i like antirez’s take on licensing here. reminder that the OSI was started by libertarians, and has always held business interests first & software freedom second.
the OSI definition of open source is basically “as long as companies can sell your software labor for free & not contribute back in any meaningful way, it’s open source.”
it’s time to explore alternatives. anyone holding the “open code = good” opinion should re-evaluate in the face of companies viciously exploiting open projects for money — it’s a digital land grab.
OSI was started by libertarians, and has always held business interests first & software freedom second.
Sure glad we’re moving away from that to this new wave of fair, moral, equitable licenses which instead grant users the freedom to make the author’s SaaS business profitable.
I’ve heard this critique before, and I believe it’s an important one, but I’m interested to know: what do you think would be more fair, moral, and equitable? Especially in the current landscape, where it’s expected that everything valuable which you publish will be laundered by others.
I like the idea behind the Anticapitalist Software Licence – not least because a licence like this could define its terms a lot better than most so-called ‘Ethical Source’ licences – but the current version is somewhat problematic in that regard. (E.g. it should say that individuals can use the software without restriction, but as written it potentially doesn’t cover hobbyist use, only use by sole traders.)
If you don’t want to be perceived as quite so radical (because the free software and open source definitions are still satisfied), the AGPL, EUPL, and other licences with a network clause seem to do a good job at scaring off the parasites in practice.
Another interesting idea is a patent guillotine clause which applies if the licensee sues any of the licensors for patent infringement. (Note this is the inverse of the infamous Facebook PATENTS file, where they as licensor could terminate the licence at any time with a patent lawsuit.) That also scares big companies off, and could in theory be applied as a condition to otherwise ‘permissive’ i.e. non-copyleft licences. Taking a stance against software patents is also likely to be less controversial than taking a stance against capitalism, even if you’re really aiming your sights at the latter.
I’ve said over and over in threads on this topic that I have no problem with proprietary software existing. And I think that if someone intends to build a business around their software project, proprietary licenses almost certainly make the most sense. They certainly make more sense than trying to give away your product free of charge under an open-source license and eventually realizing that won’t work, at which point you post about The Next Incredible Chapter Of Our Open Journey, which always involves relicensing to something anticompetitive and often not Free and/or Open Source (the usual exception there is AGPL wielded to try to create a commercial-exploitation monopoly, but even that doesn’t seem to work long-term as we’ve seen some adopters eventually go full proprietary).
So I think if you want to have an open-source project, have an open-source project. If you want to have a business, have a business. If you want to have a business that is also an open-source project, I think you will inevitably find that you cannot have both and will have to settle for one or the other.
anyone holding the “open code = good” opinion should re-evaluate in the face of companies viciously exploiting open projects for money — it’s a digital land grab.
When I make a thing and give it to the world for free on purpose, it doesn’t bother me when others use the thing I made and gave away on purpose.
It does bother me when people imply I’m wrong to enjoy making things and then giving them to the world for free.
I don’t see a problem with this. There are many valid reasons to use an OSI license.
I do see a problem with the idea that people build a community around a liberally licensed project and then decide to profit off of it when the community did all the marketing, support, and maintenance.
If you believe in commercial, proprietary software, then by all means go build that. It’s possible! If your idea is any good, though, consider that there are very motivated people out there that love to challenge themselves to “rewrite it in Rust” or “rewrite it for Libre,” for other incentives that aren’t tied to fiat currencies, and that could cost you.
I more or less agree with everything else you said, but this looks suspect:
[…] the community did all the marketing, support, and maintenance.
From the article:
[…] I would not be what I was able to be thanks to VMware and, later, more extensively thanks to Redis Labs later: a freaking Robin Hood of open source software, where I was well compensated by a company and no, not to do the interests of the company itself, but only to make the best interests of the Redis community. […]
So here we have one of the product’s cofounders saying that he would not have been able to do the work he did without the involvement of corporate sponsorship. Short of uncharitably dismissing it as sweet talk from a newly interested party, I’m curious how you would reconcile these.
