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Comment by whoville | Hacker News Reader

> at this point I don’t think it makes sense to consider Sid’s intent nefarious

Why not? He's spouting a bunch of ridiculous bullshit about licensing without any consensus among people who are experts in licensing and ethical questions and business questions, eg: the FSF, the OSI licensing list, the FSFE Legal Network, and all so he can make money. Looks nefarious enough to me, at least if you believe in free software.

Edit: HN won't let me post. Heather Meeker wrote the SSPL for MongoDB, then she helped write this which is all about protecting against the SSPL. If you cite a person as the licensing expert for credibility when the thing is completely contradictory to what that person has written in the past should result in loss of credibility, not gaining it. She's a lawyer for her client, wrapping up their chosen business model in novel legal bullshit to help sell it.

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> Why not? He's spouting a bunch of ridiculous bullshit about licensing without bothering to ask or cite the opinion of people who are experts in licensing and ethical questions and business questions, eg: the FSF, the OSI licensing list, the FSFE Legal Network, and all so he can make money. Looks pretty nefarious to me.

This is quite the spicy comment -- I'm not a licensing expert (note that there was a licensing specialist involved) so I can't speak to OCV's interpretation of licenses, but which idea is the ridiculous bullshit? The PBC charter? The idea that preventing changing license being good? Do you think OCV is making deals that exploit maintainers?

This isn't a particularly new business model, so I figure it's not there -- people like/dislike open core, but I don't think people go as far as to call it nefarious.

Is the primary concern that the other organizations weren't contacted?

> and all so he can make money. Looks pretty nefarious to me.

Is the idea here that he'll make money somehow from people choosing to start public benefit corporations? Or from a lot of maintainers choosing to take his investment?

This does not seem like a "nefarious" (generally defined as "extremely wicked") thing -- what should it look like to be not nefarious?

> Edit: HN won't let me post. Heather Meeker wrote the SSPL for MongoDB, then she helped write this which is all about protecting against the SSPL. If you cite a person as the licensing expert for credibility when the thing is completely contradictory to what that person has written in the past should result in loss of credibility, not gaining it.

Thanks for noting this, I did not know this.

That said, I don’t think that’s an indicator that the ideas or legal stuff in the article cannot be trusted.

Unless your claim is that it’s been backdoored somehow, what people have done in the past (or who they worked for) is not the sole indicator of their intentions.

I would love to see your line of questioning put to her though.

Mongo choosing to go the SSPL route was Mongo’s decision.

> She's a lawyer for her client, wrapping up their chosen business model in novel legal bullshit to help sell it.

Lawyers work for their clients and so do programmers. It’s perfectly reasonable to do closed source work and also work on open source.

Are you implying that she’s

Not everyone is Stallman, and that’s OK as long as there are enough Stallmans.

“Wrapping up their business model in novel legal bullshit” is exactly what made copyleft work.

Would you mind stating the parts of the biz model you hate? Is it just that you’d prefer if companies chose a straight dual-license approach for example(or something else)? Or a foundation?

FTA quoting an expert in licensing: "It’s important not to orphan a community codebase,” said open source software licensing specialist Heather Meeker, General Partner at OSS Capital. “It can be hard to define what that means, but it’s disruptive to withdraw code from a public repository and then change the license. The challenge is to ensure a commitment to the community as ownership interests change over time. You need protective provisions, so companies don’t abandon their open source roots.”

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