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Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start?

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Because these VC-backed OSS companies don't do open source for ideological reasons* , they do it because it gives them a competitive advantage. A permissive license means broader adoption, which means more $. And now some of them are complaining that they need to compete to get rich quickly off of the software they donated to the public. If you gift someone a lottery ticket, you deserve $0 if they win. That's what you gave up when you gifted.

Everyone is so caught up in licenses, what they really need to ask is: "why can't these companies handle competition from cloud providers?". Don't tell me it's resources when these unicorns are getting VC funding to back a single technology when cloud providers support literally hundreds. They could take the Red Hat business model, but is hard and slow. I would imagine VC growth pressure makes it difficult to follow the Red Hat model.

*The software may have started open source for ideological reasons, but once you hit the VC funding stage, open source becomes strategically important for adoption reasons. The companies might believe in it (sometimes their unwillingness to accept PRs that would help the community but hurt their business makes you wonder), but that's not why VC funding happens.

RedHat's business is not selling GPL software. They probably sell more BSD/MIT/Apache software than GPL software, but they're not in the business of selling software at all.

They're in the business of selling support.

Those are good points. As I think about it some more, it's not even just support that they sell (as in, you can call them up when there's a bug). The large enterprises they sell to value:

- support

- training

- ease of install

- ease of upgrade

- indemnity (e.g., Red Hat promises to pay your court costs if someone sues for patent infringement)

- stability (long term support releases)

Those are all things that plain old open source by itself doesn't provide, but Red Hat does.

Which are all things that usually no consumer pays for, hence the big failure of trying to sell FOSS desktop software.

business in the US has stopped paying for training, generally..

> Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software.

Red Hat built a very successful business, AFAIK, selling support to enterprise customers.

> Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start?

Probably not; there's lots of companies selling enterprise support around permissively-licensed software.

It seems most of the ones at issue want to sell SaaS platform services, and would face the same problem with well established SaaS platforms beating them at that game with their own open source software if it was copyleft licensed as if it was permissively-licensed.

OTOH if they close it off and make it exclusive it's going to be hard to keep a sufficient premium in software quality to make their platforms attractive over broader platforms with weaker lock-in, even if those other platforms require a more broadly-supportable second-choice alternative software package in place of the proprietary vendors secret sauce component.

This doesn't make sense. What additional revenue would the GPL provide for you? How would a copyleft license end up requiring additional support contracts? Your other comment lists a range of things Redhat offers in addition to support, but none of those things rely on the GPL.

Qt exists as a business today because of its use of the GPL - enterprise customers can't ship the free version of Qt with proprietary software when its statically linked (as are all? Qt programs on Windows). PyQt works the same way, its an independent business run on selling proprietary licenses to distribute derivative binaries without source in exchange for money.

For a lot of business denying their users software freedoms are a value add for them because of the power it gives them to demand payment. They will, in turn, pay back for GPL code to get that ability. If it enables the further development of free software, its probably a net win.

Qt programs on Windows are not statically linked, i have a bunch of them (including some commercial) and none link to Qt statically. Also Qt is licensed under LGPL, not GPL.

Qt used to be licensed under GPL but changed that to LGPL for version 4. Incidentally this was around when Qt switched its focus from QtWidgets to QtQuick.

Those are good questions. As I think about it more, in the early days, Microsoft stirred up a lot of fear around open source and the GPL specifically. It was viral, it would get you sued for copyright infringment (see: SCO), it would get you sued for patent infringement, it was terrible quality, hard to install, changes all the time, the project might be abandoned, etc., etc.

So yeah, maybe it wasn't so much GPL specifically (except that "viral" threat), but overall Microsoft reinforced a bunch of concerns associated with open source and Red Hat was able to address those concerns.

If mongo had gone with the GPL/AGPL they would also have options like dual licensing, which is what they seem to be attempting.

Cloud providers don't distribute the software. GPL doesn't really help, except to make them more afraid about using wrong.

Basically this. I believe you've nailed the crux of the issue.

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