5 ms·

Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in

by klabb3 3y ago

Why don’t we try to fix the “cannot be used for bezos yacht”-licenses instead of shunning the numerous companies of especially databases who want to do good in a meaningful way? Source available is good, better than proprietary which is what we get with aws, but still not enough. People are legitimately afraid of rug pulls, like sneaking in essential features into paid offerings. I think a lot of the skepticism comes from those unknowns. Afaik the non-discriminatory use is the only ideological hard line. I guess people can debate that forever, like with GPL and copyleft and such. But my edgy take is that most people don’t really care about deep ideology yet want something that promotes a healthy hacker- and small-business friendly open source ecosystem. Ideally, a simple, well-understood license that restricts “re-selling your product” and not much more, that you can slap on a project without a legal team, just like with the MIT license.

wmf 3y ago
A bunch of people are working on this from different angles. It's in a chaotic phase right now but it will probably consolidate later.
llm_trw 3y ago
The best idea I've come up with is a license which only grants the rights to a natural person to use the software otherwise it is identical to the MIT, GPL or AGPL, whatever your cup of tea is. If you're a corporation then you need to buy a license.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  This could be an interesting idea, but how would this constrain incorporating the licensed software in a larger piece of software? Either as a library, or a component like a Docker image? Would it be "viral" in the sense that, if I want to publish software that internally uses a Docker container running software with such a license, my own software can be used only by natural persons?
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    Yes, you will have to publish under a license with the same clauses. Not because you are distributing it, but because only natural persons can run the software.
- aragilar 3y ago
  There exist shared-source licences which do this (https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/ is almost what you describe, but it's the one I can recall of the top of my head), but you can't (by definition) have a open source license like this.
- bawolff 3y ago
  This is not a new idea... i mean its so old it was called out as being "not free" back in the 80s by the gnu project.
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    The GNU project has failed at getting source code to users so badly that despite owning a half dozen GPL based devises I have no access to the source code of any of them. At this point listening to them is at best pointless and at worst actively harmful. This is what happens when the last time you worked at a real job was some time in the 1980s.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      Have you tried? Did you write a letter to the vendor asking fot source code? Did they refuse?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  Certainly not a new idea. As recently as early 1990s I licensed shareware that had terms requiring corporations to pay for a license with different fees and/or restrictions as those for individual, non-commercial users. Somehow this ideal was lost. Today, software authors seems allegiant to so-called "tech" companies, not to individual, non-commercial end users. As a non-commercial end user, I would prefer to use versions of open source software that are _not_ receiving contributions from so-called "tech" companies. But I never see software licenses that say, in so many words, "If you are Amazon, Google, etc., then you need to contact the author for a commercial license." I used to think back in the 1990s that open source software was aimed at least in part at giving individuals an option to use software outside the control or influence of large corporations. This type of software does not feel as if it has the same goal today. It feels like it is literally _made for_ those large companies, not individual, non-commercial end users. Software authors seem delighted to engage with the companies, but generally prefer to avoid engagement with non-commercial end users.
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    No, a non-commercial license is not a natural born person only license. If you're a human you get to use the GPL to your hearts content. If you're a corporation you do not. It's not a hard concept to understand, but it does mean people can't steal from the commons so they spend a lot of time trying to not understand it.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
      I would have to look at the terms to understand. Your comment just reminded me of those sharware-era non-commercial licenses. That's all. Did not intend to suggest the license you mentioned is similar or the same in any other respect than having different license terms for commercial entities versus other users.
dehrmann 3y ago
> re-selling your product” and not much more That's not what AWS is doing. AWS is selling management services. The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says this is a significant value add.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  And that's also how DB companies try to monetize. So a hyperscaler offering this directly really undermines your entire business. In the past you could offer a Enterprise version with support, but with the move to the cloud that market is shrinking and Amazon is eating the new market themselves
  - thayne 3y ago
    Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it). If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure, which means higher network latency, and network costs to get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have hosting options that run inside all the major cloud providers, in any regions your customers use, which means you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much more difficult for you to build integration with the cloud's IAM or other services. Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service that is part of the cloud platform than from another provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I don't know how to get there. As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud companies.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
I think you'll find that the vast vast majority of us don't care about the whole "cannot be used for bezos yacht" problem when we contribute to free software. I contribute with no expectation of monitory gain and absolutely zero desire for some random foundation or company that's part or almost always created later to make any money. If some contributors want to make money become consultants the "amazon problem" isn't a real one. I love when Amazon or Google or whoever starts working with a project I'm touching it means it will normally get high quality contributions.
- Temporary_31337 3y ago
  How do you make money?
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    I work a normal job.... Open source is a couple of hours a week at most. It's a hobby for me some months I do nothing other I crush bugs like it was my job.
    - ajmurmann 3y ago
      The problem is that big OSS database projects have teams of paid developers working on them and they want to make their money back. You can do this by offering paid support or a hosted offering. Having someone like Amazon take your product and build their own hosted version really cuts into that revenue. Now, Redis was AFAIK pretty much just written by antirez and maybe it could have stayed that way, but even exceptional individuals clearly want to move on eventually and you'll likely need a team of maintainers. Distributed data products are complex and need people who contribute more than nights and weekends.
      - vasco 3y ago
        The best open source software is developed by unpaid people. Even the ones with companies around them, the best work is done in the first phase when everyone is still unpaid. The "cuts into their revenues" part usually mostly affects their ability to keep developing the non open source parts anyway, their SaaS dashboard, their billing, etc. Take redis, you could never change it again and it's fine. There's no need to support anyone, it's complete software that stands on its own.
jumploops 3y ago
I believe this is the goal of https://faircode.io https://faircode.io ?
aragilar 3y ago
