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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

I feel modern "open source" is kind of a parody of the original intentions and it completely misses the forest for the trees.

Wikipedia says the goals of the GPL are "the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software."

It's a pyrrhic victory in today's world where the building blocks are open source, but the full stack is not, and the software is running on corporate servers where users have no control over it.

Companies have simply commoditized and devalued the software and started hoarding the far more valuable user data instead.

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I think you're confusing open source and free software. Open source was never about the full stack. It was exactly what you found in Wikipedia.

The issue today is that people want more than open source ever promised. The source is available, you can make your own changes, you can distribute them or even start a business but that's not enough for most people/companies. They want a ecosystem, a non-profit organizing the effort, ability to buy support, etc. None of that were in the initial goals.

> The source is available, you can make your own changes, you can distribute them or even start a business but that's not enough for most people/companies.

You really can't in the original sense, though. A person using Facebook, Spotify, or YouTube can't make any modifications to those products whatsoever despite a lot of the code being "open source". It was never about taking somebody else's code and making a business.

More disappointing, users often don't even have direct access to their own data on those services.

This is why all these organisations which are promoting non-free licenses as "open source" when they mean source available is completely silly.

Either they are BSD/GPL and accept competition or they do not, and they are not open source.

The only update that I agree with is the AGPL because of the nature that software is being closed back up and not shared for studying purposes.

> or even start a business

Only if you’re not in the SaaS space. If you are, then open-sourcing your tech is a risky strategy because then if you have any success, you start to compete with bigger players who take what you’ve invested & then it’s a game of $ which is harder to compete with.

When has open sourcing your business's core software not been a risky strategy?

If you are a software as a product company and you open source your software, someone else may put it into a box and sell it beside you.

If you are a software as a business process company and you open source your software, some else may build into their business and compete against you in whatever your marketable output is.

If you are a software as a service company, and you open source your software, someone may build a service that is remarkably similar to yours.

Open source is great for things your company depends on --- maybe you get community improvements, and you can build and change it how you like; but if the core of your business is open source, that's a choice that makes it very easy for competition to form. OTOH, if you want to build something that other companies depend on, and there's open source alternatives, it's going to be hard going; I wouldn't use a closed source web server or database server or search engine, given there are good open source options; although maybe if those options don't work out, I'd consider a closed source vendor.

It can still be open source. The AGPL was designed for protections in that scenario. Unless you’re suggesting the AGPL is insufficient. There’s another one that’s really similar, too.

MongoDB and Elastic famously didn't find it to be sufficient, swapping to a new and non-OSI-approved license to protect against big cloud providers offering managed versions of their software.

I don’t know many software developers that are OK using AGPL software. The license will infect all products that someone may try to go build even if it doesn’t compete.

Ok, but Free Software has also failed at the stated goals—we still have no control over the software we use even if it's copyleft software backing it. This is a useless comment.

Yes, large corps have weaponized open source.

FOSS developers should probably slap a license on it that says it's free unless you are a company that has a revenue greater than $X million dollars. This is still fair to everyone since for the company the price of using the software would be peanuts. And now at least these companies are paying for the development and maintenance.

I came here to make exactly this proposal.

Free Software is supposed to create a gift economy. People create and release their work in good faith, others copy and improve, and contribute back to the community. Gift economies work if most continue to gift their work to society in good faith.

If some actors decide to largely take and but rarely give out of self-interest, or worse use their gifts to cement their economic position, then the gift economy turns into an exploitation economy. The way to fix such an economy is to intentionally exclude those who are exploitative.

Free Software failed to create a gift economy. I am all for abandoning it in favor of the Guarded Free Software economy as you propose.

Linux with its GPL works very well against the exploitation. A huge number of commercial companies are contributing to it all the time.

I’ve never really understood the difference between a gift economy with the expectation of reciprocity and a regular non-gift economy

In a regular economy, every exchange is a two-way transaction. I give you something, you give me something (usually of perceived equal value).

In a gift economy. I gift you something. You gift someone something. That someone could be me, but if I don't need/want anything you need, then you just gift to someone else. If there are gifts going around all the time, all in good faith, then most people will receive what they need.

You see gift economies in families or friends all the time. People help others according to their abilities. My rich friend takes me out to an expensive dinner, poor me gets us lunch from that famous food truck. I nurse my uncle when he breaks his leg. He lets my brother's son to live with him for free during college. There is no accounting of how much anyone gave. Just give what you can.

I recommend reading Cory Doctorow's novel Walkaway which describes gift economies beautifully.

A license like that makes it no longer FOSS. The AGPLv3 will accomplish the same goal while still being FOSS.

Agpl has no clause for large companies, so it's different.

Also, may I ask what is your fundamental problem with such a license besides perhaps the name and purity? This license will only affect the insanely rich, and in a way that they will most likely not even feel.

License profileration, which makes it harder for people to know what is acceptable or not. Also, GPL is well-known, well-tested, and already excludes most companies. If they want to use our stuff, they better pay it back and become GPL too.

That's the practical concern. The idealistic concern is that free software is all about handing power to the users. Much like how a pen can't restrict how you use it, developers shouldn't be able to restrict how users can use it. Note that the only restriction GPL has is that you cannot further restrict it (tolerance paradox). It's an ethical position to give power to the users, regardless of who they are, because software owners should not have the power to control the users. From here, a software developer decreeing "you may not use my stuff if you make more than X amount per year" is abusing their power over users, which is unethical. Imagine if a pen company told you you cannot use their pens if you met X Y or Z conditions. It's just not right.

Stallman covered this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

What stops Amazon from establishing a separate company called Totally Not Amazon, which employs 1 person, and hosts your software for the rest of Amazon, and has revenue much less than 1M$ so they can use it for free?

If they need more capacity than 1M would plausibly buy them from themselves, just establish however many more identical companies are necessary, none of which exceed 1M$.

This shows more what's wrong with corporate law than with the idea behind this license.

Probably language that suggests if amazon would like to do that they would need to split the entire company into a million pieces to each be under the revenue limit.

In practice though amazon engineers would reverse engineer any tool they cant legally use and need.

Probably the same thing that stops Amazon from establishing a Totally Not Amazon that has zero revenue, so that Amazon can use all sorts of "free for non-commercial use" software.

That's not free though. That's something very similar to "free for non-commercial use" (with an extension allowing free commercial use up to a certain scale).

It doesn't solve the problem of someone being able to operate the software on a server, where the users have no control of it and their data is held hostage, too.

MongoDB and HashiCorp did that... and guess what? These kinds of licenses aren't open source.

I've been burnt by "open core" in the past. Never again.

That's only a problem if you want it to be a problem.

Ironic that people complaining about free riders are trying to be free riders on the goodwill of "Open Source" by repurposing it to mean something else.

I'll happily pay if my company reaches millions in revenue. Which is only fair since my software is built on top of all kinds of open source software. I don't see the problem of paying only if the software brought me success.

Meanwhile, you propose to pay nothing at all?

It's not practically enforceable.

"I feel modern "open source" is kind of a parody of the original intentions and it completely misses the forest for the trees."

Correct.

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