I have nothing against someone trying to monetise useful software. However, switching from an open-source software (OSS) licence is essentially a bait-and-switch tactic. This immediately destroys trust. It also destroys the part of the user base that is difficult to monetise but still has the potential to be monetised. I was hoping that the Elastic and TerraForm debacles had taught people a lesson.
Flyway is also questionable at this point. If Liquibase is switching, what's to stop Flyway?
Unless a fork is happening, I'm considering creating my own migration library tailored to our actual needs and usage. It should not be so hard. Liquibase was more of a convenience.
Indeed. Go has like 5 options for SQL DDL migrations now. On python side there's alembic and bunch of homegrown stuff in various frameworks.
I think much of the complexity in liquibase comes from supporting various databases.
One thing to remember: mark a new version before each step that can fail, even if the steps themselves are together in the same file.
This is a problem I ran too much into with alembic in which each file is a single unit - a statement in the middle of the script fails and there's no simple way to roll back (unless your DB supports transactional DDL). So the pattern I have settled is to have only one simple change in one file. Liquibase of course doesn't suffer this because it has unique IDs per statement.
That's often called bait and switch if a subscription price is hiked significantly.
My naive interoperation of this comment section says there were quite a few people making money on this work, without helping them pay their bills.
Related, it's often not viable to give away something for free.
And perhaps more to the point, their revenue now is about twice what it was in 2020. That's hardly the situation I would expect to see if the move had destroyed people's trust in the company. If anything it seems like it might have had the opposite effect, at least among the demographic that matters most to Elastic as a company: paying customers.
What's more important is trust. What's to stop them from changing the licence again after evaluating the impact of the first change? Liquibase has collected "anonymous" metrics by default since version 4.30 (do they consider an IP address and timestamp as PII?). As soon as I saw that, I anticipated this scenario. It was not really a surprise. They have a way to analyse the impact. Now, I am reassessing the risks.
Alternatively if Liquibase is FSL it will technically be Apache in 2 years I think (not exactly sure how that works) but you could just go to the last non-FSL release and use that for 2 years.
I'm not exactly sure why people would need the most up to datest version of liquibase which just runs schema changes anyway. I used version 2 a bunch of years ago and it was just fine.
"Is FSL an open source license?
No."
https://www.liquibase.com/blog/liquibase-community-for-the-f...
The capitalised term indicates it's a license approved by the Open Source Initiative, which is commonly used as the basis of "actual open source"
(I do agree that this gets a little murky, especially with folks who don't understand the nuance, which is a large percentage of folks talking about this)
I do agree that not calling something even "open source" if it's under a license like the FSL is best
Liquibase has only itself to blame.
Or "open source when obsolete" because that's what it is, fundamentally. Of course, it sells less and makes it way more obvious what these delayed open source licenses are at their core: "we'd like to make people believe we respect their freedom, but are not actually convinced with giving them that".
Isn't two years of security patch lag a big deal?
Also I feel like "obsolete" is the wrong word for that.
Your phrasing is malicious. It waves off a 40 year fight from many reasonable people as extreme and ridiculous, or as religious-like.
Did you expect me to answer "no, nothing else than puritanism" to your question?
Well, I won't.
That's like saying that although I could, I won't vote for candidate C who is against the freedom of the press when candidate C would prevent awful newspaper N from publishing its horrible bullshit.
I'd prefer newspaper N not to publish bullshit, or even to not exist at all, but I wouldn't want this to cost the freedom of the press.
AWS doing terrible things shouldn't cost us user software freedom.
Yes, indeed, there's stuff that I will do or won't do out of principles, of course! Even if it would be convenient to do otherwise! Is this an alien concept?
How is this difficult to understand that someone doesn't want compromises on rights that ought to be fundamental?
I've written about this in other comments, but this happened to me in 2015 hosting Elasticsearch and the official Elasticsearch hosting offering just didn't support CPU configurations that were proper for geohashing heavy workloads. I had to switch to AWS to get that. They even talked to the head of sales, and they said, yeah, we're working on it, but right now your best bet is to switch. Under a license like this, that wouldn't be possible.
