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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

What's up is that large companies started abusing the open source licenses to benefit themselves at the expense of open source communities. All it took was one jerk ignoring the spirit of open source and exploiting open source projects to the maximum extent that was legal under the old licenses. It's not hard to guess who it was either.

It's a good lesson. As soon as one person cheats or violates the spirit of a system, everyone else has to too or they'll fall behind. Unethical people ruin everything.

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Following the terms of the license is not abuse. The whole point of permissive licenses is to allow anybody to exploit the software as they wish. If that's not what you want then don't use a permissive license. AGPL is a good alternative choice.

Isn’t that the whole purpose of this thread? There’s a trend of projects doing exactly what you just said.

They don’t want that happening so they use a non-permissive license.

Cue the holy war over the definition of open source.

While it would be nice if we could get away with people abiding by an unwritten 'spirit of the agreement' the reality is that if you don't want someone to do something with your code then it needs to be written down in a license. I think it is somewhat naive to expect it work any other way, as when you potentially have millions of devs using some code it is unrealistic to expect them all to grasp an unwritten set of rules from a culture they potentially know nothing about.

You can have quite relaxed rules as long as everyone abides by the spirit of the agreement. As soon as one party violates that spirit you are forced to make everything much more explicit, which inflicts collateral damage on use cases nobody would have objected to previously.

> You can have quite relaxed rules as long as everyone abides by the spirit of the agreement. As soon as one party violates that spirit you are forced to make everything much more explicit, which inflicts collateral damage on use cases nobody would have objected to previously.

How are newcomers to know what the mystical "spirit of the agreement" is if it's not written down?

How do you detect that there isn't, in fact, a precise consensus over the "spirit of the agreement" if it's not written down?

Newcomers can just look at what others are doing, and if what they want to do goes beyond standard practice should ask themselves "do I do undue harm to others?".

That's how society generally runs on all scales, whether we are talking about the office fridge or about national law. Things generally start with very few explicit rules, and new rules get made when they are proven necessary.

Eh? The national law is literally written down.

"Guesswork" doesn't seem like a good way to do anything without stumbling into a lot of confusion and miscommunication.

If law was as simple as reading what's written down, then what are all the lawyers and courts for. There is a lot of interpretation going on.

But really I was referring to the process of how the laws are formed in the first place. A lot of the time they start out under-specified, and as abuses emerge we make more concrete laws using our new understanding. Of course the latter part usually leads to a lot of discussion and resistance because of the collateral damage any new law causes by being slightly broader than necessary. Which is a major reason many industries self-regulate in the attempt to make explicit laws unnecessary.

Plus as a consumer I always thought the "spirit" of the open source agreement included avoiding vendor lock-in, in the first place. Now the argument is that the "spirit" all along was intended to require vendor lock-in, that consumers wanting the software hosted for them as a service should have only one option (Or authorized licencees of that one monopoly option), and that was always the "spirit" of open source?

I don't think so. I thought the "spirit" was the opposite of that, that open source would let consumers of software avoid vendor lock-in or monopoly control of the software.

There are two broad spirits of open-source license: copyleft and corporate charity.

Copyleft licenses like the GPL encourage those using the code to contribute back to the open-source community.

Charity licenses like the BSD or Apache license are used by developers who want to work for exposure. They only encourage giving credit to the original developers, and implicitly allow closing the source. Letting people do that is the whole spirit of these licenses. People who don't want to be making charitable donations to megacorps shouldn't use charity licenses.

Not necessarily. The project I'm currently working on was initiated by a group of mostly-mega corps, staffed with dozens of full-time developers, and Apache licensed — all out of rational self-interest.

Just because megacorps sometimes release code under permissive licenses doesn't invalidate my point that permissive licenses are a way to make a charitable donation out of your work. Megacorps also make donations to charities. Charitable donations can be made out of rational self-interest!

> the spirit of open source

This is not a thing that exists. What we have are licenses, not ghosts.

The spirit of collaboration and working for a common good absolutely used to exist. Many of the internet's core protocols were built with the spirit of cooperation weren't they?

Think about email and the value it adds to the world. Would we ever get the protocols needed to create email if we started right now today? Not a chance.

IMO the previous generation(s) of tech people were way better than what we have today. They were interested in and enthusiastic about building awesome tech / products. Today the only thing anyone with influence is interested in building is a company that can IPO and make them a billionaire.

> The spirit of collaboration and working for a common good absolutely used to exist.

That currently still exists. It has nothing in particular to do with software, though. People collaborate, academics collaborate. Are you telling me that massive corporations were part of this back in the good old days, just helping people for the fun of it?

I wonder what would happen if there was a law which forbade corporations from pursuing anything going against the common good?

Or a law which only allowed companies to pursue the common good?

That would probably mean, for some, shutting down entire industries i.e. smoking, gambling..

>> the spirit of open source

> This is not a thing that exists. What we have are licenses, not ghosts.