So here we have one of the product’s cofounders saying that he would not have been able to do the work he did without the involvement of corporate sponsorship.
There’s corporate sponsorship, ie, paying open source maintainers to make open source software for all, and then there are companies like Redis Labs, Elastic Search (which reversed course), and HashiCorp that built up a ton of good will, ecosystem, community, only to the change the terms of engagement, in an attempt to restrict other parties from making money off of the community’s collective work.
I have no problem with corporate sponsorship and certainly no problem with maintainers getting a bag. I have problems when copyright holders extract thousands of hours of knowledge work out of a community and then say “you have less rights now for how you can use what you helped create because my company sucks at making money, and we have investors to feed.”
You want to make money off the backs of open source maintainers? Cool. Find a way to incorporate open source into a larger niche product and contribute bug reports/fixes/features as thanks, or spot the maintainers $5 once in a while. Or build something useful, even something proprietary, and sell it. For libraries and frameworks that aren’t core to your product’s main purpose, consider spreading good will by making them available in under an appropriate OSI approved license.
There’s corporate sponsorship, ie, paying open source maintainers to make open source software for all, and then there are companies like Redis Labs, Elastic Search (which reversed course), and HashiCorp that built up a ton of good will, ecosystem, community, only to the change the terms of engagement, in an attempt to restrict other parties from making money off of the community’s collective work.
I can see how you can see it this way, but I encourage you to talk to some people on either one of those ideological divides. I personally, as someone who has built Open Source software and continues to do so, rather work at those companies to build an Open Source product than to become employed by some large megacorp and hope that they will continue to pay me until forever to contribute to Open Source software that I hope stays aligned with what they want. However, that’s me, that’s not everybody. When you create something you have a very different attachment and desire for what it can be, than if you contribute to a community project or a shared thing.
Or build something useful, even something proprietary, and sell it.
I think this is where this becoming a problem. The world is not black and white. I don’t think we arrive at the right outcome when we say either something is proprietary forever or something is the most Open Source it can be. That might be okay if copyrights would not last that long, but in the real world copyrights last way too long. In that world, we need to find other ways to restrict the total damage that corporate exploitation over a creation can have.
I wrote about my thoughts on this many times over, but I think that single-vendor “open source ish” projects should have the right of commercial exploitation, but there needs to be an escape hatch if that vendor turns out to be abusive or problematic. The FSL was the best we came up with so far, but it’s probably not perfect. But giving up on that idea entirely I think just leaves us all worst off for no reason at all.
I can see how you can see it this way, but I encourage you to talk to some people on either one of those ideological divides.
I used to work at HashiCorp, I’m quite aware of both sides. :)
I don’t think we arrive at the right outcome when we say either something is proprietary forever or something is the most Open Source it can be.
I agree, but following this advice would reduce the number of blog posts about this topic immensely, and would be right for the “average project.” If your goal is to make money from selling software, we know how to do it. You put a moat in front of your competitors by making your software proprietary so it can’t be trivially replicated, and then learn a bunch of other skills like marketing and sales to sell it.
If your goal is release software to the world, gratis (and/or) libre, for whatever motivation, doing it in a sustainable way, monetarily, is way more difficult. There are avenues to do this, but nothing universally applicable. It may be “go work for a company using the software you created.” It may be “become a contractor supporting this software.” It may be “acquire enough donations / sponsorship to sustain it.” It may be “sell a service that uses the software, but doesn’t sell the software directly.” Obviously, other skills are super useful here too, since you still have to make the software known, used, supported, etc…
Companies, like HashiCorp, try that last bit and find that other companies can do the same thing. Then they find themselves competing against others in offering a new service (which isn’t their competency), not improving the original software, leading to the natural conclusion of “cut off the competitors legs,” and we’ll be fine.
In most cases this isn’t what’s best for anyone.
