Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/corporate-open-source-dead

by ngetchell • 2 years ago

240 156 2 years ago

gnabgib• 2 years ago

HN title guidelines[0]: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WJW• 2 years ago

It's weird because in this case you could also read it as "Jeff Geerling says that corporate open source is dead", which just happens to be posted on his personal blog that has a domain name which is his personal name. It's not as if it's the site that called "Jeff Geerling" after all.

OJFord• 2 years ago

The title should be as posted on the blog, it would be weird if he put Jeff Geerling there (and he didn't). Rule's the same for bloggers without their name (obviously) in the domain, e.g. Julia Evans at jvns.ca is often submitted; not with a 'Julia Evans:' prefix.

leetharris• 2 years ago

Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady.

I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative.

I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work, they need to pivot to something that does work.

kevingadd3• 2 years ago

If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.

adrianN2• 2 years ago

You could make it AGPL if you don’t want that.

TheRealPomax3• 2 years ago

It's why things like Captura no longer exist. You make something fantastic with an open source license, someone else renames it and sells it in app stores, and the people running the app stores go "the license allowed for this, we see nothing wrong".

It's well past time for getting rid of licenses that say "you can do what you like with this software", and replace them with licenses that allows you to sell as long as the original project gets a cut, without taking on any of the liability.

The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary.

aborsy• 2 years ago

That’s guaranteed to happen. Even beyond that, how are developers going to earn a living with FOSS, at least with open licensing?

We have seen maintainers burnt out. It takes work to write code.

kube-system2• 2 years ago

Why is it depressing? It was your choice to share it.

phicoh• 2 years ago

If you make software with a small team and you have about 2 dozen customers who pay for a support contract, then those contracts are actually surprisingly cheap.

kleiba2• 2 years ago

Source available from the beginning is ethical.

Not to rms.

davisr5• 2 years ago

You must read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

skywhopper• 2 years ago

Just because they’re failing doesn’t mean switching licenses will help. HashiCorp did not increase the popularity of Terraform Cloud by clamping down on the ability of other companies to host Terraform services.

There were any number of things HashiCorp could have done to improve revenue generation from their products without changing the source license. When they realized they weren’t building the best SaaS version of their products, they didn’t try to improve their service. Instead they tried to run the competition out of business.

twojobsoneboss2• 2 years ago

It’s a business. It will by default do the easiest and least riskiest thing to make as much money as possible.

jacobr1• 2 years ago

When they realized they weren’t building the best SaaS version of their products, they didn’t try to improve their service

They went there several versions of their cloud products over the years, and pivoted a few times during that span

phkahler2• 2 years ago

> Source available from the beginning is ethical.

It's also mostly pointless. If someone wants to develop features for software they pay for I guess that's their choice.

> I'm not sure what people want these companies to do.

Not rug-pull.

radlad5• 2 years ago

There are many reasons people prefer open source software other than wanting to do their own development: Security auditing, the ability to reverse engineer protocols / serialization formats, or simply to better understand a product's features.

shkkmo• 2 years ago

So the TLDR; is don't trust any corporate open source that requires a CLA and don't contribute to those projects unless you are prepared to fork if the rug gets pulled.

TheRealPomax3• 2 years ago

Any project with a CLA was already subject to that stipulation. You get to do work for a company for free with the added benefit that you're now also on the hook for any legal problems that might arise from the code you contributed.

What a deal, you get to put in the time and effort AND potentially fight a legal battle when a patent troll decides to go "wouldn't it be fun if" all on your own!

iforgotpassword• 2 years ago

By working on a project with a CLA, where you sign away your code, you're giving carte blanche for the company to take away your freedom to use their software.