Define "fix". By definition you cannot have an open source licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht". Either you accept that, and don't rely on exclusivity for income (which really what the whole relicensing thing is about), or you don't open source your code (and accept that not being open source is a problem for some people). Open source + exclusivity for income is an unstable state, and really only works if no-one else competes with you (e.g. a specific niche), or you have some other means to enforce it (e.g. Red Hat limiting access to source to its customers, and not renewing contracts if they share the code).
- klabb3 3y ago
  > Define "fix". It’s early. Everyone is confused. If I could define it, I would have provided a defintion. At this stage, it’s about acquiring requirements and looking at prior art. And being humble about the solution space. No? If you don’t think there’s any problem today, then argue that point. > By definition you cannot have an open source licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht". By definition by what definition? There are already disagreements about what open source is, long before these business models. The problem solving comes first, and then there may or not be a debate whether about whether the solution fits better into an existing definition or a new one. > Either you accept that […] or you don't open source your code But why? Is this an intrinsic duality or an anccidental/historical one? Or is it about preventing scope creep of the open source term? The latter is easy to solve - don’t call it open source. Or at least defer the debate.
  - pabs3 3y ago
    > By definition by what definition? By the "Open Source Definition": https://opensource.org/osd/ https://opensource.org/osd/
    - klabb3 3y ago
      Right. It’s a public benefit org based in CA. I very much appreciate what they do, but I don’t think they own or should own the term. In either case, it’s a moot point because it’s just a term definition. The important thing is to find a good model that promotes the same or very similar benefits we get from traditional OSS but in an evolving world.
lolinder 3y ago
> that you can slap on a project without a legal team The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams. If you're writing a hobby project you probably shouldn't waste time worrying about feeding the AWS machine, because the odds that you'll get noticed and used are tiny. Just pick GPL or MIT and be done with it. If you're participating in a large decentralized project like Postgres, then having a big player like Amazon providing managed hosting is actually a huge plus because you get lots of contributions from the big players [0]. There's very little downside for a project like this, and lots of upside. The only type of FOSS project that needs an "AWS can't use this" license is a project that is driven by a single for-profit company which decided to make their business model "provide a managed solution layered on top of AWS". Unsurprisingly, it's hard to compete with AWS on price when you're using AWS itself as your vendor, so these companies tend to be the ones that switch licenses to tell AWS they're not allowed to compete. These companies almost certainly have their own legal counsel and they represent a tiny minority of FOSS projects, so it's not obvious to me that we need a new standardized anti-AWS license. Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business model and try something different next time. [0] https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
- meowface 3y ago
  People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation. This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me. You're right that it's probably not a great business model most of the time, but what is a good business model to collect some of the value you've produced from dedicating years of your life to something loved by millions of people? It's certainly less sketchy than monetizing a free service with ads, or something.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me. Yes, monetizing with a proprietary license, whether source available or not, doesn't seem unethical to most people outside of Free Software ideologues. “The licensing model isn't unethical but competing ones are” isn’t why open source licenses became popular over proprietary (including source available) licenses, the fact that they commoditized the underlying software, enabled competing orojects evolved from the same codebase on essentially equal terms (which also allowed a competing project to fully replace the original if the original at some point failed the community) and, as hosted offerings became more common, the zero licensing friction for hosted solutions, that's what did it. It does mean charging monopoly rents for a hosted service isn't a viable way to recover development costs and pay returns to VCs, but until fairly recently, no one was trying to do VC-backed startups around single open-source products with that as their whole business plan, and the arguments as to why that would be a bad idea were well developed by the mid-1990s
diego_sandoval 3y ago
There's many things that I don't like about how open source works, but non-discriminatory licensing is not one of them. In fact, the concept of the four freedoms as necessary parts of a more fundamental freedom is one of the things that I value the most about the free software/open source world. In hindsight, I think that the probability that things turned out the way they did in this regard was relatively low, but the ideological drive of GNU and RMS made the world see the problem from a philosophical perspective rather than a practical one (even among people that don't fully agree with RMS/GNU/FSF).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thayne 3y ago
I'm much more sympathetic to a company that starts out with this kind of license than one who changes the license after accepting contributions under a more permissive license, which is basically a bait and switch on those developers. It's even worse when the company previously promised not to do such a thing, as is the case with redis. And this is especially bad because the company that is now called Redis didn't even create the database, they took over an existing project.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Source available is good, better than proprietary “Source available” is a subcategory of proprietary, not “better than proprietary”. > But my edgy take is that most people don’t really care about deep ideology I think most people that orefer open source to proprietary software either care about the business benefits open-source provides over proprietary (including source-available) software or have an ideological affinity for Free Software, occasionally both.
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
The reason these licenses "can't" be fixed is because the OSI approves open source licenses and Amazon is their second biggest corporate sponsor. If they approved SSPL they'd probably have to lay off a staff member or two.
rnts08 3y ago
So you're suggesting the game engine model, you're free to use this software for whatever until you make $x from it? Unity was like that before they screwed it up, I have heard of other systems as well but not sure since it's not my cup of tea.
noirscape 3y ago
The problem is that in the minds of FOSS people, you might as well try to argue that you want more proprietary software. The "major platform hijacks our code for the web" is a valid concern, but the FOSS people have always kinda gone "well fuck you for having these concerns". That's... I guess fine enough when the majority of FOSS wasn't part of a SaaS stack, but now that the majority of big name libraries and tools are, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the OSD is just too lacking for those concerns. To be clear, this isn't a defense of SSPL or similar anti-Bezos licenses (the best one I've seen is the BSL, which transforms into a traditional OSS license after X years if you want my opinion), moreso an observation that there's a clear need here that can't be met by OSD. Paying developers on top of the FOSS model is hard; doing support favors entrenched suppliers because of the CYA problem (this is why AWS has the advantage they do) and I'm pretty sure that even if you do the support model, it usually just doesn't pan out. The main reason 90% of these licenses suck is far moreso because lawyers will draft contracts and licenses in such a way for you that they'll always give you the advantage. The SSPL being borderline impossible to comply with is by design for example.