(I will say that in regards to HashiCorp Vault, I didn’t like the switch to BUSL, but it’s a much more defensible position than Terraform. The main community contributions for Vault has been evangelism, not code. The shitty part of the switch is that the evangelists became unpaid corporate shills, overnight, with the change. Anyone who built their identity as a Vault evangelist on the pretense that it was an open source project, was rocked. People volunteer to be unpaid corporate shills for proprietary software all the time, of course, but they opt into that relationship.)
It’s worth being very clear here that the company which now is “Redis” basically bought the already-existing Redis open-source project, and that the “freeloaders” so often complained about were contributing to Redis prior to its relicensing. Amazon was paying the salary of a core developer!
I look at this differently. The OSI-approved licenses solve the problem of being locked into a single provider that maintains software. As long as it can be forked, maintained, and distributed by anybody then it is open source. If a single vendor or entity can forbid use, modification, and/or distribution, then it is not open source.
It’s funny you use the phrase “land grab”, here. The way Redis and others have used open source is to accelerate adoption and try to become the primary solution in a specific area. When that is achieved, then they start whining about competitors actually doing what open source allows them to do. Would they have ever achieved the same market share using the licenses they switch to? I’m skeptical.
I might have missed it, but I don’t see a bunch of companies launching projects under these source-available licenses. Perhaps because they realize that those licenses are inherently blockers to adoption, contribution, and advocacy. A lot fewer people are excited about promoting a project where all control resides in the hands of a single company that can do a heel turn at any time. Open source licenses are a protection against that. The company can still do the heel turn, but there’s the right to fork.
All that said, companies are free to publish software under source-available licenses, proprietary licenses, or open source licenses. But when a company says for years “this will always be under $license” and then does a 180, they should expect that they’re going to burn a lot of trust.
(It’s worth noting, too, that other cases where open source is better are overlooked. For example, when a company launches a project and then loses interest or when a company is bought and a project is discontinued. Citrix basically walked away from CloudStack, for example, but because it was turned over to the ASF and under the Apache License, other companies have been able to pick it up. That could’ve gone badly for those who adopted the software.)
While the first half is telling a very understandable story about a human trying to find their sense, the latter half reads like an Ad for redis new AI integration and his love for a specific model. Especially if you too already got invited out of the blue by redis labs to come visit their new AI features. Plus some damage control with the recent community clash.
Important perspective on that: I jumped out of the blue with my implementation of vector sets written from scratch that is not what Redis has developed during the recent months for Redis Graph. So I’m not writing about the existing efforts on my blog post, but what I did in the latest month (and hopefully I want to get inserted into Redis).
Yes, because RedisGraph team is implementing vector indexing too. I started from scratch because I believe the way to go is exposing it as a data structure like sorted sets.
Well on the one hand equity does that, but I think that would hold equally true if you do not have monetary equity. I have had a lot of conversations with people over the last few years about how it is to have their creation be directed in ways that are contrary to what you started out with. You have to accept it, or you have to go back in and try to re-steer it. This kind of attachment is very hard to shed, and it can be psychologically damaging if you don’t find your way around it.
Even for me leaving my Python Open Source projects too quite a bit of soul finding and a certain amount of vulnerability shared with others.
Psychological detachment from a company is a bit harder when most of your assets are (probably) tied to that company’s continued and profitable existence.
I cannot claim for others, but I’m not sure how equity plays here. I have things I care a lot about, things I care little about. I have things I have equity in and I have things I do not have equity in, and there is no correlation between all of these. How much I feel attached to something, how much psychological pain or happiness it brings me is a complex problem largely detached from money. But it is related to stresses typically.
For those who didn’t understand (sorry, it’s my fault for assuming everyone had the same perspective): I mean I’m sorry for antirez that he’s stuck with stock options because stock options on private stock are not much more of an asset than a lottery ticket or scratch card.
I don’t believe that openness and licensing are only what the OSI tells us they are.
