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diff --git a/free-software-notes.txt b/free-software-notes.txt index 6a16846..1f17928 100644 --- a/free-software-notes.txt +++ b/free-software-notes.txt @@ -1,3 +1,99 @@ + + +Creative commons gets a lot of recognition, but when you say "creative commons" what do you mean? There's so many different licenses it's hard to know. Whereas with open source you know you have the right to copy, the right to etc + + + +I help VCs with open source, most companies have a mixed model. AMA recommendations system, for a time A was the only company that had that recommendation system and so they couldn't open source it, but no everyone has that so you might as well open source it, then you get community based improvements. + +The GPL if creating a hook, but there's no requirement to support open source. + +The GPL is there to protect that. There are economic reasons that choose the licesnce. BSD is a good licence for creating a standard, works with propreitary software, easy to compile. GPL +Busybox, embedded companies added it to their products, they added 100 commands. They were each other's biggest competitor, but they could work together on busybox. Users tend to become development partners. + +There was, before open source, a reasonably large history of educational use only software, distributed. + +The central myths of American business revolve around hard-nosed businessmen chasing better bottom lines and extolling the virtues of selfishness. Free software belies these myths, or at least operates outside them to a considerable degree. The largest single contributors to projects across GitHub are Perens' assessment of the economic paradigm of open source + +I couldn't help but be struck by the parallels to ecology. Open source as a whole has often been called an ecosystem, but it seems that, as with nature, there are ecosystems within ecosystems. Considering an open source project as an ecosystem means thinking in terms of generosity. + + +It may be that free software is more of an ecosystem. + + + + +A good example of exactly that is what might be the original open source success story -- the Apache web server. +Instead Beanbooks the software suffered a fate that may well await Redis and MondoDB -- neglect and obscurity. + + +## What does work + +The Apache web server grew out of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Foundation we know today. The Group came before the software. At the time (1994-5) working on open source software was something of a novelty. The founders of the Apache Group knew that to wrangle code contributions from volunteers spread across the globe without an organizational ties would be difficult. This was the first problem they [set out to solve](http://mockus.us/papers/apache.pdf), and the solution at the time was the Apache Group. + +Only after the community structure had been established did the developers move on to writing code. + +As System76's experience with Beanbooks illustrates, this lesson -- that the community is more important than the code -- is one that open source software projects . + +Apache went on to become the poster child of successful open source software projects, eventually becoming the most widely used server on the web, displacing Microsoft's IIS to the point that today it's a mere footnote in the evolution of web servers. gg + + + + +These licenses are not open source at all. In fact, these licenses are the reason open source software licenses exist. + +The first attempts to define free software, and give it a coherent legal structure, came about because companies were taking software, using it and not giving anything back to the creators. Yes, the reasons MongoDB, Redis and others give for not sticking with open source, are the same reasons that drove Richard Stallman to create copyleft licensing in the first place. + + + +edis has recently created something called the “Commons Clause”, which takes the Apache license and makes it a non-Open-Source license. And they still call it the Apache license. This is a problem. Someone creating yet another non-Open-Source paradigm is not a problem, if they do it correctly. + +Redis doesn’t deny that it’s not an Open Source license any longer once their clause is added. + +It’s a bad idea to add a any text whatsoever to an Open Source license, and still call that license by it’s old name. Once the Commons Clause is added, it’s no longer the Apache license, and calling it so confuses people about what is Open Source and what isn’t. Hopefully that’s not meant deliberately. Now stop it. Take the license and the clause together, and title it the Redis license or another name of your choice that doesn’t confuse people that it’s an Open Source license. “Commons” is the name of an Apache project, so that is probably a bad choice for the name of the overall license. + +You’ll note that I worked on the Business Source License with MariaDB. They paid a day’s consulting fee. I made it very clear that they were not to tell people it was Open Source, and I made changes that made the license less ambiguous and confusing than their previous version. Please follow that example. + + + + + + + + + + + +It's worth asking, given it's success as a company thus far, what is Redis worried about? What is MongoDB worried about? + +There is an elephant in the cloud. The elephant's name is Amazon AWS. + +You might be wondering, how is this different than say the license that governs Microsoft Windows? Well, you can look at the code. You can even modify it. It seems to fit the letter of the