by klabb3 3y ago

wmf 3y ago

A bunch of people are working on this from different angles. It's in a chaotic phase right now but it will probably consolidate later.

llm_trw 3y ago

The best idea I've come up with is a license which only grants the rights to a natural person to use the software otherwise it is identical to the MIT, GPL or AGPL, whatever your cup of tea is. If you're a corporation then you need to buy a license.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
This could be an interesting idea, but how would this constrain incorporating the licensed software in a larger piece of software? Either as a library, or a component like a Docker image? Would it be "viral" in the sense that, if I want to publish software that internally uses a Docker container running software with such a license, my own software can be used only by natural persons?
- llm_trw 3y ago
  Yes, you will have to publish under a license with the same clauses. Not because you are distributing it, but because only natural persons can run the software.
aragilar 3y ago
There exist shared-source licences which do this (https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/ is almost what you describe, but it's the one I can recall of the top of my head), but you can't (by definition) have a open source license like this.
bawolff 3y ago
This is not a new idea... i mean its so old it was called out as being "not free" back in the 80s by the gnu project.
- llm_trw 3y ago
  The GNU project has failed at getting source code to users so badly that despite owning a half dozen GPL based devises I have no access to the source code of any of them. At this point listening to them is at best pointless and at worst actively harmful. This is what happens when the last time you worked at a real job was some time in the 1980s.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Have you tried? Did you write a letter to the vendor asking fot source code? Did they refuse?
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Certainly not a new idea. As recently as early 1990s I licensed shareware that had terms requiring corporations to pay for a license with different fees and/or restrictions as those for individual, non-commercial users. Somehow this ideal was lost. Today, software authors seems allegiant to so-called "tech" companies, not to individual, non-commercial end users. As a non-commercial end user, I would prefer to use versions of open source software that are _not_ receiving contributions from so-called "tech" companies. But I never see software licenses that say, in so many words, "If you are Amazon, Google, etc., then you need to contact the author for a commercial license." I used to think back in the 1990s that open source software was aimed at least in part at giving individuals an option to use software outside the control or influence of large corporations. This type of software does not feel as if it has the same goal today. It feels like it is literally _made for_ those large companies, not individual, non-commercial end users. Software authors seem delighted to engage with the companies, but generally prefer to avoid engagement with non-commercial end users.
- llm_trw 3y ago
  No, a non-commercial license is not a natural born person only license. If you're a human you get to use the GPL to your hearts content. If you're a corporation you do not. It's not a hard concept to understand, but it does mean people can't steal from the commons so they spend a lot of time trying to not understand it.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    I would have to look at the terms to understand. Your comment just reminded me of those sharware-era non-commercial licenses. That's all. Did not intend to suggest the license you mentioned is similar or the same in any other respect than having different license terms for commercial entities versus other users.

