Free and open source software projects are in transition

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/the-floss-transition/

by chriskrycho • 3 years ago

209 126 3 years ago

There's an "open core" VC fund I've seen blog posts from on here, I'd be interested to hear their take. I agree that open source is in trouble as it's basically shifted to branding, as a way, like the author says to extract maximal value from the "community" while giving nothing back. It's like moving into one of the sub-optimal prisoners dilemma quadrants where somebody rats.

That said, I don't agree with the dig at LLMs, it seems tacked on and more just an ideological complain, which is odd in the context of open source.

chriskrycho• 3 years ago

I largely do agree with it, but agree that it's somewhat secondary to the specifics of the pice. In context of reading his stuff more generally, it makes sense: he's been writing extensively on that subject (including a self-published book on the subject) for many months, so if you are a regular reader, it fits. The challenge of writing for your existing audience vs. the inherent context collapse of an individual post online!

yesimahuman• 3 years ago

In many cases these open core companies are not “giving nothing back”, but are funding engineer salaries on the order of millions of dollars per year to invest in the OSS project that they use as customer acquisition for a commercial cloud and enterprise offering on top. Companies like Vercel and Ionic both employ this model. I think people often forget how much these companies invest and “give back” to the community in terms of raw dollar investment

User23• 3 years ago

As usual when it comes to computing freedom, RMS was right[1]. "Open Source" was conceived as a way to market to corporate executives. It's unsurprising then that corporate executives took it for exactly what they were sold it as, a way to get developers' work without paying for it.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

spankalee• 3 years ago

I personally get paid to work on open source, which is the opposite of what you're claiming here.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

Rather, it's unsurprising that corporate executives took Open Source for exactly what it was designed as.

It's left the anti-copyleft guys babbling about plunder and The Spirit of Open Source™. I'm honestly shocked that I don't hear them calling companies that get rich off OSS "settler colonialists."

dspillett• 3 years ago

That said, I don't agree with the dig at LLMs, ... [it] is odd in the context of open source.

I don't see it that way, if talking about the stricter end of OSS licensing. There is an argument for training a model with AGPL code meaning that the resulting model should be released in full to its users as a derivative work, for instance. Being an ideological complaint doesn't make it an invalid one, even if you consider that ideology to be rather dogmatic.

sytse2• 3 years ago

I assume you mean my VC fund, Open Core Ventures https://opencoreventures.com/ that starts new companies around existing open source projects.

We believe that open core companies need to give back and the open source code base should be better off because the open core company exists. Features that appeal most to individual contributors should be open source https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-01-open-core-standard...

The article mentions the recent move of RedHat to no longer share their source code. I think RedHat is a special case because they didn't have any proprietary code https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only...

Open core can be done right and wrong (not giving back, etc.), for some more thoughts on how to do it right please see https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misun... We're figuring all of this our as we do it, suggestions are welcome.

version_five4• 3 years ago

Thanks for replying. I hope you and others can find a way to make open source more sustainable without compromising the projects. Like I alluded to with my prisoners dilemma comment above, I think there is an optimum for everyone where companies try and make the open source project itself as valuable as possible instead of extracting value from it, and I'm happy hear about businesses that are legitimately trying to get us there.

ksimukka• 3 years ago

I want to purchase a license (take my money!) to self host Posthog. The core is OSS and also has Enterprise features (that is also open source). However, they insist I should move to their cloud solution.

abeppu2• 3 years ago

A majority of the value created by modern software ultimately comes from free and open source software.
From this perspective most VC investments aren’t about creating value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The scale is for extraction.

As with so many things, I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is a loaded term because it uses destructive means to acquire exclusive access to physical resources, in a way which leaves literally less than there was before, and which can be literally lethal to a literal biological ecosystem and literally toxic to physically proximal human communities. "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone.

A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it. To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" is not the right metaphor.

