Comment by benrutter
4 hours ago
I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects.
I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes.
The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but more meaningful "open source" out there.
I certainly don't have all the answers here but the entire $300B+ SaaS industry (and a bunch of other stuff that behaves like SaaS) was built in great part on a loophole in the GPL. More precisely, many of the people who licensed their code under GPL were eventually dismayed when they realized you could sell access to whatever you like built on top of that code, over a network, and you wouldn't have to distribute the source. The AGPL was devised to close this loophole.
There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected!
The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys.
I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.
I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party
Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing...
It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.
That's why SSPL was created. People working in tech companies have expressed extreme vitriol for SSPL - I wonder why.
The SSPL isn't the best designed license, but it is "more AGPL than AGPL"
Why? What is meaningful about sharing code with the threat of a lawsuit if someone copies it? Is sounds like you want the term to be erroded?
User consent. Uninformed consent is not consent.
You cannot meaningfully consent to running software on your devices, or running your life on software, when that software's source is unavailable.
Why does that require there to be 'less open source'? Nothing is stopping that already today. Impact wise, everyday people can't use build tooling so this kind of thing only effects people that are 1 keystroke away from modifying the code and not being allowed to share it.