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Do Alternative Software Licenses Represent Open Source's 'Midlife Crisis'? (dtrace.org)
"it is clear to me that open source -- now several decades old and fully adult -- is going through its own midlife crisis," writes Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill.
[O]pen source business models are really tough, selling software-as-a-service is one of the most natural of them, the cloud service providers are really good at it -- and their commercial appetites seem boundless. And, like a new cherry red two-seater sports car next to a minivan in a suburban driveway, some open source companies are dealing with this crisis exceptionally poorly: they are trying to restrict the way that their open source software can be used. These companies want it both ways: they want the advantages of open source -- the community, the positivity, the energy, the adoption, the downloads -- but they also want to enjoy the fruits of proprietary software companies in software lock-in and its concomitant monopolistic rents.
If this were entirely transparent (that is, if some bits were merely being made explicitly proprietary), it would be fine: we could accept these companies as essentially proprietary software companies, albeit with an open source loss-leader. But instead, these companies are trying to license their way into this self-contradictory world: continuing to claim to be entirely open source, but perverting the license under which portions of that source are available. Most gallingly, they are doing this by hijacking open source nomenclature. Of these, the laughably named commons clause is the worst offender (it is plainly designed to be confused with the purely virtuous creative commons), but others...are little better...
"[T]heir business model isn't their community's problem, and they should please stop trying to make it one," Cantrill writes, adding letter that "As we collectively internalize that open source is not a business model on its own, we will likely see fewer VC-funded open source companies (though I'm honestly not sure that that's a bad thing)..." He also points out that "Even though the VC that led the last round wants to puke into a trashcan whenever they hear it, business models like 'support', 'services' and 'training' are entirely viable!"
Jay Kreps, Co-founder of @confluentinc, has posted a rebuttal on Medium. "How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product? I think Bryan's sentiment may be that it should be called the Evil Proprietary Corruption of Open Source License or something like that, but, well, we disagree."
If this were entirely transparent (that is, if some bits were merely being made explicitly proprietary), it would be fine: we could accept these companies as essentially proprietary software companies, albeit with an open source loss-leader. But instead, these companies are trying to license their way into this self-contradictory world: continuing to claim to be entirely open source, but perverting the license under which portions of that source are available. Most gallingly, they are doing this by hijacking open source nomenclature. Of these, the laughably named commons clause is the worst offender (it is plainly designed to be confused with the purely virtuous creative commons), but others...are little better...
"[T]heir business model isn't their community's problem, and they should please stop trying to make it one," Cantrill writes, adding letter that "As we collectively internalize that open source is not a business model on its own, we will likely see fewer VC-funded open source companies (though I'm honestly not sure that that's a bad thing)..." He also points out that "Even though the VC that led the last round wants to puke into a trashcan whenever they hear it, business models like 'support', 'services' and 'training' are entirely viable!"
Jay Kreps, Co-founder of @confluentinc, has posted a rebuttal on Medium. "How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product? I think Bryan's sentiment may be that it should be called the Evil Proprietary Corruption of Open Source License or something like that, but, well, we disagree."
Not compatible with the Open Source Definition. "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor."
Seems like what this guy really wants is a split release: a proprietary enterprise version, and an AGPL/GPLv3-licensed "Community Edition." Not unlike what Qt has done for years.
At this point in time, devising your own custom open-source license is like devising your own custom crypto algorithm: it's a bad idea, and shows that you really don't understand what you're getting into.
Is this anything new? Software has long had things like free academic access and paid commercial access. It works pretty well. Even companies like Wolfram, and Matlab have free or cheap academic licenses.
Trampolines! Handstands! Hula hoops!
The FSF has repeatedly rejected the concept. Theo design Raadt has despoiled the libertarian notion by rejecting DARPA funding and decrying military use of his product.
It is only the open source group, LAST on the scene, hijackers of the ideology, and largely the least successful lot, who have the problems.
No, open source is NOT as old as claimed, back then you had FREE AS IN FREEDOM, where each group defined the key freedom they wished you to be free in. This was fixed. There was no corruption, there still isn't.
Open Source rejected all that. It renounced the free as in freedom model and forced licenses to conform to a very different ideology.
You can argue as to which way was better, this or that. Feel free. Maybe you'll even be right. What you cannot argue is that the old way is perverting the new by remaining as it always was. No. They are not equivalent things.
All the article convinces me if is that the early objectors to open source were right. The free licenses, such as GNU and BSD, are better, are honest and are exactly the same in spirit as they were when created by different branches of academia.
