
Open source takes continued investment, and that must be subsidized somehow - runesoerensen
https://www.influxdata.com/blog/its-time-for-the-open-source-community-to-get-real/
======
DoreenMichele
I think an issue here is that open source allows you to create what you think
needs to exist without worrying about extra details like how to pay for its
development. You think Thing should exist, you go try to build it. The
barriers to entry are low.

If it succeeds and becomes popular, now it's a time sink. It's no longer
something you tinker on when inspiration strikes. You have obligations.

At that point, it feels like slave labor, like a thing you are required to do
without pay. And you feel like if people value it, they should support it
somehow.

Most folks doing open source probably aren't great at monetization. If they
knew how to do this as a business model from the get go, they probably would
have.

Relatively few people feel free at that point to just walk away and say "Not
my problem. I created this for free. If you love it, you maintain it. If you
need something reliable and up to date, then pay for a commercial product.
I've given you all the time I'm going to give you for free. I'm on to new
hobbies."

No, instead they get all excited that people want it, resentful that people
won't pay for it, and they rightly recognize that it has value. Now they want
to be compensated.

And the world has Nobel Prizes intended to encourage people to create
brilliant new breakthroughs to benefit humanity without necessarily knowing
how to monetize it, so we have this idea embedded in our collective
subconscious that if we do a good thing, it ought to be rewarded.

I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years. I've thought a lot about
such issues.

I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize
their thing if it gets popular. But we could also work on the cultural side of
this and help people understand that you need to think about how much you are
willing to give and that if your thing gets popular, making money with it is
an additional job to do, not an entitlement.

And if you are bitter that it doesn't pay, one legitimate option is to walk
away or only give it however much time you actually enjoy giving it and not
one minute more.

~~~
fartcannon
Compensation for volunteer work has always felt like a bandaid solution to me.
What would happen if everyone's needs were met? With infinite resources, space
and time, would people still volunteer? This question always makes me think of
StarTrek.

Does anyone know any science fiction novels that really dive into the possible
consequences of a post-scarcity, post-money society?

~~~
Alex3917
> Does anyone know any science fiction novels that really dive into the
> possible consequences of a post-scarcity, post-money society?

[https://smile.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-
Doctorow/dp...](https://smile.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-
Doctorow/dp/076530953X)

[https://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-
_Down_and_Out_in_t...](https://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-
_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.pdf)

You don't really need speculative fiction though, just look at what the
millions of folks who already have basic income do with their time.
Volunteering is pretty high on the list.

~~~
fartcannon
That's fantastic. I'll see what I can find. UBI tops the list of good things
humans could do for one another in my mind. Public school, democracy,
universal health care, and now universal basic income... what's next?
Sometimes it's hard to remember that we do do nice things for each other every
now and then.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Unfortunately if you attempt any of these things in the US you'll be branded
an evil socialist. Better off slaving away your entire life to create that
all-important shareholder value!

~~~
mg794613
This guy got down voted just because people felt insulted. Yes there is not
much prose to his words but he is sort of right. Any attempt to care for your
fellow human is branded as 'communism' or 'against the american way'.
Especially when you elect a president (or two) that literally say that.

------
wvenable
> Apache Common Clause license

As other's have pointed out, but it bears repeating, _this is not a thing_.

There is actually nothing particularly shocking about what Redis is doing
here; it's been done by many open source companies in the past and present and
nobody cares. Yes, it can be considered a somewhat less tasteful way to make
money from an open source platform but not enough to get a big thread on HN.

What they did to stir this debate is confusingly and unnecessarily tie this
move to open source licensing and "commons" naming. _This_ is what brought all
this attention to something that is otherwise not very controversial.

~~~
danShumway
Seriously, there is nothing controversial about layering proprietary offerings
on top of your own Open Source software. Tons of companies do this. They've
done it for ages.

It's only controversial because it's been phrased as an evolution of the Open
Source model. We have articles like this getting thrown around about how the
Open Source community needs to grow up and accept Open Core, right next to
articles about how the Common license is going to be the death of Open Source.

This is only a debate because Redis doesn't know how to write a decent press
release.

But in reality, most people already accept Open Core. We're not getting a ton
of articles on Hacker News about how Gitlab is evil. Just _don 't act like
it's something new or innovative_. It's not some brand new problem for us to
solve, or a sign of the Open Source community's immaturity.

We really don't need a new license for Open Core, and even if we did need some
kind of shared source available/proprietary license, it probably wouldn't look
like the Commons license.

~~~
icc97
The problem is the association with the Apache license. Apache has a positive
brand that you can attach to your project if you license it as such.

It ok if you want to say we have Apache open core and then non-free
extensions, but you shouldn't associate the non-free extensions with Apache.

------
dwheeler
This article seems to assume that the main problem with this "Commons" rider
is a complaint about the "open core" business model. I think that assumption
is false. Lots of organizations have "open core" business models, and do not
get the rise that this announcement has received.