dehrmann 3y ago

> re-selling your product” and not much more That's not what AWS is doing. AWS is selling management services. The fact that managed DBs are as popular as they are says this is a significant value add.

ajmurmann 3y ago
And that's also how DB companies try to monetize. So a hyperscaler offering this directly really undermines your entire business. In the past you could offer a Enterprise version with support, but with the move to the cloud that market is shrinking and Amazon is eating the new market themselves
- thayne 3y ago
  Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it). If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure, which means higher network latency, and network costs to get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have hosting options that run inside all the major cloud providers, in any regions your customers use, which means you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much more difficult for you to build integration with the cloud's IAM or other services. Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service that is part of the cloud platform than from another provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I don't know how to get there. As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud companies.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

I think you'll find that the vast vast majority of us don't care about the whole "cannot be used for bezos yacht" problem when we contribute to free software. I contribute with no expectation of monitory gain and absolutely zero desire for some random foundation or company that's part or almost always created later to make any money. If some contributors want to make money become consultants the "amazon problem" isn't a real one. I love when Amazon or Google or whoever starts working with a project I'm touching it means it will normally get high quality contributions.

Temporary_31337 3y ago
How do you make money?
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  I work a normal job.... Open source is a couple of hours a week at most. It's a hobby for me some months I do nothing other I crush bugs like it was my job.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    The problem is that big OSS database projects have teams of paid developers working on them and they want to make their money back. You can do this by offering paid support or a hosted offering. Having someone like Amazon take your product and build their own hosted version really cuts into that revenue. Now, Redis was AFAIK pretty much just written by antirez and maybe it could have stayed that way, but even exceptional individuals clearly want to move on eventually and you'll likely need a team of maintainers. Distributed data products are complex and need people who contribute more than nights and weekends.
    - vasco 3y ago
      The best open source software is developed by unpaid people. Even the ones with companies around them, the best work is done in the first phase when everyone is still unpaid. The "cuts into their revenues" part usually mostly affects their ability to keep developing the non open source parts anyway, their SaaS dashboard, their billing, etc. Take redis, you could never change it again and it's fine. There's no need to support anyone, it's complete software that stands on its own.

jumploops 3y ago

I believe this is the goal of https://faircode.io https://faircode.io ?

aragilar 3y ago

Define "fix". By definition you cannot have an open source licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht". Either you accept that, and don't rely on exclusivity for income (which really what the whole relicensing thing is about), or you don't open source your code (and accept that not being open source is a problem for some people). Open source + exclusivity for income is an unstable state, and really only works if no-one else competes with you (e.g. a specific niche), or you have some other means to enforce it (e.g. Red Hat limiting access to source to its customers, and not renewing contracts if they share the code).

klabb3 3y ago
> Define "fix". It’s early. Everyone is confused. If I could define it, I would have provided a defintion. At this stage, it’s about acquiring requirements and looking at prior art. And being humble about the solution space. No? If you don’t think there’s any problem today, then argue that point. > By definition you cannot have an open source licence which says "cannot be used for bezos yacht". By definition by what definition? There are already disagreements about what open source is, long before these business models. The problem solving comes first, and then there may or not be a debate whether about whether the solution fits better into an existing definition or a new one. > Either you accept that […] or you don't open source your code But why? Is this an intrinsic duality or an anccidental/historical one? Or is it about preventing scope creep of the open source term? The latter is easy to solve - don’t call it open source. Or at least defer the debate.
- pabs3 3y ago
  > By definition by what definition? By the "Open Source Definition": https://opensource.org/osd/ https://opensource.org/osd/
  - klabb3 3y ago
    Right. It’s a public benefit org based in CA. I very much appreciate what they do, but I don’t think they own or should own the term. In either case, it’s a moot point because it’s just a term definition. The important thing is to find a good model that promotes the same or very similar benefits we get from traditional OSS but in an evolving world.