Ok it's been a while so I don't remember the details or how it played out, but when Linux introduced a CoC, there were people who contributed to the kernel in the past that threatened to withdraw their code from the kernel, which would've been a nightmare to handle and clean up. How much power does a contributor have if my project is using a standard licence like GPL or BSD? Does the contributor hold any copyright over their code? Im not talking about rug pulls here, let's just say the contributor gets really mad at me for some reason.

goku122• 2 years ago

I think that the developer can demand a withdrawal of their contribution, though I don't know what happens to the code that's already published under a FOSS license. Regardless, many projects including the Linux kernel require the developer to sign off their contributions under the terms of the 'developer certificate of origin' [1]. While the developer retains the copyright to the contribution under DCO, they acknowledge that it will be distributed in perpetuity under the original license. So, retracting the contribution may not be an option.

[1] https://developercertificate.org/

Macha2• 2 years ago

The main purpose of a DCO is to take the portion of a CLA that guarantees the developer actually has a right to license the code under the project's license, as it's something that some users worry about using the software without. Basically so if someone copies some code from one of the Windows leaks into Linux and Microsoft comes to sue the Linux Foundation over it, they can point to it and say "we had legal sign off they had the right to license this code, please sue them instead".

In terms of irrevocability, the DCO is not that different from most open source licenses who themselves claim to be perpetual. The arguments for exceptions to that being true all either apply to e.g. both the GPL and the DCO, or to neither.

Generally the consensus is that an irrevocable license grant means irrevocable, though there are some concerns about examples set by e.g. the precedent that lets artists claw back rights from record labels after 30 years.

CRConrad5• 2 years ago

I think that the developer can demand a withdrawal of their contribution

I don't. And neither do you, judging from your last sentence:

So, retracting the contribution may not be an option.

So what did you mean by the first one?

LukeShu• 2 years ago

Without a separate CLA or copyright assignment, the contributor retains the copyright to their code, and licenses it to the project under the terms of the GPL (or whatever license).

The license is basically a legally-binding promise not to sue, as long as you follow the rules in the license. So the general consensus is that they can't terminate the license unless you violate the license. (Though there are dissenting opinions on that.)

mfuzzey• 2 years ago

I don't think a contributor can unilatary withdraw their code from a code base unless there is license change. Then it wouldn't be about "withdrawing" their code but refusing to allow it to be distributed under a different license than the one that applied when they submitted it.

So if Linus wanted to relicense the kernel under a different license than GPL2 he couldn't do it by himself without tracking down all the contributors and getting them to agree to the license change or removing the code in question which, for someting as large and with as many contributors as the kernel, would be basically impossible.

The CoC is completely different. It's not a license change but a process change. If a contributor doesn't like a new CoC or a new processs they can decide to no longer contribute in the future under that process, including no longer maintaining "their" code already in the kernel but they can't force anyone to remove it.

Cheer2171• 2 years ago

"Corporate Open Source" is many things. Look at how many companies are paying for membership on the Linux Foundation Board: Platinum costs $500k a year, gold is $100k a year, and silver is $5-20k based on size: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

Linux foundation was never about Linux or open source. quite the contrary.

the foundation started as a way for companies to band Against gpl. and they won the day Linus have up and allowed tainted kernel be the default and every device distributor moved their proprietary code to modules and rejoiced.

their focus then was on gpl3 fud because google et al have much more money than modem vendors.

ahartmetz• 2 years ago

Unfortunately true. I like to call the Linux foundation the megacorporations LUG (Linux user group). They want to use Linux alright, but they would prefer to do with it whatever they want, so they are not really friends of the GPL and a few other things.

calibas• 2 years ago

The resistance to GPL isn't just companies, I think you'll find the average programmer prefers using libraries licensed under MIT when given the choice.

It seems like there's a kind of political ideology over what "open source" even means and how it should be practiced.There's a school of thought that says we should switch everything over to viral copyleft licenses. This will "protect" the code and ensure all derivative work is always open source.

Then there's others, like myself, who believe if you want something that's truly "free and open" it should come with as few conditions as possible.

gn4d2• 2 years ago

Bingo.

