3 ms·

From my understanding nobody seriously involved in FOSS expects hobbyists to scale apart from on small or niche projects. The term "open source" rather than "f

by jiggy2011 14y ago

From my understanding nobody seriously involved in FOSS expects hobbyists to scale apart from on small or niche projects. The term "open source" rather than "free software" was coined at least partly in order to make it easier for business to understand and adopt the software and incentivise them to throw paid manpower at it. It seems to have broadly worked too, "we should adopt this solution because it is open source" is something that MBA types actually say now.

Locke1689 14y ago
I don't know if that's really the case. The existence of the AGPL implies that many people see open source as a development model quite different from the one used by open source inside corporations. In other words, how open source is something which is used and modified internally by company X, but rarely gets changes released because company X is exclusively SaaS? There are people who have very different opinions on what open source means. Some of them think that a lot of open source business models are bad for open source. It is important to point out that a lot of these licenses are the reason why certain open source projects are widely successful.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  The AGPL makes sense for either dual licensed things (like MongoDB) or for projects that simply don't have the need for any direct revenue generation such as people's side projects. AGPL seems to be to the cloud what GPL is to desktop. There are certainly those such as Stallman who are basically opposed to SaaS, though I'm not entirely sure where he draws the line between "in house software" , websites and SaaS. It does seem to me that asymptotically software with freer licenses "win". For example the Linux kernel. I would not be surprised if facebook was eventually replaced by something that existed under an AGPL license. However such a system would probably be powerful enough to be considered a platform in itself with it's own DSLs and therefor this would become where proprietary software lived. From a pragmatic standpoint though the increase in SaaS seems to have vastly increased the amount of open source stuff available (rails etc) and perhaps this trend will continue as higher abstraction levels of the stack become "freer".

Locke1689 14y ago

I don't know if that's really the case. The existence of the AGPL implies that many people see open source as a development model quite different from the one used by open source inside corporations. In other words, how open source is something which is used and modified internally by company X, but rarely gets changes released because company X is exclusively SaaS? There are people who have very different opinions on what open source means. Some of them think that a lot of open source business models are bad for open source. It is important to point out that a lot of these licenses are the reason why certain open source projects are widely successful.

jiggy2011 14y ago
The AGPL makes sense for either dual licensed things (like MongoDB) or for projects that simply don't have the need for any direct revenue generation such as people's side projects. AGPL seems to be to the cloud what GPL is to desktop. There are certainly those such as Stallman who are basically opposed to SaaS, though I'm not entirely sure where he draws the line between "in house software" , websites and SaaS. It does seem to me that asymptotically software with freer licenses "win". For example the Linux kernel. I would not be surprised if facebook was eventually replaced by something that existed under an AGPL license. However such a system would probably be powerful enough to be considered a platform in itself with it's own DSLs and therefor this would become where proprietary software lived. From a pragmatic standpoint though the increase in SaaS seems to have vastly increased the amount of open source stuff available (rails etc) and perhaps this trend will continue as higher abstraction levels of the stack become "freer".