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My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. The problem this addresses is not that Micro

My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. The problem this addresses is not that Microsoft forked this project. The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community[0]. Open source thrives because a bunch of individuals and groups collaborate. Microsoft, is built around the concept of profit for stock owners at any cost. They may collaborate as long as their interest in profit is served, but otherwise, it is back to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [1]. This lack of community ethic is endemic in corporations. It is also an existential threat to our community. Profit at any cost is not collaboration. It is predatory. And yes, I know, corpies and other greedist will vote this down, blah, blah, blah. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.#:~:text=Microsoft%20Corporation%2C%20253%20F.,such%20as%20Netscape%20and%20Java. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... [edit clarity]

jeremyjh 1y ago
The k8s community is mostly people who work for commercial interests and use k8s in their companies. If you develop a component of the k8s ecosystem, and you want people to use it, you can't really exclude businesses from using it. There just aren't enough installations outside of commercial spaces for it to be relevant.
- talkingtab 1y ago
  Very good point. Trying to think this through. I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay. But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that people should pay for their products, it just seems fair to me that they should not get community products for free. I guess the concept is playing by the same rules?
  - ryao 1y ago
    > I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay. That violates the first clause of the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd It probably violates 5 and 6 too. > But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that people should pay for their products, it just seems fair to me that they should not get community products for free. Windows is not open source software.
    - bornfreddy 1y ago
      Maybe the open source definition needs to change, or it is time to find a better way of protecting community software? This one is clearly (in some ways) not working.
      - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
        > Maybe the open source definition needs to change Maybe you rather don't actually want your software to be open source. Maybe you rather want your software to be under some copyleft license. Maybe you want to use an OSS license that is inconvenient for cloud providers (while still being an open source license) like the AGPL. Choose wisely.
    - starkparker 1y ago
      the OSCL turned 18 years old a month ago. maybe things have changed enough since then to validate revisiting it. OSI is too busy trying to come up with an equally mid (at best) OSAID for another thing thing that corporations already don't and won't care about following, so I don't expect them to prioritize it even if it got raised
      - pabs3 1y ago
        https://openhub.net/licenses/OSCL-C https://openhub.net/licenses/OSCL-C
philipwhiuk 1y ago
> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
- talkingtab 1y ago
  As someone commented above, commercial use is an issue. Creative commons is good, but the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. It seems to be that the crucial issue here is the duplication of the project by forking. I am unclear of where the boundaries could and should be, but in essence we want money to flow into community source projects. Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount. If they don't want to pay, they should not be able to profit from the work of the community.
  - layer8 1y ago
    > the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. [...] Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount. There is nothing preventing the project owner from also granting individual paid commercial licenses. There are a number of GPLv3 (or other restrictive license) projects with a note like "contact us for commercial licenses" in the README. Licenses aren't exclusive by default. If a company doesn't like the existing license, they are always free to contact the project owner(s) to request a custom license.
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
      > There is nothing preventing the project owner from also granting individual paid commercial licenses. Be careful. Changing the license presumably requires the consent of every copyright holder. It's trivial when it's just you but quickly become impossible in practice as the number of contributors increases. Stuff like this is why some projects ask you to reassign your copyright to them.
  - pabs3 1y ago
    The corporations aren't going to pay anyway, they will just rewrite your code or something better from scratch and use their marketing money to beat you in the developer mindshare stakes.
eriksjolund 1y ago
The license would no longer be open source if you limit use to only community. See "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" in The Open Source Definition https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
coldpie 1y ago
Eh, just use the (L/A)GPL. It's already well understood and established; humans and well-meaning businesses can use the software ethically; corps won't use it even though they could because their intellectual property lawyers don't understand how intellectual property works.
- baq 1y ago
  They most likely understand, they don’t trust their engineering coworkers to not ignore it. Blanket ban is an easy sell when upside is limited and downside is basically unbounded.
  - coldpie 1y ago
    My experience talking to big corp IP lawyers is they have a set of policies ("open source bad; protecting our IP good") and will make up any justification to support those policies, even if their justifications are plainly incorrect given the license text. Usually they just stop responding when you point out the obvious contradiction. It'd be one thing if they just said "no" with no justification, but my experience is they spout a bunch of false stuff about open source licensing, then explain how that false stuff violates their policies even though the real license actually doesn't, and then stop talking when you show them that they are wrong. As you say, their job is to protect the company, not actually understand how IP works. But it's pretty silly when some stupid dev like me knows their supposed area of expertise better than they do.
    - flomo 1y ago