YMMV.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Open Source Initiative, contrary to some folks here on Slashdot, has expressed its purpose as the preservation of software freedom. They did that in an official statement of the board regarding the license acceptance process.
The Open Source definition, the definition of what is really Open Source and what is not, started out life as the Debian Free Software Guidelines. So, a Free Software definition. Once upon a time, there were some people who posed Open Source as an opposition to Free Software. Fortunately, those folks are no longer associated with OSI.
I don't speak for the OSI board. I am, however, co-founder and current standards chair and member of the license committee. So I might know what I'm talking about :-)
As far as I can tell, these various licenses in discussion are not Open Source licenses and won't be accepted as Open Source licenses. The folks who promote them can use any license they wish, as long as they don't call it Open Source. I suggest they do that. I even help them, for free, as long as they are clear that conflicts witbh Open Source should be avoided.
Bruce Perens.
> "...'support', 'services' and 'training' are entirely viable!"
That was certainly true for certain types of OSS back in the "old" days, 2-3 years ago, when the business model was to do whatever it takes to be distributed by default by the most famous Linux distributions and monetize a tiny fraction of the large install base. Or sell non-GPL versions of the same software for close-sourcing purposes.
But there's a new game now. Multi-billion dollar companies (Amazon and Microsoft, but especially Amazon) integrate the OSS into their Clouds and offer just enough 'support', 'services' and 'training' that there's nothing left for the original makers of the software. OSS makers take the costs and Clouds (Amazon) take the profits!
Well, is it bad? Maybe the OSS business model was always some kind of bullshit to begin with. Maybe anyone who chose not to use Copyleft licensing (more recently the AGPLv3) basically asked for it. Time to go back to "farm by day and develop OSS by night"!
I don't care what you call your license, or what other kind of restrictions you want to put on people, as long as the Four Freedoms are protected. If you count on copyright law to make it illegal for me to exercise one or more of those, I won't run your software. If you don't, and your code is good, more power to you.
But didn't this start being a problem about the time Redhat wen't public.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Except the BSD license gives you more freedom than the GPL
It's not enough that you give them a free license. They'll tell you: "That's not nice of you, that you won't let us lock your software away in our SaaS farm. We want to get paid handsomely without having to reveal the bits we added. Why won't you let us?" Well, they'll not tell you that to your face, they'll smear you and tell you that your motivation is flawed and that you not letting them pillage with impunity is akin to a midlife crisis.
Stop looking at code comments.
Stop making political speech demands the most gifted, smart, amazing people who give their free time to write the best code in their generation.
A person writes great code. With few computer problems. Use the code and attract more skilled people.
Micromanagement of language use, politics, comments just makes "free" feel like another day at work.
Want a business model? Sell your code.
Want to do open source? Work in your free time and see what others can add to your hours and years of work.
No politics, comment reading, CoC needed, reviews of "how" the programming language was used.
Past years of code resulted in the best OS and best software over generations. No "crisis" as real experts just got on with really great code.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Holy shit... Whether you agree with him or not... BP has done more for the community in a few minutes of time than you ever will.
What a disrespectful d-bag.
I don't care about "teh communitah!" It can go fuck off.
Do not feed the trolls.
Considering the fact you apparently haven't seen the other trash articles /. has ran about open source "not making quarterly profits" lately, I'll fill you in.
They don't care what it's called. It could be called "The Spaghetti License" and they would still use it as clickbait to help fan the flames of "Open Source in decline." Which just shows one thing: That the real story is that open source is winning, and the heads of the proprietary software industry are scared out of their minds. If the transition to the SaaR, Software as a Rental, business model by virtually every major vendor wasn't the cue for investors to jump ship, this is. As it turns out "good enough" really is good enough. Even if they got rid of OSS entirely, the proprietary vendors cannot compete with their past offerings and would still go the way of the dodo.
OSS just won by default, and will only continue to get better as more work gets put into it for all to benefit from. The proprietary vendors however are desperate, and want to destroy OSS before their shareholders realize they've been had. Hence the "OSS isn't profitable" mantra. It's their attempt to lure away people from OSS in hopes of destabilizing it, and forcing everyone to sign new lease contracts that include annual payments.
These licenses are attempts at businesses trying to make profit where there is none anymore. Software that costs as much as a mid-range car 20 years ago today has alternatives that are better, free, can be downloaded in 30 seconds and have multiple alternatives that are even competing for attention. We are at a point where branding is the key differentiator, because each and every piece of software is beyond feature complete. Every once in a while someone tries to hold back the tide. This time it's a new wave of pseudo FOSS and it will fail just as the last one.
