Open Source Community's Double Standard

AlexGr writes to point out a really good point Matt Asay raises in his CNET News Blog: Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit? "Deja vu. Remember 2002? That's when Red Hat decided to split its code into Red Hat Advanced Server (now Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora. Howls of protest and endless hand-wringing ensued: How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free? Enter 2007. MySQL decides to comply with the GNU General Public License and only give its tested, certified Enterprise code to those who pay for the service underlying that code (gasp!). Immediately cries of protest are raised, How dare MySQL not give everything away for free?"

Comments

Human Nature

[suso]

This is human nature and it does not just apply to computers.

Example: If a girl is a real bitch then people expect her to be a bitch and if she is suddenly nice one day, then people say "Wow, she's so nice today". But if someone is nice all the time then one day gets angry people say "What's wrong with her, sheesh."

Its not a double standard, its human nature. Nuff said, discussion over.

Re:Human Nature

[Chris Burke]

It's not even human nature, it's common freaking sense. If you have a student who averages C- and gets a B on a test you praise them for their achievement. If you have a student who averages A+ and gets a B on a test you ask them what went wrong. If you fail to praise the underachieving student or fail to question the overachieving student then you discourage further improvements by the underachiever, and encourage further drops in performance by the overachiever.

It's not a double standard. It's a rational standard: Improvement is good, regression is bad. Becoming more open is good, becoming less open is bad. Ignoring this in order to be "fair" and avoid being accused of a "double standard" is just stupid.

Re:Human Nature

[Compholio]

You can't have "fair and balanced" reporting unless there's a conflict!!

I thought "fair and balanced reporting" was giving the same amount of face time to the person with the logical and well thought out arguments as to the crazy wack-job who bases all decisions on truthiness and faith.

Makes sense

[NetNifty]

Praise for companies moving towards our goals, opposition to companies moving away from them..

How is that a double standard?

[spun]

Shocking. The open source community wants software to be open source, that seems pretty consistent to me.

What?

[SIIHP]

"How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free?"

Why are they pushing this misconception of what open source means? AFAIK, it doesn't mean "give everything away for free" it means "the source is open".

If find this surprising too

[gweihir]

After all the GPL only requires you to give source when you give executables. I think this is perfectly fine. And as long as you get a devcent version of the product for free, having a "special" version for paying customers is also fine in my book.

Why do we praise slave states

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

who open up a little bit, but damn free states, who begin forced servitude little bit?

The issue is not a "double standard" unless you use the current "mainstream media" Orwellian definition of "fairness."

The predjudice is for freedom, openness and opportunity. When you compound closing of source by the inclusion of earlier community contributions, testing and evangelism - you then reduce freedom to a marketing tool.

Someone doesn't know what a double standard is.

[vux984]

A double standard is when you are inconsisent.

There is nothing inconsistent about praising people for opening up a little bit, while condemning those that close down a little bit. We praise ANY move towards openness, and condemn ANY move away from it. How is that a double standard.

Allow me to illustrate using the oft neglected fruit analagy:

I gleefully watch my strawberry plants grow little fruit that ripen into perfect sweet strawberries, but watch me complain when my delicious strawberries start rotting and become ever less their original strawberry goodness.

Why oh why do I praise the things as they become ripe, but criticise them as they rot! I am such a hypocrit. Hmm.

The blurb is actually pretty accurate

[hummassa]

(I normally RTFA before posting)

The problem here is: IMHO (and RMS's opinion) non-free software is unethical, because it's basically a scam: making software is a service with value; making copies of software is of (marginally) zero value. So, the GPP is right on the mark.
If a company that makes (unethical) proprietary software starts making some (ethical) Free Software, it is (1) improving its act and (2) contributing to the pool of Free Software.
If a company that makes Free Software starts making proprietary software, it is (1) starting to make unethical things and (2) contributing less to the pool of Free Software.
So, that's the reason why we praise non-free-software companies that open um and we boo free-software companies that close down.
Putting it like the GPP: would you praise a country that permitted slave labour and then passwd a law freeing some of its slaves? (like mine did in 1871...) And would you protest a country without slaves that passed a law allowing for some to have slaves?
HTH.

