what AWS did in principle, and didn’t want it to happen to authentik. GPLv3 doesn't protect SaaS users anyway! That's the whole point of AGPL. lol IOW, GPLv3 doesn't prevent Amazon or Google or Microsoft from offering a hosted version of your project without sharing source code changes with customers.

48 points by BeryJu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Right off the bat there's a pretty serious error: > There’s been a lot of discussion about licensing in the news, with Red Hat and now Hashicorp notably adjusting their licensing models to be more “business friendly,” and Codecov (proudly, and mistakenly) pronouncing they are now “open source.” Red Hat has not adjusted any of their "licensing models." They've simply stopped publishing the RHEL sources publicly. They're still published and fully available to paying customers, who are the only ones they are legally[1] required to distribute them to. None of the licenses (GPL, MIT, etc) have any requirements to publicly distribute code. [1]: there is some dispute over whether the customer agreement violates the GPL in spirit or letter, but that's a different question. It's not a licensing thing, it's a business agreement/contract that is completely separate from the licenses. The licenses don't require you to do business with people you don't want to do business with, and they don't require you to give away your product for free.

tomcam 3y ago
Not arguing. But in practice there’s some number of large orgs hostile to GPL (which strikes me as bass-ackwards, but there you have it).
- freedomben 3y ago
  Indeed, I don't understand it, especially when it's a back-end service they're running, not even something they are modifying and reselling. The GPL is completely safe for that.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    It's FUD. Microsoft in particular and proprietary software companies in general have long been scaremongering about the alleged dangers of using GPL code as a marketing tactic, and some people believe them.
BeryJu 3y ago
That is a very good point, I'll fix that in a bit

tomcam 3y ago

Hope this continues to work. Commercial version costs all of $.02 per external user per month. I hate auth so this seems like a no-brainer.

38 3y ago

I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL: https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php to non commercial: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a commercial license for a fee. so despite the roar of complaints from open source purists, it works for me.

tomcam 3y ago
Interesting. Has it been more advantageous financially?
mrweiner 3y ago
Do you know how that non commercial license differs from BSL? I’m getting ready to release a product and trying to figure out licensing.
likenesstheft 3y ago
People are upset that they can't profit off your labor without a license? Those don't sound like open source purists to me. They sound like straight up thieves lol.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > People are upset that they can't profit off your labor without a license? No, open source licenses are, in fact, licenses.
kiba 3y ago
A lot of discussion around has been people disingenuously calling their software open source when it isn't. I have a less of a problem with people openly restricting their software to non-commercial usage only.
version_five 3y ago

mcguire 3y ago

Tl;dr: "I would like to justify my decision to dump the GPL for money."

mynegation 3y ago
Money looks like a perfectly good reason to me.
- ta8645 3y ago
  It is, but just be honest with yourself about it, if you make that decision.
c0l0 3y ago
I am not sure I understand what they (the business behing "authentik") hope to gain from having their Open/Libre variant available under MIT instead of under GPLv3, when they do have a fully proprietary ("you may look at the source" or not, meh) alternative that they are trying to sell INSTEAD of the free variant? Is it because they hope that MIT-licensed software is more readily adopted by businesses, and they hope to get their foot in more doors for their proprietary "premium" version that way? Or is there something else/in addition to that that I cannot see?
nottorp 3y ago
But MIT is even less restrictive for a competitor. What I'm guessing is they had external contributors so the thing was about getting them to relicense under MIT.

version_five 3y ago

I'm curious about this line: As a company and a real legal entity, we would have recourse if something like AWS/Elasticsearch were to happen What does that mean? Didn't AWS just take advantage of the terms of the license and do something they were allowed to, couldn't the same thing happen here? What recourse would there be?

freedomben 3y ago
I had the same thought. Elastic was a real legal entity too, and clearly they didn't have recourse... There are a number of errors/incorrect info in this blog post. I don't mean to be critical, but I hope nobody is looking to this post for advice because it has some bad advice (such legal recourse, what different licenses achieve the objective of protecting from the concerned case (GPL doesn't)).
erik_seaberg 3y ago
I read this as “we would have a way to prevent competition,” which is good for them but not users.

gowld 3y ago

Types of freedom: Gratis: Free as in beer. Libre: Free as in "freedom" (for end-users, not developers). Coexisting: Free as in culture (share and share alike, or pay up ).

freedomben 3y ago

Is GPL vs. MIT even relevant in this case? GPL only requires providing sources with the distributed binary, but for server-side code you don't distribute the binary so don't have to publish sources. The whole point behind the AGPL is to close this loophole. Further I don't think the change to GPL even fixed the author's original concern of something like AWS taking it and standing up a service on it. The GPL wouldn't prevent that because again, no binary distribution. I don't doubt that the author was told this by Sid at OCV, but it seems like a misunderstanding on both their parts of what the licenses actually require and don't require.

trane_project 3y ago
The whole thing about how GPL propagates to unrelated works that happen to use a GPL licensed software is a misunderstanding. One that the FSF foundation is happy to propagate, but not one that would hold in court. The concept of derived work in copyright law has nothing to do with how the binaries are linked together nor is an entire work derived from a GPL library just because they happen to call it at one point. Lawyers look at this very differently. See https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366
- dahdum 3y ago
  I don’t see definitive statements in that article. It’s a lawyer stating opinion, using qualifiers like “in most cases” and “I would argue”. Most concerning is: > This is a complex topic that courts and lawyers disagree on I would argue, in most cases, the benefits aren’t worth the risk, nor the legal fees spent to ascertain and manage that risk.
gowld 3y ago
The link "Changed to GPL v3" was actually "change to Enterprise Edition license. So that's a bizarre comment to make in the blog post. https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/commit/4671d4afb4d32988ca0058a33888862bd9652b16#diff-03ba86a206c08bbe3ba78915054abb45db356f300a459ef86205059793012067 https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/commit/4671d4afb4d3...