NuSkooler• 2 years ago

TL;DR: Once again, capitalism takes it's toll.

matheusmoreira7• 2 years ago

Always remember: It's either AGPLv3 or proprietary all rights reserved. Anything else means you're giving your labor away for free to the beggar barons. Biggest wealth transfer in history, from developers and straight into the pockets of billionaires. It's just irrational.

Also remember: Whoever owns the copyright gets to do whatever they want. The licensing security of free software, defined here as the likelihood of free software remaining free software, is proportional to the number of copyright owners involved. Changing the license requires agreement between all copyright holders, once a sizeable number of them has built up it becomes all but impossible. Therefore, anyone who asks you to assign your copyright to them should be viewed with suspicion. A true proponent of free software would want to maximize the number of copyright holders involved, not centralize the copyrights under a single entity.

busterarm3• 2 years ago

Maybe I like writing software that I don't bother to monetize but allows anyone who wants to come along and use it to eat to do so.

Don't give things away if you care about what happens to them afterwards. So many people completely misunderstand what open source is about.

matheusmoreira7• 2 years ago

Don't give things away

That's exactly the point I was making. My whole point was: DO NOT just give things away. That's just irrational. It brings you no profit and doesn't actually create long lasting wealth and freedom in the form of copyleft software. All it does is enable your exploitation. All it does is enrich billionaire corporations who are free to take the work of others, use it to make a killing and then laugh all the way to the bank at the suckers who made it all possible for free.

Don't just give your code away for free. Either make it proprietary all rights reserved, or make it AGPLv3. Those are the two choices. Maximum profit or maximum freedom. Either they pay you lots of money, or they adhere to the full set of conditions spelled out by the AGPLv3.

Don't just give your stuff away. Attach lots of strings to it. Strings that force others to benefit you in return for your generosity. Either by paying you lots of money or by being equally generous to you in return.

Don't just give software away. That was the point.

There is exactly one scenario where "permissive" licensing makes sense: a world without copyright. In other words, a world without licensing at all. They can copy your software and you can copy theirs. Until such a day comes that copyright is abolished though, "permissive" licensing is just nonsense, it just gives away all your leverage.

twojobsoneboss2• 2 years ago

Those “robber barons” are also the source of most tech jobs and how most of us here earn a living

matheusmoreira7• 2 years ago

Not robber barons. Beggar barons.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

Trillion dollar corporations. That beg for free labor. That exploit the good will of free and open source software developers.

Here's the latest example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39912916

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909949

int_19h2• 2 years ago

The source of most jobs (tech or not) are, ultimately, people and their needs.

stuff4ben• 2 years ago

I don't blame the big corps like IBM (disclaimer: I work there, I don't speak for them) and Microsoft and Google. I really blame investors who are looking to get their money back. When they force an IPO but there's no business model to sustain the company, this is what happens. CEOs resort to developer-hostile actions which kills off the community and generates ill-will towards the company. People here shit on "lifestyle companies" but IMO that's the best model for sustainablility and developer communities (if that's what you're into).

Ekaros• 2 years ago

If you offer something for free. And it becomes popular partly because it is free. Well it should be pretty clear that there is not huge money in free product... And at some level someone packaging with some margin your free product is well...

ergonaught• 2 years ago

Products aren't projects, which has confused people for decades.

If open source products retreating from some of the "freedom" elements bothers you, then you should be focusing your ire on the megacorporations and overfunded startups who simply refuse to contribute to the financial viability of the products that sustain them.

For some reason "we" celebrate the exploitative, though, so I guess that's out.

nrawe• 2 years ago

Yep. The author complains that there used to be plucky startups with Open Core business models who've now gone "extinct", while simultaneously sharpening their pitchforks because those same companies got successful and _slightly_ amended their licenses to prevent loosing revenue against IaaS giants so that they can, in turn, continue innovating. I guess money grows on trees where they live.

geerlingguy4• 2 years ago

The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'.

