6 ms·

It's very hard for me to take anything which starts with CatB seriously. It was very charismatic, beating up a strawman which didn't exist, and zero of it playe

It's very hard for me to take anything which starts with CatB seriously. It was very charismatic, beating up a strawman which didn't exist, and zero of it played out as expected. Eric Raymond is mostly gone, as everything he's touched has failed. Open-source has started to realize Richard was right about ethics, as the two movements have increasingly converged. Richard, for his part, is still marginalized, socially awkward, and everything seems to be playing out by the playbook he wrote in the nineties. This writing is just as confused. The author is missing the basic points of a license: A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract. The FSL is looked at through none of those lenses. The attempts at empathy with the opposing viewpoints clearly don't express an understanding of those viewpoints. The reasoning is just bad. Even taken at face value, a license which does not set up an ecosystem of equals is a cathedral license, not a bazaar one. The citation is weird. Analyses needed for licensing: - Who will contribute, and why? - What ecosystem is being set up? One of equals? One with a central party? - Why will my customers give me money? Does this preserve my ability to make money? ... and so on. Those require deeper dives. "If you build it, they will come" doesn't work. If you want contributions, for example (not everyone does), you want to do a deep dive on the needs, wants, and motivations of potential contributors. An ecosystem of equals (bazaar) will bring in more contributors, but also more competitors. I'll give a personal example: In my professional work, I use 100% open-source, largely to mitigate for the risk of what happens when the cloud vendor disappears. FSL mitigates that risk, while BUSL doesn't. The license seems non-crazy, though, and a huge step up from BUSL. What's concerning, though, is that it's completely unclear that the author understands why this license makes sense, so it's liable to be misused. It feels more accidentally-stumbled-upon.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
> What's concerning, though, is that it's completely unclear that the author understands why this license makes sense, so it's liable to be misused. It feels more accidentally-stumbled-upon. The author of the post (me) was part of the group at Sentry that created that license. I can’t dispel your interpretation that my writing is “confused” but I can assure you that a lot of thought went into the license. That blog post is not a “here are all the reasons for the license” but it narrows down on a very specific aspect of it. You can read the original announcement post for more context and you can also listen to a panel discussion about it with me, Chad from Sentry and Heather Meeker who helped us draft it: https://www.youtube.com/live/UB9fo7pnDzY?si=0HVI6FsR42Pn5yP2 https://www.youtube.com/live/UB9fo7pnDzY?si=0HVI6FsR42Pn5yP2
- James_K 3y ago
  For what it's worth, your writing is confused. For instance: > There cannot be a limbo where the rights holder prevents the flourishing of a fork out of lack of interest or fear. The entire point of this license is to prevent forks of software. It makes it especially easy to do so by simply pushing small incompatible changes on a two-year schedule. But the really strange part about this is that it assumes a developer that is scared of allowing their work to be forked would decide to use a license that forces them to allow their work to be forked. They simply wouldn't. That's the exact thing they were scared of.
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    > The entire point of this license is to prevent forks of software. If that was the case, it would be a different license. The point of the license is to enable forks, but with some restrictions. There are many (once) Open Source software projects where the rights holder at one point made decisions that required a full community (or even commercial fork). The license does not want to take that opportunity away. From MySQL to MariaDB, from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, many projects no longer live under the original leadership. There are also other cases such as Xapian which are stuck under a GPL license that prevented adoption, but the rights holder (I believe it was Orange) had no interest in the project but also no desire to relicense under something that would permit commercialization. The point of the license is ensure that the commercial entity (us) that is funding the project, can do so without taking away the long term viability of the project even beyond the hypothetical future non-existence of that entity.
    - James_K 3y ago
      I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs*, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. Had this license not been used there would be nothing preventing me from forking the software. My interpretation of this license is that it's effectively saying: "you can't do anything with this while we're working on it". Which is fair enough and has its benefits, but it's not open source as much as it is a promise to become open source if the licencor ever loses interest. All those examples you cited weren't using this licence, and probably would have had a much harder job creating their forks if this license was used. Xapian specifically highlights a flaw in your logic. The creators of Xapian wouldn't have used this license because they don't want to re-licence their software. The only people that would use this license are ones who were already willing to re-license their software. The existence of this license doesn't actually solve the problem because you can't force people to use this license any more than you could force them to use an open license. *edit: it's worth pointing out that this really does basically kill any chance of a fork. Normally you could start a fork with a single dev and then grow it naturally, but with this license you need a team the size of the official team to put in two years of work, and to keep doing that in perpetuity.
antipurist 3y ago
Your comment, and this line in particular: > A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract. finally gave me an answer to the question that bothered me for a while: how do we reconcile the goal of making FOSS available for everyone to run/tinker with/distribute freely with the issue of corporations leeching off community-created FOSS? Now the solution is clear to me: less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts. Instead of writing some code and throwing it to the MIT-license winds with little hope to gain anything in return it should be possible to create software cooperatives, i.e. real legal entities, with a simple premise: the code is free for non-commercial use; any person whose contribution was accepted is free to join the cooperative; any company that wants to use software stewarded by the cooperative has to pay for it, with said payment being shared among the members and/or saved for later. That would be an overkill for a tiny personal weekend FOSS project, but for serious products the overhead of formalizing the community would likely be totally worth it. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to come up with such an idea, I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  That's a non-commercial licence, which is not FOSS.
- MaxBarraclough 3y ago
  This is contradictory. > less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts This gives the impression you support sticking to truly Free and Open Source software licences. > the code is free for non-commercial use A licence that explicitly forbids commercial use in this way is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence, by definition. > I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice The Business Source Licence (aka BSL, or sometimes BUSL for some reason) pretty much does this. [0] It is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence. (They're pretty upfront about this, which is good.) [0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#osl https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#osl
  - 3y ago
financltravsty 3y ago
> Richard For the entire first paragraph, I had no idea who you were referring to; then I realized you were talking about Stallman! The Richard I was imagining in my head was more Hendrix, not the various oddities and eccentricis of Stallman.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

