7 ms·

Single vendor is the new proprietary

141 points by yarapavan 3y ago

Pannoniae 3y ago
The author completely neglects the "non-open-source/open collaboration" quadrant as if it didn't exist. Best examples are games with easily accessible modding communities. While development is centralised and you definitely don't have any kind of open source licence, collaboration is generally open in terms of releasing mods to the game. They also bash the Commons Clause purely using the definition (zero mention on why they think the restrictions are bad, it's just handled with "not OSI" and that's it) Of course this position can be understood better when you look at who are sponsoring this organisation. (in a short way, opensource.net is an OSI front, and OSI is lobbied heavily by the software industry)
- RyanHamilton 3y ago
  OSI isn't the software industry. It's sponsored by Google, amazon then ms via github in order of sponsor donations. It's financed by the hyperscalars. https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors
  - Spivak 3y ago
    This is such a crazy retelling of history that it's hard to take seriously. Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors -- namely Microsoft and Oracle, and to prevent people from imposing their will on users via software in a manner that users had no possible redress from. OSI was founded by Perens and Raymond and very much represents the interests of the wider software industry. You're free to argue that at some point they have stopped in recent but Open Source has meant the same thing for going on 30 years.
    - Retric 3y ago
      OSI is from 1998 so it’s much younger than the open source movement. BSD was approaching 20 and Linux was what 7 years old at that point?
      - Spivak 3y ago
        The free software movement is for sure older than that but I can't find any verifiable source of "open source" being used in its current form earlier than the 90's.
        Retric 3y ago
        The term still predates OSI, but more importantly than the name than what was going on. The specific transition from sharing as public-domain software vs free, open, shared, and permissivly licenced software dates to ~1953 with A-2 being provided for free and requesting updates be sent back to UNIVAC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System Others might point to IBM SHARE from 1955 as being closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) Followed by many similar arrangements before the term open source was coined with OSI only showing up much later.
        outop 3y ago
        No, because it's a name that was made up then to try to rebrand something that had already existed for decades, but which has a name that those guys didn't like.
        doctor_eval 3y ago
        My memory from the time was that the OSI was mostly about trying to characterise the various licenses that were floating around, and about legitimising the use of freeish software in industry. Today the majority of free software that I use seems to be Apache/BSD/MIT - and GPL for Linux - but back in the 90s everyone seemed to make up their own “free” license, and there was a lot of confusion around GPL. My recollection is that OSI was trying to create some clarity around which licenses really were “free”, and which weren’t. I was just a passive observer, I was not involved in any way, I wasn’t a fan of some of the players, and I even thought calling it OSI was pretentious - but nevertheless they made a dent in the universe by popularising the term “open source”. OSI was far more than a rebranding because it enabled us to speak about GPL - which imposes conditions on use - and free licenses like BSD in the same breath, while excluding what we now call “source available” licenses. So despite my misgivings, I think the OSI deserves credit. They stood up and did something meaningful, and helped move the entire software industry forward. Because of this, I think calling it a rebranding is totally unjustified and unfair.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Bloomberg, Capital One, Cisco, Intel, Meta and Red Hat all are sponsoring at the same level as GitHub. FerretDB, Perforce, Tidelift and Salesforce join Microsoft at the next level down. That's a much more diverse crowd of sponsors than I thought I'd see based on your comment.
- Macha 3y ago
  Note that it's subscription/service games that often have the most contentious relation with their modding scenes, as they tend to see the mods more as competition. On the other hand, people are generally more willing to develop mods for software sold with perpetual licenses, as the chances of no longer having access to the thing you are supporting is much lower than with e.g. $XXXXX/month cloud services.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    Very good point, not only in live service games... I've seen a thing or two and it's usually obvious how developers treat the modding community. In some games they are viewed as an asset (people mod my game, they make it different, this attracts more people to buy my game) and in other games, modders are the scum who always want to cheat/commit "fraud" by not wanting to buy all the microtransaction slop/etc.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    Even for perpetual license games, if the game has paid DLC the developers often see mods and cheatengine as a threat to their revenues. Capcom is on the record that this is part of why they put DRM and anticheat into their single-player games now, because otherwise you can get items and cosmetics with cheatengine instead of buying them off Steam/PSN/XBL
- Buttons840 3y ago