The problem is that this "Commons" rider is confusing and misleading. The term
"Commons" makes it sound like this is a Creative Commons license - which it is
not. The term "commons" is often used to refer to open source software
licenses - which this is not. The coupling with Apache makes it sound like
this licensing system is from or endorsed by the Apache Foundation - which it
is not. (The article uses the term "Apache Common Clause license" \- the fact
that author thinks that's a reasonable name, even though Apache didn't create
or endorse this license, shows how confusing the situation is.) The Commons
FAQ admits that the rider isn't OSS, but then suggests that the OSI definition
is some minor technicality - yet the OSI definition is what practically
everyone uses, and the "technicality" is at the heart of the point (that
_everyone_ can use it for _any_ purpose).

Yes, making money is hard. That problem is not limited to OSS either - most
new restaurants fail within the first 2 years. I love to see new/better ways
to fund OSS. Having a proprietary rider for some modules or having an open
core model aren't new ideas, but if they want to do those things (and have the
legal right to do), then let's see what happens!

But if you're going to create a rider, it's important to actively work to
_not_ be confusing. It's hard getting consensus on anything; I think the anger
here is choosing names that appear designed to be deceptive. If these names
and such aren't changed, I wouldn't be surprised if the Creative Commons
Corporation or Apache Foundation start considering a trademark suit to prevent
confusion in the marketplace. If they weren't intended to be deceptive - and I
hope they weren't - then some renaming and clarification would go a long way.

~~~
tannhaeuser
I agree "Commons" might be unfortunate, but I understood it to stand for
"license for common people" eg. those neither paying nor otherwise
contributing. Maybe I'm wrong, English isn't my native language.

~~~
DoreenMichele
"Commons" means shared public resource that is free for use.

A phrase associated with it is "tragedy of the commons" which means everyone
takes as much as they can get to enhance their own lives and doesn't give
back. This is one of the things impacting Open Source and one if the things
people are complaining about when they say companies use Open Source, make
money off of it, but don't want to support it.

Historically, the commons was typically a field where animals grazed.
Overgrazing by some could ruin it for all.

------
jondubois
People underestimate how difficult it is to create a popular open source
project. It's very competitive. You're competing not just with other open
source projects but also with SaaS solutions from well-funded companies; and
you have to compete with a $0 marketing budget.

Also, if the project does become popular eventually (which is very unlikely),
maintenance is a lot of work. To make matters worse, there is a general
tendency that if things go wrong, the community will blame you but if things
go well, you get almost no credit.

Even if your project has several thousands of stars on GitHub, it means
nothing financially. Most of these OSS authors can't afford to quit their day
job even though their project may be generating millions of dollars of value
for other people.

Money is an important topic to open source authors because after a decade of
working for free during nights and weekends, most of them would love to be
able to afford to quit their day jobs to focus exclusively on their projects
but they can't do that; they're tired but they have to keep soldiering on with
the 80+ hour work week.

Being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now. I think
that any business innovation which helps keep open source projects going
should be welcome.

~~~
Benjammer
>after a decade of working for free during nights and weekends

Think I spotted the problem.

This whole thing feels like someone martyring themselves for a cause and being
recognized as a hero, but then complaining that martyrs are heroes and we
should be _supporting_ our heroes and not forcing them to be martyrs. But that
was the whole point to begin with and why there was any opportunity for
recognition at all.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

~~~
m3mpp
> You can't have your cake and eat it too.

It's not that simple, what would be this industry without Linux, without the
FSF, without the BSD network stack (that is in all the macs...)

The growth of our industry, and probably of a good chunk of the whole economy
for the last 10 years has a lot to do with those people working during nights
and week-ends imo.

~~~
monochromatic
And? People are welcome not to write OSS if it’s a burden.

~~~
zapita
No they’re not, because it’s increasingly expected of developers to have a
track record of open-source contributions if they want to move up into the
higher tiers of their profession. That amplifies inequalities in the field
between:

1) the top 1% employees in the field who have the luxury to invest unpaid
time, and the social clout to make their projects more successful, or to join
more successful projects. (example: how much more likely are you to be a key
contributor to Kubernetes if you are, or were at some point, employed by
Google?);

2) the other 99% who cannot afford to invest the spare time, and do not
benefit from the social proximity to successful open-source contributors (and
success in open-source is as much about social proximity today than technical
skills, hopefully we can change that in the future);

3) The corporations who benefit financially from open-source, sometimes
enormously, with very little pressure to contribute back because of the
aforementioned social pressure on individuals to contribute on their free
time. The expectations are so low that even modest corporate contributions
(joining or starting a foundation, hiring a few engineers, paying for a
conference) will be hailed as generous and benevolent, because the bar is so
incredibly low.

~~~
hnaccy
>it’s increasingly expected of developers to have a track record of open-
source contributions if they want to move up into the higher tiers of their
profession.

Is it really? Of the people I know who have had excellent career paths in
software/computing none have a track record of open source contributions.