The issue of adding proprietary features to OSS projects I think we should acknowledge as diluting value, not subtracting it. If the choice is between project development being discontinued at time T with core feature set F, vs continued through time T+K with extended feature set F + G + H where H is proprietary, but G is not, users who won't use the proprietary features may still benefit from G, and are still better off with continued development -- but we must acknowledge that it's at a slower rate than if H had not been added. Communities should evaluate whether diluted support is worthwhile, or at what point it should be considered abusive, or at least separated into distinct companion projects.

version_five4• 3 years ago

I think strip mining is a good analogy. Like google has strip mined the internet and left a toxic pit behind, if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.

infogulch• 3 years ago

left a toxic pit behind

Nonsense. If google scrapes your site, your site is not affected. Where is the toxic pit, exactly?

abeppu2• 3 years ago

Like google has strip mines the internet and left a toxic pit behind

Can you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving us with a more impoverished web experience.

If you're making a different kind of assertion, please elaborate on it.

Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use.

Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on to the page from which the information was sourced, that does seem effectively extractive. But I think that's distinct from the OSS project-capture problem.

if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.

I actually think google is a good illustration of the full spectrum of OSS projects. They're definitely "getting their way" but:

- gson, guice, protobuf, snappy, the go language are all examples of projects that are very useful and pretty separate from any revenue-generating google product

- kubernetes, istio, etc are projects that can easily be used without touching any google revenue-generating project, but if you're using some of their revenue-generating projects, you may likely want something like this. Perhaps this is OSS but writing for your paying customer-base as a target audience?

- android, chrome, tensorflow are all about building little googleverse of customers in their orbit

dasil003• 3 years ago

I disagree, the analogy is weak. Strip mining is about harvesting naturally occurring resources in the most invasive way. The internet is not a natural resource. It was created by and for humans, from zero to unfathomable scale in thirty quick years. It is a reflection of ourselves, our systems, and our social and financial incentives. Google definitely deserves some blame as they certainly have helped shape those incentives, but it's not like they came in and started dynamiting some pristine wilderness, do you remember what search was like before Google came along?

dtaht4• 3 years ago

I think strip mining is a decent analogy as well, so long as you include the fate of the participants. Take diamond mining as an example. The miners themselves tend to be dirt poor, and searched for stuff of value on exiting the mine, yet the outcome is big money for the corp controlling the mine.

throwaway2907• 3 years ago

Like google has strip mined the internet and left a toxic pit behind

Sorry, what?

a13o• 3 years ago

The strip mining imagery landed for me when focusing on the trend of open source communities adjacent to cloud platforms. Citus, ElasticSearch, Kubernetes, etc all feel like corporate goliaths forked and outcompeted David. No analogy is perfect, but I can see facets of why one might liken this to strip mining.

rrdharan• 3 years ago

How does David vs. Goliath apply to any of these projects?

Kubernetes was developed, paid for and released by Google and loosely inspired by Borg.

ElasticSearch meanwhile wouldn't exist without Lucene which was again paid for and released by Excite in 1999, and who were very much not a David at the time.

PostgreSQL came out of Berkeley.. is the idea that David is the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (which includes Microsoft, Google and Amazon employees)? Or maybe it's EDB (https://www.enterprisedb.com/)?

pseudocomposer• 3 years ago

Potential value extraction of OSS really depends on the license; the (A)GPL vs. MIT-style license debate has been going for decades now. There’s a reason none of the big corporations touch anything GPL, aside from Linux distro subdivisions that are never their direct money makers. And when you compare what actually reaches consumers, like Qt vs. GTK for an ancient but ongoing example, or basically every Android distro pre installed on a consumer phone, and the various modern MIT-licensed FE tools (React, Flutter, etc.)… the apparent levels of nefariousness/data mining/anti-competitiveness/price-gouging generally seem higher for the MIT-licensed (and especially corporate-controlled) products than (A)GPL products. (Yes, there is also definitely a trade off in terms of easy UX between these!)

skrebbel• 3 years ago

I agree but this blog post is hardly about that. It’s way less “companies bad, OSS good” as I expected it to be after reading your comment.

rpastuszak• 3 years ago

I actually like the metaphor, although I agree it's flawed.

"Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone.

For instance, look at the amount of brainpower wasted on using tech to steal our attention via adtech (and its supporting industries), large companies using OSS to increase their monopolies instead of giving back, small companies trying to build nothing of immediate value, but rather blitz-scale so they can get sold at valuations not reflecting their value.

wpietri• 3 years ago

To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" is not the right metaphor.

