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Why Some Open-Source Companies Are Considering a More Closed Approach (geekwire.com)
There's no question that the concept of open-source software has revolutionized the enterprise software world, which spent billions of dollars fighting the mere idea for several years before accepting that a new future had arrived. But more than a few people are starting to wonder if the very nature of open-source software -- the idea that it can be used by pretty much anyone for pretty much anything -- is causing its developers big problems in the era of distributed cloud computing services. From a report: Two prominent open-source software companies have made the decision to alter the licenses under which some of their software is distributed, with the expressed intent of making it harder -- or impossible -- for cloud computing providers to offer a service based around that software.
Two companies do not a make a movement. But as the cloud world packs its bags for Las Vegas and Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2018 conference next week, underscoring that company's ability to set the agenda for the upcoming year, the intersection between open-source projects and cloud computing services is on many people's minds. "The way that I would think of it, the role that open source plays in creating commercial opportunities has changed," said Abby Kearns, executive director of the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation. "We're going to see a lot more of this conversation happening than less. I would put it in a very blunt way: for many years we were suckers, and let them take what we developed and make tons of money on this."
Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal doesn't mince words. His company, known for its open-source in-memory database (used by American Express, Home Depot, and Dreamworks among others), has been around for eight years, an eternity in the fast-changing world of modern enterprise software. [...] "Ninety-nine percent of the contributions to Redis were made by Redis Labs," Bengal said. There's a longstanding myth in the open-source world that projects are driven by a community of contributors, but in reality, paid developers contribute the bulk of the code in most modern open-source projects, as Puppet founder Luke Kanies explained in our story earlier this year.
Two companies do not a make a movement. But as the cloud world packs its bags for Las Vegas and Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2018 conference next week, underscoring that company's ability to set the agenda for the upcoming year, the intersection between open-source projects and cloud computing services is on many people's minds. "The way that I would think of it, the role that open source plays in creating commercial opportunities has changed," said Abby Kearns, executive director of the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation. "We're going to see a lot more of this conversation happening than less. I would put it in a very blunt way: for many years we were suckers, and let them take what we developed and make tons of money on this."
Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal doesn't mince words. His company, known for its open-source in-memory database (used by American Express, Home Depot, and Dreamworks among others), has been around for eight years, an eternity in the fast-changing world of modern enterprise software. [...] "Ninety-nine percent of the contributions to Redis were made by Redis Labs," Bengal said. There's a longstanding myth in the open-source world that projects are driven by a community of contributors, but in reality, paid developers contribute the bulk of the code in most modern open-source projects, as Puppet founder Luke Kanies explained in our story earlier this year.
TLDR: they broke their own business models.
Cause: They made their product open source but were charging money for a hosted service. Other people start selling their own hosted service and they got unhappy that they didn't have a monopoly so they switched part of their code to "Commons Clause" which disallows others from offer it as part of a paid service.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They shouldn't forget that regardless of the % of paid vs non-paid developers on a project the reason why they have the market penetration they currently do is because their products are FOSS in the first place.
Yep, and when they lock down their material, the logical response from the community is to select an older version as a base to start with and tell the original developer to fork off.
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You could summarize this as "open-source companies are realizing that they don't actually want to open-source their work."
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Getting modded down for off-topic posts is not the same as censorship.
ZIP
So license it under the AGPL.
Oh, they have to make their mods freely available? Most companies are making no mods at all, or only small ones that are specific to their use of the SW, so they don't care if they have to make them public.
You don't even have to do that if you're using your modified software internally. Our company uses open source software, some of it with small modifications for our specific needs.
From the GPL faq:
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.
IBM is one of the major contributors to open source, fear of IBM is just stupid.
All of the software that people speculate they wanted out of the deal are areas where they're already pushing out open source (mostly Apache 2 licensed, so usable by everybody, GPL/BSD/proprietary) and they're basing their profits on professional services to big users.
That's great for open source, great for smaller companies dedicated to open tools, great for business. The only people it sucks for are their competitors trying to sell lock-in that has less brand gravitas. LOL The world has sure changed!
I'm loving this new systemd world. SysV can burn in a fiery hell for all I care. No, I'm not going to explain the difference between a semaphore and a mutex; I'm hoping to forget that SysV ever existed! Use grpc, d-bus, or pass messages. No, you don't get to edit startup scripts on the fly, you have to check them into source control anyways, so even if they were plain-text, you can't do that. Talk to the BOFH and quit trying to fuck up the configuration by mashing the keyboard.