  Modding games seems like a legal grey area. Permission hasn't been granted, but also, game developers already have your money and they know a lot of players would be unhappy if they tried to stop the modding.
  - tcmart14 3y ago
    I wouldnt be surprised if most game studio didn't enjoy it/try to promote it in maybe indirect ways. Skyrim is an old game, great game, but an old game. However modding keeps it fresh and interesting and I would imagine it probably is a big reason why they still get sales on it. While it isn't a huge money maker any more, they are still selling copies just for people to play with the mods, extending the timeline of how much revenue the game will create over it's total lifetime.
gavinhoward 3y ago
If it is, then Open Source has won, right? And we can disband the OSI, right? I suspect that's not the message they intended to send. (I read the article, btw.) As the author of source available software, this article merely seems to be screeching from big players that they can't exploit some software anymore.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I'm not following; how does an onslaught of fake FOSS mean FOSS has won? If anything it sounds like it needs more defending than ever.
  - havilland 3y ago
    How is fake FOSS different from FOSS ?
    - dartos 3y ago
      Is fake kindness different from real kindness?
  - gavinhoward 3y ago
    It means that the expectation is that the source is open. The default used to be closed source, so in essence, Open Source has won. Personally, I don't see source available as a bad thing. [1] [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-that-bad/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...
  - vinceguidry 3y ago
    Nobody is discussing FOSS here, only OSS. The only solution to capitalistic shenanigans is the software commune, OSS isn't a commune, FOSS is. OSS is, essentially, a software cartel disguised as a philanthropic enterprise. Advocates of OSS want to live in a world where bigcorps and little guys can coexist, this has always been a pipe dream, since day one. FOSS locks the bigcorps out of the discussion, or rather, forces them to compete on the same playing field as the little guy, which amounts to the same thing. So you see these articles come out every now and again bemoaning capitalistic greed. Communist utopia is right there bro. Just open your eyes and stop letting bigcorps eat your lunch every couple of years or so.
bee_rider 3y ago
I somehow still don’t get what single vendor open source code is, even after reading the article. Is it code that is open source but the license says “no forking.” And maybe the license says they are allowed to fork it and chance the license to proprietary? Or is it code that is open source, but nobody has ever bothered to fork it. With the potential spin that sometimes code is just so specific that nobody would bother forking it because it is super tied to some platform or hardware. The former, that just seems like looming proprietary code. The latter, I dunno, can’t blame people for implementing niche projects I guess.
- lmeyerov 3y ago
  I like to think of Open Governance vs Open Source on topics like, if someone adds SSO to the OSS repo, will the main vendor behind it reject the PR because it breaks their OSS core business model
- worldsoup 3y ago
  I think they are basically saying an OS project with a single commercial entity as the maintainer.
  - danenania 3y ago
    If that’s the case, it seems like a very bigcorp-centered perspective. Indie devs and people who aren’t already well-connected don’t have the ability or resources to get consortiums of companies behind their projects or create open source foundations. So I don’t know—maybe it wasn’t intended this way, but it comes across as very gatekeep-y to me. Like telling people that unless they are already established and famous enough to start a project that has tons of backing from the start, that they can’t “really” be opensource (despite a very real opensource license), meaning you as the little guy should either build your project for free with no hope of ever making a living from it, or else be excluded from the broader opensource community.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Take Hashicorp's Terraform as an example. Until recently, the code was completely open source with a permissive license. You could do exactly as you like with it. The 'single vendor' decided that was no longer in their best interests. What's the problem? Now you have 1000's of companies that rely on this software, and if they want to continue to receive security updates, they need to comply with the new license. Of course, people are free to fork projects, and that has been done in the case with terraform, but it's something that a foundation-led project most likely wouldn't do (change the license). There's another flavor of single vendor open source IMO. I call it 'look but don't touch open source.' Modern software projects have become some complex, and the build and dependency systems so customized, you could have the source code available, and be free to modify it, but wholly unable to do so because of the build-time complexity. A foundation-led project would, ostensibly, ensure that the entire lifecycle of the software is approachable by end users (docs, tooling, etc).
daniel-s 3y ago
I read this article and feel no further informed on this topic. Avoid.
worldsoup 3y ago