It can, but it often does the opposite. "Extraction" may not be a metaphor that's quite true to the material. But it's very true to the attitude with which many companies operate, and that's because a lot of business culture was developed in extractive contexts and then applied elsewhere.

kdmccormick3• 3 years ago

I work on one of those FLOSS projects that has several ostensibly-open-but-only-works-on-the-proprietary-instance sort of features baked into the core codebase. Some of them are dilutive, but some of them are actively subtractive, especially when they impact performance, become a blocking point during library upgrades, confuse our users, and generally make the codebase harder to reason about. This code is essentially dead code in the community offering, and we all know that dead code is not neutral, it's a liability.

Fortunately, our project is moving in the opposite direction than the one that the article describes: we have an independent steering committee & well-funded core team now, and lately have been actively trying to boot proprietary features out of the core offering. But it's a lot of work, both technically and socially, and we'd have much more time to spend on new features if it weren't for the dead weight we have to deal with.

JJMcJ3• 3 years ago

More than one FLOSS developer has written of huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software that serves only the company's interest.

Or even replying that they are busy with other things but if the company wants to pay for the change they can work on it, and company replying that that seems like "extortion", as if the developer is under moral obligation to fix Initrode's problems for free by the end of the week.

dtaht4• 3 years ago

I would be very interested in learning how to go about getting a well funded core team for an open source project (libreqos.io). We are increasingly popular, but still lack a business model. I too tend to reject most friction-creating and value-subtracting processes, but the top ramen is running low.

gochi2• 3 years ago

A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it

They don't need to, until they realize people aren't upgrading to the added layers of offerings and then start removing that value. This is required because the base value tends to be substantial enough to swiftly encourage people to use it, and VC loves the growth this comes with.

monocasa2• 3 years ago

Most company use of OSS isn't a freemium model, but instead them using it for their infrastructure in complements to their ultimate product. Think Google's use of Linux on their servers, or their use of gcc/clang to compile their search application.

keepamovin• 3 years ago

I’m launching something soon to try to reverse this and give back power to open source creators, around their earnings and, to bring a bit of order to an informal marketplace that really needs it. If you’re interested, join the wait list / launch email list and you’ll get to be among the first to use it: https://ash6wpkw.paperform.co/

esafak• 3 years ago

Which FLOSS projects did pyTorch and Tensorflow -- the libraries behind the hottest companies today -- strip mine? Both come from venture-backed companies.

bombolo• 3 years ago

And they have no dependencies? Despite being known for being hellish to install due to how badly they handle dependencies…

behringer• 3 years ago

I think open source users need to get more serious about using a more pro consumer license like the gnu gpl. If you're using less restricting licensing you're working for Amazon for free.

paulddraper4• 3 years ago

Often these open-source projects have their own commercial offerings to support development, e.g. Elasticstack, MongoDB. And then AWS destroys that, without offering any contributions themselves. So it's no longer commercially viable for the original organization, and development suffers.

That's a net negative result.

Havoc• 3 years ago

I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is a loaded term

The analysis isn’t suffering from it but rather that is the analysis.

The authors whole point is that these foss communities and projects will die as a result

carapace4• 3 years ago

Here's my $0.02 (again. Apologies to those who've heard it already.)

First, let me proclaim by bias: I'm a Free software fanatic. I do not ever want to run software that I can't read and, if I want to, modify. I just won't do it.

Open Source doesn't make sense to me and never has, becasuse you have always been able to give away your code.

The entire point of Free software is to avoid or even prevent closed proprietary software. That's why the GPL is "viral", eh? That's the whole point. Free software started when RMS wanted to fix his printer and Xerox said, "No."

Now we have companies like John Deere that use computers to lock out their own customers from fixing their own tractors. We have car companies charging to unlock heated seats and extra acceleration. Printers that lie to you about how much ink they have left, and brick themselves if you try to use cheaper unofficial ink. Etc.

You can be in charge of your computer, or you can be a peasant in someone else's fief.