OSI doesn’t tell us what ‘openness and licensing’ are, though. The OSI only defines the term Open Source Software. If you want to differ from their definition, you are more than welcome to use your own terminology, just not theirs.
Yet, as I’m an atheist and still I’m happy when I see other people believing in God, if this helps them to survive life’s hardships, I also don’t believe that open source is the only way to write software
This is a pretty great code for “freedom is a religious issue”
Lol. Nope I was smart enough financially speaking that while I was doing the Robin Hood I got me covered for life. And now I asked to rejoin for less than a frontend developer earns in SF.
i like antirez’s take on licensing here. reminder that the OSI was started by libertarians, and has always held business interests first & software freedom second.
the OSI definition of open source is basically “as long as companies can sell your software labor for free & not contribute back in any meaningful way, it’s open source.”
it’s time to explore alternatives. anyone holding the “open code = good” opinion should re-evaluate in the face of companies viciously exploiting open projects for money — it’s a digital land grab.
Sure glad we’re moving away from that to this new wave of fair, moral, equitable licenses which instead grant users the freedom to make the author’s SaaS business profitable.
I’ve heard this critique before, and I believe it’s an important one, but I’m interested to know: what do you think would be more fair, moral, and equitable? Especially in the current landscape, where it’s expected that everything valuable which you publish will be laundered by others.
I like the idea behind the Anticapitalist Software Licence – not least because a licence like this could define its terms a lot better than most so-called ‘Ethical Source’ licences – but the current version is somewhat problematic in that regard. (E.g. it should say that individuals can use the software without restriction, but as written it potentially doesn’t cover hobbyist use, only use by sole traders.)
If you don’t want to be perceived as quite so radical (because the free software and open source definitions are still satisfied), the AGPL, EUPL, and other licences with a network clause seem to do a good job at scaring off the parasites in practice.
Another interesting idea is a patent guillotine clause which applies if the licensee sues any of the licensors for patent infringement. (Note this is the inverse of the infamous Facebook PATENTS file, where they as licensor could terminate the licence at any time with a patent lawsuit.) That also scares big companies off, and could in theory be applied as a condition to otherwise ‘permissive’ i.e. non-copyleft licences. Taking a stance against software patents is also likely to be less controversial than taking a stance against capitalism, even if you’re really aiming your sights at the latter.
I’ve said over and over in threads on this topic that I have no problem with proprietary software existing. And I think that if someone intends to build a business around their software project, proprietary licenses almost certainly make the most sense. They certainly make more sense than trying to give away your product free of charge under an open-source license and eventually realizing that won’t work, at which point you post about The Next Incredible Chapter Of Our Open Journey, which always involves relicensing to something anticompetitive and often not Free and/or Open Source (the usual exception there is AGPL wielded to try to create a commercial-exploitation monopoly, but even that doesn’t seem to work long-term as we’ve seen some adopters eventually go full proprietary).
So I think if you want to have an open-source project, have an open-source project. If you want to have a business, have a business. If you want to have a business that is also an open-source project, I think you will inevitably find that you cannot have both and will have to settle for one or the other.
When I make a thing and give it to the world for free on purpose, it doesn’t bother me when others use the thing I made and gave away on purpose.
It does bother me when people imply I’m wrong to enjoy making things and then giving them to the world for free.
I read the comment the other way around - insisting that others release everything free and open source “or else”.
I don’t see a problem with this. There are many valid reasons to use an OSI license.
I do see a problem with the idea that people build a community around a liberally licensed project and then decide to profit off of it when the community did all the marketing, support, and maintenance.
If you believe in commercial, proprietary software, then by all means go build that. It’s possible! If your idea is any good, though, consider that there are very motivated people out there that love to challenge themselves to “rewrite it in Rust” or “rewrite it for Libre,” for other incentives that aren’t tied to fiat currencies, and that could cost you.
