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Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on
by leetharris 2y ago
Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady.
I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative.
I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work, they need to pivot to something that does work.
- kevingadd 2y agoIf you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.
- adrianN 2y agoYou could make it AGPL if you don’t want that.
- kevingadd 2y agoNot unless all the contributors signed an Evil CLA first so I can relicense it :-)
- TheRealPomax 2y agoIt's why things like Captura no longer exist. You make something fantastic with an open source license, someone else renames it and sells it in app stores, and the people running the app stores go "the license allowed for this, we see nothing wrong". It's well past time for getting rid of licenses that say "you can do what you like with this software", and replace them with licenses that allows you to sell as long as the original project gets a cut, without taking on any of the liability. The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary.
- TillE 2y agoThere is absolutely nothing wrong with making and selling proprietary software. If you want to make money, you should probably just do that. I'm very happy to have created a mildly popular permissively-licensed library. It's a contribution to a community with zero intention of profit. That is, for the most part, what open source is all about.
- TheRealPomax 2y agoIf you read me as saying making and selling proprietary software was wrong, you read a very different text from what I wrote. Making and selling software is perfectly fine, and building that software on top of libraries specifically released for that purpose is equally fine. Open source licenses that in perpetuity lock you out of any form of gains from your own work, even when that work is the very backbone of someone else's non-open-source, for-pay product, are morally objectionable licenses.
- radlad 2y agoI believe the parent is responding primarily to this point: > The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary. There's no reason this should ruin your life - your quality of living didn't suddenly decrease. If you are unhappy with this outcome, you probably didn't really intend to create open source software, and should stick to writing proprietary software. > Open source licenses that in perpetuity lock you out of any form of gains from your own work, even when that work is the very backbone of someone else's non-open-source, for-pay product, are morally objectionable licenses. It is simply false that open source licenses lock you out of any form of gains from your own work. They allow others the opportunity to benefit from it, as you yourself can too.
- aborsy 2y agoThat’s guaranteed to happen. Even beyond that, how are developers going to earn a living with FOSS, at least with open licensing? We have seen maintainers burnt out. It takes work to write code.
- davisr 2y agoI make substantial income by selling copies of my AGPLv3-licensed program for $12/ea.
- radlad 2y agoYou've piqued my interest. Can you share more? Do you have a blog post about your product and how you sell it?
- davisr 2y agoI don't have a post about it, but the equation is pretty simple: good cross-platform software + good documentation + responsive development = good product. The trick is to write good software -- the license doesn't matter so much. But, making it free/libre is competitively advantageous, all else considered. Some customers have told me they would not have considered paying for a proprietary option. My project is called reMarkable Connection Utility (RCU), and it makes about $2.1k MRR, selling ~200 copies/month. Some months are worse, some are better. I've never purchased any advertisement. Its users advocate for it through online forums. That genuine attestation, to its quality and also to me as a person/programmer, helps it sell. That its users, too, are free to share their copy with friends helps people encounter the program who otherwise would not have purchased forthright. I sell it from my personal website with links to PayPal and Stripe. The return URL is its download page. No JavaScript anywhere. I provide the entire Git history of the project, as well as binaries for all major distros of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS. I also provide two mailing lists -- one for all customers to be informed of updates, and another for customers to talk with each other, see my latest code patches, and talk about its general development and the reMarkable tablet. http://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/ http://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/
- kube-system 2y agoWhy is it depressing? It was your choice to share it.
- kevingadd 2y agoI think at this point it's undisputed that modern society relies on a lot of permissively licensed software, and the people who maintain that software aren't getting paid enough (or at all) to do it. xz is only the most recent example, NTP and OpenSSL come to mind. I used to do OSS development full time, but it wasn't financially sustainable for me.
- kube-system 2y agoIMO, that's more of a sad story about the state of respect for supply chain risk management in the software engineering discipline. It may be convenient at first to add a bunch of dependencies for free that solve a particular task, and ignore the part that says "AS IS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND". The only thing a FOSS license gives anyone is code. It never gave anyone maintenance or support. Any organization that uses software that is "as is" should have a plan to maintain that software themselves, or mitigate the risk in other ways. And many of the large players in this industry do exactly that, and their full-time employees are top contributors to many large FOSS projects.
- jahewson 2y agoA great many open source maintainers are employed by a corporation that pays them well, if not fantastically well, for maintaining it. Over time, the trend has been increasingly in that direction.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoExactly. If I put something out in the world for the benefit of others, and someone packages it up for profit, I'm still achieving my goal. In fact, that helps my goal to advance even further! That's not depressing to me, that's exciting.
- phicoh 2y agoIf you make software with a small team and you have about 2 dozen customers who pay for a support contract, then those contracts are actually surprisingly cheap.
- kleiba 2y ago> Source available from the beginning is ethical. Not to rms.
- skywhopper 2y agoJust because they’re failing doesn’t mean switching licenses will help. HashiCorp did not increase the popularity of Terraform Cloud by clamping down on the ability of other companies to host Terraform services. There were any number of things HashiCorp could have done to improve revenue generation from their products without changing the source license. When they realized they weren’t building the best SaaS version of their products, they didn’t try to improve their service. Instead they tried to run the competition out of business.
- twojobsoneboss 2y agoIt’s a business. It will by default do the easiest and least riskiest thing to make as much money as possible.
- jackthetab 2y ago> ~~It’s a business. It~~ will by default... They're humans. They will by default...
- jprete 2y agoIndividuals almost always have values beyond monetary gain. Businesses usually don't.
- jacobr1 2y ago> When they realized they weren’t building the best SaaS version of their products, they didn’t try to improve their service They went there several versions of their cloud products over the years, and pivoted a few times during that span
- phkahler 2y ago>> Source available from the beginning is ethical. It's also mostly pointless. If someone wants to develop features for software they pay for I guess that's their choice. >> I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. Not rug-pull.
- radlad 2y agoThere are many reasons people prefer open source software other than wanting to do their own development: Security auditing, the ability to reverse engineer protocols / serialization formats, or simply to better understand a product's features.