Vox_Leone• 3 years ago

First, let me proclaim by bias: I'm a Free software fanatic. I do not ever want to run software that I can't read and, if I want to, modify. I just won't do it.

I can relate to that. I guess you're are also having problems developing AI, because it is next to impossible to set up a full FLOSS AI stack [then I have to use proprietary stuff - conflicts of conscience ensue]

Free software started when RMS wanted to fix his printer and Xerox said, "No."

Is there an AI stack that RMS would approve/use?

carapace4• 3 years ago

you're are also having problems developing AI

I have no interest in talking computers.

cf. James Mickens' USENIX Security '18-Q keynote speech: "Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

Anyway, they're just a pile of linear algebra and a massive pile of Other People's Data, eh? (And piles and piles of hype, my god, so much hype. Even in the "academic" papers!)

The difficulty would lie in amassing that data, not in developing software. You would have to solve that "conflict of conscience" first, no?

But more to the point: none of my goals can be advanced by talking computers.

- - - -

Is there an AI stack that RMS would approve/use?

I have no idea. You could ask him if you're really interested.

tracker13• 3 years ago

I mostly agree... I'm not necessarily dogmatic about closed source software or services, but definitely in favor of always having an exit strategy, even if more painful.

mindslight2• 3 years ago

I'd say this is the critical distinction that communities focused on "open source" are missing. We've had a whole crop of developers raised to focus on "open source", thinking it implies some be-all end-all, when it was really more of a corporate marketing term that emphasizes the mechanic rather than the goal of end-user computing freedom.

Just because a piece of software has some trappings of libre software does not mean that it is a fully fledged libre software. If most of the development energy comes from a single company, then that company can change its policies overnight and introduce terrible non-libre anti-features to that "open source" code base (see: the ongoing Chromium fiasco). Or in the case of most "web" software, when the main use of that software is from load-every-time distribution via centrally-controlled HTTP(s)/DNS, most of its use is decidedly non-free.

Yes, it is certainly a step up that such projects can be used as libre software - patched to remove the anti-features, or even hard forked and rebranded if the centralized maintainer gets too heavy handed etc. And this should not be taken for granted! However, we have to stop seeing the "open source" label as a synonym for libre software where user freedoms are first and foremost, when it's more like one bullet point in a "pros" column.

(also just a nit. When you say "I do not ever want to run software that I can't read and, if I want to, modify. I just won't do it", I doubt this hardline assertion is true! Even RMS rationalizes running proprietary software as long as someone else has written it to flash and doesn't talk about it too much. I use a more strict-but-pragmatic approach based around an assumption of a Libre/Secure core and then analyzing how specific proprietary bits actually compromise my freedom)

carapace4• 3 years ago

(> I doubt this hardline assertion... )

(I'll cop to having an iPhone, but only because my sister got it as part of a package deal last time she renewed her phone contract. I only use it to communicate with her, and only because we have to coordinate closely on the care of our elderly mother. I have installed no apps, and I removed most of the ones that came with it. Other than that, yeah, I run all Libre/Open software. I rarely actually read it, of course, but in theory I could.)

(⌐■-■) (Sardonic-"I'm so cool" self-deprecatory shades.)

someguy72502• 3 years ago

Now we have companies like John Deere that use computers to lock out their own customers from fixing their own tractors. We have car companies charging to unlock heated seats and extra acceleration. Printers that lie to you about how much ink they have left, and brick themselves if you try to use cheaper unofficial ink. Etc.

Exactly! I believe this issue is becoming a very political one because some companies even lock people out of developer tools with a paywall. And when we are forbidding people from learning that they are being suppressed, very bad things happen.

I learnt programming by rooting my phone and then installing a compiler. Android 12 almost killed it alongwith Termux. Are you telling me that if I was born today, I'll simply give up? (Edit: To answer this quesiton myself, No. Today's kids are probably installing customized apk/ipa instead of rooting. Frida is also interesting. But if history repeats itself, even these tools will be banned (self signing dev packages, and using ptrace as a modding tool). And that affects more than just kids..)

