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Comment by fbdab103 | Hacker News Reader

I am more inclined to agree with the FSF in that open source should not unduly limit how I use a tool. If I can no longer embed it in a product I sell, it is source available, but not open source.

Regardless, if the library is worth anything (I am not familiar), I would suspect the pre 1.0 version to be forked and sucked up by AWS/Azure/etc similar to ElasticSearch.

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Seems there's a fork already under the previous Apache-2.0 license by a non-hyperscaler user https://github.com/Preemo-Inc/text-generation-inference https://github.com/huggingface/text-generation-inference/iss...

The EU has a bill on the table that would make open source authors liable for patching bugs and exploits in commercial software.

If that bill goes through. This argument is nullified at the global scale. And it behooves open source authors to create licensing agreements Commercially.

Open Source simply means Open Source. Everything after the fact is up to the license and bad actors will always ignore such.

Can you link to the bill?

Cyber Resilience Act: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/cyber-resil...

It most certainly does not nullify the argument at a global scale. Non EU based developers are not beholden to EU regulations in any way.

Open source is a misnomer. It should have been libre source.

(then this discussion wouldn't exist)

I am less inclined to agree with the FSF in that bourgeoisie who think they can hoover up innovations from the commons to build empires and oppress the masses should at least have to pay for the privilege. Thankfully I know I'm not alone in that appraisal, and the Gilded Age of Free and Open Source is coming to a close, as evidenced by projects like this getting a clue and so many robber barons being incensed that they have to actually pay for things they took for granted.

Nobody put a gun to their head and made them share their work. If they get indignant that people profited off of their backs then maybe sharing of the work was the wrong approach.

If they wanted to profit from their ideas, they could have started with selling the product from the start.

"If they get indignant that people profited off of their backs then maybe sharing of the work was the wrong approach."

No, no and no. I can want to publish the project to the community but at the same time want to restrict corporations from using it. It goes against the OSI open-source definition but.... we should maybe think about how much that definition is fit for purpose then.

This is like saying "if you don't want someone to steal your work, just don't publish it"

The only thing really missing here is a common community-focused anti-corporate license with a catchy name.

Then choose a license like AGPL and no corporation will touch your code. If you choose an Apache 2 license or similar, don't be shocked when people use it as the terms intend.

Personally, I will continue to release any code I open source as Apache 2, and if I intend to sell it, code will not be open source. You are free to think I am "wrong", but fortunately we need not agree with each other.

I don't have to intend to sell it in order to want to restrict others from doing so, though. Even if I want to allow others to sell the product or something which contains it, I can want to restrict them to certain usecases. (see "no more than 700M MAU" in LLaMa)

AGPL is not a full solution to this because the SaaS loophole.

Huggingface is entirely in the right here - there is zero reason for them to effectively subsidise their competitors who will obviously not contribute back in any meaningful way, but at the same time, want to publish the source, either for altruistic reasons or for publicity reasons.

> AGPL is not a full solution to this because the SaaS loophole.

"SaaS loophole" is the GPL. AGPL is the thing that closes it.

No it doesn’t. Anyone can take AGPL code and wrap it up as a SaaS. AGPL forces you to publish changes even as a SaaS which GPL does not. But that doesn’t close the AWS problem that Elastic and others faced.

The "loophole" is that you can modify and use the software without contributing back your changes. This has bad economics because then someone can take the work you've done, add 10% more effort to make it 10% better, and outcompete anyone else because their thing is 10% better than the free thing even though the original authors did 90% of the work and are still carrying most of the maintenance burden.

People using free software for free is not a loophole.

And I am free to agree that authors can relicense their works under open source licenses that are inconvenient to the bourgeoisie. Such is life.

Source available / do whatever you want until 100M MAU seems like a great way to go. Lightweight users get lots of freedom and autonomy, big users have to pay to support the ecosystem.

By that same logic: If you didn't want to run the risk of them relicensing their work going forward... you shouldn't have used it at all.

The FSF's answer to that is to use AGPLv3, which trips copyleft on network access.

The technicalities of actually using AGPLv3 is... well, if your only goal is to keep large businesses from touching your code, sure. But you can also do that with the weird funky postmodern licenses that technically confer no rights and could easily be used to set up copyleft trolling. If you just want rules that are fair and easy to comply with, this license has... problems. To make a long story short, AGPLv3 only makes sense for web development in interpreted languages that make it easy to list out the code of the site. In literally any other context[0] you're creating traps to sue people with.

MongoDB wanted to extend AGPLv3 even further with a requirement to release all supporting software - e.g. management UIs and things like that. OSI wouldn't put their blessing on it. Amazon just reimplemented the MongoDB API rather than complying with SSPL.

No, I don't think we should be entertaining the notion of API copyright. Hell, FOSS Patents thought Oracle was in the right purely because "oh it'd let Oracle assert GPL", even though it would completely pull the foundation out of the commons.

If you want to be even stricter, there's also the OpenWatcom license, which trips the copyleft whenever you use the software. So no private forking. This is actually less of a compliance headache than AGPLv3 - you don't need to allow source code download over the network, you just have to publish your modifications somewhere. The FSF refuses to touch it because they consider private forking to be a human right.

The problem with stopping "the bourgeoise" from hoovering up all the innovation from the commons is that doing so takes the software out of the commons. Its worse than AGPLv3, SSPL, or OpenWatcom. Anyone who is trying to do this is not trying to protect the commons, they're trying to join the bourgeoise. Because saying that you're not allowed to host the software for others, period, is the language of the proprietary world. Proprietary software licensing is so lucrative specifically because of usage restrictions - it lets you look into each user's wallet and extract the maximum amount of money from it.

[0] Hector Martin found AGPLV3 on the source code for an Ethernet PHY - how the hell do you put a "view source" link on an Ethernet packet?

He's also pointed out that if you just link to a Git repo as your compliance, that's not good enough, because you need to have the specific source code currently executing be accessible. You can't point to a commit inside of itself[1] The original idea was that AGPLv3 source would have quines in them that listed all the source code, and then AGPLv3 would prohibit removing the quines, but you really can only do that in interpreted languages (e.g. PHP, Python, or Ruby).

[1] Cryptographic hash algorithms would be no good if you could do this

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