The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other existing tooling. The open core part was injected when the startup decided it had to turn into a platform to sustain the beefy staffing budgets while they figured out how to generate revenue off something that was freely available.

godelski• 2 years ago

We saw this with xz. Many, including me, suggested this is an example of how paying developers could reduce likelihood of attack and speed up progress. These people make these products in their spare time. You know... After work. So they clearly would rather do that than their job. But a common response was "what, so we could pay the hacker?" Which missed the entire point.

I'm also reminded by a relatively recent episode of either PIMA or Freakanomics (I forget which) where Steve asks Bill Gates why charities don't pay as well as corporate gigs and Gate's response was "it's a charity".

We seem to forget that things take work. Just because someone does that work on their own time and without asking for compensation doesn't mean that they don't deserve it. It just means their more passionate.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

If you can't capture sufficient value, you're not going to be able to make a business around it. The problem isn't value creation, which the OSS model does do. The problem is value capture. That's why so many people go around saying "We need to pay X more". That's a sign that creation and capture have a gap.

You'll see that with traditional open-source. With companies that attempt to capture the value, your customers will always hate you unless you're careful.

Of course using the Elastic license family from the beginning is one way there. The Llama license family is another way. But perhaps my favourite observed thing has to be Kong's licensing: the base thing is Apache 2.0 but when you sign a contract with them, they'll give you access to the Enterprise plugins and you can edit their source. I loved working with them.

They seem to have done a good job with value capture. I think they're leaving a lot on the table, but there is significant path dependence on what they've done, so they don't have the option any more. But good job.

buildfocus• 2 years ago

There are uses for CLAs besides rug pulls. For example, if you want to offer software as AGPL, accept community contributions, but be able to _also_ offer a non-AGPL option to paying customers (who effectively pay to be allowed to integrate the license without themselves being subject to licensing risk). Quite a few big orgs have a full ban on internal use of AGPL software so this can be very valuable.

That requires a CLA (as I understand it, IANAL) because you're relicensing a contributor's contribution. At the same time though, I wouldn't consider it a rugpull - contributors lose nothing here, and the open source project gains a funding mechanism (a rare thing in open source).

cogman102• 2 years ago

Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it.

Latest versions stay fully open source while back ported fixes are a paid feature if you don't keep your software up to date. That, to me, is a win win.

Oracle is doing the same with the JDK.

jabl• 2 years ago

Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it.

Huh, what software is MS releasing under the GPL now?

wmf2• 2 years ago

This is abuse of the AGPL and open source in name only.

piaste2• 2 years ago

Richard Stallman, of all people, is not as intransigent as you.

I've considered selling exceptions acceptable since the 1990s, and on occasion I've suggested it to companies. Sometimes this approach has made it possible for important programs to become free software.
[..] [S]elling exceptions permits limited embedding of the code in proprietary software, but the [non-copyleft] X11 license goes even further, permitting unlimited use of the code (and modified versions of it) in proprietary software. If this doesn't make the X11 license unacceptable, it doesn't make selling exceptions unacceptable.
I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

pxc• 2 years ago

I think you can do this in a principled way with some extra corporate/bureaucratic machinery, like the Free Qt Foundation, so that it doesn't allow rug pulls.

barfbagginus• 2 years ago

Hmm. Orgs which ban AGPL should be marked and targeted for dismantling. Any way to scope them out, or public registry of them we can build? Orgs banning AGPL should not be allowed to exist at all, or use open source at all. They should all be systematically sabotaged by the OSS community, and if possible acquired/reformed, or destroyed.

And it would be very convenient for me to be able to relicense an AGPL contributor's work as if it were mine all along, like an evil genius capitalist, tee hee hee :3

But I would fork a project that tried it, and that is the attitude we should encourage.

Those aren't valid reasons for CLAs in my organizations and projects, since they do damage to AGPL as I envision it.

