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.
> 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).
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.
> The AGPL is still not restrictive enough because you can resell the software without contributing anything back if you don't modify it
Why would you want to restrict reselling? If you want free software then you’re going to have reselling. If you don’t want reselling, then don’t make your software free/open source.
I’m not sure why people are getting mixed up. Anyone can make proprietary software and restrict all they want. There’s tons of commercial software. But it doesn’t have the features of free/open source.
Depends on what your philosophy is. You believe in the software commons and the free sharing of software? You would want software to remain as a public good so no one can profit from it exclusively.
Are you a business who made some software? You don't want others to resell it because it's your work, you made it and you don't want others to freeload.
>If you don’t want reselling, then don’t make your software free/open source.
Sure, and the consequences of this will be much more all-rights-reserved proprietary software. A huge loss to users and developers.
>But it doesn’t have the features of free/open source.
Yes it does. Just because it doesn't conform to all tenets of the OSI definition, many useful things are still kept. The most obvious is the right to view the source code - which is highly liberating in an age where many vendors lock their systems down or try to offer everything as a SaaS where you don't even see the binaries.
You usually also have the right to modify the software under most of these licences - you are the user but you find a bug in the software, you don't need to wait for the vendor to fix it, you can fix it and share your modifications to other users (either paid or not).
You can also have the right to contribute changes if contributions are allowed, which is also a positive for everyone.
There are many freedoms which can be granted without necessarily going for a maximalist open-source approach but still preserving the right to exploit your own work and prevent others from exploiting it.
> Depends on what your philosophy is. You believe in the software commons and the free sharing of software? You would want software to remain as a public good so no one can profit from it exclusively.
> Are you a business who made some software? You don't want others to resell it because it's your work, you made it and you don't want others to freeload.
I cant help but notice that you assume everyone uses money as a measure of desirable/undesirable outcomes. Whenever I publish a library/project with a GPL license (my preferred license), it's so that others can use it. I have a well paying job that's enabled in part by others sharing their work[1], so I let the "freeloaders" have at it - I too am one, after all.
At the time I release the software, my problem is adequately solved: I already did the work , maybe someone else may benefit. Creating/sharing value with others is the point - I don't mind if someone else sells it : if they abide by the license, that means I can sell something identical for half of whatever they sold it for if I suddenly felt competitive.
1. I'm amazed that I can use Linux, git, hypervisors, orchestrators, various computers and interpreter, libraries, ops tools and more all for free,and with the ability to pry them open and make any changes I want! How frigging cool is that?! I'm compelled to pay it forward in any way I can.
Because I don't mind people using my software commercially if they are respecting the license. I wouldn't want to be charged for all my commercial usage of Linux, Git, Postgres, zsh, the rust toolchain, etc.
I believe if everyone in our industry tried to capture all/most of of the economic value of their work, we'd all be poorer for it, metaphorically and literally since a huge part of high SDE salaries is due to high productivity enabled by the open source ecosystem. We are all freeloaders, to varying degrees. Without FL/OSS, most of these source-available companies would never have gotten off the ground.
Exactly. I don't understand the drama on this at all.
"Corporate Open Source is dead"?? I don't even know what that means! Having launched at least 20 open source companies, several that went public -- this is not news that this faction of companies were NEVER going to make it (AND WE SAID SO). And that is ok.
That's entirely fair, but you can tailor the licences to target the biggest freeloaders (prohibit hosting it as a cloud service, allow everything else) while letting everyone else use it without worrying about licensing.
That's the beautiful part - you can choose vastly different approaches with differing levels of freedom/openness, depending on your and your users' needs. A game is licenced quite differently than a library which is also licenced differently than a website. And they can all coexist:)
FWIW, I avoid using and contributing to projects with revenue-based licenses on principle - I hate bait-and-switches and folk who pull up ladders behind themselves. They will have to coexist with the forks with standard licenses.
Your solution seems to just incorporate OSS and at some point it just isn't OSS anymore. The problem was not the developer of xz, it is the people that build upon it without reflection. Although to be fair, almost every developer has a dependency like that somewhere.
I find it funny that people call to support the developer. That is true, but the scam was exactly about how the dev was pressured to hire more maintainers. The lesson here should be that if third party is nagging you about your open source project, you just hint them on the "no warranty" part. Everything else is their problem.
I wish the developer would swim in money. He did more constructive work than many, many very rich people. Problem still is that there is no entity that could be trusted to pay him. If that would be corporation, the pressure would be even higher. Because then you are essentially a freelancing developer with a corporate contract. You lose freedom and independence, something many OSS developers specifically do not want.
> 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!’
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
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.
> "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.
"Evangelists" = People promoting ideas not firmly rooted in reality.
The software industry seems to harbor more than it's fair share --- crypto evangelists, open source evangelists. As folks from the ghetto used to say, "You gotta be rich to even think like that".
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.