The OSI (for most of its existence) called the efforts of advocating for software freedom "ideological tub-thumping", hardly language I'd associate with preserving software freedom. Every now and then there's also some organization which calls itself an open source distributor that boasts of its association with a proprietor. Like the time Red Hat told us it was "partners" with Microsoft (Canonical did similarly with Microsoft) and did not frame the issue in terms of software freedom but "choice and flexibility" instead—apparently the flexibility to install a GNU/Linux on a Microsoft VM thus allowing the VM owner (Microsoft in this case) to know everything one is doing on that system. This is a position indistinguishable from granting considerable control to a proprietor over the possibly free GNU/Linux system. These are not the choices nor the language I'd expect from people choosing to frame what they're doing in terms that intend to remind people to learn about software freedom or request software freedom for their organizations so that their organizations can retain their own data and fully control what their organization does with their own computers. As the older "Why 'Free Software' is better than "Open Source" essay points out, "This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term 'free software.' But companies do not seem to use the term 'free software' that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term 'open source' opened the door for this."
What I see is not precisely the same but much more in keeping with what is described in a GNU Project essay in the section "Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions...but Not Always":
Digital Citizen
APK
GO the fuck AWAY!
(Everybody join in!)
APK
GO the fuck AWAY!
APK
GO the fuck AWAY!
APK
GO the fuck AWAY!
APK
GO THE FUCK AWAY!
OSI was founded to evangelize the idea of Free Software with different language, because at the time RMS wasn't really reaching business people - the message of a priori valuation of freedom over all else still plays best with programmers. Today many have reached an appreciation of Free Software starting with Open Source's gentler introduction. I don't deny that one person actively deprecated RMS. But it's long over.
Bruce Perens.
Betteridge's law of headlines says the answer is 'No'.
Knowing actual history backs up Betteridge and shows how little 'new' is in the news that asks questions like this.
All of the freedom respecting licenses were born into a world of commercial, closed and proprietary licensing for software and services by default. From the 1970s onward, outside of BSD you had to pay somebody for a black box bag of code to run your hardware. All of these boxes included and still include specific instructions that there are no user serviceable parts inside and to which you could not share, loan, resell or even examine.
Even today licenses like the GPL depend on the severe strength of copyright law. Law that was created purposefully to support those commercial, closed and proprietary licenses to content like Mickey Mouse.
Tivo and other SaaS offerings are not new. Running GPL 3 code on your hosted-service-but-its-new-because-we-call-it-cloud-now offering does not change the obligations to your users. Either you support the Four Freedoms to use, source, modify and share or you don't have a 'free' license. It's just another commercial offering where you might be playing up some 'Open Source' marketing angle.
Snake Oil is as old as oill and snakes. Most the VC money will dry up once the investors figure out these "fake open source" companies have no product, no market and aren't GitHub so Microsoft won't buy them out.
Not quite. Free software was born from the reaction to the change from public domain to closed source that began in the 70s. It wasn't born into a world of proprietary licenses, but into one where they were starting to appear. Whatever your opinion of RMS, you cannot deny his foresight.
As though anyone would ever feel part of, or want to be part of, a "community" around a closed proprietary product like Sharepoint.
But, ooo, doesn't that company just wish that people would be passionate about their products like libre software people actually are about their software.
"How do you describe a license that lets you run, modify, fork, and redistribute the code and do virtually anything other than offer a competing SaaS offering of the product? "
Definitely neither as "open source" nor "free software", which it simply isn't. If for some reason you don't want to just call it "proprietary", which it is, then invent your own new term.
It's OSS, strictly speaking, but it's not FOSS anymore. The moment you introduce arbitrary requirements or restrictions, the "freedom" part flies right out of the window. The "ethical" way to make money is, IMO, to offer your software under AGPL3 with a commercial license available on a company-by-company basis. That way, on the one hand your software is fully free as in speech (and any proprietary changes to it become free as well), yet there is a way out for SAAS vendors who want to tweak it to run better on their infra, which is basically all of them.
What "community"? The only thing the OSI has done has helped themselves. We are fine without them. They just muddy the waters.
+1 sad truth
Yup - the freedom of corporations to leech, and the freedom of programmers to starve. Good on you!
AGPL is much to weak for their purpose. Amazon or Google would have no problem with complying with its terms and still offering the service to customers. The problem here is money that author company doesn't get and not getting some mythical code modifications..
Google, RedHat
I'm all about _people_ having the freedom to use software however they see fit. But I couldn't give a flying fuck if corporations have "freedom" to do anything at all.
Because Freedom is for human beings. Corporations are "legal entities", more or less malevolent machines, little petty gods we've built and raised up over ourselves.