~~~
zapita
> _Of the people I know who have had excellent career paths in software
> /computing none have a track record of open source contributions._

Right, that’s how they built their career _in the past_. All things being
equal, it will become gradually harder to build a career that way _in the
future_. I already know several major employers who look at a candidate’s
github activity as a factor in the standard hiring process. And that trend is
only accelerating.

~~~
jnurmine
If employers score higher the candidates with a high Github activity, then
eventually the employers get workers who continue to spend a lot of their time
in Github.

If these people spend a lot of their free time, and perhaps even some of their
professional time, in Github contributing to various public projects, then
they might not necessarily have 100% focus on the employer's tasks. I am not
sure if this is what the employers expect or even want to happen.

The intention is probably to use Github activity as a pre-screening proxy
metric for technical capability and skillset. But... why would someone who is
contributing a lot to public projects cease to do so, once employed? Is there
a risk of getting a partially distracted, though skilled person?

If the wish from the company then is to ensure they get the most performance
for themselves, the logical step would be to cut down on the public
contributions via e.g. legal and contractual means.

So... why would someone who enjoys contributing to public projects join a
company that selects based on Github activity, if it is in the company's
interests that further contributions should be reduced?

Ahh... Maybe I am just overanalyzing it.

------
mintplant
> which will prohibit them from being used freely by hosting and cloud
> providers and other software makers that profit directly from them

All the pro-"Common Clause" reporting I've seen has focused exclusively on
cloud providers, omitting the prohibition on even "consulting/ support
services related to the Software". This reaches further than most license
agreements for _fully-proprietary_ software, to the point where I'm stunned
that it's even legal.

Thought experiment: is a paid employee of a company working with one of these
Redis modules considered to be providing support "for a fee or other
consideration"\---and thus in violation of its license? Is it illegal now to
teach a class on how to use RediSearch?

~~~
driverdan
This is my problem as well. Freelancers and consultants would be unable to
teach, install, configure, or manage anything licensed under Common Clause.
It's a terrible license.

~~~
cpuguy83
I suspect in this case that it's expected that you establish a partnership
agreement with the company.

~~~
PeterisP
Maybe, but that's still a _very harsh_ restriction - in that regard pretty
much every commercial product of random anti-open-source company is more free,
their licences almost never require something remotely comparable to that.

------
error54
If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend Henry Zhu's (Babel core team)
talk from React Rally[1]. He talks candidly about the struggles of maintaining
an extremely popular library and the demands and stress it puts on his life;
especially now that he quit his job to work on Babel full time.

If your company uses Babel (which it probably does), please donate to Henry[2]
or at the least, send him a thank you for his work.

1 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sfFX7WH1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sfFX7WH1c)

2 - [https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu](https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu)

~~~
acemarke
Henry is a wonderful person, and this talk was excellent. I second the
recommendation.

I posted my own thoughts about over-committing and potential burnout a few
months back: [https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux-writing-
resp...](https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux-writing-
responsibilities-burnout-and-a-request-for-help/) . Since then, I've stepped
back from trying to keep up with recurring treadmill tasks like cataloging
articles and links, and am focusing my maintainer time on some specific
Redux/React-Redux issues. Feeling a lot better as a result.

------
saidajigumi
I find this article's angle to be somewhat refreshing, simply because there's
a segment of the OSS world that is allergic to open discussion of funding.
Some of the anti-commercial arguments I've seen are absolutely fantastical,
amounting to demanding OSS to be a massive entitlement to the free time of
others.

This also gets to the biggest criticism I have of the FSF: the only measure of
success is a narrow definition of "freedom" \-- with little to no discussion
of what social systems, economic structures, and advocacy might be useful
and/or necessary to support those aims.

~~~
binomialxenon
I've also seen that many people FOSS users mainly because it's typically free
of charge. It really should become more normalized to 'pay' for Free Software
and give money regularly to projects the user supports and finds useful.

------
einhverfr
I have made my living doing open source software development for a number of
years now. My perspective here is a little different than the article's.

There are, in reality, three ways that open source software comes to be. The
first two are heavily subsidized (educational/academic proof of concept and
internal projects by larger companies which are open sourced to cut
maintenance costs). In the first case, academia subsidizes the software and in
the second case the software exists open source to try to reduce the burdens
on one company. Kafka, etc. are good examples of the second.

There is a third approach which I have also used which is the the customer-
sponsored-development model. This works well with a certain kind of
application aimed at vertical markets in business. Here you expect those who
need new features or support accounts to subsidize maintenance. This is also
how a lot of larger open source software projects that escape academia
effectively work.

In all cases there are two distinct issues. The first is subsidizing the
initial development. This has to be subsidized somehow because often times
getting to a minimum viable project is a lot bigger than folks expect.
Academia and big business are the two major ways these often happen here. But
then the second is subsidizing continued development and maintenance. Here
there are different approaches. One can use pay-for-development/support models
or expect users to contribute patches (depending on the context of the open
source project either one might actually be viable and beneficial and the
difference is who is paying the paycheck, and what the relationship is between
the user and developer).