law, but it only seems that way. If there are restrictions on what you can build, then what you have is not open source software. the Redis tk license is the definition of a proprietary license -- it restricts what you can do with the code. + + + + +It's hard for MongoDB to compete with a service that offers MongoDB and every other infrastructure tool on the internet. License of the sort that MongoDB is suggesting would allow their software to be called open source, but limit how that software could be sold. + + + + + +For MongoDB this isn't a rhetorical question. + +Redis, MongoDB, Confluent and others have changed from open source licenses to proprietary licenses in recent months. The new licenses limit what you can do with the software, making it no longer open source software. + +Every good story starts with conflict. + + +Redis and MongoDB claim that open source licenses, specifically the GPL, are making it possible for other companies to take their ideas, wrap them in a cloud service and sell them without contributing anything back to the source project. + + + + + + + The differences in the license: "My sense is that it's not philosophical... we're going to iterate until we get it right." There has been only one official release of the license, "We've been continually evolving the license, updating the language" @@ -11,3 +107,149 @@ On other's with MongoDB's model: "MongoDB is unique. I would like us to not be u Legally the AGPL covers us, but the SSPL clarifies that in language that will hopefully discourage the bad actors. Did you know about AWS DocumentDB before the license change. At first he said no comment, then he said no we did not. But if it wasn't Amazon, it would be someone. + + + +""" + + +""" + +Database guru Mark Callaghan put it this way: "I can speak from experience that 'new license' == 'must speak to lawyers'. They tend to be busy and figuring out a new license takes a long time." In other words, you've just created a legal problem, when before all you were trying to solve was a technical one. It's simply not worth the bother. + +Redis Labs modules making them no longer free and open source, GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora are no longer able to ship Redis Labs' versions of the affected modules to their users. + +As a result, we have begun working together to create a set of module repositories forked from prior to the license change. We will maintain changes to these modules under their original open-source licenses, applying only free and open fixes and updates." + +They're looking for help with this project. + +The Common Clause sub-license forbids you from selling software it covers. It also states you may not host or offer consulting or support services as "a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the software." This is expressly designed to prevent cloud companies from profiting by using the licensed programs. + +As Redis Labs' co-founder and CTO Yiftach Shoolman said in an email, the company did this "for two reasons -- to limit the monetization of these advanced capabilities by cloud service providers like AWS and to help enterprise developers whose companies do not work with AGPL licenses." + +Be that as it + +Recently several open source projects have run into what they see as a serious problem. Free software + + +MongoDB is building a “better database for the next generation of applications,” co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz told TechCrunch. We aimed to “build something that makes developers way more productive.” + + + + +Still, there is something to bear in mind + +one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. + +There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. + + +That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software. + + + +Agree. Private enterprise has been profiting on open-source, mostly without giving back, for as long as we’ve had open source. That’s not new. It’s literally how the GPL came about. + +data portability will be the next big issue with users of cloud computing. Use MongoDB and you can move your data to any cloud provider that offers MongoDB. Use Amazon DocumentDB and you are now married to Amazon in the most Catholic of ways. There is a MongoDB API, but because of the license changes that API is pinned to a specific version of MongoDB. In other words you can get your data out, but it might not be a form that's easy to get into MongoDB running on say, Digitalocean or Azure or Google. + +The way to avoid this provider lockin is the make sure you chose cloud provider services that stick with mainstream open source projects as a base, perhaps adding whatever user-friendly management on top of that, but under the hood your data is stored in an open source software package. Postgresql make a good example here. Half a dozen cloud providers offer managed Postgresql in some form. If I spin up an AWS tk DB instance of postgres and two years from now decide that's no longer the best option for my company, I can dump that data out, move it to any cloud provider -- or my own bare metal server -- and import it back into a postgres database without a hitch. + +Cloud providers vary in how much they seem okay with this data portability from AWS's more or less pure disdain to Azoure and Google which have turned not competeing with their customers and supporting open standards into something of an pitch. + +--- + +Carl at system76 + +The usefulness of open source is that you can connect it anything. + +beanbooks, + +I'm epathetic to their cause, but there should a way to do that