This article is dramatically simplifying the state of software markets. >Single vendor isn’t a reasonable way to do Open Source and resist evil proprietary software. It’s just another way to do proprietary software. >proprietary software is not evil. It’s just inferior. Based on these statements the author would have you believe there is no value in commercial/proprietary software and we should just never develop it. All software should be open and collaborative. That is obviously silly. While open source software is great, many incredible software innovations and truly valuable software comes from proprietary companies. In fact, these companies are typically the ones that make the large open source ecosystem possible by making massive donations in developer hours as well as cash to orgs like linux foundation. The interesting discussion is in whether commercial software should be closed source or source available with restrictions. The days of building propriety, VC backed infrastructure software with a traditional permissible license are over and likely never coming back.
- coloneltcb 3y ago
  yes it's puzzling how simplistic this framing is. I would expect more from the Vice-Chair of the OSI.
- simoncion 3y ago
  >> proprietary software is not evil. It’s just inferior. > Based on these statements the author would have you believe there is no value in commercial/proprietary software and we should just never develop it. Do you believe that there is no value in inferior products and that they should never be developed? I certainly don't, and it's clear to me that the Carrez does not, either. If I have the option, and can afford to do so, I will select the superior product. But if there is no option, or I cannot afford the superior product, I will accept the inferior one and be better off than if I had no product at all.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  > The interesting discussion is in whether commercial software should be closed source or source available with restrictions. Thank you! The author carefully uses the term "proprietary software", drawing no distinction between whether it is closed source or source available, as if that distinction is totally beside the point. But for me, as someone who makes software, there is a huge distinction between those two things! I really hate using tools that I can't read the source of. Just recently I traced some documentation on how python garbage collection works into the implementation for that particular thing in the particular version of the language that I'm using. If python were a single-vendor source-available tool, that would be a bummer and I'd be less likely to use it, but it wouldn't actually affect my work much. But if it were closed source, that would absolutely be a deal breaker for me. I need to be able to go look and see how my tools work, otherwise I'm blind. I do agree with the author that community-driven open source is better, and I consider projects like the Linux Foundation, BSD, GNU, Apache, CNCF, etc. to be wonderful miraculous gifts. But I also worry that a distressing proportion of the most important software I use has been built on the backs of a series of absurdly under-compensated and eventually burnt-out passionate nerds, and I can't stand that. So I'm sympathetic to a model that has a more obvious (to me) path to creating software tooling that I can use without flying blind, while compensating people adequately for their work.
rglover 3y ago
> You should be on board if you want Open Source to win against proprietary software. But those companies are still doing what is, essentially, proprietary software: like the proprietary software companies of the 80s, they very much consider the software being produced as their exclusive property. They still intend to capture all the value that derives from it. And thanks to copyright aggregation or permissive licensing, they still can change the license any time they want. So it’s still proprietary: they just choose, for now, to release their software under an Open Source license. This brings to mind two questions: why does open source need to "win" (why can't there be multiple options) and re: things being produced as their exclusive property, what is the issue with this? They did the work to make the thing, therefore it's their property (unless they choose to release it otherwise). Sadly, a lot of the arguments I hear around OSS sound like the "you didn't build those roads" argument when they should be "thank you for making your work accessible to me." It's no surprise that most OSS work gets abandoned due to developer burnout when "open source" is often misinterpreted as "100% free for me to do literally anything I want, whenever I want, and you're evil if you disagree with my entitlement to your efforts." The ideology around OSS has serious NPD vibes. It's worth people revisiting Rich Hickey's "Open Source is Not About You" [1]. [1] https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9 https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
- paulgb 3y ago
  The author is not so much against proprietary software, as bait-and-switch tactics that present software as open source. > Anyone who truly thinks that software developed by a diverse set of actors working in an open collaboration is not better should just adopt the proprietary model. But they should be honest about it.
  - tensor 3y ago
    I don’t see how it’s bait and switch. You can still used and develop against the last open version. In fact, we’ve seen recent examples of that in Terraform and Redis. Open source does not mean you are entitled to all future improvements unless the license says you are, like the AGPL. Personally, I’m grateful these project made their source open for so long. The alternative would not be AGPL terraform, it would be completely closed terraform.
transpute 3y ago
FOSDEM 2024 talk by the author, https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2190-single-vendor-is-the-new-proprietary/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2190-sing... > explain the origin and value of the permissionless innovation that we currently all enjoy, and reassert the virtue of software developed in open collaboration, compared to single-vendor software