Being stuck between "host it yourself" or "don't have the latest features" is pretty far from a rock and hard place.
Businesses are precisely and exactly people.
Yes a business is made out of people, but that's a very different thing from what I was talking about.
(And please don't mention sole proprietorships, what I meant should be plenty clear now.)
We're talking about freedoms, not the ability to interact with the legal system.
Company personhood and its implications and restrictions differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and in countries like the USA the exact definition is still a matter up for debate.
There is this blind trust in open source model taken to a unhealthy or misguided extreme in a lot of online discussion.
A two year delay is pretty reasonable and liberal. It allow costumers that dont want to accept the new licence able to continue as-is by simply following an older version.
In my case, it's not about any open source model, it's about software freedom.
What's unhealthy is non-free software, and there's nothing extreme in having this opinion.
If you base your opinions on pure black and white tests without considering the actual tradeoffs of the license then that's blindness.
It's not a hard thought experiment. Just imagine this license applied to whatever database you're used to spinning up in the cloud on whatever provider you want. If that one provider doesn't have the plan you're looking for, you're forced to take on the work of hosting it yourself because no one is allowed to do that for you and let you pay them because the license forbids it.
Free software encurrage interoperability to a degree, but interoperability and free software are very separate things.
And hosting providers are not evil or bad for making highly coupled systems. Its a valuable service companies gladly pay for, and a compromise developers need to calculate in their plans.
And competitors can still host a mildly older version freely, so that prevents long term lock-in even if I ignore self hosting.
So the main company still has to compete to keep business, which is good for everyone, but they keep some control over the hosting business, which means they're less likely to get crushed and stop updating. I think it sounds good overall.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
That license restricts what you can do with the software due to a business interest of the author. Therefore, it's non-free or proprietary.
> That license restricts what you can do with the software due to a business interest of the author.
Yes, it restricts you from offering a competing hosted service. Do you offer a competing hosted service to Liquibase using Liquibase's source code? Is this something you ever would conceivably do? If not, how does this restriction affect your life in any way?
> Therefore, it's non-free or proprietary.
I never claimed it was Free Software.
That's exactly what my comment is addressing! People advocating for Free Software don't usually advocate that _only_ the software they use should be free; they advocate for the freedom of all users.
> I never claimed it was Free Software.
You did not, indeed. Sorry if my wording gave the impression I was trying to put claims in your post. That phrase is an answer to this question from you:
> Why do you object to FSL for this specific type of software
We object to it because it makes the software proprietary rather than free.
Personally I call that something other than promoting freedom. Quite the opposite.
Please, there's no point in arguing like that. There's no need to mischaracterize or reword what another user is saying.
I don't think we'll get much further in this discussion if you consider yourself a fan of the FSL, a proprietary license. Your time will be better spent replying to other people.
> There's no need to mischaracterize or reword what another user is saying.
You directly linked to a post by RMS which says things like "When you use proprietary programs or SaaSS, first of all you do wrong to yourself, because it gives some entity unjust power over you. For your own sake, you should escape." Among many other examples in that post, and countless other FSF posts, telling people not to use non-Free Software. This is not a mischaracterization.
Granted, these are RMS's statements, not yours. But I assumed that since you linked to that post and are espousing similar concepts, you are endorsing its contents and hold the same views. If that is not the case, my apologies. But perhaps you could clarify whether or not you think RMS is correct to tell people not to use non-Free software?
> if you consider yourself a fan of the FSL
I live in a free society and can be a fan of whatever license I want -- meaning, I can express free will in how I select what software I use, and how I license software that I create. That is freedom. I am not trying to dictate what software or licenses you use, because I respect your freedom to do the same.
What do we do now?
> It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses
Nope. "Free" has specific meaning in this context, this qualifier doesn't apply here. It's the whole point. If you believe it applies, you've fundamentally misunderstood the free software definition and what's at stake for the free software movement.