Honestly companies have too much control through DRM and copyright. The public needs a way to fight back. If the laws were to be changed, I hope that companies are not immune from lawsuits through TOS, and I hope to see a few class-action lawsuits causing a company to lose some of its copyrights to the public domain.

fidotron• 3 years ago

The big change of the last decade has really been the cloud explosion and with it a serious bias towards valuing deployment and operations over development, to the degree that if you're doing development which is not about deployment and operations then you're a sucker.

The emergence of the LLMs etc makes the classic open source business model of relying on incomprehensible documentation to drive people to pay you as a consultant fall apart as they will get answers on demand. You just have to look at things like Docker to see how hard it is to turn even wildly successful projects into viable companies even before all this.

radisb• 3 years ago

You reap what you saw

sesm• 3 years ago

I was thinking about the essence of open source recently, and I came to the following conclusion: open source is when you treat people as developers, not as users. Which means: it should be trivial to build and run from source, debug, add extra logs and apply patches. Moreover, creating and applying your own patches should be encouraged, anything that can be easily patched shouldn't be a configuration option.

Most corporate "open source" fails this test, they treat people as users, create marketing websites while publishing zero developer documentation.

What's interesting, JS ecosystem accidentally has this property, thanks to packages being distributed as source, standard logging system (console.log) and widespread use of `patch-package` tool.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

Not everyone can code in a way that is useful for development, but one way of looking at it could be: actually treating people like a community, rather than users.

Unfortunately the phrase “community” has been degraded a bit by companies who want a more in-group-feeling-inducing way of describing their users. But, in a real community, people support each other and try to push projects forward, contributing in the fashion that best suits their skills, and toward goals that best fit their interests.

J_Shelby_J2• 3 years ago

In the age of LLMs everyone is a dev.

What's the next iteration of SaaS then?

majewsky2• 3 years ago

Most uses of LLMs for development that I've seen are for writing code, when the majority of dev time is spent reading code. What offerings exist to read through an existing codebase and ask questions of it? Do contemporary LLMs have enough lookbehind for that?

BSEdlMMldESB• 3 years ago

the free software movement and its close companion movement of open source are in need of a renewal

I think we should call it "liberty minded software"... software which cares and caters to the liberties of the users and makers of the software.

blibble• 3 years ago

due to the OpenAI strip-mining I've simply stopped publishing all my open source code

once the courts rule this isn't fair use I'll resume, otherwise I'm done for good

I see no need to train my replacement, especially not for free

kykeonaut• 3 years ago

Or you can start publishing extremely poor code ;)

dtaht4• 3 years ago

That's what I do!

pier25• 3 years ago

In the LAMP + jQuery days, it was harder to build very sophisticated apps but the big advantage is the stack was very simple. Not only simple to build with but also to maintain. We basically lived in the AK47 era.

These days the stack is super complex with lots of moving parts which means it requires exponentially more effort to maintain. Eg: What will happen to React and Svelte if Vercel crashes and burns?

troyvit2• 3 years ago

I feel like that puts us in the F-35 days.

OJFord• 3 years ago

It amuses me that a thread or two above we've got complaints that 'strip-mining' and 'extraction' are forced metaphors, taking it too far, and here we are - afaict pretty seriously - talking about software as AK47s & F-35s.

peter_l_downs4• 3 years ago

Pretty good overview from Baldur — I don't always agree with everything he writes but this seems relatively correct.

One question I'd ask him (and anyone else reading) is: what are some other options for monetization?

Over the last few weeks I had three different VCs reach out to me about some of the open source projects I've been releasing, and ask me if I'd thought about making a business out of them. I told them that no, based on the problem the software was solving, I didn't see how I could adopt open-core or companion-saas business models, and I wasn't sure how else it could be done while keeping the code open source.

Can anyone suggest a viable business model that would allow:

* Code remains at least source available, ideally open source for non-commercial use.

* I can charge for commercial use.

* Actually doing the licensing is reasonable, ie no spyware or phoning home from the tool.

Wouldn't need to be perfect, I understand that if the code is open source a company could easily fork and use it without paying me. The idea would be to make it zero-headache to pay me for a license if the code is being used by a funded team.