tedunangst 3y ago
I wonder how one would view late 90s gcc in this light? Single vendor compiler that made everybody so mad they finally forked it and basically restarted with a new team.
jerrac 3y ago
The article itself is rather, hmm... Melodramatic? Not sure that's the right word, but it is close. That said, the overall idea that "open source" projects that are controlled by a single vendor have problems is true. I think that having a for-profit company controlling an open source project is a major conflict of interest. Open source does not always result in profit. Often the opposite. And I think we've seen the results of that with all the different open source projects that have re-licensed into pretend open source licenses. There are ways to run open source projects that support both the open source culture, and allow for for-profit companies to make a profit. But most of those ways mean allowing competition. Which is where the single vendor project conflict of interest becomes apparent. Yeah, big tech will leech off any successful project. Yes, that means less money for the "single vendor". Yes, that is not fair. But I'd say re-licensing is worse than leeching, so... The other side effect of "single vendor" I've run into a lot, is simply that their paid options are always priced for organizations with very deep pockets. So the smaller orgs (and individual developers) that jumped on the bandwagon early because the project was open source (and they actually could jump on the bandwagon), have no chance at supporting the project. And end up have to find something else because the project stops supporting open source.
- jshen 3y ago
  I don't see how it's a conflict of interest. The primary benefit of open source is that you can run and modify it yourself if you need to. This benefit is still there if there is a single vendor behind the project. The risk of a single vendor project is that it's less likely to be supported in the long run. This isn't a conflict of interest though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
phoe-krk 3y ago
> On one axis, the license used is either Open Source (as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which I would summarize as coming with all freedoms necessary to enable the permissionless innovation I mentioned earlier) or it’s not. On the other axis is the development model: it’s either developed as a commons, by a community working in open collaboration, or it’s developed (and ultimately owned) by a single entity. Is SQLite "the new proprietary"? It seems to fit the description perfectly: very permissive license, very closed development process.
- ec109685 3y ago
  That’s why the fork that is more open for contributions is gaining momentum: https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql
  - oefrha 3y ago
    You mean the "single vendor" fork from Turso, the VC funded startup [1]? Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick with D. Richard Hipp. [1] https://turso.tech/investors https://turso.tech/investors
goodpoint 3y ago
And this is why we need copyleft.
Centigonal 3y ago
Single-vendor is not proprietary because I can fork VSCode and I can't fork Microsoft Word. Single-vendor open source is the balance some companies have found between sharing their software with the community and capturing the value of their employees' labor. It's less free than openly developed FOSS and more free than proprietary software. It's unrealistic to expect all software to be openly developed FOSS with today's economics; the hundreds of thousands of contributors to single-vendor open source projects all need rent money, and you can't build a business on providing the open-source backend for AWS managed services. Companies will move up and down the freedom gradient depending on their needs at any given time. Sometimes they do it well, and sometimes they handle it in a kludgy and myopic way (I'm looking at you, HashiCorp). LinkedIn open-sourced Kafka, and Elastic restricted their license for ElasticSearch. Software doesn't always go from "more free" to "less free."
- devdao 3y ago
  You can't forkvscode...
  - SpecialistK 3y ago
    https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/forks https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/forks 27,000 people seem to have done so.
    - amarshall 3y ago
      That repo is not actually VS Code. What you get when you download compiled VS Code releases includes proprietary, closed-source components. If you build “VS Code” from OSS components, you do not end up with VS Code.
      - QuantumG 3y ago
        Chromium is still useful but it's not Chrome.
      - circuit10 3y ago
hn_acker 3y ago
For what it's worth, speaking in terms of free software rather than open source (since the author of the featured article might be receptive to the moral ideals of free software rather than merely the business-pragmatic ideals of open source): if the vendor lets you download the source code of free software already in your possession without an excessive burden (one valid option being letting you download a zip/tar.gz of the entire necessary codebase; one invalid option being forcing you to copy files one at a time) then the software is free software regardless of whether the vendor accepts any third-party contributions.
bandrami 3y ago
My quaint dinosaur view is that all of the single-vendor stuff I can think of is aimed at data farming at a scale that is itself presumptively evil. The need to do what these pieces of software do at the scale they do them is a filter for the kind of organization you get becoming involved with them.