      Well, it's great that you have that understanding. But the internet is full of FOSS types fantasy IANALing based half-forgotten RMS FAQs, even in places where they really should know better. Most of these nerd arguments are pretty much worthless if it came to a courtroom.
      - coldpie 1y ago
        Yeah, I said I was stupid. What's their excuse? :)
bdcravens 1y ago
Does this exclude anyone who works for a corporation from contributing? I think the obvious answer is no, as long as someone is working in their own interests, but it would be very hard to establish. After all, Linus worked for the Transmeta Corporation during some of Linux's most seminal years.
bornfreddy 1y ago
Yup. But then you also limit the usage of your software in enterprises which do not try to compete with you. There are a number of licenses which tried to solve this exact problem (cloud protection licenses / fair licenses / ...), for example Commons Clause, but community usually doesn't accept them nicely, at least I don't know of a case where they were welcomed. Not sure why, maybe because most of such projects go from FOSS to fair license instead of starting with one? Anyway, to me it looks like opensource licenses nowadays serve mostly the interests of Big Tech and not those of regular users.
unsungNovelty 1y ago
> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. You are going exactly against the OSS philosophy. OSS shouldn't restrict the use of software just because you don't like it. It was created to fight exactly this. This is also why source available BS (like BSL) is against OSS. OSS is literally about being about hacking and changing software to suit your needs. It was never about the money part. You should create your software as proprietary if you are SO bothered with OSS. And you can always donate and contribute back to the OSS software you use. I don't think butchering OSS philosophy is the way. The problem here is license illiteracy. Even I who for a while used to think I understood a lot about OSS license just had a doubt now: When you fork, do you retain the copyright part? Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors That is what we need to fix.
- saulpw 1y ago
  The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations. Then for-profit corporations co-opted the "Open Source"(tm) label to ensure they could benefit from all this free labor. You and many others are falling for it, and doing their work for them by scolding OSS developers for "going against the OSS philosophy". So screw this corporate "OSS philosophy", and stop telling people what they "should" do. Those licenses exist and people can use them and this is what happens. We can and should also make different licenses which protect our interests as developers and we don't need corporate shills invoking some philosophical argument to discourage us.
  - YetAnotherNick 1y ago
    The point is what do creators want to get out of their open source project. If it is the opportunity to sell, they can make it source available. If they don't want money, having open source license is better as it could mean more contributions.
    - saulpw 1y ago
      In practice it doesn't mean more contributions though. If MSFT used his project for profit and contributed back, he wouldn't be complaining. Instead they forked his project, without even sufficient attribution, and now he has to do even more work to differentiate his original project from their derivative. So the point is that we need another license that does gives open source rights to individuals, yet does not permit corporations to take everything and give nothing.
seqizz 1y ago
How about post-open license? https://postopen.org/ https://postopen.org/
HexDecOctBin 1y ago
It already exists: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/ https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  These are not open source licenses; they violate the open source definition.
  - HexDecOctBin 1y ago
    So? I never said they were for Open Source (as defined by some libertarian crusty hacker), and the parent comment never asked for it. Why do people like you always jump in, screaming "It's not Open Source!"?
BeetleB 1y ago
> The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community What is this "our community"? My releasing something under the MIT license doesn't mean I'm part of whatever community you're invoking. It means I'm releasing something with an MIT license. That's it. I certainly don't want to give companies like MS a "pause" before they decide to fork my project. I'm explicitly telling them they can do that. I absolutely do not want them to be hampered by notions of "What will this action look like?" Don't impose your values on other people's use of my software.
- talkingtab 1y ago
  Adding an additional kind of license simply gives you an additional choice. There is nothing about you not being able to use the MIT, or any other license for your code. Providing options for people is not an instance of me imposing my values on you. Your code, your license. My code, my license.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
Hard to word that language to prevent a corporation from forking it, as you have to "fork" the project locally to make modifications and send patches back. I'm sure nobody here wants to stop a random engineer at a corporation from contributing to a community project? If you want a corporation to avoid it like the plague, just make it GPLv3. If you really want to screw them, go with AGPLv3. This way you keep a true open source license, but don't have to worry about corporate control.
mpalmer 1y ago
But what is the practical difference between that and Spegel's situation? Where is the deterrent? Microsoft is currently violating the license, and the author's recourse is this HN post.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
m463 1y ago
Just thought I'd mention something... Free Software (like GPL) has the philosophy that you can USE the software for any reason. The rights are for the USER. The responsibility kicks in when you redistribute the software. It ensures that you preserve the same freedoms you received when you pass it on. But if you restrict USING the software, it's not free software anymore.
pabs3 1y ago
Who is going to be able to afford to enforce such a (not Open Source) license against the corporations who will inevitably violate it? The GPL is already violated very commonly but is very rarely enforced, although Conservancy are trying to make that easier, but their precedent-setting lawsuit against Vizio is taking years to get to trial. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
NoahZuniga 1y ago
You can get pretty close with a copyleft license like GPL.
interludead 1y ago
I think a lot of people in the OSS world are feeling this tension more acutely now.

