
The Commons Clause doesn't help the commons - pabs3
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/51177.html
======
djsumdog
Stepping back, this gets into the bigger questions of "What is commercial
use?"

If you take an image that's Creative Commons BY-SA-NC and you use it as the
title image in your article and display the photographers name and even link
to his or her website/original image, but your site is filled with ads you use
to make money off your writing ... have you violated that license?

This is why Wikipedia doesn't allow NC works and why we have the "Open
Culture" classifications for licenses types.

I feel like the Common Clause supporters are in this spot where they want to
monetize and survive of their software, and I can respect that. But the spirit
of the GPLv3 camp of devs is that "Fine, let other people make money off my
works if they want. But they need to contribute their improvements back."

I feel like the Commons Clause is kinda a half-and-half approach that really
fails on both sides of the camp. Most BSD licensed tools can be used in GPLv3
software, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) it doesn't look like Commons
Clause is compatible at all.

It's kinda sad how licensing hinders using the best tools in open source
development. An excellent example is Hunspell, which is a god awful spell
checker that's used in everything. Aspell if superior in almost every case,
and yet it can't be included in anything due to licensing:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/aspell-and-hunspell-a-tale-
of...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/aspell-and-hunspell-a-tale-of-two-spell-
checkers/)

~~~
rmc
> If you take an image that's Creative Commons BY-SA-NC ... but your site is
> filled with ads you use to make money off your writing ... have you violated
> that license?

Other examples: Is the BBC commerical? It's technically a public service
broadcaster, owned and "controlled" (ish) by a government. But it has managers
and offices and directors (and sorta) CEO, and HR departments and employees
and will sell products, and it buys many things, and competes in the same
space as many commerical TV stations and producers.

Is the US Department of Defence commerical? No. The US Army? No. What about
Deutsche Bahn, the German train company?

Imagine a tiny worker owned co-operative, it's 10 local indiginous farmers who
are barely self suffecient, but they made a co-op selling their products. It's
a democratic organisation, controlled by it's members. That is definitly
commerical.

Doe "Non-commerical" exclude who you want?

~~~
babuskov
> Is the BBC commerical?

In my experience BBC asks permission to use anything. I have an open source
game (GPL), and they asked me for permission to use a footage of their own
gameplay. So, even if this would fall into "fair use", they still asked.

~~~
rmc
The BBC might do this, good for them. But other similar organisations might
not.

This happened in Germany over a Creative Commons NC licence.
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140326/11405526695/germa...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140326/11405526695/german-
court-says-creative-commons-non-commercial-licenses-must-be-purely-personal-
use.shtml)

------
infinity0
> The author continues: > > "Our view is that open-source software was never
> intended for cloud infrastructure companies to take and sell. That is not
> the original ethos of open source." > > which is a pretty astonishingly
> unsupported argument. Open source code has been incorporated into
> proprietary applications without giving back to the originating community
> since before the term open source even existed.

It depends on who you ask. The GNU AGPL certainly was intended not for cloud
infrastructure companies to unconditionally take and sell. And as for non-
cloud software, some projects like Wine used to be licensed permissively until
they realised certain companies like Cedega [1] were making money off their
work without contributing anything back, and switched to the LGPL instead.

Then OTOH you have permissive fundamentalists from parts of the US west coast
that are already rich and whose livelihoods aren't dependent on money, and
then of course are very happy to gather favour and reputation from giant tech
monopolies by giving it all away for free with no pesky "reciprocal altruism"
conditions for the lawyers to have to reason through.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedega_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedega_\(software\))

~~~
cwp
If you ask the people behind the AGPL about the ethos of open source, you're
asking the wrong people. They're pretty explicit about having a different
ethos:

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point.en.html)

------
jancsika
I'm probably not thinking this through, but here goes anyway...

Ignoring the "free software developers" for the moment and only focusing on
"open source" developers...

There are essentially two classes:

1\. Those who truly believe in the spirit of 3-clause BSD license, plus the
small number who believe in the spirit of the GPLv2.

2\. Everyone else who "chooses" 3-clause BSD license because that's the
default open source license and they just want to spend their time dev'ing.

I'm guessing group #2 is _vastly_ bigger than group #1.

So for group #2, why not _default_ to AGPLv3 plus selling proprietary licenses
to companies that want to use your software?

The companies' lawyers won't let them touch the AGPL with a ten foot pole. If
they want to use your software they will pay for a reasonably priced
proprietary license.

For group #2, this is not that much different than defaulting to 3-clause BSD,
_except_ for the following:

* companies will _pay you money_ before using your software

* there might have been some companies which would have downloaded and used your software under 3-clause BSD which will not use it under AGPL _nor_ pay for the proprietary license. But those companies are the ones _least likely_ to support you under the 3-clause BSD license anyway, either by donation or even giving back patches

So if the premise is, "I just want to dev," choose AGPL. Then when _anyone_
tries to bikeshed about the license kindly offer to sell them a reasonably
priced proprietary license instead.

If they accept, eat. If not, keep dev'ing.