141 points by yarapavan 3y ago

The author completely neglects the "non-open-source/open collaboration" quadrant as if it didn't exist. Best examples are games with easily accessible modding communities. While development is centralised and you definitely don't have any kind of open source licence, collaboration is generally open in terms of releasing mods to the game. They also bash the Commons Clause purely using the definition (zero mention on why they think the restrictions are bad, it's just handled with "not OSI" and that's it) Of course this position can be understood better when you look at who are sponsoring this organisation. (in a short way, opensource.net is an OSI front, and OSI is lobbied heavily by the software industry)

RyanHamilton 3y ago
OSI isn't the software industry. It's sponsored by Google, amazon then ms via github in order of sponsor donations. It's financed by the hyperscalars. https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors
- Spivak 3y ago
  This is such a crazy retelling of history that it's hard to take seriously. Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors -- namely Microsoft and Oracle, and to prevent people from imposing their will on users via software in a manner that users had no possible redress from. OSI was founded by Perens and Raymond and very much represents the interests of the wider software industry. You're free to argue that at some point they have stopped in recent but Open Source has meant the same thing for going on 30 years.
  - Retric 3y ago
    OSI is from 1998 so it’s much younger than the open source movement. BSD was approaching 20 and Linux was what 7 years old at that point?
    - Spivak 3y ago
      The free software movement is for sure older than that but I can't find any verifiable source of "open source" being used in its current form earlier than the 90's.
      - Retric 3y ago
        The term still predates OSI, but more importantly than the name than what was going on. The specific transition from sharing as public-domain software vs free, open, shared, and permissivly licenced software dates to ~1953 with A-2 being provided for free and requesting updates be sent back to UNIVAC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System Others might point to IBM SHARE from 1955 as being closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) Followed by many similar arrangements before the term open source was coined with OSI only showing up much later.
      - outop 3y ago
        No, because it's a name that was made up then to try to rebrand something that had already existed for decades, but which has a name that those guys didn't like.
        doctor_eval 3y ago
        My memory from the time was that the OSI was mostly about trying to characterise the various licenses that were floating around, and about legitimising the use of freeish software in industry. Today the majority of free software that I use seems to be Apache/BSD/MIT - and GPL for Linux - but back in the 90s everyone seemed to make up their own “free” license, and there was a lot of confusion around GPL. My recollection is that OSI was trying to create some clarity around which licenses really were “free”, and which weren’t. I was just a passive observer, I was not involved in any way, I wasn’t a fan of some of the players, and I even thought calling it OSI was pretentious - but nevertheless they made a dent in the universe by popularising the term “open source”. OSI was far more than a rebranding because it enabled us to speak about GPL - which imposes conditions on use - and free licenses like BSD in the same breath, while excluding what we now call “source available” licenses. So despite my misgivings, I think the OSI deserves credit. They stood up and did something meaningful, and helped move the entire software industry forward. Because of this, I think calling it a rebranding is totally unjustified and unfair.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Bloomberg, Capital One, Cisco, Intel, Meta and Red Hat all are sponsoring at the same level as GitHub. FerretDB, Perforce, Tidelift and Salesforce join Microsoft at the next level down. That's a much more diverse crowd of sponsors than I thought I'd see based on your comment.
Macha 3y ago
Note that it's subscription/service games that often have the most contentious relation with their modding scenes, as they tend to see the mods more as competition. On the other hand, people are generally more willing to develop mods for software sold with perpetual licenses, as the chances of no longer having access to the thing you are supporting is much lower than with e.g. $XXXXX/month cloud services.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Very good point, not only in live service games... I've seen a thing or two and it's usually obvious how developers treat the modding community. In some games they are viewed as an asset (people mod my game, they make it different, this attracts more people to buy my game) and in other games, modders are the scum who always want to cheat/commit "fraud" by not wanting to buy all the microtransaction slop/etc.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Even for perpetual license games, if the game has paid DLC the developers often see mods and cheatengine as a threat to their revenues. Capcom is on the record that this is part of why they put DRM and anticheat into their single-player games now, because otherwise you can get items and cosmetics with cheatengine instead of buying them off Steam/PSN/XBL
Buttons840 3y ago
Modding games seems like a legal grey area. Permission hasn't been granted, but also, game developers already have your money and they know a lot of players would be unhappy if they tried to stop the modding.
- tcmart14 3y ago
  I wouldnt be surprised if most game studio didn't enjoy it/try to promote it in maybe indirect ways. Skyrim is an old game, great game, but an old game. However modding keeps it fresh and interesting and I would imagine it probably is a big reason why they still get sales on it. While it isn't a huge money maker any more, they are still selling copies just for people to play with the mods, extending the timeline of how much revenue the game will create over it's total lifetime.