I wonder if there are other reasons for a genuine AGPL radical to support a CLA? Seems AGPL is good enough on its own, and most CLAs just weaken it - both technically and in a spiritual and ethical sense. Could we strengthen it instead?

Arrowmaster• 2 years ago

Amazon bans it's developers from even viewing AGPL code on corporate devices. Good luck on your crusade.

trueismywork• 2 years ago

That's a rug pull for a price. I don't think it's a problem because the software is still there. But it's a rug pull.

GardenLetter27• 2 years ago

Even just stuff like releasing a GPL'd game on Steam or consoles can have the same issue if you need to keep some parts proprietary.

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

There's no such thing as a "GPL'd game with proprietary parts". GPL was designed to prevent that.

You can say "Steam and game consoles only allow publishing software with proprietary components", but don't blame that on GPL.

amouat• 2 years ago

The declining share price and profits is exactly what made it possible for IBM to buy Hashicorp. The license change didn't juice things -- it watered down the price. $6 billion is a snip compared to the $14 billion IPO valuation.

Fintan Ryan has a nice write-up here: https://medium.com/@fintanr/on-ibm-acquiring-hashicorp-c9c73...

TheDudeMan• 2 years ago

I just watched this interesting Node.js doc (Open-source Node.js was purchased by a corp and there was some drama along the way).

https://youtu.be/LB8KwiiUGy0

deathanatos• 2 years ago

And they're not even a pointless AI company!

Are you sure? (/s), because IBM mentioned "AI" no less than 10 times in their announcement of the purchase:

AI-driven application growth … IBM's deep focus and investment in […] AI … The global excitement surrounding generative AI … HashiCorp's capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era … generative AI deployment continues to grow … IBM's commitment to […] AI innovation … today's AI revolution … AI-driven complexity … IBM is a leading provider of global […] AI, … IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI

Thankfully the press managed to delete most of those, though there were some announcement that nonetheless took the bait.

geerlingguy4• 2 years ago

Ah, maybe IBM was duped into thinking HashiCorp was an AI play?

Aissen• 2 years ago

Obviously, you discover and talk to AI services with consul, store AI secrets in vault, deploy AI platform nomad with AI infrastructure software terraform.

j-cheong• 2 years ago

I think the anger comes from the rug pull, not that they chose to be source available, right?

If they chose to be source available from day 1, then no harm done?

geerlingguy4• 2 years ago

Yep; though HashiCorp would be a much smaller company had they not started with an open source license.

Decabytes• 2 years ago

I'm glad Jeff pointed out the RMS article on Free software

For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.
“Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.”
We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters. What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.” To make this clear, we avoid using those terms.

People in the FOSS world has been beating this drum since the very beginning. Free software was always an ideology. I get that that turns people off, just like projects wrapped up in religion and politics do, but it's the only way to ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen.

I concede that the people who champion FOSS are not always the kindest people to be around, see the response from people about Guix when I mentioned it as an alternative to Nix.

But when I was in Boston I was a card carrying member of the FSF. I went to a few libre planets, and I met some real nice people in real life who also cared about FOSS very deeply, so I know not everyone in the community is a jerk.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

"What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.”

I have zero idea what this means and I've been on Debian since Woody

runjake• 2 years ago

The GNU philosophy believes Free Software[1] and Open Source are two different things[2].

1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

2. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

crandycodes• 2 years ago

It's possible that "Open Source" here is the OSI definition, which FSF has some objections to. If "Closed Source" just means "not Open Source as OSI defines it", then it is true that some non-OSI software is "free" software. Free software still requires source to be available and that you're allowed to modify and distribute it.

CRConrad5• 2 years ago

They mean that what they advocate is “free software”, not “open source”; and that what they oppose is therefore “non-free software”, not “closed source”.

Honestly, how could that be hard to understand from the context of the discussion here?

chefandy• 2 years ago

I think the FSF's take is philosophically solid, and I've gotten a ton of of their software and advocacy over the years, as most software developers surely have. However, developers and other technical people are nearly the only people for whom that's true.

