4 ms·

I'm going to answer this too because we are in the situation you are describing. We are writing a platform that we intend to release under a liberal no-strings

by brl 19y ago

I'm going to answer this too because we are in the situation you are describing. We are writing a platform that we intend to release under a liberal no-strings-attached free software license (ie: not GPL). We're not worried at all about people taking our code and using it to build proprietary products. In fact, we are going to encourage people to do exactly that because, as far as we can see, other companies having a vested interest in our platform is pretty much a win-win situation for everybody. Of course as a business, we have revenue generating activities with the platform planned for ourselves, but it really seems unlikely that another company would choose to compete head on with us about that. We wrote the platform after all, so there are many different ways we could rain on their parade if they decide to use our software in an antagonistic way.

izak30 19y ago
In which ways could you 'rain on their parade'? stop supporting your software? change the license? They could just hire talented coders to use and update your base from the last point that you did update, or the last point that you had that license. Right? I'm not trying to antagonize you, just trying to understand the legalities of the open-source side of capitalism.
- brl 19y ago
  We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platform. But yes, they could then pick up that development on their own by forking the platform from an older version. The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else. We only want to reserve a small number of commercial opportunities for ourselves out of a large number of possibilities. Cooperating with us to develop one of those other possible product ideas is going to seem a lot more attractive than competing directly with us. Please don't worry at all about challenging our ideas about this stuff. We are trying to understand the same things you are and our open source business strategy is largely theoretical at this point.
  - corentin 19y ago
    > We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platform. Why not doing it in the first place, then? > The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else. If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code?
    - brl 19y ago
      > Why not doing it in the first place, then? We don't want to do it at all and probably never would. I'm only mentioning it as something that somebody evaluating risks from the other side might imagine that we could do. > If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code? No, we're not going to deliberately obfuscate anything because that would be against our goals of encouraging as many people as possible to adopt our platform. I think it's not really necessary to create artificial obstacles for us to have an important advantage. Very large systems take time and experience to understand even when they are both well designed and well documented. Linus and Alan Cox have an advantage over newcomers at extending the Linux kernel, right? Hypothetically, if Linus, Alan, and say Rusty Russell got together and created a startup to implement a Linux kernel based idea, would it make sense to compete against them on exactly that idea?
      - corentin 19y ago
        It would make sense: while they would spend their time debugging and fine tuning their beloved baby of a kernel you would just use their work and add value on top of it.
  - raganwald 19y ago
    > The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else. Bill Gates, is that you?

by brl 19y ago

izak30 19y ago

In which ways could you 'rain on their parade'? stop supporting your software? change the license? They could just hire talented coders to use and update your base from the last point that you did update, or the last point that you had that license. Right? I'm not trying to antagonize you, just trying to understand the legalities of the open-source side of capitalism.

brl 19y ago
We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platform. But yes, they could then pick up that development on their own by forking the platform from an older version. The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else. We only want to reserve a small number of commercial opportunities for ourselves out of a large number of possibilities. Cooperating with us to develop one of those other possible product ideas is going to seem a lot more attractive than competing directly with us. Please don't worry at all about challenging our ideas about this stuff. We are trying to understand the same things you are and our open source business strategy is largely theoretical at this point.
- corentin 19y ago
  > We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platform. Why not doing it in the first place, then? > The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else. If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code?
  - brl 19y ago
    > Why not doing it in the first place, then? We don't want to do it at all and probably never would. I'm only mentioning it as something that somebody evaluating risks from the other side might imagine that we could do. > If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code? No, we're not going to deliberately obfuscate anything because that would be against our goals of encouraging as many people as possible to adopt our platform. I think it's not really necessary to create artificial obstacles for us to have an important advantage. Very large systems take time and experience to understand even when they are both well designed and well documented. Linus and Alan Cox have an advantage over newcomers at extending the Linux kernel, right? Hypothetically, if Linus, Alan, and say Rusty Russell got together and created a startup to implement a Linux kernel based idea, would it make sense to compete against them on exactly that idea?
    - corentin 19y ago
      It would make sense: while they would spend their time debugging and fine tuning their beloved baby of a kernel you would just use their work and add value on top of it.
- raganwald 19y ago
  > The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else. Bill Gates, is that you?