If it doesn't work at all, you've _still_ got an open source project available
to the public under an open source license.

~~~
eridius
If you don't care about licensing, you should absolutely not default to a
copyleft license. You should only ever use a copyleft license when you
intentionally and explicitly want copyleft behavior.

The truth is, unless you're spending a significant amount of time building a
high-quality, highly-useful piece of software, as well as marketing it, no
company is going to pay you for your open-source software regardless of its
license. If you are spending the time and effort necessary to produce
something a company will go through the trouble of licensing, then you should
be giving a lot of thought to the license you're using already instead of just
going with a "default".

As far as actually making money off of open-source work, by far the best way
to do that is to leverage your open-source contributions into getting a
highly-payed job at one of the big companies. For these purposes, the actual
license of the work is pretty much irrelevant, except that using a more
permissive license is likely to result in having more users of your component,
which in turn gives you as the author more prestige and therefore makes you a
more valuable hire.

So basically, if you don't want to give any thought to the license you should
use for a particular project, you should default to a permissive one. You can
always relicense it later if you decide it's turning into something that might
actually be valuable enough for companies to pay for.

~~~
js8
I think you described the trade-off between permissive and copyleft licenses
well, but the argument that you shouldn't default to copyleft is weak.

If you care about developers, you should use permissive license, if you care
about end users, you should use copyleft license. The final decision is
completely determined as who you see yourself more as a maintaner - developer
of the software or end user of the software. The choice depends on the nature
of software, and if you expect that you will be paid on either developing it
or at least using it in another paid project.

Unfortunately, there is no middle road. The middle road will just mean more
free loaders.

~~~
eridius
That's a fair argument, but the counterargument is that permissive licenses
are good for users because permissive licenses allow more software to
incorporate your component, thus (presumably) increasing the overall quality
of software, and it's good for users to have good-quality software.

~~~
js8
That is an argument which only works, however, when you're writing a
component.

Almost exactly dual argument can be made to defend end-users.

And it is what we actually observe in the real world. Components that concern
developers, such as libraries, often have liberal licenses, while finished
programs often have copyleft licenses.

------
bumholio
I think a solution that actually helps the commons is to time-bomb the
"Commons Clause" for a 3-5 year period, after which the software reverts to
full open source (similar to the GPL Time bomb discussed some time ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492)
) This way, the developers get paid fairly, for what they actually deliver,
but they can't lock the users in. If the developer dies, goes bankrupt or
falls into a predatory phase where it milks the product for cash without
reinvesting sufficient back (Adobe), then the project can be salvaged as open
source by those who use it. An even better option is to allow any commercial
developer, after the 3 year period passes, the option to fork and develop it's
own version with similar licensing conditions.

This will ensure a healthy, competitive environment where the software can be
monetized traditionally, yet the 4 freedoms are (eventually) satisfied. As a
user, this is what you care about above all else; you will pay the commercial
license fee to get the bleeding edge product, knowing you are in a way
"leasing to own" the software and you will be able to fork it in-house if the
way you use it diverges from what the publisher will want in the future.

------
flukus
Am I correct in thinking that what we're missing is an "ALGPL", a version of
the AGPL that only requires modifications to be distributed and not everything
linking to it? At the moment the AGPL seems to be the only common license that
requires modifications behind a corporate firewall to be published but the
copy left nature makes it corporate cancer.

~~~
stubborn_d0nkey
You don't have to make it available to the public if you only use it
internally. You only ever have to share it with the people who use it. If it's
only internally used that means you don't have to share it.

Even if it's externally used that doesn't mean it has to be freely available.
If you require a paid subscription to access the AGPLed software then you only
have to provide the source to those that have paid for the subscription.

~~~
jimktrains2
> If you require a paid subscription to access the AGPLed software then you
> only have to provide the source to those that have paid for the
> subscription.

While true, there's no restriction on the subscribers making the code public.

~~~
icebraining
True (and one can't add it, as the license procludes doing so), but in my
experience working for a company that distributed most of its software under
the A/LGPL licenses to paying customers only, they aren't really interested in
doing that. We never had one of our modules being publicly distributed by a
third-party.

------
fnord123
>Well, no. The GNU Affero GPL has a clause that covers this case - if you
provide a network service based on AGPLed code then you must provide the
source code in a similar way to if you distributed it under a more traditional
copyleft license.

This is definitely not true.

[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html)

>Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the
Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting
with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such
interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your
version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server
at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying
of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source
for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is
incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.

There are two things here:

1\. People only get access if they access the service. I don't know how this
has been tested in court, but to my IANAL ears it means opening a socket to
the service.

2\. You only have to distribute it if you modify the software. This is nothing
to do with using AGPL code as part of the collection of services. And if you
don't let users open a socket to the AGPL part then you don't need to release
those parts.

~~~
anonymfus
Doesn't "collection of services" constitute a derivative work which should be
under AGPL if other services depend on AGPL part?

~~~
fnord123
I'm not a lawyer, but my belief is no.

------
bitwize
The Commons Clause is there to _remind_ the commons of their subordinate
relationship to the vendor.

------
tasubotadas
I only use open source libs that's apache, mit, or BSD licensed. To use
anything else you must be crazy (as this article proves). I'd rather write my
own code if it's not available under one of those licenses.

I am more flexible with the software as it doesn't really matter (like
databases).