More specifically, the qualifier is not relative to a specific entity and what freedom it actually needs / uses at some given point in time.
I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.
To go further with the comparison, there's nothing in being against compromising on the freedom of the press that's blindness or being black and white (or maybe it's being black and white, but I can't see how it would be wrong).
> I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.
Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.
GPL and MIT fully fulfill the exigences of the free software definition, there's no compromise here.
Choosing between GPL and MIT may involve compromises, but we are talking about something else, you are moving the goalposts here.
(note: I kept updating my previous comment, probably while you were writing this, sorry for this)
(edit: ah, you noticed)
> Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.
Violating an NDA is a matter of law and contracts that can equally apply to software, it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.
If you are speaking about protecting one's source, then it's orthogonal (and probably also an important mechanism for) freedom of the press.
> it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.
I would say the ability to run a competing business within two years is less fundamental than the ability to talk about what you saw at your former job.
Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.
No. Someone can use some MIT licensed software for any purpose and can strictly do anything with it that the GPL would allow.
Just as free.
However, I do agree that permissive licenses like the MIT allows someone to build proprietary software with the code, and the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result. That would be the reason why I wouldn't license my software under permissive license except for specific cases.
One could argue the MIT actually gives more freedom to the user: they can, with a MIT source code, build and distribute a proprietary derivative. Of course, this doesn't mean this additional freedom is desirable.
> Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.
Yeah, just like laws limit your freedom to run free software for any purpose. You, for instance, can't legally take /bin/ls with you to go kill someone even if its license itself doesn't explicitly forbid it. I'm pretty fine with this.
I have some feeling we do agree that freedom is never absolute and kinda argue past each others.
That's the part I was talking about.
So I don't know why you started your post with "No."
> I'm pretty fine with this.
Cool. And I'm fine with some other restrictions. So we're agreeing that being fine with a restriction doesn't necessarily mean anyone has "lost the direction" of free software? And instead we can talk about the specific dangers of a restriction without reflexive rejection?
> That's the part I was talking about.
> So I don't know why you started your post with "No."
You are mixing two different users. FreeBSD user A enjoys software freedom. macOS user B doesn't. A and B are different people. And notably, the release of macOS didn't make FreeBSD disappear, so A still fully enjoys their freedom even though B doesn't with the downstream software (but could with the upstream software as well).
If you are mixing user A and user B, your mental model of this stuff is not clear and reasoning with it is going to be difficult and frustrating. And it makes you reach incorrect conclusions such as "permissive licenses are less free for the users than copyleft licenses".
> So we're agreeing that being fine with a restriction doesn't necessarily mean anyone has "lost the direction" of free software?
Laws are supposed to protect individual and collective freedom and interests. They do this by putting limits on what you could do that would prevent others from enjoying their own freedom.
(of course, I know we are far from this ideal; also laws aren't perfect and issues should be fought against - it's actually, in practice, a constant fight because different (groups of) people have different interests and priorities - but that's another concern and mixing concerns makes things hard to reason about)
License restrictions that compromise on software freedom are simply not comparable to whatever it takes to make a society work. They are not making a tradeoff for your own good as a user. They are benefiting the software provider at the cost of the user's freedom.
> Laws are supposed to protect individual and collective freedom and interests. They do this by putting limits on what you could do that would prevent others from enjoying their own freedom.
I'm not sure where you're going with this when my example was NDAs. NDAs aren't there to protect freedoms, they only remove freedom. Laws enforce them, but in the same way that laws enforce license restrictions.
Okay, I would agree more with this phrasing. That's the issue I have with permissive licenses.
> NDAs aren't there to protect freedoms, they only remove freedom.
To be fair, I'm also not a fan of most NDAs indeed.
> Laws enforce them, but in the same way that laws enforce license restrictions.
Yep, I agree with this.
So do you also see what I meant about both permissive and copyleft licenses giving up some freedoms? You can't have it all.
A restraint on running a particular type of business isn't great for software freedom, but if it's narrow and temporary I don't think it ruins the entire license. The gap in freedom is avoidable but also it's much smaller than the gaps you can't avoid.
