Comment by KingMob
1 year ago
I got curious about why Forgejo split off from Gitea, and it seems like yet another case of broke FOSS creators/maintainers getting screwed from above (and maybe below too).
From the Gitea incorporation announcement (below), it looks like they couldn't pay their bills as FOSS, and there were wealthy free-riders (which the MIT license allows).
> "Over the years we have tried various ways to support maintainers and the project. Some ways we have tried include bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We have found that while there have been many wonderful individuals, and a few corporations who have been incredibly generous, and we are so thankful for their support, there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements. [emphasis added]
I'm not a fan of Bruce Perens, but he kind of nails the problem when he says:
> "We have a great corporate welfare program, our users are the richest companies in the world. Indeed, we've enabled companies like Google to be created.
> "In contrast, if our developers aren't working for those companies, they probably go un-compensated."
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On the flip side, the community rebelled when the creators formed a company, but not supposedly because they formed a company, but because that co held the domain and trademark. Seems like a small hill to die on to me, but I don't know the details.
Regardless, it looks like exhibit #187 of FOSS failing for anyone outside of hobbyists and FAANGs.
FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.
What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom. Nowhere in "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" does it say "and we should be able to pay a few developers a salary for their work towards that fundamentally ethical goal". Under the original paradigm and goals, any income streams are just cream on top of doing the right thing.
According to the OSI's history of itself [0], at some point people got it into their heads that the open development model was inherently a good one for business, too—Netscape jumped on board, and then some people got together and decided to rebrand Free Software:
> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.
The word FOSS reminds me a lot of American corporate Buddhism—mindfulness and meditation totally removed from its original deeply religious context and turned into some sort of self-help program, with the result being something that would be barely recognizable to the original practitioners. Free Software was never about sustainable development. It was about doing the right thing—enabling user freedom—because it is right. Everything else was just means to that end, but at some point along the line the means became the end and we started wondering why FOSS wasn't paying the bills like it was supposed to.
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...
> FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.
This seems an interesting point and one I share. Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that we now see. It's time the "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" be updated to something like 'users and makers should be free of coercion and exploitation by software.' What, after all, are the grounds for such freedoms? Are they issues of property? Or are they ones of the dignity of the persons involved? It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another uses us as means to their ends without our consent. In personal actions, many act as if they believe this. Yet corporations consistently do not act with those values. You're right: we should strive toward a system not in which it's viable to create businesses out of FOSS but in which both users and developers are not exploited or used unwillingly.
>Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that we now see.
If someone uses and benefits from your product, at what point does it become "unethical extractivism"? If I as an individual figure out a way to build a business centered around your product that you make for free, is that already unethical, or is it at a later point?
>It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another uses us as means to their ends without our consent.
But you gave your consent by publishing software for anyone to use.
> What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom.
This actually illustrates the key flaw in Stallman's understanding. To him, "user" encompassed both humans and megacorporations. But a corporation is an abstract legal convenience, cannot feel the pain of being "thwarted" in its use of software, and thus, want freedom. Freedom is only an ethical good for humans.
Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself. Encouraging otherwise borders on encouraging exploitation.
tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time, and encouraging THAT is unethical.
Stallman's reasoning wasn't flawed (at least, not in the respect you state). Corporations are simply a group of humans. I don't think there's a good argument to be made that humans should have a right to X, but suddenly lose that right when they get together as a group.
> Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself.
Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor". People are making an effort to put something out there for the benefit of the entire human race, and if that includes corporations that's fine. Not one person is harmed if Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a profit, even if they make it into closed source. My project remains freely available for the benefit of all, just as it was before Amazon used it. So who exactly has been harmed? Not me, I'm in the same state as I was before. Not my (non-Amazon) users, they are in the same state as they were before. Not Amazon, of course. If every single person is no worse off or even better off than before, I don't see how you can argue that the corporate users are doing something unethical. It seems to me that really this isn't about ethics, but is about "we don't like those icky people" masquerading in pretty sounding language.
> tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time...
Nobody should go broke to make open source software, period.
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Well, stallman would probably advocate for the AGPL in such cases, which the megacorps are still wary of.
Sometimes I wish I could upvote twice in replies like this.
Many open source developers has misread the room and thinking the environment is still like it was 15~20 years ago where open source software were the works of hobbyists who has a well-paid day job and only here for street credit.
