[hendzen]

At the end of the day, open source projects need developers... and developers need to eat.

These license changes have been forced by the business reality of larger cloud companies capturing all the value created by open source communities and leaving OSS developers to starve.

Who deserves the value created by Redis? Antirez and the Redis Labs developers? Or Jeff Bezos?

[emersion]

This is not the point.

The point is: stop calling open-source stuff that isn't. You shouldn't lie to your users.

[thrower123]

Open-source doesn't necessarily imply everything that the FOSS and GPL folks think it does outside of their semantic bubble. It's one of those bastardized terms that has become so mangled and situationally-dependent as to be almost meaningless.

For a significant number of people "open-source" just means, "I found this on GitHub"

[pfooti]

It hasn't, though. There's at least two different organizations that work to concretely operationalize what "open source" means. People may be confused about the term, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying to educate about it, and it definitely doesn't mean we should let other people go on polluting the ontological space with garbage that seems intentionally designed to confuse.

[falcolas]

Do you consider Microsoft Windows, or Oracle database to be open source software? Because the source code is viewable (albeit under an NDA).

Open source does have a specific meaning, and twisting it like this does nobody any favors.

[thrower123]

No, I'm well aware of what open-source is supposed to mean, as opposed to shared-source or whatever the proper term is for that type of arrangement.

I just try to deal with the world as it is, and the damage has been done already to the popular meaning of the term. I don't have the energy or interest to tilt at this particular wind-mill, so at this point if somebody says something is open-source, unless I have prior knowledge of what they think open-source means, I can't really infer anything in particular, and have to ask some more questions.

[icebraining]

Sure. And plenty of companies have stretched thin the definition of "free" or "unlimited". But that doesn't mean we have to accept that as OK.

[rocqua]

So this is just a very harsh discussion of semantics? Moreover, one where the argument is based on common understanding of a term, rather than a literal interpretation of the term.

Because a literal interpretation of open-source is a system where the 'source'(code) is open (to read). Indeed many people understand it to mean more, but that doesn't make that understanding indisputably correct.

[emersion]

"Open" doesn't mean "read", it means "freedom". If I look up the definition of "open-source" for instance on Wiktionary [1], it says "permit modifications and redistribution" (and refers to the OSI definition).

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/open%2Dsource

[dragonwriter]

> These license changes have been forced by the business reality of larger cloud companies capturing all the value created by open source communities and leaving OSS developers to starve.

No, they haven't, because the “big industry players capture the revenue, while open source devs mostly work for those players, either directly or through sponsored projects” isn't something that started with the cloud; it's why Linus Torvalds isn't a billionaire.

It's forced by firms wanting the economics of classic proprietary software and the PR benefits of F/OSS, in many cases, apparently, because they have investors who bought in to F/OSS-based endeavors based on expectations that were unrealistic ab initio given the economics of the industry.

[vorpalhex]

If you want to publish open source and not have cloud companies use it for their own profit without contributing back, there's a license for that called the GPL.

If you want to write software and get paid for it, then ask for money for your software instead of handing it out as open source then changing your mind once it's popular. In common parlance that's called a bait and switch.

[kryptiskt]

Cloud companies can use GPL code without contributing back as they're not distributing it.

[detaro]

GPL does nothing of the sort. If AGPL is a worthy tradeoff overall is debated a lot.

[huzy]

As the Red Hat model dies, and SaaS becomes more and more relevant, people have to get used to these new terms. Ranting won't work (or feed anybody).