gavinhoward 3y ago

If it is, then Open Source has won, right? And we can disband the OSI, right? I suspect that's not the message they intended to send. (I read the article, btw.) As the author of source available software, this article merely seems to be screeching from big players that they can't exploit some software anymore.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I'm not following; how does an onslaught of fake FOSS mean FOSS has won? If anything it sounds like it needs more defending than ever.
- havilland 3y ago
  How is fake FOSS different from FOSS ?
  - dartos 3y ago
    Is fake kindness different from real kindness?
- gavinhoward 3y ago
  It means that the expectation is that the source is open. The default used to be closed source, so in essence, Open Source has won. Personally, I don't see source available as a bad thing. [1] [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-that-bad/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...
- vinceguidry 3y ago
  Nobody is discussing FOSS here, only OSS. The only solution to capitalistic shenanigans is the software commune, OSS isn't a commune, FOSS is. OSS is, essentially, a software cartel disguised as a philanthropic enterprise. Advocates of OSS want to live in a world where bigcorps and little guys can coexist, this has always been a pipe dream, since day one. FOSS locks the bigcorps out of the discussion, or rather, forces them to compete on the same playing field as the little guy, which amounts to the same thing. So you see these articles come out every now and again bemoaning capitalistic greed. Communist utopia is right there bro. Just open your eyes and stop letting bigcorps eat your lunch every couple of years or so.

bee_rider 3y ago

I somehow still don’t get what single vendor open source code is, even after reading the article. Is it code that is open source but the license says “no forking.” And maybe the license says they are allowed to fork it and chance the license to proprietary? Or is it code that is open source, but nobody has ever bothered to fork it. With the potential spin that sometimes code is just so specific that nobody would bother forking it because it is super tied to some platform or hardware. The former, that just seems like looming proprietary code. The latter, I dunno, can’t blame people for implementing niche projects I guess.

lmeyerov 3y ago
I like to think of Open Governance vs Open Source on topics like, if someone adds SSO to the OSS repo, will the main vendor behind it reject the PR because it breaks their OSS core business model
worldsoup 3y ago
I think they are basically saying an OS project with a single commercial entity as the maintainer.
- danenania 3y ago
  If that’s the case, it seems like a very bigcorp-centered perspective. Indie devs and people who aren’t already well-connected don’t have the ability or resources to get consortiums of companies behind their projects or create open source foundations. So I don’t know—maybe it wasn’t intended this way, but it comes across as very gatekeep-y to me. Like telling people that unless they are already established and famous enough to start a project that has tons of backing from the start, that they can’t “really” be opensource (despite a very real opensource license), meaning you as the little guy should either build your project for free with no hope of ever making a living from it, or else be excluded from the broader opensource community.
linuxftw 3y ago
Take Hashicorp's Terraform as an example. Until recently, the code was completely open source with a permissive license. You could do exactly as you like with it. The 'single vendor' decided that was no longer in their best interests. What's the problem? Now you have 1000's of companies that rely on this software, and if they want to continue to receive security updates, they need to comply with the new license. Of course, people are free to fork projects, and that has been done in the case with terraform, but it's something that a foundation-led project most likely wouldn't do (change the license). There's another flavor of single vendor open source IMO. I call it 'look but don't touch open source.' Modern software projects have become some complex, and the build and dependency systems so customized, you could have the source code available, and be free to modify it, but wholly unable to do so because of the build-time complexity. A foundation-led project would, ostensibly, ensure that the entire lifecycle of the software is approachable by end users (docs, tooling, etc).

daniel-s 3y ago

I read this article and feel no further informed on this topic. Avoid.