lolinder 3y ago

> that you can slap on a project without a legal team The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams. If you're writing a hobby project you probably shouldn't waste time worrying about feeding the AWS machine, because the odds that you'll get noticed and used are tiny. Just pick GPL or MIT and be done with it. If you're participating in a large decentralized project like Postgres, then having a big player like Amazon providing managed hosting is actually a huge plus because you get lots of contributions from the big players [0]. There's very little downside for a project like this, and lots of upside. The only type of FOSS project that needs an "AWS can't use this" license is a project that is driven by a single for-profit company which decided to make their business model "provide a managed solution layered on top of AWS". Unsurprisingly, it's hard to compete with AWS on price when you're using AWS itself as your vendor, so these companies tend to be the ones that switch licenses to tell AWS they're not allowed to compete. These companies almost certainly have their own legal counsel and they represent a tiny minority of FOSS projects, so it's not obvious to me that we need a new standardized anti-AWS license. Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business model and try something different next time. [0] https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

meowface 3y ago
People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation. This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me. You're right that it's probably not a great business model most of the time, but what is a good business model to collect some of the value you've produced from dedicating years of your life to something loved by millions of people? It's certainly less sketchy than monetizing a free service with ads, or something.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me. Yes, monetizing with a proprietary license, whether source available or not, doesn't seem unethical to most people outside of Free Software ideologues. “The licensing model isn't unethical but competing ones are” isn’t why open source licenses became popular over proprietary (including source available) licenses, the fact that they commoditized the underlying software, enabled competing orojects evolved from the same codebase on essentially equal terms (which also allowed a competing project to fully replace the original if the original at some point failed the community) and, as hosted offerings became more common, the zero licensing friction for hosted solutions, that's what did it. It does mean charging monopoly rents for a hosted service isn't a viable way to recover development costs and pay returns to VCs, but until fairly recently, no one was trying to do VC-backed startups around single open-source products with that as their whole business plan, and the arguments as to why that would be a bad idea were well developed by the mid-1990s

diego_sandoval 3y ago

There's many things that I don't like about how open source works, but non-discriminatory licensing is not one of them. In fact, the concept of the four freedoms as necessary parts of a more fundamental freedom is one of the things that I value the most about the free software/open source world. In hindsight, I think that the probability that things turned out the way they did in this regard was relatively low, but the ideological drive of GNU and RMS made the world see the problem from a philosophical perspective rather than a practical one (even among people that don't fully agree with RMS/GNU/FSF).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thayne 3y ago

I'm much more sympathetic to a company that starts out with this kind of license than one who changes the license after accepting contributions under a more permissive license, which is basically a bait and switch on those developers. It's even worse when the company previously promised not to do such a thing, as is the case with redis. And this is especially bad because the company that is now called Redis didn't even create the database, they took over an existing project.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Source available is good, better than proprietary “Source available” is a subcategory of proprietary, not “better than proprietary”. > But my edgy take is that most people don’t really care about deep ideology I think most people that orefer open source to proprietary software either care about the business benefits open-source provides over proprietary (including source-available) software or have an ideological affinity for Free Software, occasionally both.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago

The reason these licenses "can't" be fixed is because the OSI approves open source licenses and Amazon is their second biggest corporate sponsor. If they approved SSPL they'd probably have to lay off a staff member or two.

rnts08 3y ago

So you're suggesting the game engine model, you're free to use this software for whatever until you make $x from it? Unity was like that before they screwed it up, I have heard of other systems as well but not sure since it's not my cup of tea.

noirscape 3y ago

The problem is that in the minds of FOSS people, you might as well try to argue that you want more proprietary software. The "major platform hijacks our code for the web" is a valid concern, but the FOSS people have always kinda gone "well fuck you for having these concerns". That's... I guess fine enough when the majority of FOSS wasn't part of a SaaS stack, but now that the majority of big name libraries and tools are, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the OSD is just too lacking for those concerns. To be clear, this isn't a defense of SSPL or similar anti-Bezos licenses (the best one I've seen is the BSL, which transforms into a traditional OSS license after X years if you want my opinion), moreso an observation that there's a clear need here that can't be met by OSD. Paying developers on top of the FOSS model is hard; doing support favors entrenched suppliers because of the CYA problem (this is why AWS has the advantage they do) and I'm pretty sure that even if you do the support model, it usually just doesn't pan out. The main reason 90% of these licenses suck is far moreso because lawyers will draft contracts and licenses in such a way for you that they'll always give you the advantage. The SSPL being borderline impossible to comply with is by design for example.