[sanderjd]

My perspective is more like the parent's. As someone who has grown up along with open source, I've found it surprising recently how up in arms people are about how critical the ability for anyone to commercialize a project is for the definition of open source. To me, I care a lot about whether I can see how software is implemented, and modify it for my own use, but it has never really occurred to me that I need to have the right to commercialize any arbitrary project.

But :shrug: I guess different people care about different things, is what I've realized watching these discussions unfold.

But I do think this purist perspective on open source is just going to result in more Snowflakes and fewer Hashicorps, because why bother with this fight?

[orra]

> But I do think this purist perspective on open source is just going to result in more Snowflakes and fewer Hashicorps, because why bother with this fight?

Orgs like Hashicorp clearly think they benefit by pretending to be open source.

They could simply stop being disingenuous about their source available proprietary software, and nobody would stop them.

[sanderjd]

First of all, as is probably clear if you read my comments on this, I personally think it would be better if the definition of "open source" did not exclude this kind of re-sale limitation. I don't think it's intuitive at all that this is required to fit the definition of "open source". It seems to me like a tacked on ideological stance from the gatekeeper of the definition, that isn't present in or implied by the words themselves.

But while that's what I think, it isn't at all the view espoused here by Hashicorp. They aren't claiming this is open source. They are accepting the OSI definition and not claiming their new license falls within it.

They aren't being disingenuous. You're putting words in their mouth, and then getting mad at them about those words they didn't say.

[orra]

> They aren't being disingenuous. You're putting words in their mouth, and then getting mad at them about those words they didn't say.

No, they say open source needs to evolve, the implication this is an evolution (not devolution) of open source.

Their announcement talks about how they spoke to OSS experts. That's not relevant: the experts would simply have said: that's not open source.

Hashicorp several times say the BSL is permissive. Permissive is a well established term in software licensing. No, the BSL is not. The BSD and MIT and Apache licenses are permissive.

Finally there is this claptrap from their FAQ:

> 17. Does HashiCorp still believe in open source? > > Yes. [...]

[sanderjd]

> the implication this is an evolution (not devolution) of open source.

"implication"

> the experts would simply have said: that's not open source.

Presumably the experts did tell them that it is not an open source license, which is why they chose not to claim that it is.

> Permissive is a well established term in software licensing. No, the BSL is not.

I think BSL easily fits the bill for the word "permissive".

It's just all so much gatekeeping, and it's really tiring.

[davidgerard]

> why bother with this fight?

Because companies keep bringing this fight.

[sanderjd]

No, companies keep making services with code I can read and modify for my own use, and people in the community keep bringing this fight to them because they're peeved that other companies can't commercialize that software that they didn't build.

Companies will naturally conclude they should just make proprietary software, which doesn't require a big fight. And I think that's a shame.

[cthalupa]

The problem is these companies almost universally could not exist without open source software that allowed them to commercialize things. It is impossible for the vast majority of companies to ever "give back" as much to open source as they profit off of it - from the Linux kernel, all the GNU stuff, the nginx or apache webservers hosting webpages and API access, the haproxy load balancers, the corosync/pacemaker they're using to keep things online, etc. etc. etc.

How many of these companies could exist if all these projects underpinning their own swapped to the SSPL, BSL, etc? And I don't mean now - once you reach a certain size, if you have to replace a bunch of dependencies, you have the resources to do it. But when these companies were smaller, would they have been able to create their own implementation of all these dependencies and still get their product to market? Would they have had the resources to commit to all of it? Would they have had the money to pay for non-FOSS options?

How many of these projects would still exist if the community couldn't commercialize them? We're not even talking about whether or not they ultimately end up contributing code back, etc., because it's not like these licenses give you some threshold of code contribution after which you can commercialize it. Sure, the possibility exists of some special private licensing agreement being struck, but that's possible with proprietary code, too.

Source available might sound fine from a personal use perspective, but it ignores the fact that the environment that made all of this possible would not have been possible under that model.

[sanderjd]

A very thoughtful argument, thank you!

To me, the difference is that these are all building blocks rather than standalone products. I think of these commercial products as making sense for standalone services, rather than libraries and other building blocks.

But also: I think the business model that built all those open source building blocks has always been pretty shitty, relying on a lot of altruistic un- or poorly- compensated work from people. And I think that's bad. But I don't think demanding that companies making useful services also be subjected to a shitty business model is a good solution.

[reegnz]

One man's product is another man's building block.

[cthalupa]

You're welcome! Thanks for continuing the civil discourse :)

But, let's take just apache and nginx as an example: Lots of people offer just webhosting as a service. It's gotten less and less common now, with things like Squarespace, Shopify, Medium, etc. etc. etc., but once upon a time there were tens of thousands of companies that were making all their money by providing storage/compute/networking and a place to upload your HTML files, and then later adding in additional services like PHP and other scripting languages, MySQL for database hosting, etc.

Now, the context here is a bit different here, of course, particularly for Apache httpd. But Nginx has Nginx Plus, MySQL AB would license you a closed-source version or do the usual support/consulting/etc. stuff. But it's not hard to imagine a world where they could have easily said "Hey you know we're experts in running this stuff, we should just run it for people and charge them" - just like we see with a lot of these "open source" companies today.

There was never a general outcry about tons of businesses making money just hosting these open source services, even though the vast majority never contributed financially or otherwise to these open source projects. The only real difference I can see between then and now is simply what path the companies behind the projects, where applicable, have taken to monetize. Would the internet be a better place if MySQL AB moved to offering hosting as a service and put MySQL on the BSL, preventing all of these webhosting companies from having existed? If F5 had done it after acquiring Nginx? Cheap and plentiful webhosting is a big part of what grew the internet so quickly, particularly before the 'Web 2.0' days of social media sites centralizing so much of the traffic on the internet into a handful of places.

> But I don't think demanding that companies making useful services also be subjected to a shitty business model is a good solution.

Well, I'm not demanding a company do anything. I'm just saying that the internet as it exists today, including all of these companies we're talking about, would not exist if earlier on people had made the same choices they are. Open source is not about guaranteeing a viable business model to companies - it doesn't care about your business - it's about ensuring certain freedoms in software. And the internet we're discussing this on exists because of those freedoms it guaranteed.

If you can't build a viable business when abiding by those freedoms for whatever reason, then sure - go build proprietary software. I'm not going to call it or you evil. But I do take issue with a company using open source as a method to gain adoption, additional contributions, mindshare, etc. and then no longer being open source while talking about how they are an "evolution" of it. You're not an evolution of open source if you're removing freedoms.