So much of the FOSS world blames marketing for the lack of non-technical users, routinely ignore, or even deride the prospect of prioritizing the most important factor non-technical users choosing software: usability. The people who do so dismiss interface and experience design as superfluous aesthetics. It might be true for people with a working mental model of software architecture in their back pocket, but to others, those little 'trivial' bits of prerequisite knowledge aggregate into a giant frustrating roadblock.

qwertox• 2 years ago

It's basically become market research where the amount of devs which get hooked indicate success and these devs also double as the client (a trap). I try to stay with my stack, which also makes me miss out on things like the highly recommended Tailscale-service.

Pannoniae6• 2 years ago

None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it, and prevent others from exploiting you in the process.

Hyperscalers like Amazon exploit OSS projects by reselling them as a cloud service and they earn a gigantic sum in the process. But this is not a neutral thing to do - the OSS project is still responsible for maintenance! (And in many places, the "no warranty" clause seems completely disregarded - users and corporations demand bugfixes since it's a "critical library")

The most telling sentence is "Open source culture relies on trust. Trust that companies you and I helped build (even without being on the payroll) wouldn't rugpull."...

where is any trust in exploiting someone's work without giving anything back? the hyperscalers routinely break the OSS social contract, but because they abide to the letter of the licences, they get a free pass and many white knights from even the OSS community and even OSI itself.

A business model of "you can see the source, you can modify it but you can't offer it as a service or resell my work" is much more honest and trustworthy than the "develop a library, a cloud service picks it up then pressures you with PRs and issues until you permanently burn out from the whole thing"

This is partly addressed by the post - "But you know what? I'd just prefer honesty. If revenue is so dependent on selling software, just... make the software proprietary. Don't be so coy!".

This is not honesty though. Claiming that anything not party-approved.... I mean OSI-approved is not open source and it's proprietary is a very myopic thing. For users and developers, it's much more beneficial if they can see or even modify the source even if they don't have an unrestricted right to use and modify it however they want. This absolutist, black-and-white approach could potentially lead to many pieces of software becoming fully proprietary, all-rights-reserved in the future since the open source community harasses source available projects quite frequently, and not many have the patience to put up with that. And that would be a sad outcome indeed for user freedom, repairability, portability and other values RMS and the FSF dearly holds.

sangnoir4• 2 years ago

None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it...

Should OSS solve that "problem"? Free software predates billion-dollar OSS / open-core companies, it also doesn't require the maintainer directly earn a living from it. Perhaps the era of OSS megacorps and the concomitant VC/startup dreams is setting, as these large, formerly OSS companies are rejecting OSS licenses in favor of bigger profits. To that, I say good riddance, not every useful git repository has to be incorporated.

...and prevent others from exploiting you in the process.

The whole point of free and open source software is anyone can use it and improve it - including Amazon and the person you hate. An OSS license is not a growth-hack for adoption: if you want to discourage Amazon from using your product, use AGPL. If you're worried others won't use your AGPL software, then you're growth-hacking.

FL/OSS will be fine between evening/weekend hackers (xz), small-to-medium companies/consultancies (Rails), and our neo-feudal tech overlords (React).

Pannoniae6• 2 years ago

Should OSS solve that "problem"?

If you don't want a cyberpunk-like dystopia of megacorps controlling everything, yes. This is not just affecting the VC-funded startups' profitability but it also affects ordinary software developers' lifestyle businesses too. Sure, the core principles of OSS don't require that you'd be able to earn money from your work, but then perhaps it is OSS which is not fit for purpose, not the desire to earn money from creating software.

if you want to discourage Amazon from using your product, use AGPL.

The AGPL is still not restrictive enough because you can resell the software without contributing anything back if you don't modify it. Stuff like the SSPL or the Commons Clause are much better to prevent that kind of exploitation.