jeremyjh 1y ago

The k8s community is mostly people who work for commercial interests and use k8s in their companies. If you develop a component of the k8s ecosystem, and you want people to use it, you can't really exclude businesses from using it. There just aren't enough installations outside of commercial spaces for it to be relevant.

talkingtab 1y ago
Very good point. Trying to think this through. I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay. But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that people should pay for their products, it just seems fair to me that they should not get community products for free. I guess the concept is playing by the same rules?
- ryao 1y ago
  > I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay. That violates the first clause of the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd It probably violates 5 and 6 too. > But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that people should pay for their products, it just seems fair to me that they should not get community products for free. Windows is not open source software.
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    Maybe the open source definition needs to change, or it is time to find a better way of protecting community software? This one is clearly (in some ways) not working.
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > Maybe the open source definition needs to change Maybe you rather don't actually want your software to be open source. Maybe you rather want your software to be under some copyleft license. Maybe you want to use an OSS license that is inconvenient for cloud providers (while still being an open source license) like the AGPL. Choose wisely.
  - starkparker 1y ago
    the OSCL turned 18 years old a month ago. maybe things have changed enough since then to validate revisiting it. OSI is too busy trying to come up with an equally mid (at best) OSAID for another thing thing that corporations already don't and won't care about following, so I don't expect them to prioritize it even if it got raised
    - pabs3 1y ago
      https://openhub.net/licenses/OSCL-C https://openhub.net/licenses/OSCL-C

philipwhiuk 1y ago

> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

talkingtab 1y ago
As someone commented above, commercial use is an issue. Creative commons is good, but the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. It seems to be that the crucial issue here is the duplication of the project by forking. I am unclear of where the boundaries could and should be, but in essence we want money to flow into community source projects. Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount. If they don't want to pay, they should not be able to profit from the work of the community.
- layer8 1y ago
  > the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. [...] Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount. There is nothing preventing the project owner from also granting individual paid commercial licenses. There are a number of GPLv3 (or other restrictive license) projects with a note like "contact us for commercial licenses" in the README. Licenses aren't exclusive by default. If a company doesn't like the existing license, they are always free to contact the project owner(s) to request a custom license.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    > There is nothing preventing the project owner from also granting individual paid commercial licenses. Be careful. Changing the license presumably requires the consent of every copyright holder. It's trivial when it's just you but quickly become impossible in practice as the number of contributors increases. Stuff like this is why some projects ask you to reassign your copyright to them.
- pabs3 1y ago
  The corporations aren't going to pay anyway, they will just rewrite your code or something better from scratch and use their marketing money to beat you in the developer mindshare stakes.

eriksjolund 1y ago

The license would no longer be open source if you limit use to only community. See "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" in The Open Source Definition https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd

coldpie 1y ago

Eh, just use the (L/A)GPL. It's already well understood and established; humans and well-meaning businesses can use the software ethically; corps won't use it even though they could because their intellectual property lawyers don't understand how intellectual property works.

baq 1y ago
They most likely understand, they don’t trust their engineering coworkers to not ignore it. Blanket ban is an easy sell when upside is limited and downside is basically unbounded.
- coldpie 1y ago
  My experience talking to big corp IP lawyers is they have a set of policies ("open source bad; protecting our IP good") and will make up any justification to support those policies, even if their justifications are plainly incorrect given the license text. Usually they just stop responding when you point out the obvious contradiction. It'd be one thing if they just said "no" with no justification, but my experience is they spout a bunch of false stuff about open source licensing, then explain how that false stuff violates their policies even though the real license actually doesn't, and then stop talking when you show them that they are wrong. As you say, their job is to protect the company, not actually understand how IP works. But it's pretty silly when some stupid dev like me knows their supposed area of expertise better than they do.
  - flomo 1y ago
    Well, it's great that you have that understanding. But the internet is full of FOSS types fantasy IANALing based half-forgotten RMS FAQs, even in places where they really should know better. Most of these nerd arguments are pretty much worthless if it came to a courtroom.
    - coldpie 1y ago
      Yeah, I said I was stupid. What's their excuse? :)

bdcravens 1y ago

Does this exclude anyone who works for a corporation from contributing? I think the obvious answer is no, as long as someone is working in their own interests, but it would be very hard to establish. After all, Linus worked for the Transmeta Corporation during some of Linux's most seminal years.