without wrecking OSD. + +Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all that investment. We wanted patent protection for a few years. It ended up hurting us, hurting the platform and we shouldn't have had those concerns, we should have AGPLed from the beinnning. If it was good enught hat godaddy wanted it, + +You have to be good enough and stay ahead without needing a licence to protect you. If you can't stay ahead, the license won't help. + +Licenses that are more restrictive. You have to move fast and compete. + +If generosity isn't built into open source it isn't going to work. + +MS has the same problem with piracy, solutions to that led to open source. you don't have to use unlicensed ms software. + +If you come up with a solution for one thing, you try to protect the brand, OSI doesn't like that, but it's easier than touching the software. Mongo always comes with the Mongo trademark. o + +The best conversation is an open minded conversation between OSI and mongo. + +Open hardware is quiet a bit different, there's less copying of specific designs. It's less of an issue than backend code which has no face at all. + +There is always a risk of being commodity. It depends on the bottom line, who can more efficiently deliver that infrastructure. + +Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance. -- not quote: You have a head start, but where are you going. -- the only way to be successful is to stay ahead, I don't think the license has anything to do with it. + +--- + +Bruce Perens: + +In The Cathedral and the Bazaar [16], Eric Raymond attempted to explain Open Source as a gift economy, a phenomenon of computer programmers having the leisure to do creative work not connected to their employment, and an artistic motivation to have their work appreciated. Raymond explains excellently how programmers behave within their own private subculture. The motivations he explored dominated during the genesis of Open Source and continue to be effective within a critically important group of Open Source contributors today. + +Raymond edited The Cathedral and the Bazaar, then a year old, to replace the words Free Software with Open Source. + +Neither Microsoft software nor Linux and Open Source can help you differentiate your business for long, because they are available to everyone. They differentiate against each other, they just don't differentiate your business. One or the other can save you money or make you more efficient, but in general they don't make your business more attractive to your customer. + +The companies that join Open Source collaborations are seeking to use the software in a non-differentiating, cost-center role. It's not important to these companies that Open Source does not in itself produce a profit. Their profit-centers are things other than software, and software is for them an enabling technology. In order to continue to operate their profit-centers, they must make some investment in their cost centers. In the case of differentiating software, they have little choice but to make use of the in-house or contract development paradigm, because they need to prevent their differentiators from falling into the hands of their competitors. For their non-differentiators, they have the choice of the retail or Open Source paradigms. But which is more efficient? + + +Eric Raymond proposed that the volunteer's motivation is mainly intangible, and that a particularly important motivator is participation in a community of respect in which developers are recognized by their peers for the quality and innovation in their work. The FLOSS study surveyed Open Source developers regarding their motivation, found that many of them are motivated by technical curiosity and the desire to learn. I feel that their motivation is similar to that of an artist: just as a painter wants people to appreciate his paintings, a programmer wants to have users who appreciate his software. + + +--- + +Free software was the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It was an astounding gift to give, one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. + +There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. + +Free Software did not have to happen, arguably it should not have happened. The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built. + +That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software. + + + +This notion of free software as a commons though requires some clarification lest someone trot out the tired old "tragedy of the commons" analysis, which has, in most fields of analysis, been long since abandoned. + +The notion that free softwareo + +The “Commons Clause” is a nonfree license because it forbids selling copies of the program, and even running the program as part of implementing any commercial service. Adding insult to injury, it also twists the words “commons” and “sell.” + +We urge people to reject programs under this license and to develop free replacements. Where a previous version was available as free software, continuing development of that version is an option. + + + + +“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” + +In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: +“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” + +It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece + + +There are thousands of text and quotes around the injustice of private property (or property rights), for example San Ambrosius in the IV century said: +“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” + +In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: +“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” + +It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece + + +In this layer, however, both community and resource boundaries are multiplied. Every single community that forms around specific instances or projects +of free software counts as a different commons, with its particular (even though +in some cases similar) rules, boundaries and systems of governance. In other +words, each group of people who not only use a certain free software, but also +help to support or develop it (in the expanded sense outlined previously), can be +seen as a commons in itself. + +Also bear in mind that there is no reason for free software occupies the position it does. + +The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built. + diff --git a/free-software.txt b/free-software.txt index 0c52720..75a52d4 100644 --- a/free-software.txt +++ b/free-software.txt @@ -1,68 +1,125 @@ +Free and open source software enables the world as we know it. From web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. Free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the [largest software acquisition](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/ibm-buys-red-hat-with-eye-on-cloud-dominance/) in the history of the world. +Free software is a gift. It's the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It's an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. They were unwilling to use free software, it was too radical and by extension, too political. It had to be renamed "open source." +Once that happened though, open source software took over the world. +Recently though there's been a disturbance in the open source force. +Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses in recent months, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software. +The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also known as Amazon AWS. +## Cloud Burst +MongoDB the company is built around the open source "NoSQL" database of the same name. MongoDB's database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there's no structured tables there's no "structured query language" for working with the data, hence the term "NoSQL." -Bruce Perens: +MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it's one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the [fifth most popular database](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking), with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB. -In The Cathedral and the Bazaar [16], Eric Raymond attempted to explain Open Source as a gift economy, a phenomenon of computer programmers having the leisure to do creative work not connected to their employment, and an artistic motivation to have their work appreciated. Raymond explains excellently how programmers behave within their own private subculture. The motivations he explored dominated during the genesis of Open Source and continue to be effective within a critically important group of Open Source contributors today. +MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud. -Raymond edited The Cathedral and the Bazaar, then a year old, to replace the words Free Software with Open Source. +The cloud, argues Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to "deal with new challenges in a new environment." The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part a software and service (SaaS), is that it then competes with MongoDB's own cloud-based SaaS -- MongoDB Atlas. What's threatened then is not MongoDB's source code, but MongoDB's own SaaS derived from that source code, and which is the company's chief source of revenue. -Neither Microsoft software nor Linux and Open Source can help you differentiate your business for long, because they are available to everyone. They differentiate against each other, they just don't differentiate your business. One or the other can save you money or make you more efficient, but in general they don't make your business more attractive to your customer. +To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the GPL to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas. -The companies that join Open Source collaborations are seeking to use the software in a non-differentiating, cost-center role. It's not important to these companies that Open Source does not in itself produce a profit. Their profit-centers are things other than software, and software is for them an enabling technology. In order to continue to operate their profit-centers, they must make some investment in their cost centers. In the case of differentiating software, they have little choice but to make use of the in-house or contract development paradigm, because they need to prevent their differentiators from falling into the hands of their competitors. For their non-differentiators, they have the choice of the retail or Open Source paradigms. But which is more efficient? +MongoDB has submitted the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization that oversees and approves or disproves open source licenses, but the approval process is still in the early review stages. That said, judging by discussion on the mailing lists, and the wording of the license, the SSPL is unlikely to every be approved by the OSI, at least as it's currently written. +Part of MongoDB's problem is that it's not the first open source business to run into this situation. In fact, part of this problem -- companies taking software, using it as they please and contributing nothing back -- is the reason open source software exists at all. -Eric