worldsoup 3y ago

This article is dramatically simplifying the state of software markets. >Single vendor isn’t a reasonable way to do Open Source and resist evil proprietary software. It’s just another way to do proprietary software. >proprietary software is not evil. It’s just inferior. Based on these statements the author would have you believe there is no value in commercial/proprietary software and we should just never develop it. All software should be open and collaborative. That is obviously silly. While open source software is great, many incredible software innovations and truly valuable software comes from proprietary companies. In fact, these companies are typically the ones that make the large open source ecosystem possible by making massive donations in developer hours as well as cash to orgs like linux foundation. The interesting discussion is in whether commercial software should be closed source or source available with restrictions. The days of building propriety, VC backed infrastructure software with a traditional permissible license are over and likely never coming back.

coloneltcb 3y ago
yes it's puzzling how simplistic this framing is. I would expect more from the Vice-Chair of the OSI.
simoncion 3y ago
>> proprietary software is not evil. It’s just inferior. > Based on these statements the author would have you believe there is no value in commercial/proprietary software and we should just never develop it. Do you believe that there is no value in inferior products and that they should never be developed? I certainly don't, and it's clear to me that the Carrez does not, either. If I have the option, and can afford to do so, I will select the superior product. But if there is no option, or I cannot afford the superior product, I will accept the inferior one and be better off than if I had no product at all.
sanderjd 3y ago
> The interesting discussion is in whether commercial software should be closed source or source available with restrictions. Thank you! The author carefully uses the term "proprietary software", drawing no distinction between whether it is closed source or source available, as if that distinction is totally beside the point. But for me, as someone who makes software, there is a huge distinction between those two things! I really hate using tools that I can't read the source of. Just recently I traced some documentation on how python garbage collection works into the implementation for that particular thing in the particular version of the language that I'm using. If python were a single-vendor source-available tool, that would be a bummer and I'd be less likely to use it, but it wouldn't actually affect my work much. But if it were closed source, that would absolutely be a deal breaker for me. I need to be able to go look and see how my tools work, otherwise I'm blind. I do agree with the author that community-driven open source is better, and I consider projects like the Linux Foundation, BSD, GNU, Apache, CNCF, etc. to be wonderful miraculous gifts. But I also worry that a distressing proportion of the most important software I use has been built on the backs of a series of absurdly under-compensated and eventually burnt-out passionate nerds, and I can't stand that. So I'm sympathetic to a model that has a more obvious (to me) path to creating software tooling that I can use without flying blind, while compensating people adequately for their work.

rglover 3y ago

> You should be on board if you want Open Source to win against proprietary software. But those companies are still doing what is, essentially, proprietary software: like the proprietary software companies of the 80s, they very much consider the software being produced as their exclusive property. They still intend to capture all the value that derives from it. And thanks to copyright aggregation or permissive licensing, they still can change the license any time they want. So it’s still proprietary: they just choose, for now, to release their software under an Open Source license. This brings to mind two questions: why does open source need to "win" (why can't there be multiple options) and re: things being produced as their exclusive property, what is the issue with this? They did the work to make the thing, therefore it's their property (unless they choose to release it otherwise). Sadly, a lot of the arguments I hear around OSS sound like the "you didn't build those roads" argument when they should be "thank you for making your work accessible to me." It's no surprise that most OSS work gets abandoned due to developer burnout when "open source" is often misinterpreted as "100% free for me to do literally anything I want, whenever I want, and you're evil if you disagree with my entitlement to your efforts." The ideology around OSS has serious NPD vibes. It's worth people revisiting Rich Hickey's "Open Source is Not About You" [1]. [1] https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9 https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

paulgb 3y ago
The author is not so much against proprietary software, as bait-and-switch tactics that present software as open source. > Anyone who truly thinks that software developed by a diverse set of actors working in an open collaboration is not better should just adopt the proprietary model. But they should be honest about it.
- tensor 3y ago
  I don’t see how it’s bait and switch. You can still used and develop against the last open version. In fact, we’ve seen recent examples of that in Terraform and Redis. Open source does not mean you are entitled to all future improvements unless the license says you are, like the AGPL. Personally, I’m grateful these project made their source open for so long. The alternative would not be AGPL terraform, it would be completely closed terraform.