------
jacquesm
This is not about 'the open source community' this is just about Redis. The
open source community is doing just fine (and Redis is doing just fine), no
need for overbroad or inaccurate claims.

Besides that the obvious point is that every open source producer is entirely
free to release their product under whatever license they see fit and if you
don't like it then simply don't use the product.

~~~
shawn
Are they doing fine?

I’d like to make all of the software I write freely BSD licensed.

If I do that, it seems with very high probability that it might turn out to be
a time sink and a money sink with no benefit other than +reputation. Which is
worthwhile, but perhaps not as worthwhile as those fat stacks.

I don’t know. We’re heading for a future where the only people that can afford
to write OSS projects _that actually influence the world_ are those who work
for FAANG or in academia.

~~~
antirez
Redis Labs is doing fine but probably _despite_ the license of Redis + the
Cloud setup we have currently, just because Redis OSS is massively popular. I
think that a less popular project that could survive with AGPL may be
completely non viable with BSD. However note that AGPL is a weak protection.
It takes just the Amazon legal department to say "ok, let's do it" because it
is perfectly legal to just sell as a service AGPL licensed stuff. Let many
popular OSS projects switch to AGPL and you'll see Amazon switching mentality
about AGPL, IMHO.

~~~
pas
AWS is probably unstoppable via licensing, they can do a clean room
implementation from the wire protocol - if they really want to. (Though with
the Oracle v Google API copyrightability lawsuit ongoing, this might change,
but that seems like a small win for a big loss.)

~~~
koolba
Could go one step further (out of the Oracle playbook) and include a
copyrighted poem in the wire protocol itself so that any clean room build
automatically violates that copyright too.

~~~
pas
Use a haiku For this lovely handshake In the autumn

~~~
koolba
Ha! I do love a good haiku.

Maybe something like this would be more fitting:

    
    
        Way down to the wire
        It gets bleaker than ever
        Try and copy this

------
capkutay
I always found the commercial open source community to be a bit too
idealistic. On one end you have developers from very wealthy companies driving
these hyped up projects.

Sometimes those same developers will leave that wealthy company to start the
commercial vehicle for that project. They talk about the wonders of open
source and free software.

Obviously their next move is to monetize the project with commercial add-ons
and they end up charging 6 to 8 figure price tags for 'free' software. Their
enterprise customers justify this by saying 'we have the source code for the
core product...its open source so we won't get locked in'. But the likely hood
that some overgrown Fortune 2000 IT team will use the forked source code and
not the shipped enterprise product is basically zero.

At that point, the FOSS nature is just a farce. It might as well be
proprietary software at that point. There's no way the same company will
prioritize the community over the high paying customers. They take over the
development of the core open source version. They end up hiring all the main
contributors. They find new ways to monetize it. They build add-ons that are
end up being essential to using the same project in production. Its no longer
a community-driven engineering meritocracy, but simply an enterprise
development team with a github page.

~~~
cpkpad
Open edX

------
rectang
> _Apache Common Clause license_

No. This is reprehensible garbage. This license is not endorsed by the Apache
Software Foundation.

EDIT: removed "proprietary"

~~~
Benjammer
It's not called "Apache Common Clause." This is a mistake by the writer of the
post. It's "Apache 2 + Commons Clause add-on."

~~~
rectang
And this illustrates why the Commons Clause naming and usage guidelines are so
problematic.

~~~
Benjammer
Yep, agreed.

------
molteanu
I was thinking about this in the past, but seeing the comments here, by
DoreenMichele and jondubois, for example, both of whom seem to agree that
_being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now_ , only
reinforces my hypothesis that maybe this OSS has a lot of marketing behind it.
I don't mean a certain project, but the very idea of it. Because, in the end,
it just means the people basically have a second job, only it pays nothing. It
means extra work is being done, tools are being created and the people who
know how to monetize it, do, while the poor souls how _keep soldiering on with
the 80+ hour work week_ get only the "fame".

So isn't it possible that powerful corporations pushed and continue to push
this OSS ideal, the ideal that you do meaningful work, that you'll bask in
glory at the end of it, that your name will be carried on by armies of
software developers until the end of time? Isn't it possible for all of this,
or at least partially, to be just marketing coming out from the hands of
people who really know how to tickle our emotions?

