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Open Source is, by and large, intended by the creator to donate their ideas to benefit humanity as a whole; many people feel that using their thing to help stre

by hcrean 2y ago

Open Source is, by and large, intended by the creator to donate their ideas to benefit humanity as a whole; many people feel that using their thing to help strengthen an (ethically questionable) monopoly is acting against that core goal.

ethbr1 2y ago
I think it's less about strengthening a monopoly and more about zero sum business models. If AWS/Azure/GCP/et al. ran a cloud version of X and the main company supporting the open source project was a going concern, I doubt many would have a problem with the entire scheme. However, in reality, every enterprise support dollar that goes through a third party cloud-managed offering is one that doesn't go to the first party. In which case, what dollars are left to pay the independent company that creates and supports the software? Granted, there are a lot of nuances to the above, but I think it's generally fair to say that third-party cloud companies are making more off managed open source offerings than they're paying to contribute to them.
OkayPhysicist 2y ago
This is why the most viral AGPL license you can find is the only right license for Open Source. There is no downside: for honest, upstanding developers who want to use your code, there's no problem, because their code was going to be Open Source, too. For the soulless corporations, they'll either not use your code, or contribute back their modifications, a win-win for everyone. The only losers are people who are engaging with the Open Source community in bad faith, viewing it as something to steal from, rather than participate in.
- pas 2y ago
  is there a stronger version of AGPL where if you run it as a SaaS you need to publish the source for the infra/management/self-service/payments machinery too?
toast0 2y ago
When I fix a bug in OpenSSL, it benefits humanity regardless of who deploys it. Maybe slightly less beneficial if it fixes an evil service, but still... Better to have a successful TLS handshake and get on with the evil. I don't think anything else open source I've done has been widely deployed, but if I save a bit of someone's time because they can use something I did, or save some users' cpu and bandwidth, it doesn't matter to me if that's a user of a free service or a propriatary one, I still helped their user.
vinyl7 2y ago
I don't think this is entirely true. I think a non-insignificant portions of OSS is OSS because they want people to help build the project (for free)

by hcrean 2y ago

ethbr1 2y ago

I think it's less about strengthening a monopoly and more about zero sum business models. If AWS/Azure/GCP/et al. ran a cloud version of X and the main company supporting the open source project was a going concern, I doubt many would have a problem with the entire scheme. However, in reality, every enterprise support dollar that goes through a third party cloud-managed offering is one that doesn't go to the first party. In which case, what dollars are left to pay the independent company that creates and supports the software? Granted, there are a lot of nuances to the above, but I think it's generally fair to say that third-party cloud companies are making more off managed open source offerings than they're paying to contribute to them.

OkayPhysicist 2y ago

This is why the most viral AGPL license you can find is the only right license for Open Source. There is no downside: for honest, upstanding developers who want to use your code, there's no problem, because their code was going to be Open Source, too. For the soulless corporations, they'll either not use your code, or contribute back their modifications, a win-win for everyone. The only losers are people who are engaging with the Open Source community in bad faith, viewing it as something to steal from, rather than participate in.

pas 2y ago
is there a stronger version of AGPL where if you run it as a SaaS you need to publish the source for the infra/management/self-service/payments machinery too?

toast0 2y ago

When I fix a bug in OpenSSL, it benefits humanity regardless of who deploys it. Maybe slightly less beneficial if it fixes an evil service, but still... Better to have a successful TLS handshake and get on with the evil. I don't think anything else open source I've done has been widely deployed, but if I save a bit of someone's time because they can use something I did, or save some users' cpu and bandwidth, it doesn't matter to me if that's a user of a free service or a propriatary one, I still helped their user.

vinyl7 2y ago

I don't think this is entirely true. I think a non-insignificant portions of OSS is OSS because they want people to help build the project (for free)