For ongoing freedom, If I was choosing between plain MIT and a GPL clone that bans competiting companies but reverts to pure GPL after a couple years, I would pick the latter.
Not a fan of the framing but I get your point (of view).
> For ongoing freedom, If I was choosing between plain MIT and a GPL clone that bans competiting companies but reverts to pure GPL after a couple years, I would pick the latter.
Reasonable. I would find the 2 years delay unbearable and pick MIT, but I wouldn't enjoy doing so. It's fortunate I don't have to pick :-)
At this point, FSL appears to be more widespread than BSL. Adoption of BSL has waned; even its creators (MariaDB, for their MaxScale proxy product) recently stopped using it.
I stand corrected. I hate license proliferation, but the naming and marketing is better. I hope the other former open-source companies consolidate on something.
> undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP). [1]
and that "DOSP" (Delayed Open Source Publication) is an OSI concept! [2]
But I cannot (yet) find what the timeframe for the DOSP is... because we don't want to wait 90 years for Mickey to be public domain.
As for the timeframe, FSL uses a 2 year period.
edit to add: just to be clear, I'm a fan of FSL and Fair Source licensing, and do not consider lack of OSI endorsement to be a problem.
Now, of course they should get paid for the work they do, but these sort of "we were FOSS and surprise we're not anymore" are becoming commonplace and are always done hoping no one notices.
Most of us prefer not to bring on a dependency in our project that is primarily designed to extract commercial value from users and is less friendly to contributors than similar open source projects.
Let me know if there's more I can include!
Either just reading the "base" part and plugging some unrelated service, or claiming source available is the same as open source
I wonder if a project which uses Liquibase can be included in Debian, Fedora, etc.? Since these projects also have requirements on OSS licenses for the software they distribute.
Cannot be included in the main repositories, but nothing stops them from being part of other repositories (custom, or if something like rpm fusion non-free exists for Debian based distros as well).
1. They co-opted the free software movement and made it more business friendly.
2. They convinced people that Open Source is pure and software that isn’t Open Source is unclean.
3. They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon.
4. They convinced a well meaning subset of those developers to police the other devs and pressure them to release their software under big tech approved licenses.
The rest of your comment mainly seems to be a mixed bag of rhetoric. It obscures the reality that Liquibase is, to modify your words, "co-opting the" open source movement to make it "more business friendly."
The freedoms were about freedom for the user not a non user developer.
There has been some revision over time, but there's an argument to be made that small revisions are inadequate to keep up with the sea change in how computing works that's happened since the turn of the century. The elephant in the room here is that SaaS, and especially cloud computing, has pretty well undermined the practical foundation for how the Free Software model was supposed to work for people who are trying to make a living selling Free Software.
Because everyone was always a user in the definition of free software! Because it's free as in free speech.. In the first bulletin where the definition was made, Stallman envisioned no restrictions on distribution and a user being a business was entirely unrelated to how compensation were to occur: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.
For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
I think those concerns existed at the time of the writing of the first bulletin, if you read how they were expecting to be compensated. See the part titled "So, how could programmers make a living?".
>For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
Yep, the duty and obligation to redistribute, as mentioned in the bulletin above - but without a single company being the sole arbiter or commercializer of the source, as defined in the Free Software Definition you mention elsewhere. Freely, as in free speech.. A quote from the original bulletin:
```
This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art.
Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.
```
In the SaaS era, freedom is impinged not because hyperscalers make money off of free software. That was always the intended goal, because it isn't freedom like free beer or simply 'non-commercial uses'. Freedom is impinged because modifications of the software aren't redistributed if distribution is only done over generated artifacts on a network. AGPL is specifically for networked software like this.
Unless you're implying that the GNU foundation, Richard Stallman, or the free software movement generally ever viewed even narrowly commercially restrictive licenses as free software. Which you can tell from the source documents and all others in this comment thread, that is obviously not the case.
Back in RMS days, he advocated, for example, a RedHat-style business model where you sell Free Software with services. But when AWS takes your project and releases it as their service, good luck competing with them. This is a very real problem.