How much would git or linux or emacs cost to develop? Instead, they are
developed/maintained partly by armies of "passionate" developers who get zilch
for they work. But they are used by money-loving corporations for free. Now
isn't that convenient.

~~~
adim_web
It's not really that simple. Writing free software is not zero sum (you either
make money or you don't). The process of writing software is also a process
where you learn things (which can be rewarding in itself, and learning from
other free software is easier) that you can later apply even in your daily
job. It's important not to treat free software like a money making machine.
Providing value is more important than extracting money. For example Google
uses a lot of open source software created by third parties and they make
money, but they also provide a lot of services for free. As long as it remains
a fair deal, it's not that important that a corporation extracts value from
software created by others (as the money may go to people who maintain, test
and provide patches). Remember that if you create some piece of free software
that a corporation can use, so can somebody who doesn't have the money to buy
a license, and that person may be a future developer who's going to write
software for you.

------
no_wizard
I been stirring on this since the Redis incident yesterday.

Here’s what I don’t like about it, in essence. If we are going to have a (and
I think sometimes justifiably so) position of _companies are using our OSS
product to make millions but don’t contribute back us_ of justification, there
are really two things that come to mind to me that are highlighted

1\. Thst culturally we have a bias orientation of take vs give. If so many
companies can get away with this because their customers don’t care, I think
that shows we have a long way to go toward promoting an equitable culture.
It’s not a a government thing mind you. I think OSS organizations need to
spend more time educating their target audience of how to have this balance we
all seek of making sure huge corporations aren’t rent seeking on the backs of
hard working volunteers. It is a problem, I think, in many industries and not
just ours, which brings me to point number two.

2\. You owe it to everyone I think that if this is your stance, __name the
perpetrators __

Why no list of companies one by one? What they are doing isn’t illegal but if
collectively enough of their base is upset about it to move away from them to
different ones that is the sort of selective ness we want right?

That is if your argument is a cogent one and not just a way for you to
monopolize dollars in your dominant position as the provider of that software.

In essence, if there alleged companies have done this alleged wrong, lay it or
for everyone to see. If your argument is succinct and worthy it’ll stand on
its own two feet

------
chiefalchemist
re: "Developers free time is where it often starts..."

Words matter. We need to stop calling it free time. It's not free. Nothing is
free, and certainly not a limited resource such a time.

Personally I'd like to see one of the major OSS code hosts (e.g., GitHub,
GitLab, etc.) incorporate payments (read: donations) into their system. If I
could load say $25.00 in credits to my account I could make a donation with a
click. The receiver - or anyone for that matter - could keep the "cash" or put
a bounty on a bug or new feature.

~~~
toyg
The real game-changer would be to link downloads/checkouts to user accounts.
Like, you can download this repo anonymously once or twice a day; more than
that, and you have to pay -- on a sliding scale, so that companies with build
systems and so on are forced to pay more.

If Github and Gitlab (and maybe Bitbucket) had the balls to build something
like that, I think things would improve. Users would be impacted, so it would
be essential to get some help on the PR side from established projects and
bodies like FSF, Python Foundation, and so on. Getting the big companies
onboard should be easy enough - just give them a flat-fee yearly subscription
option that they can spin in a nice Bloomberg release on how they support
innovation and blablabla.

You would likely still see cheapskates setting up their internal mirrors and
so on, but with the right price structure, I bet most medium-to-big shops
would accept it and start generating substantial amounts for OSS projects.

~~~
sytse
So a paywall similar to newspaper sites? And make it per project per
organization? You work at ACME Inc. and you already used your 2 free downloads
of Redis for today?

One problem I see is that most open source doesn't get consumed as source code
but via language package servers (Rubygems/NPM) or OS distributions (Debian
packaging Redis).

~~~
toyg
Language-specific packagers that source directly from VCS services, could
easily accommodate the need to specify credentials for source repositories --
in the same way you need cloud-provider credentials to run cloud-provider
command-line utilities. So that's not a problem.

For other packagers and OSes: packages don't happen out of thin air: someone
has to write recipes and scripts, and test them. So that's already some
revenue right there, especially from the big players. Companies like RedHat
and Ubuntu could just cut a flat $10m check every year, distributed to
projects proportionally in accordance with OS-provided stats like popularity-
contest. That's the easy option. Ideally, you would also have some buy-in from
the major OS distributions that could somehow "trickle down" the model to
their own packages (say, linking a VCS repo to an OS package and reporting
activity accordingly: "You asked to apt-get install Redis, but I've checked
with a webservice and you have already downloaded it 2 times from Github.com
today: time to pony up!". In most cases, this sort of link is already
documented formally, somewhere in the package definition.)

Like newspaper paywalls, it doesn't need to be perfect; it just has to be
enough hassle that most people who can afford to make the pain go away, will
just do that.

------
pauldix
Post author here. I'm surprised at the number of comments in this thread that
say it's about the messaging or the Commons Clause license. They've cleared up
the confusion about what is still BSD (almost all of it) and that it's just
some enterprise modules that are commons clause. If the Commons Clause license
is confusing or ambiguous to you, simply treat it as a commercial license.
Functionally that would be equivalent. Saying that the Commons Clause it the
source of everyone's outrage is disingenuous. Would you really be less
outraged if they were simply commercial licenses?