Re:The blurb is actually pretty accurate

[Deadbolt]

Neither RMS nor the GPL nor the FSF says you CAN'T charge for your work; in fact they encourage you to charge as much as your customers will pay.

See here and here.

Re:The blurb is actually pretty accurate

[Deadbolt]

Again, no one's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use a free software license.

If you're talking about games, there are several ways you can do a free software game. You release the engine as free software and then assert copyright on the artistic assets like textures, sound, music, character design, etc. You would be charging for your ideas, not for your software, if that makes sense, and users would not be able to freely distribute the artistic assets. I think that's a fine compromise between making money and being moral. In fact, if your game is any good and becomes popular, users will fix your engine's bugs, port it to new platforms, and start thriving mod communities around it, all while talking you up as the Awesome Guy who wrote the free software engine that made it all possible. It's not that different from what id has been doing, but Carmack's been keeping the engine proprietary for a few years to make money from licensing and then it gets GPL'ed. I have zero problem with that.

As far as being evil for writing non-free software? Well, yes, it is evil. There are different degrees of evil; if I don't want to buy your game because it's nonfree, then I don't have to. But if you write software that blocks DVDs from being played on machines you don't like, that's a lot more evil. And if you were to, say, extort people for money to fix bugs in your mission-critical software, that's about as evil as you can get in software. For those of us who believe it to be a moral issue, not acting morally is evil. Personally I'm more of a realist than some people I could name, and I respect the individual's right to make his own choices. I've even written proprietary software before, and I'll probably write more in the future, but doing so is always wrong to some degree, and I have to choose if it's far enough over the line that I won't participate.

What??

[thed00d]

MySQL decides to comply with the GNU General Public License and only give its tested, certified Enterprise code to those who pay for the service underlying that code (gasp!). Immediately cries of protest are raised, How dare MySQL not give everything away for free?"

Right, so so how is this closing the source? The source is still available, and it's still open source. I think the author here has confused open source with "free", and their not interchangeable terms. There is plenty of open source software that also happens to be free, thats F/OSS. There is also plenty of software that is free, but isn't necessarily open source, thats Freeware. This is really a non-issue, the source is still available, and they also continue to have and support a F/OSS version of code base.

Personally, I think this is a positive move for them. It's a positive move for the technology community as a whole as well. When my team looks at investing in technology for our business, we usually like to have a positive feeling that the technology will still be relevant 5 years and 10 years from when we purchase it. This move will make it easier for me to deploy MySQL in the enterprise, as I can now say to my review comity - "Look, they have a revenue source. They'll be around 5 years from now, and they'll be there to honor any support contract we purchase from them". Whereas in the past, I could only argue the point that they've been there a while, they should still be there a while from now. So, positive move in my book, not just for them, but for the technology community as a whole.

Mod parent up please

[crush]

It makes an absolutely crucial point: there may well have been howls of protest, but they were from people that either wanted to spread confusion or else were completely ignorant. There's another point: Fedora is the basis of RHEL not the other way around. Fedora is a very aggressively moving distribution that tries out new technologies. Red Hat looks at how succesful those are in Fedora and rolls any that work out well into its supported product: RHEL. It's in a good position to do so because many of the engineers that it hires are involved in the Fedora Project and so know intimately what features are stable and easily supportable. It galls me that Red Hat as a company is so open, adhering in both letter and spirit to the ideals of Free Software, makes money from selling support for that software, re-invests the money in hiring top-notch hackers that contribute Free Software for everyone and then are shit on by people that know that they're doing this work and yet a company like Canonical with a non-Free "launchpad" are fawned over. Feh.