Put out a restricted license if you don’t want hyperscalers to offer it as a service. Although they have enough software engineering talent to use the old version to create and maintain a fork (e.g. valkey, opensearch, etc.).
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.
The original 1986 definition, which I see you referring to elsewhere, came from a news letter that's available here: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
The news letter itself cost $1. And it also includes an order form charging $150 for Emacs ($443.40 in 2025 dollars). The tape and the manual come to $487.74 in 2025 dollars.
The issue with SaaS is loss of the freedoms, not that vendors charge money. Free Software was never about forcing organizations to break even or operate at a loss. If you believe that's inherent to the original definition then I think you'd have to present a clearer argument for that position.
Free Software Foundation Order Form
February 6, 1986
Quantity Price Item
________ $150 GNU Emacs source code, on a 1600bpi industry standard mag tape in tar format. The tape also contains MIT Scheme (a dialect of Lisp), hack (a rogue-like game) and bison (a compatible replacement for yacc).
________ $15 GNU Emacs manual. This includes a reference card.
Thus, a tape and one manual come to $165.
________ $60 Box of six GNU Emacs manuals, shipped book rate.
________ $1 GNU Emacs reference card. Or:
________ $6 One dozen GNU Emacs reference cards.
Shipping outside North America is normally by surface mail. For air mail delivery, please add $15 per tape or manual, $1 for an individual reference card, or 50 cents per card in quantity twelve or more.
Prices are subject to change without notice. Massachusetts residents please add 5% sales tax to all prices.
There are really two issues here: one is what counts as copyleft (i.e. the ideal FSF license) and what counts as compatible with copyleft. The so-called permissive licenses like MIT and BSD are compatible with copyleft licenses in a way that licenses that restrict commercial access aren't. That's because these licenses don't add new restrictions but the non-commercial one does.
The abstract idea of copyleft is that it's a chain of rights grants A > B > C > D... where entities on the right have exactly the same rights as the entities on the left. In other words, copyleft preserves downstream freedoms, or ">" is a freedom preserving operator for copyleft software.
A permissive licensed piece of software X can be incorporated into copyleft software, say, B because X does not restrict any freedom required to be free software. However once incorporated, the chain becomes absorbed, you can't un-free the free software. So X >' B where >' is a sort of injection operation, but then everything downstream of B uses the ">" operator. X can also spin off proprietary copies of itself. Those are not compatible with free software, but they exist on a different branch of the rights grant tree and so aren't relevant to free software.
On the other hand a license with a non-commercial clause includes a restriction already. It's not a hypothetical restriction that someone else can add to a fork (as in permissive licenses). You can't take a license with a non-commercial clause M and map it into free software because, as you granted, free software includes the right to sell and the license doesn't grant the right to remove the non-commercial restriction. If it did grant the right to remove that restriction, then a fork that removed the restriction would possibly be compatible with free software.
What your argument amounts to in this framing is that even though A has the right to sell copies of the software, ">" doesn't have to preserve that right. This would require a stronger argument IMO, since (1) the freedom to charge is explicitly mentioned early even if it's not explicitly enumerated as one of the four freedoms yet, and (2) we have no examples where the FSF allows an entity on the left of ">" to terminate rights on the right of ">". That would break ">" as an operator.
These tenets are core to Free Software. Without freedom for users _and_ developers, there is no true freedom.
The original creators of the free software movement would disagree.
You are trying to co-opt the free software movement for your own ideals.
This comment might as well just be "nah."
"You're wrong."
"No I'm not."
"Yeah you are."
"Nuh uh"
"Yuh huh"Free as in beer? They are. BSL and SSPL and FSL and friends are free, with some restrictions which are usually extremely reasonable and boil down to forbidding reselling.
Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
> The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom
It's free as in libre, not free as in gratis. They don't prohibit the exchange of money.
A license that gives freedom but not gratuity fits the rules you quoted. The general topic is far from an open and shut case so I’m happy to debate arguments with you, but not the lazy, disingenuous way.