FL/OSS will be fine between evening/weekend hackers (xz), small-to-medium companies/consultancies (Rails), and our neo-feudal tech overlords (React).

I find the xz example especially funny because that shows how it is very much not fine. Single developer, burnt out, not getting paid a penny for his thankless work, a bunch of state-sponsored actors pressure him to hand his project over -> backdoor injected. If Lasse Collin could get support for his project, this almost certainly would not have happened.

https://xkcd.com/2347/ is very relevant here.

jqpabc1232• 2 years ago

None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it

In other words --- developers can not live from Open Source alone.

If all software was Open Source, there would likely be a lot fewer developers. And those that remain would be spending a lot more time and effort on survival and less time creating software.

Open Source is inherently self limiting and unsustainable. It is a utopian concept that defies the basic economic reality we are all forced to contend with.

And the really crazy part --- even the least educated manual laborer can immediately grasp that giving his work away for free invites exploitation. It may be noble and good for somebody --- but ultimately not for himself or others like him.

ThrowawayR2• 2 years ago

"And the really crazy part --- even the least educated manual laborer can immediately grasp that giving his work away for free invites exploitation."

The funniest part is that this outcome was obvious even in the 1990s. Evangelists were begging businesses to start using FOSS with slogans like "free as in beer and free as in speech" and hailing every corporate adoption as a victory. Meanwhile, business were belching contentedly and asking for another free beer while pointedly not giving a rat's ass about giving back or software freedom.

I'm absolutely amazed that it took reality this long to catch up with FOSS.

eadmund2• 2 years ago

None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it, and prevent others from exploiting you in the process.

You’re begging the question of whether one should be able to earn a living from making free software.

Free software is not fundamentally about business or profit: it’s about ethics. It’s about the freedom of software users to use, modify and share their software.

How programmers get paid is an interesting question, but it’s not the most important question. The important one is, ‘is it ethical for a programmer to prevent his software’s users from using, inspecting, modifying and sharing modifications to the software they use?’ And the answer in my opinion is a resounding ‘no!’

Pannoniae6• 2 years ago

Sure. If it's about ethics then I could argue that corporations are not people. So I can give the right to all people to use, inspect, modify and share modifications to the software they use, but corporations aren't people so they don't get those rights. :D

bsnnkv2• 2 years ago

I recently re-licensed a large open source project from MIT to a source-available license which restricts redistribution after someone decided to fork it, completely rearrange the code and introduce subtle breaking interface changes, and then package it up with basic Electron UI for sale on a platform digital store.

I don't know what the answer is, but the OSI definition is clearly not built to withstand this era of late stage capitalism and the "hustle culture" that permeates through it.

8organicbits2• 2 years ago

Trademark law should handle this (at least in some countries). Register a trademark and then send a cease and desist to the fork as they are creating confusion in the marketplace by distributing something they created using your registered name.

Perhaps consider using Apache 2.0 license, section six has language that specifically addresses trademarks.

wmf2• 2 years ago

A lot of open source devs are allergic to promoting their work so owning the trademark won't help them. For example, the above developer could have created their own official GUI and put it in the app store but they won't. Realistically the value is in GUIs, SaaS, marketing, etc. not in backend code.

8organicbits2• 2 years ago

I started (and just published) a website[1] that tries to track relicensing risks across a number of OSS projects. The current methodology looks at trademark holders, licenses, and CLA/DCO requirements. I think there's community value in educating develpers, surfacing risks, tracking when a project changes it's posture, and promoting forks.

If this sort of thing is interesting to you, I'm looking to expand the project listing with community support. I suspect the relicensing trend is on its way up.

[1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

Most successful open source projects are actually backed by companies and most of those projects are of course alive and kicking. The entire fortune 500 runs on software and the most of that consists of massive amounts of open source with some sprinklings of proprietary stuff mixed in. Linux would have stayed a silly hobby project without the possibility for this.