bornfreddy 1y ago

Yup. But then you also limit the usage of your software in enterprises which do not try to compete with you. There are a number of licenses which tried to solve this exact problem (cloud protection licenses / fair licenses / ...), for example Commons Clause, but community usually doesn't accept them nicely, at least I don't know of a case where they were welcomed. Not sure why, maybe because most of such projects go from FOSS to fair license instead of starting with one? Anyway, to me it looks like opensource licenses nowadays serve mostly the interests of Big Tech and not those of regular users.

unsungNovelty 1y ago

> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. You are going exactly against the OSS philosophy. OSS shouldn't restrict the use of software just because you don't like it. It was created to fight exactly this. This is also why source available BS (like BSL) is against OSS. OSS is literally about being about hacking and changing software to suit your needs. It was never about the money part. You should create your software as proprietary if you are SO bothered with OSS. And you can always donate and contribute back to the OSS software you use. I don't think butchering OSS philosophy is the way. The problem here is license illiteracy. Even I who for a while used to think I understood a lot about OSS license just had a doubt now: When you fork, do you retain the copyright part? Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors That is what we need to fix.

saulpw 1y ago
The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations. Then for-profit corporations co-opted the "Open Source"(tm) label to ensure they could benefit from all this free labor. You and many others are falling for it, and doing their work for them by scolding OSS developers for "going against the OSS philosophy". So screw this corporate "OSS philosophy", and stop telling people what they "should" do. Those licenses exist and people can use them and this is what happens. We can and should also make different licenses which protect our interests as developers and we don't need corporate shills invoking some philosophical argument to discourage us.
- YetAnotherNick 1y ago
  The point is what do creators want to get out of their open source project. If it is the opportunity to sell, they can make it source available. If they don't want money, having open source license is better as it could mean more contributions.
  - saulpw 1y ago
    In practice it doesn't mean more contributions though. If MSFT used his project for profit and contributed back, he wouldn't be complaining. Instead they forked his project, without even sufficient attribution, and now he has to do even more work to differentiate his original project from their derivative. So the point is that we need another license that does gives open source rights to individuals, yet does not permit corporations to take everything and give nothing.

seqizz 1y ago

How about post-open license? https://postopen.org/ https://postopen.org/

HexDecOctBin 1y ago

It already exists: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/ https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
These are not open source licenses; they violate the open source definition.
- HexDecOctBin 1y ago
  So? I never said they were for Open Source (as defined by some libertarian crusty hacker), and the parent comment never asked for it. Why do people like you always jump in, screaming "It's not Open Source!"?

BeetleB 1y ago

> The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community What is this "our community"? My releasing something under the MIT license doesn't mean I'm part of whatever community you're invoking. It means I'm releasing something with an MIT license. That's it. I certainly don't want to give companies like MS a "pause" before they decide to fork my project. I'm explicitly telling them they can do that. I absolutely do not want them to be hampered by notions of "What will this action look like?" Don't impose your values on other people's use of my software.

talkingtab 1y ago
Adding an additional kind of license simply gives you an additional choice. There is nothing about you not being able to use the MIT, or any other license for your code. Providing options for people is not an instance of me imposing my values on you. Your code, your license. My code, my license.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

Hard to word that language to prevent a corporation from forking it, as you have to "fork" the project locally to make modifications and send patches back. I'm sure nobody here wants to stop a random engineer at a corporation from contributing to a community project? If you want a corporation to avoid it like the plague, just make it GPLv3. If you really want to screw them, go with AGPLv3. This way you keep a true open source license, but don't have to worry about corporate control.

mpalmer 1y ago

But what is the practical difference between that and Spegel's situation? Where is the deterrent? Microsoft is currently violating the license, and the author's recourse is this HN post.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

m463 1y ago

Just thought I'd mention something... Free Software (like GPL) has the philosophy that you can USE the software for any reason. The rights are for the USER. The responsibility kicks in when you redistribute the software. It ensures that you preserve the same freedoms you received when you pass it on. But if you restrict USING the software, it's not free software anymore.

pabs3 1y ago

Who is going to be able to afford to enforce such a (not Open Source) license against the corporations who will inevitably violate it? The GPL is already violated very commonly but is very rarely enforced, although Conservancy are trying to make that easier, but their precedent-setting lawsuit against Vizio is taking years to get to trial. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

NoahZuniga 1y ago

You can get pretty close with a copyleft license like GPL.

interludead 1y ago

I think a lot of people in the OSS world are feeling this tension more acutely now.