You absolutely cannot forbid reselling and call yourself Free Software. So what are you talking about?
My interpretation is you can share anything you have with anyone else, even Amazon dot com and it (Amazon dot com) will have all the rights you have.
Amazon is prohibited from using it for their commercial offering.
As a user, it's pretty important for me that someone can continue to provide software under reasonable conditions even if original authors can't.
(FSL and other licenses which convert to open source are much better in that regard, but there is no excuse for BSL / SSPL)
They adopted the existing Debian Free Software Guidelines as the Open Source Definition. The DFSG are good, actually, and represent an important community consensus outside the FSF.
Also if you read the original DFSG the clause about field of endeavor has been interpreted by OSI differently from the intent.
It was about saying your license can’t prevent an end user of your software from using it for a specific purpose. It really says nothing about restrictions on how you can sell the software.
The problem is OSI is now the sole interpreter of the definition.
Debian (and most other distributions, btw), for the most part (or entirely, I suppose), agrees with the FSF / the GNU project when deciding which license is free or non free. The OSI has a more permissive interpretation.
RMS speaks about that in a recent interview in French [1], English translation below:
> La FSF a financé Debian à son commencement. Mais rapidement, le projet, qui comptait plus de contributeurs, a voulu formuler une définition de la liberté différente, avec l’intention d’être équivalente.
> À l’époque, j’ai commis une erreur : j’aurais dû vérifier plus attentivement s’il pouvait y avoir des divergences d’interprétation entre le projet GNU et Debian. La définition me paraissait équivalente, même si elle était formulée autrement. J’ai dit : “C’est bon.” Mais en réalité, il y avait des problèmes potentiels.
> Plus tard, quand l’open source a émergé, ils ont repris la définition de Debian, je ne sais plus s'il ont changé quelques mots mais ils ont surtout changé l’interprétation. Dès lors, elle n’était plus équivalente à celle du logiciel libre. Il existe aujourd’hui des programmes considérés comme “open source” mais pas comme logiciels libres, et inversement.
> J’ai d’ailleurs expliqué ces différences dans mon essai Open Source Misses the Point.
English translation (not a native English speaker, I hope the translation is ok, especially considering that RMS is close to his words and it's probably easy to misrepresent him without noticing):
> The FSF funded Debian at its beginnings. But rapidly, the project, gaining more contributors, wanted a different phrasing for the definition of freedom, which the intent of being equivalent.
> Back then, I made a mistake: I should have checked more carefully if there could be different ways to interpret it between the GNU and the Debian projects. The definition seemed equivalent to me, even if it was phrased differently. I said: "OK". But in reality, there were potential issues.
> Later, when Open Source surfaced, they took Debian's definition, I don't know if they changed a few words but they above all changed the interpretation. Since then, it was not equivalent to the free software definition anymore. There exist open source software that's not free software, and conversely.
> By the way, I explain all this in my Open Source Misses the Point essay.
[1] https://linuxfr.org/news/40-ans-pour-l-informatique-libre-en...
It is notably used by the Open Watcom C compiler, which is used to compile VirtualBox's BIOS. Which is the reason why you won't find VirtualBox in most distros, including Debian.
The reason the FSF and major distros don't consider it free is that there are cases where you can't use it privately without releasing your modifications. The license doesn't pass Debian's Desert Island test [5]:
> Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.
I don't have an example of a license that the FSF / GNU project considers free and that the OSI doesn't consider open source.
[1] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Watcom-1.0
[2] https://opensource.org/license/sybase-php
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_Open_Watcom_Public_Lice...
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=376431
> Oops... it looks like OSI smoked something especially bad this time, I'm afraid. This license looks like someone took his time to collect every single problematic clause.
[5] https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#desert_island
The license here isn't an exemplar of what I'm interested in. But the discussions on this thread are. Anything that isn't OSI blessed is bullied.
We are already OK with saying you can use this software however you want, but when you distribute it you have certain obligations/restrictions. I think it's fine to go a step further and say if you distribute this software and you make $1 billion a year in revenue, you can't charge for it.