I used to think this way about OSS before I actually had to run and maintain a
significant project. Add to that trying to build a business and those two
together have formed my current view. In my ideal world, everything would be
permissively licensed, but that doesn't match with reality. And every major
open source maintainer I've ever talked to has acknowledged that tradeoffs are
made. Either in the form of what is open, how it's licensed, or how the
project is funded.

~~~
ABS
Paul I'm surprised you are surprised this is about the confusion (and FUD) the
Redis Labs announcement created since that's exactly the single most repeated
piece of feedback/comment in the previous two HN threads on this topic.

~~~
pauldix
If it was really about the confusion, people would stop taking them to the
wood shed after they cleared things up. But that's not what's happening.
People are still railing about this and talking about the "bait and switch". I
haven't seen a single comment or tweet that said "ok, we understand now,
thanks for clearing that up."

------
nailer
Nobody is complaining that Redis ia using the same 'OSS core, proprietary add
ons' business model that NGINX has been using for decades.

They're complaining about the weird/impossible 'clause on top of open source'
and 'existing OSD' (as if there's another new one) language in Redis'
announcement and the 'Commons Clause' website

~~~
antirez
To be fair most of the complains were about the model. And such complains
where pretty pointless since no resource to write Redis core is take in order
to write Redis modules. Fortunately (haha) Redis OSS was always just me and
sometimes (like now that there is Fabio part time just to OSS side) some other
collaborator, very few people allocated there, plus the very important
contributions from Redis Labs devs, Alibaba devs, and so forth. I agree that
criticizing the Commons Clause makes more sense, I did not follow closely how
the license was created, but the process was to let N vendors to use the same
clause so that the basic license was still valid but with the added
restriction. It was AFAIK a non evil process, but actually now that I read the
complains about Commons Clause I can see more how that could be better with
new names for each license that each vendor used. Maybe you just cut&paste the
clause into the OSS license you are using, but then you call it <company>
Commercial License.

~~~
nailer
> Maybe you just cut&paste the clause into the OSS license you are using, but
> then you call it <company> Commercial License.

Yep, I think that would make it better too.

Redis: BSD (or whatever OSS licence)

Redis X module: Redis non commercial License

Redis Y module: Redis non commercial License

------
throw2016
Open source was mainly powered by academics and motivated by ideology. It was
never about income or personal benefit.

The current software gold rush in SV like any gold rush is driven by greed and
dreams of wealth and has no place for ideology. It is all about taking
whatever spades are available. They don't even care about open source, if they
had to pay for the spades they would, it just that open source happened to be
around.

Once this 'taker generation' gets to their 40s and 50s they will start
thinking more seriously about the ideology and start contributing back. What
else will they do, coders need to code. And the cycle will continue.

The only thing to watch out for are increasingly complex 'open source'
projects backed by corporates. These are just like closed source projects in
that they not amenable to the individual or small team incremental dynamic of
open source.

------
paulstovell
This is the best write up I have seen in a long time on this subject. Open
source doesn’t exist in a vacuum without commercial influence. The best you
can do is pick the influence.

FAANG sponsor open source either for strategic reasons (the Kubernetes example
in the blog) or as a goodwill exercise. To the kinds of engineers Facebook
would love to hire to help serve ads more devilishly, React goes a long way to
making the company look developer friendly. These projects get a ton of
marketing support (time to promote the project, brand name, etc) that an all-
volunteer nights and weekends grassroots open source project can never
complete with.

Then there’s open core, which seems to struggle from the difficulty that open
source has a kind of altruistic halo around it, and any attempt to
commercialise or restrict parts of it (especially for things that were once
open) is seen as bait and switch. Yet to see an Open Core company that isn’t
continuiously torn between what it takes to keep the business viable and what
it takes to keep the community on their side.

Consulting and support has its own downsides too. It only scales linearly as
you can hire people, and the margins are much lower so it takes a lot more
people - much less fun of a company to run. And it influences the project
roadmap too: “yes the setup process is broken and could do with a wizard, but
the complex install process drives a lot of our consulting leads”.

It seems like the huge companies that were threatened by open source have been
replaced by huge companies that know how to weaponise open source. Open source
still wears a certain halo thanks the nights and weekends code hacker that
does it for the love, but open source at any scale is as corrupt - maybe more
corrupt - than any proprietary company.

(Disclaimer: my company sells proprietary software but gives customers source
access/right to modify and open sources many of the building blocks. As
someone who wrote code for the love of it, I often feel like there’s something
evil in not making everything open source. But I’m yet to see a less evil open
source model)

------
hashkb
I don't think it's responsible to write about "open source" software while
ignoring the legacy of "free software" which kicked off the entire movement in
the first place. The pioneers of "open source" believed in utterly free
software and (at least RMS) believe furthermore that cloud solutions (wherein
someone else does your computing for you) are anti-free.

~~~
Avamander
We do have a license that deals with anti-free cloud solutions but people feel
"it's too restrictive" but it's actually only restrictive to developers who'd
want to infringe users' rights. Not understanding the point behind GPL causes
developers to go with MIT and BSD and then complain about other people using
their software for profit and giving nothing back... that's a pity.

------
dkhenry
The most successful open source company of all time is RedHat. They built
their core product 100% open source. I think there is a model out there where
you can be open source and still provide a valuable service for customers.