Raymond proposed that the volunteer's motivation is mainly intangible, and that a particularly important motivator is participation in a community of respect in which developers are recognized by their peers for the quality and innovation in their work. The FLOSS study surveyed Open Source developers regarding their motivation, found that many of them are motivated by technical curiosity and the desire to learn. I feel that their motivation is similar to that of an artist: just as a painter wants people to appreciate his paintings, a programmer wants to have users who appreciate his software. +Open source licenses vary, but the gist is generally, you can take this code and do what you want with it, but you can’t make the code proprietary, and if you use it in another project, then that project can’t be proprietary either. These licenses were written this way to prevent companies from taking open source code, using it in their own code and not sharing any of it back to the original project. +Horowitz argues that wrapping a piece of code in a SaaS offering is the modern equivalent of using it into an application. ---- +It's a novel argument, but it's in defense of a very old problem that goes well beyond licensing. It's a problem that goes all the back to the beginning of free software -- how do you make money off software if you give it away for free? -Free software was the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It was an astounding gift to give, one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. +One traditional answer has been that you sell services around your open source software. But for Horowitz that's not good enough. "Monetizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model," he tells Ars. Red Hat would likely disagree, but Horowitz believes that more protective licenses would bring more venture capital investment and spawn more software businesses based on the open model MongoDB has used. "We're unique," he says, "I want us to be less unique." -There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. +He may be correct. A more protective license could induce more venture capital investment because there's (arguably) a greater likelihood of return on their investment. But if that capital did come, it wouldn't be investing in open source because that kind of restriction on the software means it no longer fits the definition of open source. -Free Software did not have to happen, arguably it should not have happened. The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built. +Quite a few open source advocates have already made the counter argument that the current set of licenses are fine, it's the business models that need work. -That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software. +Bruce Perens, co-author of the original [open source definition](https://opensource.org/docs/osd), says the SSPL is incompatible with the OSI's open source definition number nine, which says that the "license must not restrict other software." Since the SSPL forces any SaaS software that is aggregated with the covered software, but not a derivative of it, to nevertheless be open source, it fails this test. "I wrote number nine into the OSD to prohibit exactly this sort of conduct," says Perens, "the text is really clear." +MongoDB is not the only one complaining that the cloud is raining on its profits. +Redis Labs, another data storage company, was the first to sound the alarm about cloud providers threatening its business and Redis Labs may have the better solution. Redis Labs initially changed its license to include something called the Common Clause sub-license, which forbids anyone from selling any software it covers. Software licensed with the Common Clause is not, by anyone's definition, open source, which Redis Labs acknowledged. It has never described those portions of its software as open source. -This notion of free software as a commons though requires some clarification lest someone trot out the tired old "tragedy of the commons" analysis, which has, in most fields of analysis, been long since abandoned. +As this article was wrapping up Redis Labs made yet another licensing change, in essence dropping all pretense of being open source software and adopting a homegrown proprietary license for some of its modules. To be clear, most of Redis is governed by the Apache 2.0 License, but some modules are not, namely RedisJSON, RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisML and RedisBloom. -The notion that free softwareo +The license Redis Labs applies to these modules says that while users can view and modify the code, use it in their applications, it restricts which types of applications they can build. With Redis Labs' new license you are not free to build anything you want. You cannot build database products, a caching engine, a processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or any kinds of ML or AI derived serving engine. You cannot in other words use Redis Labs' code to compete with Redis Labs. This violates one of the core tenants of open source licensing -- that there be no restrictions on derivative software. -The “Commons Clause” is a nonfree license because it forbids selling copies of the program, and even running the program as part of implementing any commercial service. Adding insult to injury, it also twists the words “commons” and “sell.” +This is the same sort of protection MongoDB also wants, but MongoDB wants to retain the open source label. -We urge people to reject programs under this license and to develop free replacements. Where