Before we had open source, we released software as public domain. The spirit existed before the trademark phrase was even invented and long after people were already giving away their software for free because of the spirit of the community. We used to go to computer swap meets in fairgrounds buildings and buy boxes of floppy disks with random software on them just to see what was around, people uploaded it to BBSes and shared the work they did - we had Donationware, Shareware, Postcardware (a personal favorite), Beerware and everything in between which was 100% based on the spirit of the community. We just called most of it Freeware.

We have licenses because the spirit was abused.

You're projecting your good feelings about collaborating with other computer hobbyists onto a set of software licenses applied to extremely corporate, not-hobbyist software. And additionally complaining that the "abuse" of these licenses by massive corporations are keeping the authors of this software from getting rich.

If you're doing this for the pure joy of programming, you're already rich in spirit - Amazon taking your software and using it is actually a tribute.

I really don't think my comment said anything about people getting rich; I myself was involved in one report of GPL abuse to the EFF on behalf of Busybox, yet another early 2000s device created by 2 people in their bedroom who simply decided the license didn't apply and releasing the source code was not their responsibility - Busybox had a "Hall of Shame" web page up back then, you can still see it in the Internet Archive. It was pretty rampant, the sharks saw "free code" in the water and simply had the attitude "so, sue me and prove it in court" about early GPL. It took us collectively a decade or more to actual make things like the GPL enforced in courts of law, the dawn of our digital age started with bad guys trying to exploit the good guys who gave away code.

My thought is that you're focusing on the "gratis" part of FOSS, whereas I'm over here in the "libre" side of the house - as a (now) Linux systems guy, when (foo) doesn't work I reach and go down that rabbit hole of code until I figure out what's wrong and we fix things - that is what Open Source is about to me, it has no underpinnings of monetary compensation, it's all about two (sic) people who don't know each other being able to randomly see each other's code to solve the problem at hand (and then possibly submit fixes, bug reports, etc.). I've traced tons of open source software to solve problems both personally and professionally.

Getting paid for open source is a relatively new thing in my life timeline, I don't honestly subscribe to that idea but to each their own. I do, however, recognize the time effort and energy it takes to create said software, so I personally take these tech dollars I make at $job and donate to a lot of open source initiatives, coders and even public radio stations bringing me "free" music. There's no such thing as a free lunch as a wise sci-fi author once wrote.

Do you include piracy in this?

As I remember it the 'community' was completely divided for most of its existence between those who held that the spirit meant writing your own software and sharing that of others who had agreed to do so, and a much larger group who believed that the spirit consisted of sharing anything you wanted, including plenty of closed and for-pay commercial software.

> Do you include piracy in this?

No I do not (I don't deny it was/is a thing), as I feel that was a different community (and it still exists today) - yes, the same technology was used but no, they were not/are not the same community. These are two distinct communities sharing common technology (just like Linux ISOs and pirated software are both distributed over BitTorrent today - the technology has changed but both groups still share it's use). I knew/know people from both communities, they're just two different groups of people who might happen to end up at a party together, that's about it really. I personally don't condone piracy, but then again I've been living inside Linux for 20 years so I don't really encounter it these days.

Me personally, I ran a BBS under OS/2 and was part of Fidonet (I actually roomed in college years with the local Fidonet hub guy), wrote my own widgets in TurboPascal and distributed the binaries and source without any licenses (if we even had any at the time), some of it can still be found in those old CD collections that folks used to sell. I lost my own source code over the years and was able to recover some of it out of those archives. :) (my career steered away from programming into systems engineering, not a coder by trade)

Well, I think a lot of the people who were doing piracy would argue that they embodied the spirit of the community, and the anti-pirates were just a small minority who had a particular approach. So I don't think it's possible for you speaking alone to say what was or wasn't the spirit or the community.

We're both talking about the open source community, right? This was the Parent comment I replied to and directly quoted, and I'm not seeing why you're intent on focusing on something I'm not talking about. You seem to have an axe to grind here on this specific topic of piracy, not open source.

I'm just using piracy here to illustrate how your take is not founded in reality.

You said:

>Before we had open source, we released software as public domain. The spirit existed before the trademark phrase

You're claiming that the shareware community was a thing, and is somehow the same, or a natural predecessor to the open source community, and that the software piracy community is something completely different and unrelated.

I think this claim is just you imposing a political slant on something much more ambiguous. Arguably the BBS community as a whole was strongly pro-piracy and pro-shareware, and generally indifferent, except for small sections, to things like sharing source code.

> Unethical people ruin everything.

In this case, let's be clear: it was unethical companies.

Companies are made of people.

Companies don't have ethics. It's unethical people running and working at those companies.

And it's really far past time we stopped giving those people a pass because "it's the company, not me"

> Companies don't have ethics.

In a way, they do. There exists a "company culture", which is the collection of social norms that have formed inside the company. Most members of a group will behave in a way that does not stray too far from these norms.

There is a very good TED Talk by Dan Ariely "Our Buggy Moral Code" which describes how such a culture is facilitating unethical behavior by individuals.

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