I think that's fine the same way I think it's fine to say a company has free speech despite not allowing people to threaten murder.
Someone using your software (for whatever purpose) does not negatively affect you unless you depend on holding a monopoly over some aspect of your software - in which case you have already decided that your priorities lie elsewhere than free software - e.g. you want to build a business.
Then defend a source available license designed by a company that describes the license as intended for prioritizing business needs over user freedom and used, and is often brought out when businesses decide to switch a more available license to one that restricts commercial activity, co-opting public contributions that would otherwise never happened
INSTEAD of promoting copyleft licenses such as AGPL, seems a bit odd. We care about freedom, in every use case.
AGPL isn’t battle tested enough for me to be confident it will protect against big tech doing big tech things like spinning off a separate company in Ireland to firewall AGPL software.
What does it matter if they do? The point of the AGPL is that if you make a version available to users over the network, either you release the source to your version or you can't use it. That subsidiary could still be made to release the source or stop using it. Wouldn't that be "mission accomplished?"
I don't know if that scheme would work but I think "not battle tested enough" is valid.
Also there's some weirdness in how the availability requirement applies at the time of editing that gives me questions, but I'm far from an expert there.
I think a plain read of the license would make it clear that the "distribution" obligation occurs when you make it available on the network to your users (regardless of whether you modified it yourself or paid a contractor to do so), but I'm not a lawyer, so sometimes what looks like plain text to me can have a specific meaning that doesn't make sense to me.
Starting with no trickery, there's a lot of circumstances where you could buy software from a vendor and confidently declare you didn't modify it. And that should be true even if you ask for certain features just for you. So there's probably a way to make the separation work.
My view is that if Amazon or Apple lawyers thought they could bypass the AGPL that easily, they would've done it already (just look at the stuff NVIDIA does to pretend that it's not flagrantly violating the GPL).
> I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.
I completely agree there, but they still need to find the license clause sufficiently correct and in scope if they want to throw the book at you.
You're also forgetting that even if it was illegal, setting up a shell company in a foreign country means the shell company will be able to get away with a lot of outright illegal stuff.
Chinese tech companies can just take your code with no recourse.
I'm not sure what's bad about 2. What's quite bad however IMHO is the push to use permissive licenses and the anti (A)GPL FUD that these big tech companies spread. Of course it is very convenient to them that every library under the sun is under MIT or BSD, so they can built proprietary software more efficiently.
Note: the OSI recognizes the AGPL as an open source license so at least the set of "big tech approved licenses" is not the same set as the OSI approved licenses.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
AGPL hasn’t been thoroughly tested in the courts, so it’s unclear how much protection it offers. It’s not beyond someone like Amazon to setup a new company just firewall off AGPL software.
If I'm not mistaken, Apple would rather avoid touching anything GPLv3 with a ten foot pole. They are among the biggest tech companies in my mind.
Anybody seems fine with GPLv2 though. But GPL is less convenient than permissive licenses.
Of course, you can still indeed build services with GPL software without redistributing the modifications, which is the point of the AGPL.
> It’s not beyond someone like Amazon to setup a new company just firewall off AGPL software.
I suppose so. However, this would work as intended: the Amazon firewall company would need to redistribute the improvements.
Also, do you have examples of this happening? (not arguing, actually genuinely curious)
I think this poster created the legal theory themselves because they were aware of other legal concerns with the AGPL affecting the above scenario. I've read a lot of legalblogging about AGPL, and none bring up this as even a remote possibility, because unless you think GPLv3 case law is somehow irrelevant then you don't think AGPL will be simply bypassed.
One last thing: I'm surprised the poster was concerned about AGPL being untested, despite it using GPLv3, and not that FSL has only existed for 2 years and has 0 case law surrounding.
If I understand correctly what you say, this is one of the main concerns with the SSPL because of the following [1]:
> The SSPL is based on the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), with a modified Section 13 that requires that those making SSPL-licensed software available to third-parties (modified or not) as part of a "service" must release the source code for the entirety of the service, including without limitation all "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available", under the SSPL.