You know who read the room correctly? GitLab. They've found a balanced way to offer their product under an open source scheme while keeping their lights on. They've earned trust as well as income, that's a job well done.
If one wants to live off of their open source work, then they need to run it as a business and perform appropriate business tricks. Otherwise their own effort may one day become their own rip-off. Not saying anything sinister, but fairness is a balancing game, if you hard work don't treat you well, then it's unfair too.
GitLab has collected a few severe CVEs. I would choose "v4 final final actually final" folders as a versioning scheme before I used them. It is surprising to me that they have any users at all.
What does that have to do with whether it's a successful business?
GitLab isn't profitable yet, at least on a GAAP basis. They're definitely moving in that direction, and I hope they'll get there, but IMO it's a bit early to put them on a pedestal.
Copyleft licenses are supposed to prevent to an extent this sort of free riding, but they are no longer "fashionable".
I don't see the point of refusing to add additional (copyleft) terms to a license, only to end up hoping companies act as if the terms existed out of good will.
Companies like Google love the permissive licenses, and go as far as to sponsor MIT/BSD-licensed replacements to common building blocks like toybox.
EDIT: I see that Forgejo v9+ is indeed GPL-licensed.
I released a tiny toy fun project under the GPL. It’s the kind of thing that no one could possible want to monetize, but the first PR was someone pleading the case that I should relicense to something more friendly, like MIT. I’d never before been so instantly tempted to ban someone from a project.
I agree that copyleft is less fashionable these days, but I think big companies have figured out all the tricks they need.
Case in point: Amazon offers a hosted Grafana service, which is AGPL. They may not be able to meaningfully change the code in secret, but they can still impoverish the actual Grafana creators trying to sell Grafana as a service.
How exactly does that apply? What's the "corporate welfare" here? Almost nobody is profiting off Gitea, especially not big tech. I know using the big tech boogeyman is useful to justify open source projects rugpulling on their licenses, but it doesn't even apply here. Not that it usually makes sense[0], but in this case it's not even something that the maintainers themselves ever alluded to.
[0] projects like MongoDB, ElasticSearch or Redis only became popular because they were OSS, and probably limited competition for years simply because competing with free is hard. only to then switch on their users years further down the line. So any money that they ever got was due to them being OSS in the first place since absolutely nobody would've used MongoDB 1.0 if it was a commercial product.
FOSS is a distribution strategy, not a business model.
> Regardless, it looks like exhibit #187 of FOSS failing for anyone outside of hobbyists and FAANGs.
Forks that survive after splitting off are cases of FOSS succeeding, not failing. Failing would mean closing down, in this case it's replicating with changes, we (the public) are getting even more options.
The idea behind choosing a license like MIT is that people can create forks from your work, requiring not much more than attribution. If what the license calls out as valid is considered a failure in your eyes, don't choose a license like MIT.
This paints it as if Gitea was not a fork of Gogs specifically to turn a profit out of something they did not make on their own. I might be more sympathetic if they'd created Gitea, but given it's a fork of another project, it looks a lot like they're playing the same game that beat them.
I don’t think this is quite correct. Gitea was a community fork of Gogs, because Gogs was limited by its single maintainer, who was often unresponsive for months. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296717
In a way that makes it worse. A community fork that is repurposed by a select few to make money off of work that those few did not do for the most part.
It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them).
FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.
> They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
Please, quit the cheap sophistry.
Evolution doesn't intend or plan anything for us, and you will have a very hard time convincing people that we would be better off living in a tribal/clan society than whatever we have today.
Evolution intends in the sense that it follows an abstract fitness function. I didn't think I'd have to explain that here. I know how to implement evolution algorithmically.
And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over ideological differences all the time. Political parties are tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes. Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are tribes.
We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if we're talking about a cluster of people.
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What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.
The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open Source what it is.
And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.
It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.
But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.
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Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics. Legality doesn’t imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this was about legality, people would say so.
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Which megacorporation abused Gitea here? And how?
I'm sympathetic to some of what you're saying, and I believe the original hacker ethos spurred some of the original FS impulses, but...
FOSS licenses don't, and can't, embody anarchism (or any socialism) because they make no distinction between humans and capital-holding entities, lumping them all under the term "users".