[tolmasky]

This is also incredibly worrying for the original goal of open source which was individual user's rights. I think it will be very difficult to make a license that cleanly allows me a personal user to change/use/distribute the source, but not a big business like Amazon. And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I use for my real estate business or something. With open source, the requirements are really easy, as soon as there is a door for someone to get a cut of what you make, we get into the territory of whether you become a big enough target to start demanding a cut from. And then it's up to the courts to decide. That might be great from the author's point of view, but I think completely goes against the whole point of the software user's freedom.

For example, is it that far fetched that at some point someone will come up with the abstract argument that your blogging service is really actually just a fancy interface to your MongoDB instance -- and thus you should pay up since you are a MongoDB provider.

[Drdrdrq]

> And sure, maybe its as simple as "are you profiting from it" -- but then we get into weird edge cases of me using your software on my router that I use for my real estate business or something.

Just to be clear, if you are referring to Commons Clause, you can freely use the software for real estate or whatever, you just can't sell the router itself, software itself, or offer paid consulting / support / hosting for the software (well you can, but you need to obtain a commercial license - which is fair enough, since you are making money off the software, not off you real estate business).

This is a common misconception about Commons Clause. You can use it for commercial purposes. Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it.

As for blogging example, the concern is imho not justified. Hybrid licenses need support of community as much as open source ones and such behaviour would be suicide. It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early... There aren't many projects using Commons Clause yet for example.

[tolmasky]

> Exception is when you are selling the software itself, or the services that base on it.

I think we're agreeing here: no one actually knows the boundaries of this. I'm simply not interested in being the guinea pig of where the line is of "the services that base on it". In my experience the actual deciding factor for this is when you become successful enough and worthwhile to sue. Then it's up to some judge in Texas to decide whether my service is "based on" this technology? I mean, I can't run my services at all without Linux -- I think they'd have a really good argument that my entire business is "based on it". You and I may see how this is silly, that's not sufficient for making me feel safe in a legal environment that currently rewards patent trolls for example.

> It would help if the projects were clearly stating the allowed (and disallowed) usages in advance, but it's a bit early...

If we're in "warrant territory" of explicitly stating up front every possible "OK use case" to make the user feel safe, then its either going to have so many allowable use cases as to be self-defeating, or not possibly able to predict really exciting unexpected uses and rule itself out from those domains. At the absolute minimum, I'm going to start to actually have to read over the license with a lawyer now (as opposed to one common understanding of something like MIT), since I can't imagine a "one size fits all" of acceptable explicitly spelled out use cases when the whole point of these licenses is to carve out meaningful profit areas for the project itself - something that in my opinion is going to vary greatly project to project depending on the unique features it provides.

[Drdrdrq]

Yes, I think we are in agreement. Except that MIT is not as well understood as most people think it is (Kyle Mitchell wrote about it, can't find the link right now), so you might want to lawyer up for opensource too. :)

I just think a solution that better aligns incentives of users, businesses and developers is needed, because opensource doesn't do its job good enough. But time will tell which licenwe will get enough backing to succeed in dethroning it.

[tolmasky]

Sure, but the whole point is that the parties choosing to adopt "Source Available" licenses are doing so because they failed to predict how their users would use and profit from it, and in response, are wanting a new arrangement that better benefits them. So in some sense, we know ahead of time that this is a group which has been upset by unexpected use of their software. Now they've created a license that specifically gives them the benefit of the doubt in such scenarios in the future (vs. MIT which gives that benefit of the doubt to the user). As such, I as a user would be entering into an agreement that specifically is weighted against me in a case that has happened before, with a party that has shown in the past to want to change the rules when they felt they were not being sufficiently compensated. This makes me feel significantly less safe without the presence of a lawyer than with a license that has lots and lots of example usage. Would you say that's fair?

[Drdrdrq]

Fair to the user - less than with FOSS, but more than with proprietary licenses. Fair to developer, yes.

But the problem for me is that if developers don't have incentives aligned with their users', then we get low quality software. I am a FOSS user and have been for many years, but while I appreciate the freedoms it grants me, the whole experience is... Let's say "inconsistent". I would prefer limiting some of the freedoms in exchange for better software, and especially in exchange for having it at all on mobile.

I think the somewhat extreme view FOSS movement holds about freedoms actually hurts opensource adoption, because it hurts its quality and availability.

Note that I don't mind Amazon (ab)using FOSS so much as I mind not having any freedom on mobile.