I want to release software under a license that grants the Four Freedoms to human beings. And grants jack shit to corporations. No license I'm aware of does this. But maybe it could be hacked into existing licenses with just a few edits. Any thoughts on the wording?
PS: There's probably some numbnuts out there thinking, "Hey doood, a corporation is just a group of people. Corporations have rights too!!1!" Sorry bro, it's Current Year, and no one believes that obvious lie anymore.
Exactly the kind of self-serving drivel one would expect from Bruce Perens and his little committee.
Except the BSD license gives you more freedom than the GPL
This depends on who "you" are. If you are a propriety software company wanting to use BSD software in your own software, then you are right, the BSD gives you the freedom to include that software with your own without allowing other people to share it. If you are a software _user_ then the GPL gives you more freedom because you have the freedom to share that software. Most people, even most developers spend more time using software so they gain more freedom on average from the GPL than they gain from the BSD license.
Why are you so cowardly that you try to hide your anti-semitism behind (((jew))) brackets? We all know what they mean, and you're free to be as nazi as you like on /. Are you really a bit ashamed of yourself, or just a snivelling coward?
I worked on a major DoD acquisition program in the previous decade, where the prime contractor and the government both kept a lawyer busy nearly full-time evaluating Open Source licenses.
We did overcome a lot of the resistance to the GPL, but that was a significant set of both legal and business arguments that went up to the executive levels.
The worst was packages with a mix of commercial and Open Source licenses, when we had to figure out not just what we could do with the their code and our code, but also how we would maintain the resulting system.
(And as a side comment, one big problem we had was incompatible/obsolete version of OSS components. I think an audit of one of our builds found something -20 different- versions of SSL libraries, some with really bad security vulnerabilities.)
See subject & Google EFast (malicious & created from OpenSORES Chrome), bushwhacked code https://www.bleepingcomputer.c... +https://securityintelligence.com/news/popular-javascript-library-for-node-js-infected-with-malware-to-empty-bitcoin-wallets/
* PLUS "threats" I've gotten on my code that IF I opened SORES'd it I'd have a malicious doppleganger made of it by those doing the threats HERE ON /.!
Per this hobby program of mine I've recently ported to Linux (better vs. Win32/64 model too) & SOON to MacOS (very soon, getting a Mac this week) https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
PAY ATTENTION TO THE CHINA ONE in that last link - it will AMAZE you what I discovered that is going to SAVE Spectrum users...
NO ABUSED DOWNMODS BOYS - I WON'T ALLOW IT WHEN I POST NOTHING BUT VERIFIABLE FACT https://news.slashdot.org/comm... & you try CENSOR/HIDE it.
APK
P.S.=> You're seeing what happens to it & IF NOT FOR THAT? Hey - I'd be for it, & have opened my code, but I WON'T NOW for sure per the above - any questions? Ask... apk
As a former googler: Google doesn't even allow you to install VLC on company laptops. It's safe to say they will not allow the deployment of _anything_ AGPL licensed in the datacenter.
Thanks for adding your view.
It was somewhat confusing to read their piece. Absolutely nothing in my experience matches their position. Excepting those that want to restrict the use of software while leveraging free resources.
And of course, it's right there in the open source definition. Item 6 is, "no discrimination against fields of endeavor". The definitions of "free software" and "open source" are practically identical, and what these people are doing doesn't meet either one.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I describe it as "not open source."
The licenses affect different people differently, but BSD is still more free. Free isn't about what you can do, it's about what someone says you can't or have to do. The more someone controls you, the less free you are. The main argument isn't about which is more free, but which ideology is "better" as a whole. BSD is objectively more free than GPL, but GPL is subjectively better than BSD by enforcing certain subsets of freedom at the expense of others deemed less important.
BSD is about giving freedom to the recipient of your code, and no concern for the freedom of users downstream.
GPL is about preserving the same freedom for downstream users that the first recipient got. That is the FSF's justification for the GPL's restrictions, anyway.
"Freedom for me, but not for thee" is shortsighted IMHO.
Forced freedom is not freedom and the logical dissonance required to willingly conflate entitled access to other people's work and freedom is blind zealotry. With BSD, you always have access to the original, just no guarantee about access to derivatives. Which is "better" is subjective, but BSD is objectively more free.
the flaw in open source and free software is any corporation like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft can make millions and billions off of it while the people who put in the work get nothing - people will work for free, but why would they work to make another billion for a corporation?
There is no 'forced freedom' with GPL. It places conditions on what you MAY do, but does not require you to do anything at all to use the software.