What's dead, or rather was never really that much alive is the notion of not quite so open source projects where a single corporate entity attempts to dictate the rules and actively discourages outside contributions, and people profiting from "their" source code. As a proportion of most widely used OSS software the amount of software and the number of developers involved with it is a rounding error.

There are two main problems with corporate OSS:

1) it stifles the formation of a healthy community of outside contributors. This endangers long term success of projects. The more restrictions exist (e.g. copy right transfers or aggressively anti commercial usage licenses like AGPL), the more likely it is that would be contributors will take the hint and stay away.

2) it limits growth to the strategy, financial success, and imagination/skills of just one company. Because with projects being bottle necked on the financial success of just one company and cut of from outside help, absolutely nothing happens unless that one company pays for it.

And with finances effectively supplied by VC investors interested more in IPOs and quick exits than good software, OSS is just a buzzword that goes on the investor deck and not something they actively value or appreciate. Hence legal monstrosities like BSL that make no sense whatsoever from the point of view of nurturing a healthy community of external developers. Most VC companies of course fail. That kind of is the point. And most of their restrictively licensed software projects die along with them and don't survive the implosion of these companies. Developers move onto other things and the software gets peddled to hedge-funds or companies like IBM.

The only exception to this is properly licensed open source that can simply be forked. Oracle, Redis, Red Hat, Hashicorp, Elasticsearch, etc. found that out the hard way. The answer is not getting more proprietary about OSS software and preventing forks. The software gets forked precisely because these projects are too valuable to let it rot away behind corporate pay walls. This is not a failure of open source but actually a huge success. The software will long survive the misguided corporate shenanigans. The software and community will be fine. Those companies, possibly a lot less.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

Which hard way? None of those forks are relevant enough to matter.

Macha2• 2 years ago

The Jury is still out. I suspect in 5 years, Valkey and OpenTofu will be more popular than Redis and Terraform, at the very least for new products, but probably also for most actually maintained products. There's a good chance OpenSearch will also displace Elasticsearch.

flerchin• 2 years ago

Teraform and serverless doing the exact same thing at the exact same time really indicates that the market conditions that allowed for software like this was not long term sustainable.

As a builder that leverages them both, I'm saddened, but I get it.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

What is dead is the utopian dream that making companies whose main product is raw software, is possible to do in a sustainable way, while keeping everything open source.

There are bills to pay, donations only give so much, very few buy books from community members, consulting doesn't apply to all software, trainings even less, not everything can be a SaaS,...

tzs• 2 years ago

OT: if the author of the article sees this, there's an error in a quote. You quote HN user skywhopper as saying

HashiCorp already did a great job pre-draining all their flavor

but their quote actually says [1]

HashiCorp has done a good job of pre-draining any flavor it once had

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135686

geerlingguy4• 2 years ago

Ah sorry about that, was paraphrasing for the video, but the blog post should have the direct quote since I don't have a snapshot. I'll update the page when I'm back at my computer later!

getcrunk• 2 years ago

This goes against the foss ethos but given that foss is ultimately rooted in freedom I think what I will suggest can be reconciled with the primary principle.

I’ve been thinking the only way to truly protect freedom of individuals and of foss development is to have a dual license which is foss unless you deploy it to over 10m users or 10m revenue or belong to list of companies like the eu designated gatekeepers. In that case each project should have the latitude to decide if they will enforce terms if any. Meaning that given the needs of the developers being otherwise met they can always forego any additional requirements

jratkevic2• 2 years ago

What is C

penguin_booze• 2 years ago

Bryan Cantrill's been sounding the alarm for years—yes, that Bryan Cantrill, the one who posted this gem

The video is of Brendan Gregg, not of Bryan. Am I missing something?

nsteel• 2 years ago

Yes: Bryan posted the video of Brendan shouting.

zhengiszen• 2 years ago

In 2024 a whole lot of ideals have been shattered... It is a wake up call for each one of us

Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

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