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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.
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.
It's not new, but the only difference here is that people want to take software with licenses too restrictive to be Open Source and call it "Open Source". They should call it something else.
Bruce Perens.
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
I've participated in my fair share of flame wars and it's not pretty. I won't bore you and cite 101 examples of shitty code written by good programmers. I get lots of guys feel defensive because they know their behavior has been bad in the past. Get over it and start acting like how you want to be treated.
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.
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.