transpute 3y ago

FOSDEM 2024 talk by the author, https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2190-single-vendor-is-the-new-proprietary/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2190-sing... > explain the origin and value of the permissionless innovation that we currently all enjoy, and reassert the virtue of software developed in open collaboration, compared to single-vendor software

tedunangst 3y ago

I wonder how one would view late 90s gcc in this light? Single vendor compiler that made everybody so mad they finally forked it and basically restarted with a new team.

jerrac 3y ago

The article itself is rather, hmm... Melodramatic? Not sure that's the right word, but it is close. That said, the overall idea that "open source" projects that are controlled by a single vendor have problems is true. I think that having a for-profit company controlling an open source project is a major conflict of interest. Open source does not always result in profit. Often the opposite. And I think we've seen the results of that with all the different open source projects that have re-licensed into pretend open source licenses. There are ways to run open source projects that support both the open source culture, and allow for for-profit companies to make a profit. But most of those ways mean allowing competition. Which is where the single vendor project conflict of interest becomes apparent. Yeah, big tech will leech off any successful project. Yes, that means less money for the "single vendor". Yes, that is not fair. But I'd say re-licensing is worse than leeching, so... The other side effect of "single vendor" I've run into a lot, is simply that their paid options are always priced for organizations with very deep pockets. So the smaller orgs (and individual developers) that jumped on the bandwagon early because the project was open source (and they actually could jump on the bandwagon), have no chance at supporting the project. And end up have to find something else because the project stops supporting open source.

jshen 3y ago
I don't see how it's a conflict of interest. The primary benefit of open source is that you can run and modify it yourself if you need to. This benefit is still there if there is a single vendor behind the project. The risk of a single vendor project is that it's less likely to be supported in the long run. This isn't a conflict of interest though.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

phoe-krk 3y ago

> On one axis, the license used is either Open Source (as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which I would summarize as coming with all freedoms necessary to enable the permissionless innovation I mentioned earlier) or it’s not. On the other axis is the development model: it’s either developed as a commons, by a community working in open collaboration, or it’s developed (and ultimately owned) by a single entity. Is SQLite "the new proprietary"? It seems to fit the description perfectly: very permissive license, very closed development process.

ec109685 3y ago
That’s why the fork that is more open for contributions is gaining momentum: https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql
- oefrha 3y ago
  You mean the "single vendor" fork from Turso, the VC funded startup [1]? Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick with D. Richard Hipp. [1] https://turso.tech/investors https://turso.tech/investors

goodpoint 3y ago

And this is why we need copyleft.

Centigonal 3y ago

Single-vendor is not proprietary because I can fork VSCode and I can't fork Microsoft Word. Single-vendor open source is the balance some companies have found between sharing their software with the community and capturing the value of their employees' labor. It's less free than openly developed FOSS and more free than proprietary software. It's unrealistic to expect all software to be openly developed FOSS with today's economics; the hundreds of thousands of contributors to single-vendor open source projects all need rent money, and you can't build a business on providing the open-source backend for AWS managed services. Companies will move up and down the freedom gradient depending on their needs at any given time. Sometimes they do it well, and sometimes they handle it in a kludgy and myopic way (I'm looking at you, HashiCorp). LinkedIn open-sourced Kafka, and Elastic restricted their license for ElasticSearch. Software doesn't always go from "more free" to "less free."

devdao 3y ago
You can't forkvscode...
- SpecialistK 3y ago
  https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/forks https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/forks 27,000 people seem to have done so.
  - amarshall 3y ago
    That repo is not actually VS Code. What you get when you download compiled VS Code releases includes proprietary, closed-source components. If you build “VS Code” from OSS components, you do not end up with VS Code.
    - QuantumG 3y ago
      Chromium is still useful but it's not Chrome.
    - circuit10 3y ago

hn_acker 3y ago

For what it's worth, speaking in terms of free software rather than open source (since the author of the featured article might be receptive to the moral ideals of free software rather than merely the business-pragmatic ideals of open source): if the vendor lets you download the source code of free software already in your possession without an excessive burden (one valid option being letting you download a zip/tar.gz of the entire necessary codebase; one invalid option being forcing you to copy files one at a time) then the software is free software regardless of whether the vendor accepts any third-party contributions.

bandrami 3y ago

My quaint dinosaur view is that all of the single-vendor stuff I can think of is aimed at data farming at a scale that is itself presumptively evil. The need to do what these pieces of software do at the scale they do them is a filter for the kind of organization you get becoming involved with them.