a previous version was available as free software, continuing development of that version is an option. +Unfortunately for MongoDB it doesn't make sense to simultaneously say that you are open source, and that only you should profit from your open source software. There *is* a business model where than does make sense: proprietary software. +## Lessons from history +Why does MongoDB want to be open source at all? After all there is no shortage of very successful proprietary software, so why not embrace that path and move on? +Horowitz tells me he believes "that open source results in better systems software, especially databases," going on to cite security and community as advantages of remaining open source. While he's right about both of those things, those are often cited as reasons to use open source software, more eyes on the software means fewer bugs, in theory anyway. -“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” +But looking at the working of the OSD, it's clear that Horowitz is missing one key component that's built into to every open source license -- generosity. Open source does not limit what you can do with the software, ever. And that may well be the reason for its success. Generosity of this kind is how you get community, the cornerstone on which any successful open source project is built. By allowing the widest possible range of users to use your software you get the biggest possible community. More eyes on bugs, more people fixing them. That community is what turns into momentum. That momentum becomes market share. Market share sometimes becomes profit, but that's not a promise of open source. -In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: -“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” +As Bruce Perens puts it, "we have to draw a line between open source... and the right to make money with open source. The open source definition allows, but does not support your right to make money. We're not going to change the rules because you can make money better that way." -It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece +Just because you build it and they come, does not mean massive profit. +In fact, if you build it and they come and then you take it away, it might be worse than if you'd never built it. -There are thousands of text and quotes around the injustice of private property (or property rights), for example San Ambrosius in the IV century said: -“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights” +Redis Labs' move away from open source comes after it reaped all the benefits of open source -- community support, wide adoption and code contributions from a widespread sources. To put it bluntly, Redis Labs angered the community. -In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”: -“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one” +When free software developers get mad, they get forking, and there is indeed a fork of Redis, [GoodFORM](https://goodformcode.com/). GoodFORM takes the re-licensed Redis modules as they were prior to the license change, and will maintain them for Debian, Fedora and other Linux distros that cannot ship proprietary software. -It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece +The unintended consequence of Redis Labs' new license is that anyone wanting to use a full and open source version of Redis will have to use GoodFORM, not Redis. +Individual developers might not much care, but large companies looking to use open source software aren't so cavalier. For them it usually comes down to a choice, either use clearly open source software with an OSI approved license, or call the lawyers. And no one ever wants to call the lawyers just to install a piece of software. -In this layer, however, both community and resource boundaries are multiplied. Every single community that forms around specific instances or projects -of free software counts as a different commons, with its particular (even though -in some cases similar) rules, boundaries and systems of governance. In other -words, each group of people who not only use a certain free software, but also -help to support or develop it (in the expanded sense outlined previously), can be -seen as a commons in itself. +Perens tells Ars that this was one of the key motivations behind the intimal open source definition (originally written for the Debian project). "The open source definition means that you shouldn't need a lawyer just to be a user," says Perns. "And one of the ways we do that is minimizing the legal load." + +Redis Labs' new license puts companies in the position of needing a lawyer, and GoodFORM becomes the more logical choice. This also may hint at why MongoDB wants to remain open source. + +Other open source projects which have changed to closed source licenses have not faired well. The Xfree86 project was the defacto standard for running X Windows for most of the 1990s, up through the early 2000s. In 2004 Xfree86 began shipping code that the Free Software Foundation felt was counter to the GPL. The downstream operating systems using Xfree86 decided that was unacceptable and a fork, X.org, was born. Today X.org occupies the place Xfree86 once did and Xfree86 is abandoned. + +Other examples are easy to find, LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, MariaDB came out of license changes in MySQL, Wireshark came out of Ethereal, the list goes on, but the key thing to note is not just that the forks happened, but that they took with them the developers, the community, the momentum that sustains open source software over the long