~~~
m3mpp
Why do you think they're the only one, don't you think maybe they enjoyed a
very special set of circumstances that will, more than likely, never happen
again?

~~~
dkhenry
I think the only special set of circumstances is that they were able to go
public and remain independent. At this point most companies get acquired as an
exit, but thats not just Open Source companies, thats almost all companies.

~~~
m3mpp
The fact that they were the first to support an infant OS that will end up
powering the majority of the server out there is a stronger reason imo, but
you're right, it's definitely a reason. Another one is the internet bubble of
course.

~~~
toyg
IIRC they weren't the first (Caldera...?), but they were among the few that
managed to survive the dot-bust. One reason they survived was that they were
(then) charging less aggressively than others, at a time when money dried up
everywhere. When the bloodbath was over, only them and SuSE were left
standing; and SuSE was eventually swallowed and mismanaged by Novell.

------
eadmund
Sure, I completely agree. The thing is, anything using the so-called 'Commons
Clause'[0] is no longer Open Source. Let me repeat that: if it's using the so-
called 'Commons Clause,' it's neither Open Source nor Free Software.

You can't burn a village to save it; nor can you invest in open source by
closing it.

Yes, the goal of figuring out how to support free software developers is a
noble one, but denying users Freedom Zero[1] is hardly the correct way to go
about doing so.

[0]: I write 'so-called "Commons Clause"' because it's really an _anti-
commons_ clause: by using it, the software is removed from the commons.

[1]: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html)

~~~
hassy
Redis is still very much open source and free; the difference is that there
will exist some amount of code under Commons Clause which will support its
further development. Moreover, nobody is forcing anyone else to use any of
that Commons Clause code.

------
Agebor
Maybe it's also time to realise for OSS developers that they cannot win with
the cloud in the long term, so maybe it would be better to work with it.

The reality in a few years time will be a multi-cloud environment where it's
the cloud itself that will be commoditized. So let's make great open source
projects work well with that:

1\. Provide X options for deployment on many clouds/orchestrators - k8s,
terraform, serverless, etc.

2\. Work on top of clouds and easily integrate with them, e.g. use existing
permission systems of AWS, GCloud, Azure, service discovery systems, secret
management systems, parameter systems, log aggregators and many others. So in
this approach, pricing would still be controlled by the OSS company, by paying
for machine time or per-request.

------
LukeShu
_> Despite that confusion, I don’t think the community’s outrage is driven
largely by that. RedisLabs’ post wasn’t ambiguous about the licensing of Redis
itself._

Yes it was. It has since been edited to be clearer.

~~~
orangeshark
The twitter post[0] announcing the Commons Clause doesn't help make it clear
by saying:

> Redis has adopted a new license I've been working on w/ a talented team.

The Redis mentioned here. I believe, actually means Redis Labs, not Redis the
project.

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/kevinverse/status/1032068995979956224](https://twitter.com/kevinverse/status/1032068995979956224)

------
EGreg
1\. This is the promise of cryptocurrencies: the authors get paid once from
presales of whatever thing people would spend money on, and then the system
eventually is turned over to the participants. That's one of the great use
cases of cryptocurrencies - finally a way to monetize open source projects!
([https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf](https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf)
illustrates this).

2\. I would like to see a world where Universal Basic Income pays for all the
basic necessities of life for everyone. Then you won't get such unnecessary
sentiments like "they would like to quit their job to work on their project
full time, but can't". People would do things like write music, practice
religion, learn new subjects, engage in philosophy, raise children and take
care of elderly parents, all things that aren't rewarded well by the current
economic system.

------
amelius
Why not use a crowd-funded model? For example, development of the Prosemirror
editor (which is open-source) is funded that way:

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/)

I suppose this funding-model could work for maintenance work too.

------
enitihas
This makes me wonder, if redhat started in this cloud poly era, would it even
be possible for them to succeed.

------
dragonwriter
Open source is subsidized somehow.

I get that done tech infrastructure startups are frustrated that users demand
open source, open source let's established firms sell services, and the
commotion from established firms makes it more difficult for the infra firm to
establish a most and extract revenues...but, I don't see why users should
compromise on their preferences just to make it easier for those startups to
make the kind of returns investors demand.

“My business model doesn't provide enough money” -> “the market should change
its demands” is... interesting reasoning.

------
cavneb
I cannot agree more. Funding must play a part in the sustainability of open
source.

I recommend the Lemonade Stand document by Nadia Eghbal
([https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-
stand](https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand)) as well as the Sustain
Report from the Sustain Summit last year
([https://sustainoss.org](https://sustainoss.org))

------
cavneb
I just want to point out that there are a handful of initiatives trying to
help fund the maintainer. I run the CodeFund platform. We provide ethical
advertising on documentation websites and give up to 70% of all revenue to the
developers. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s made an impact with quite a
few OSS projects.

There are other channels as well. Open Collective has been doing an amazing
job as well as Carbon Ads.

------
m3mpp
What is the situation with GPL (2 or 3) for those issues with cloud providers?
Is it better than BSD licenses in that regard?