I more or less agree with everything else you said, but this looks suspect:
From the article:
So here we have one of the product’s cofounders saying that he would not have been able to do the work he did without the involvement of corporate sponsorship. Short of uncharitably dismissing it as sweet talk from a newly interested party, I’m curious how you would reconcile these.
There’s corporate sponsorship, ie, paying open source maintainers to make open source software for all, and then there are companies like Redis Labs, Elastic Search (which reversed course), and HashiCorp that built up a ton of good will, ecosystem, community, only to the change the terms of engagement, in an attempt to restrict other parties from making money off of the community’s collective work.
I have no problem with corporate sponsorship and certainly no problem with maintainers getting a bag. I have problems when copyright holders extract thousands of hours of knowledge work out of a community and then say “you have less rights now for how you can use what you helped create because my company sucks at making money, and we have investors to feed.”
You want to make money off the backs of open source maintainers? Cool. Find a way to incorporate open source into a larger niche product and contribute bug reports/fixes/features as thanks, or spot the maintainers $5 once in a while. Or build something useful, even something proprietary, and sell it. For libraries and frameworks that aren’t core to your product’s main purpose, consider spreading good will by making them available in under an appropriate OSI approved license.
I can see how you can see it this way, but I encourage you to talk to some people on either one of those ideological divides. I personally, as someone who has built Open Source software and continues to do so, rather work at those companies to build an Open Source product than to become employed by some large megacorp and hope that they will continue to pay me until forever to contribute to Open Source software that I hope stays aligned with what they want. However, that’s me, that’s not everybody. When you create something you have a very different attachment and desire for what it can be, than if you contribute to a community project or a shared thing.
I think this is where this becoming a problem. The world is not black and white. I don’t think we arrive at the right outcome when we say either something is proprietary forever or something is the most Open Source it can be. That might be okay if copyrights would not last that long, but in the real world copyrights last way too long. In that world, we need to find other ways to restrict the total damage that corporate exploitation over a creation can have.
I wrote about my thoughts on this many times over, but I think that single-vendor “open source ish” projects should have the right of commercial exploitation, but there needs to be an escape hatch if that vendor turns out to be abusive or problematic. The FSL was the best we came up with so far, but it’s probably not perfect. But giving up on that idea entirely I think just leaves us all worst off for no reason at all.
I used to work at HashiCorp, I’m quite aware of both sides. :)
I agree, but following this advice would reduce the number of blog posts about this topic immensely, and would be right for the “average project.” If your goal is to make money from selling software, we know how to do it. You put a moat in front of your competitors by making your software proprietary so it can’t be trivially replicated, and then learn a bunch of other skills like marketing and sales to sell it.
If your goal is release software to the world, gratis (and/or) libre, for whatever motivation, doing it in a sustainable way, monetarily, is way more difficult. There are avenues to do this, but nothing universally applicable. It may be “go work for a company using the software you created.” It may be “become a contractor supporting this software.” It may be “acquire enough donations / sponsorship to sustain it.” It may be “sell a service that uses the software, but doesn’t sell the software directly.” Obviously, other skills are super useful here too, since you still have to make the software known, used, supported, etc…
Companies, like HashiCorp, try that last bit and find that other companies can do the same thing. Then they find themselves competing against others in offering a new service (which isn’t their competency), not improving the original software, leading to the natural conclusion of “cut off the competitors legs,” and we’ll be fine.
In most cases this isn’t what’s best for anyone.
(I will say that in regards to HashiCorp Vault, I didn’t like the switch to BUSL, but it’s a much more defensible position than Terraform. The main community contributions for Vault has been evangelism, not code. The shitty part of the switch is that the evangelists became unpaid corporate shills, overnight, with the change. Anyone who built their identity as a Vault evangelist on the pretense that it was an open source project, was rocked. People volunteer to be unpaid corporate shills for proprietary software all the time, of course, but they opt into that relationship.)
It’s worth being very clear here that the company which now is “Redis” basically bought the already-existing Redis open-source project, and that the “freeloaders” so often complained about were contributing to Redis prior to its relicensing. Amazon was paying the salary of a core developer!