haul. Lose the goodwill of the open source community and it can be vicious in exacting its revenge. It's also efficient in doing so, Xfree86 was effectively dead six months after X.org began, OpenOffice disappeared into irrelevancy similarly quickly. + +The overwhelming lesson of open source history is that once you are open source, it's very unlikely you will change that and survive. + +## What makes open source work: generosity + +If open source history teaches that there is no going back, it's worth considering why. + +After years of using Quickbooks to appease accountants, I got fed up with it. I looked around for some open source accounting software and stumbled across something that fit my needs, [Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a little project spun out of Linux computer manufacturer System76. + +System76's Beanbooks is a perfect example of what Peren's sees as an ideal open source software scenario. In <cite>The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source</cite> Perens argues that a company's non-differentiating software is its best scenario for open source software. That is, open source the infrastructure of the business, not the core. + +To put it another way, Beanbooks was not System76's profit center, but it is an enabling technology for System76's profit center -- building Linux-based computers. + +However, despite being a perfect candidate for an open source license, Beanbooks is not open source. Why? + +System76 sells a hosted version of [Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a SaaS, and at the time the company was worried that a larger company would come along, take the GPL code, essentially clone Beanbooks and get all the profit from System76's investment. + +System76 founder Carl Richell says he can empathize with MongoDB and Redis Labs, but he has already been down the worry-about-someone-stealing-your-code-for-competing-SaaS road and regrets it. "Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all our investment." He says System76 wanted something like patent protection for a few years, but that "ended up hurting us, hurting the platform, and we shouldn't have had those concerns." + +While the SaaS version of Beanbooks looks to be fine, the available code does not get updates and is, from a free software perspective, fairly useless. The Github page is a ghost town. There's no development, no community. + +Beanbooks the service carries on, but it does so without a community contributing ideas, code and everything else vibrant open source projects have. Richell thinks Beanbooks might have avoided its fate if it had a GPL or similar license from the beginning. + +"If it was good enough that someone wanted it that's great," says Richell. The key to success for Ritchell isn't the open source software, it's the innovation. "Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance," he says. As the software developer you have a head start, and, hopefully, a vision of where you are going, those are your differentiators, to use Perens' terms. + +"The only way to be successful is to stay ahead," says Richell, "I don't think the license has anything to do with it." + +## What the future looks like + +Everyone loves an underdog, and Redis Labs and MongoDB want to portray themselves as the open source underdogs waging a heroic battle against the forces of evil in the form of AWS. But are they? + +Redis Labs and MongoDB both look like very healthy companies. Redis Labs just raised $60 million dollars in funding and, based on the companies doing the funding, looks poised for a successful IPO. MongoDB's IPO last year was, by all accounts, a huge success. It's stock IPOed at $24 and has steadily climbed ever since then. Today it trades at at around $100 a share. Just before this article went to press one of MongoDB's biggest users, Lyft, did defect to Amazon, but after a slight stock drop, MongoDB's stock was right back up where it was before Lyft defected. + +Neither company seems to be hurting in anyway. Yet. The fallout from their license changes remains to be seen. It could be that they end going the way of Xfree86 and OpenOffice. It could be that they are able to survive as proprietary software companies. The fate of either is unimportant to the fate of the larger open source paradigm. + +The open source paradigm doesn't work for everyone. As Perens put it in a conversation we had as I was wrapping this up, "you can use any license you want as long as you don't call it open source, that's your freedom. But we have certain rights that come with open source it doesn't make sense to give these up to protect a business model." + +Through all the conversations I had with developers and founders, one line kept coming back to me. System76 founder Carl Richell told me: "if generosity isn't built into open source, it isn't going to work." + +Generosity in this case is the right to use the software for any purpose. + +This has always been the basic litmus test for new open licenses -- is the license limiting the generosity of the software? What got open source where it is today is that it could be used anywhere, with anything. Need to combine open source and proprietary software? No problem. Need to re-write that open source library so it can interface with your proprietary code? No problem. Want to take that open source library, wrap it up as a service and sell it? No problem. Because in the end, that's what open source is: freedom through generosity. And as Perens points out, that's what it is even when that model doesn't work for a particular business. |