~~~
wmf
It's basically the same. Cloud providers will pay nothing and contribute
nothing.

------
ummonk
>However, there are frequently hidden motives for these projects. For example,
Google puts significant investment into Kubernetes, but it’s also in their
financial best interest to do so.

This, in a nutshell, is the driving force behind the EU's antitrust
investigation of Android.

------
kodablah
> Open core is a fairly honest way to go about developing open source
> software.

Only if you're equally honest in admitting it's the most risky approach wrt
sustainability and therefore the one most subject to strange capitalization
mechanisms (and endless blog post justifications for them :-)). They go out of
business all the time, leaving stale software in their wake that might have
otherwise had steady maintenance if independence and growth were less
paramount (like before commercialization where, in many cases, the burden was
just as large). Either way, it's definitely the hardest model and if you have
a piece of open source software that must have growth or you are currently no
longer able to sustain it, I would try to find any other way possible to
finance it...but I agree sometimes it's just not there so you build a business
around it.

And I'd change "developing" to "financing" since there are many more honest
ways, just not at scale.

------
baybal2
What to say, the headline is rather flamebaitish.

If your opensource project can't live without "life support," it's a failed
project. It means nobody wants to keep it alive.

No such prerequisite is for 9 out of 10 software packages you see in any
serious software repo.

I now run a graphical Linux desktop with fully functioning graphical UI, all
done without a dime of sponsorship money, or corporate life support of any
sort.

No "well funded corporation" in the world can pull out making an OS with
graphical UI from scratch these days. That's simply beyond even heavyweights
like google and apple with their countless battalions of coders.

Now say, who has more power there?

Why it is such a problem for guys making software for web ecosystem if open
source desktop community can pull out doing things many many many times more
hard and complex?

I myself draw a mental line in between a genuine open source projects, and
those which are masquerading as such. In reality, those are failing commercial
enterprises trying to earn "coolness cred"

~~~
notriddle
RedHat, Canonical, plus multiple other companies, put money into desktop
Linux.

------
hueving
>Lastly, we have consulting and support, which I think is a dead end

Given that the only large company that is actually successful with open source
as a business model long term (Redhat) follows this model, that shallow
statement seems pretty tone-deaf.

~~~
wmf
Nobody can figure out how to replicate Red Hat's business model, so for new
companies it is a dead end.

------
angel_j
Simple answer: license OSS non-free for commercial use.

------
twblalock
I wonder how many of the people who complain about the Redis license situation
are making their living writing proprietary software.

------
marknadal
> Within InfluxDB, our dividing line is that anything related to high
> availability or scale out clustering is kept as a closed source commercial
> product

No, we've discussed this time and time again:

Open Core = crippleware

Articles like this occasionally come out and promote propaganda that masks
"crippleware" with nice sounding words.

\- Changelog has interviewed me about this
[https://changelog.com/podcast/236](https://changelog.com/podcast/236)

\- Hackernoon has published me on this [https://hackernoon.com/the-
implications-of-rethinkdb-and-par...](https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-
of-rethinkdb-and-parse-shutdowns-c076460058f7)

I maintain a tremendously popular Open Source project with 8.5K+ stars, and it
is extraordinarily hard. (Hint: Imagine Firebase + IPFS had a lovechild, that
is what it is. See my HN profile if you are curious.)

I should be the first person agreeing with this - last year was one of the
hardest times of my life because of doing Open Source. But this is the moral,
harsh, but important:

Financial hardship sucks but does not define the values of Open Source.

The values of Open Source has removed financial hardship for many, and made
lives better for the masses.

[https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656](https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656)

Just like you should not gamble on crypto what you cannot afford to lose...
you should not Open Source what you cannot risk.

Open Core = crippleware: Faux companies publicly wearing sheepskin to look
like they're developer friendly, but privately are forced to shame you into
the fox's den.

Open Source = giving, truly. It has hurt me at times, but those values have
brought more win+win to my life and others, far beyond we can count.

So thank you, to all real Open Source developers out there. You are heroes.

~~~
Avamander
>
> [https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656](https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008066378295750656)

I don't agree with the tweet at all. I too thought MIT/BSD are good licenses,
until I got burned by a piece of code majorly consisting of MIT code
infringing my user rights - unwarranted tracking and a few bugs I couldn't
fix. I now understand why (A)GPL exists and make sure my projects infringe on
no users' rights like projects containing MIT/BSD can.

