| These are the bullets from the article: It takes open-source code produced by others, runs it as a commercial service and gives nothing back to the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open source, thereby intercepting the monetization of the open source. It forks projects and forcibly wrestles control away from the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open-source projects, as it did in the case of Elasticsearch. It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs. Check, check, check. Remember RMS' screed? "Only the writing of software should be paid for, the using of it is an inherent right of everyone and should not make any remuneration requirements on the user." Back when he wrote that he was mad because companiies wrote code and charged big fees just to use it. He felt that was unfair. But now the shoe is on the other foot, and big companies are just "users" they aren't writing the software, so why should they pay for it? And while RMS was happy to have an architect use CAD software that someone else paid to have written, to design the houses that they sold for big bucks to their own clients, I don't think he thought it all the way through. The missing bit here is that the "using of software" has a value. Whether you are using a better C compiler than your competitors so your compiled code runs faster than theirs, or you are using a distributed database to offer a scaled up database service that is impractical for an individual to equip and maintain. The whole reason people paid for software in the first place is because it accelerated the value they could create. And when that delta in value, that was worth significant money to them. Still is. That is why electronic CAD software still gets big bucks from its users, the same with packages like Adobe studio. And guess what? When you use someone's software, and you are getting additional value that is accruing to you, if you didn't pay anything to the person who created it and maintains it, they feel cheated. Surprised? I am not. When the software manufacturers of old found people that used their software without paying for it, they called them Pirates, and Crooks, and all manner of ill names. They turned to technology, and licensing legalize, to create ways they could pursue those people to make them pay. Not unlike the folks at Redis changing their licenses to make it harder for people like Amazon to "pirate" their software. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. There is nothing "free" about Free Software as RMS envisions it, it is just a structural way for the users of the software to rip off the people who wrote it by capturing all of the value gained by using that software to develop or provide a product or service. It has always been true that software vendors were often extortionate in their pricing while escaping all liability by disclaiming the software did anything. If you fixed that problem, then we will be in a much better place. |