> What's concerning, though, is that it's completely unclear that the author understands why this license makes sense, so it's liable to be misused. It feels more accidentally-stumbled-upon. The author of the post (me) was part of the group at Sentry that created that license. I can’t dispel your interpretation that my writing is “confused” but I can assure you that a lot of thought went into the license. That blog post is not a “here are all the reasons for the license” but it narrows down on a very specific aspect of it. You can read the original announcement post for more context and you can also listen to a panel discussion about it with me, Chad from Sentry and Heather Meeker who helped us draft it: https://www.youtube.com/live/UB9fo7pnDzY?si=0HVI6FsR42Pn5yP2 https://www.youtube.com/live/UB9fo7pnDzY?si=0HVI6FsR42Pn5yP2

James_K 3y ago
For what it's worth, your writing is confused. For instance: > There cannot be a limbo where the rights holder prevents the flourishing of a fork out of lack of interest or fear. The entire point of this license is to prevent forks of software. It makes it especially easy to do so by simply pushing small incompatible changes on a two-year schedule. But the really strange part about this is that it assumes a developer that is scared of allowing their work to be forked would decide to use a license that forces them to allow their work to be forked. They simply wouldn't. That's the exact thing they were scared of.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > The entire point of this license is to prevent forks of software. If that was the case, it would be a different license. The point of the license is to enable forks, but with some restrictions. There are many (once) Open Source software projects where the rights holder at one point made decisions that required a full community (or even commercial fork). The license does not want to take that opportunity away. From MySQL to MariaDB, from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, many projects no longer live under the original leadership. There are also other cases such as Xapian which are stuck under a GPL license that prevented adoption, but the rights holder (I believe it was Orange) had no interest in the project but also no desire to relicense under something that would permit commercialization. The point of the license is ensure that the commercial entity (us) that is funding the project, can do so without taking away the long term viability of the project even beyond the hypothetical future non-existence of that entity.
  - James_K 3y ago
    I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs*, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. Had this license not been used there would be nothing preventing me from forking the software. My interpretation of this license is that it's effectively saying: "you can't do anything with this while we're working on it". Which is fair enough and has its benefits, but it's not open source as much as it is a promise to become open source if the licencor ever loses interest. All those examples you cited weren't using this licence, and probably would have had a much harder job creating their forks if this license was used. Xapian specifically highlights a flaw in your logic. The creators of Xapian wouldn't have used this license because they don't want to re-licence their software. The only people that would use this license are ones who were already willing to re-license their software. The existence of this license doesn't actually solve the problem because you can't force people to use this license any more than you could force them to use an open license. *edit: it's worth pointing out that this really does basically kill any chance of a fork. Normally you could start a fork with a single dev and then grow it naturally, but with this license you need a team the size of the official team to put in two years of work, and to keep doing that in perpetuity.

antipurist 3y ago

Your comment, and this line in particular: > A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract. finally gave me an answer to the question that bothered me for a while: how do we reconcile the goal of making FOSS available for everyone to run/tinker with/distribute freely with the issue of corporations leeching off community-created FOSS? Now the solution is clear to me: less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts. Instead of writing some code and throwing it to the MIT-license winds with little hope to gain anything in return it should be possible to create software cooperatives, i.e. real legal entities, with a simple premise: the code is free for non-commercial use; any person whose contribution was accepted is free to join the cooperative; any company that wants to use software stewarded by the cooperative has to pay for it, with said payment being shared among the members and/or saved for later. That would be an overkill for a tiny personal weekend FOSS project, but for serious products the overhead of formalizing the community would likely be totally worth it. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to come up with such an idea, I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice.

Symbiote 3y ago
That's a non-commercial licence, which is not FOSS.
MaxBarraclough 3y ago
This is contradictory. > less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts This gives the impression you support sticking to truly Free and Open Source software licences. > the code is free for non-commercial use A licence that explicitly forbids commercial use in this way is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence, by definition. > I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice The Business Source Licence (aka BSL, or sometimes BUSL for some reason) pretty much does this. [0] It is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence. (They're pretty upfront about this, which is good.) [0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#osl https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#osl
- 3y ago

financltravsty 3y ago

> Richard For the entire first paragraph, I had no idea who you were referring to; then I realized you were talking about Stallman! The Richard I was imagining in my head was more Hendrix, not the various oddities and eccentricis of Stallman.