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago

I looked at OP's account. No comments at all, and every submission leads to his own website. Many of them marked as [dead]. I thought this was strictly against HN guidelines?

gowld 3y ago
"Guidelines" are never "strict." Guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." OP has made 5 submissions in 7 months. All for blog posts tangential to their product, not even direct product offerings, not even directly pitching their product. (I read the posts and still don't know what they actually sell.) Nothingburger.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Actually OP has made 12. Only 4 of them escaped death. This is clearly a case of using HN only for self-promotion. I wouldn't suggest we should stop them as it doesn't cross into abusive IMHO, but it does seem against the guidelines. It may not be reason to take action but doesn't seem like a nothingburger either.
rpastuszak 3y ago
Probably 80% of my submissions are “Show HN” links to my work. It’s me saying “hey look at this cool/silly thing I just made!”. I don’t necessarily ask for feedback when I do that, although I do appreciate it.

gowld 3y ago

The article is confusing. The difference between MIT and GPL is that MIT favors immediate users who are developers, and GPL favors end-users. These interests are always in tension, and one of them just be chosen as favored. In both cases, the original authors are giving up their rights for the benefit of users. So no one has standing to attack the original authors. If you use the original software, you can enjoy it either way. If you are in business, MIT is better for you. If you are a user of an intermediary, that's for you and the intermediary to deal with, no the original author. If you are afraid of the intermediary being evil, than go directly to the original source, or find a GPL or MIT(!) intermediary.

mcdonje 3y ago

>The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add... That's the entire point of copyleft licenses. Businesses want to benefit from the community without giving back.

fancyfredbot 3y ago
Copyleft doesn't seem to cause businesses to give more back, but does seem to prevent them from benefiting from the community, which is a shame.
- mcdonje 3y ago
  It doesn't prevent them from benefiting from the community. They're deciding they don't want to be beholden to a license that requires them to contribute back, and they're blaming the license itself for their selfishness.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  How many drivers are available as FOSS in the Linux kernel? Now how many drivers for the same hardware are available as FOSS for Windows? Do you think so many of those Linux drivers would have their code available if the kernel weren't copyleft licensed?
  - fancyfredbot 3y ago
    I wasn't thinking of hardware vendors, but you are right that here the copyleft license works well. The reason I think is that in this case the companies are making their money from selling hardware not drivers.

benterix 3y ago

The author talks about several very different issues: (1) him switching between GPL and MIT, both of which are open source licenses, (2) Hashicorp switching to BSL, which is not an open source license (by the OSI definition), (3) Red Hat providing sources as per GPL requirements to paid customers only and stopping to provide it to the whole world (there is more to it when you remember how red Hat started, why CentOS appeared, how it they were bought etc.). There is only some superficial similarity between these two (as the author says, nobody objected when they switched from GPL to MIT).

weare138 3y ago

I'm not sure what the overall point here is. The headline and article are framed in a way that makes it seem switching from GPLv3 was the catalyst for increased profitability but this is never clarified or quantified: Two years later, Sid at Open Core Ventures (OCV) contacted me about creating a company, building on the features and functionality of authentik. It was a dream opportunity: work full time on my hobby project and make 25% more in the process. But I had to let go of the GPL license. It seems the investors stipulated the license change to secure funding versus the change itself resulting in increased profitability. And the justification seems based on speculation about marketability: The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add, and they will sooner find a competitor with a more permissive license than adopt your software. This is obviously not ideal when you’re trying to get traction and grow a business. OCV proposed we switch back to MIT. Obviously something like the MIT license is more attractive to corporations. Now they can just steal all your hard work, integrate your code into their commercial product and not even have to pay or so much as credit you now. I'm sorry, it sounds you may have just been hustled out of your app.

HWR_14 3y ago
It sounds like he was paid, and gets to work on his app. It may not be maximizing the value, but it seems to be similar to accepting a job at a company. He has steady income instead of long term rights. Perfectly reasonable choice. So would putting a second license for paying customers as an available choice.

pxc 3y ago

> Initially, authentik used the MIT license. When Elastic called out AWS for trademark abuse (offering Elasticsearch as an AWS service without collaborating with Elastic), I changed it to GPLv3 because I didn’t like what AWS did in principle, and didn’t want it to happen to authentik. GPLv3 doesn't protect SaaS users anyway! That's the whole point of AGPL. lol IOW, GPLv3 doesn't prevent Amazon or Google or Microsoft from offering a hosted version of your project without sharing source code changes with customers.