The OSI definition of open source is copied almost directly from the community norms formed at the Debian project and codified as DFSG.
I look at this differently. The OSI-approved licenses solve the problem of being locked into a single provider that maintains software. As long as it can be forked, maintained, and distributed by anybody then it is open source. If a single vendor or entity can forbid use, modification, and/or distribution, then it is not open source.
It’s funny you use the phrase “land grab”, here. The way Redis and others have used open source is to accelerate adoption and try to become the primary solution in a specific area. When that is achieved, then they start whining about competitors actually doing what open source allows them to do. Would they have ever achieved the same market share using the licenses they switch to? I’m skeptical.
I might have missed it, but I don’t see a bunch of companies launching projects under these source-available licenses. Perhaps because they realize that those licenses are inherently blockers to adoption, contribution, and advocacy. A lot fewer people are excited about promoting a project where all control resides in the hands of a single company that can do a heel turn at any time. Open source licenses are a protection against that. The company can still do the heel turn, but there’s the right to fork.
All that said, companies are free to publish software under source-available licenses, proprietary licenses, or open source licenses. But when a company says for years “this will always be under $license” and then does a 180, they should expect that they’re going to burn a lot of trust.
(It’s worth noting, too, that other cases where open source is better are overlooked. For example, when a company launches a project and then loses interest or when a company is bought and a project is discontinued. Citrix basically walked away from CloudStack, for example, but because it was turned over to the ASF and under the Apache License, other companies have been able to pick it up. That could’ve gone badly for those who adopted the software.)
While the first half is telling a very understandable story about a human trying to find their sense, the latter half reads like an Ad for redis new AI integration and his love for a specific model. Especially if you too already got invited out of the blue by redis labs to come visit their new AI features. Plus some damage control with the recent community clash.
Important perspective on that: I jumped out of the blue with my implementation of vector sets written from scratch that is not what Redis has developed during the recent months for Redis Graph. So I’m not writing about the existing efforts on my blog post, but what I did in the latest month (and hopefully I want to get inserted into Redis).
Interesting, I had an invite for “new AI features” as a cold-mail from them around 3 months ago?
Yes, because RedisGraph team is implementing vector indexing too. I started from scratch because I believe the way to go is exposing it as a data structure like sorted sets.
Even antirez is stuck holding stock options.
Well on the one hand equity does that, but I think that would hold equally true if you do not have monetary equity. I have had a lot of conversations with people over the last few years about how it is to have their creation be directed in ways that are contrary to what you started out with. You have to accept it, or you have to go back in and try to re-steer it. This kind of attachment is very hard to shed, and it can be psychologically damaging if you don’t find your way around it.
Even for me leaving my Python Open Source projects too quite a bit of soul finding and a certain amount of vulnerability shared with others.
Psychological detachment from a company is a bit harder when most of your assets are (probably) tied to that company’s continued and profitable existence.
I cannot claim for others, but I’m not sure how equity plays here. I have things I care a lot about, things I care little about. I have things I have equity in and I have things I do not have equity in, and there is no correlation between all of these. How much I feel attached to something, how much psychological pain or happiness it brings me is a complex problem largely detached from money. But it is related to stresses typically.
For those who didn’t understand (sorry, it’s my fault for assuming everyone had the same perspective): I mean I’m sorry for antirez that he’s stuck with stock options because stock options on private stock are not much more of an asset than a lottery ticket or scratch card.
OSI doesn’t tell us what ‘openness and licensing’ are, though. The OSI only defines the term Open Source Software. If you want to differ from their definition, you are more than welcome to use your own terminology, just not theirs.
This is a pretty great code for “freedom is a religious issue”
Man needs money to feed his family, put food on the table. Gotta post a blog post about it.
Lol. Nope I was smart enough financially speaking that while I was doing the Robin Hood I got me covered for life. And now I asked to rejoin for less than a frontend developer earns in SF.