The projects:

* https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

* https://github.com/peterldowns/pgmigrate

peter_l_downs4• 3 years ago

I asked this question in a discord for this kind of stuff and the answer I got was "not possible." I also spoke with the developer of OrbStack, and they suggested just not being open source and charging for it, which is what they're going to do. When it comes to dev tools (particularly those that are involved in operations/sre flows like pgmigrate) I consider open source a huge benefit, and I'm sad to think that there is no way to get paid for an open source project without shoehorning in a bad experience or unnecessary features (like Baldur points out)

bckmn• 3 years ago

I think an alternative is to fund _individuals' maintenance of the projects_, as opposed to the project itself. Filippo Valsorda has written about this recently: https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer

peter_l_downs4• 3 years ago

That's an interesting idea, thank you, I'll read through the post.

EDIT: I found the post interesting but unfortunately these projects are in no way load-bearing. I'm happy to hear Filippo has made it work for himself but as he points out, the projects he works on are simply much better suited to sponsorship and retainer/consulting agreements. I wonder what he would recommend for newer or less-load-bearing projects.

tracker13• 3 years ago

I don't think "source available" is really that viable of a model. MS tried that with a lot of their developer offerings before more became truly FLOSS, specifically in the .Net space.

In the end, I'm less likely to trust/use ANY non-floss software/services that doesn't have a clear and clean exit path. I can use CockroachLabs (CockroachDB cloud) as I can exit pretty cleanly to self-hosted PostgreSQL with other models. I can abstract the usage of say DynamoDB to target other options relatively easily as well.

That said, tethering deeply into rented services, or commercial+floss providers can only hook you in the end if things get too dicey. And you only need to look at Oracle and IBM/RedHat as examples of the hook you and reel you in approach. A lot of businesses are also pretty deeply tied into a given cloud platform. They all have nice to have, relatively easy to use features/services. If you don't have an exit strategy, you better have a fat wallet. It's not that it won't still be painful to exit, but without at least a strategy, you're trapped.

lifeisstillgood• 3 years ago

Redis and Mongo have tried this - see https://redis.com/legal/licenses/

Officially they are not OSI approved but they go straight to the heart of the issue :

>> has only two primary limitations. You may not:

Commercialize the software or provide it to others as a managed service Remove or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices

cillian64• 3 years ago

What ChibiOS does is release under GPL3 and then sell a commercial dual license. This is definitely open source and also means most non-open-source commercial use would need to pay for a license. It’s probably also one reason why FreeRTOS is much more popular in business than ChibiOS.

https://www.chibios.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=chibios:licensi...

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

License it as AGPL and offer alternative license for businesses for money.

MaxBarraclough2• 3 years ago

If the software takes the form of a library, that approach might work as intended, but AGPL does not forbid commercial use in general. To copy from [0]:

    The basic obligations of the AGPL which set it apart from other licenses
    are as follows:

    • Any derivative works of AGPL-licensed software must also use the AGPL.
    • Any users of such software are entitled to the source code under the
      terms of the AGPL, including users accessing it over the network such as
      with their web browser or via an API or internet protocol.

    If you’re using AGPL-licensed software like a database engine or my own
    AGPL-licensed works, and you haven’t made any changes to the source code,
    all you have to do is provide a link to the upstream source code somewhere,
    and if users ask for it, direct them there. If you have modified the
    software, you simply have to publish your modifications.

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

(Usual disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc.)

paulddraper4• 3 years ago

https://databaseci.com/ is similar.

(Seems to be down though...not a good sign.)

peter_l_downs4• 3 years ago

Yes, I was inspired by djrobstep's work and many of the analysis queries that pgmigrate uses to generate a schema dump come directly from schemainspect (the library that migra uses underneath the hood). Migra targets a different kind of development flow but it is also in the migration space. My tool, pgmigrate, would be a good way to apply migrations created by Migra.

It is unfortunate that the Migra project is abandoned, I believe djrobstep has gotten into political advocacy and spends most of his efforts on things other than programming at this point. I say unfortunate because he is extremely talented and I have learned a lot reading and working with his code. Hopefully he comes back at some point to help transition Migra to some other maintainers and fix the website and such :)

erwin-co• 3 years ago

Free and open source software projects are in transition

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