I'm not familiar with this concern for the AGPL itself.
So far this contagion concern hasn't actually played out, and big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros - and nothing thus far has been compelled to be open sourced that isn't AGPL software.
This might be insightful about the concerns as well as why lawyers still think it's straightforward: https://www.opencoreventures.com/blog/agpl-license-is-a-non-...
https://discuss.logseq.com/t/on-the-agpl-license-and-the-ide...
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL
(not a lawyer): https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html
Oh yeah, I have encountered this argument before, indeed. Thanks for the pointers btw. I do agree with Drew (your last link) here. I think it's part of the FUD from Google & Co I mentioned in my first comment in this thread. To me, it's even an evidence that the AGPL actually works as intended: it's not convenient for the Big Tech companies who can't reuse the AGPL without having to release their code that's targeted to end users, which they don't want to do.
> big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros
Do you have specific software in mind? What's AGPL in a common Linux distro? I'm asking because this surprises me. AGPL isn't usually used for something that's not a internet service, I wouldn't expect to find it in Linux distros' basic blocks.
Debian is also the other more common one distros with AGPL software included with it.
Other things like forks of BerkleyDB by hyperscalers have all ended up as FOSS because of AGPL. Presumably this is a better example of where non-AGPL code would have not actually seen the light of day.
For several Amazon Linux AMIs, yes and yes! For Debian, the software are in the main archive, actually.
Okay, I believe you, I'm not familiar with this. I'd still be interested in knowing which specific AGPL software Amazon would use themselves (note, I'm sure they distribute AGPL software through their distro, that doesn't mean they use it themselves).
> For Debian, the software are in the main archive, actually.
I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.
>I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.
No, afaik, unfortunately. That might drastically change how you distribute its base. I was a little unclear but I had meant "No but at least the most common distro ships it in their archive" with my first comment.
Hadn't thought about Ghostscript!
Oh I agree! And I think it's straightforward to comply with.
I was just explaining the common legal concerns that pop up with the license, and that too much 'contagion' has historically been a gripe about its lack of case law.
Can I catch GPL inadvertently and against my will? No, it is not "contagious".
An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.
The potentially overreaching nature of AGPL is one reason it maybe unenforceable. On the other hand if courts lean towards the less viral interpretation Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.
In US courts, the case law shows that the "virality" is not really an open question because of GPLv3 case law, and has never been interpreted that way. I'm not sure why you're commenting about this scenario when you're unaware that this has been actually tried in courts.
In fact, we saw that in infamous Neo4j AGPL case, actually. AGPL worked as intended and protected the AGPL software in a similar way to LGPL. The court went on to protect non-GPL compliant additions that Neo4j made as being considered contagious, even, going even further to protect the original licensee than intended with the original unmodified license.
So, just recapping, you've gone from stating that Amazon could firewall off AGPL because it has no case law, and after learning it does has its case law includes GPLv3 that it simply may not be 'viral' enough because that hasn't been tested in court, to now learning it has been tested in court and successfully enforced.
My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.
If it isn’t, then they it doesn’t really hamper their business model at all.
The Neo4J case was one piece of a longstanding part of GPLv3 caselaw where the virality is clear.
>My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.
Just a recap of your responses so far:
So AGPL has no case law and might even be unenforceable, so therefore it you should use non-free source available licenses. Oh, it does have case law and hyperscalers have been forced to open source their forks like of BDB?
Well, the virality hasn't been tested and FSL would be an easier case. Oh, it has been tested, multiple times and licensees have had to work out an agreement like in the Neo4j case - such that judges would actually be able to rely on prior art unlike FSL?
Okay, well, even if that's all true - Amazon could just firewall it anyways. How? Well they would simply use vast resources to create proprietary hardware, create a fork for proprietary hardware despite that making it impossible to receive patches from the main fork, and then sell that as a service.
Based on the above, I think you've done what you can to convince me.
Well I guess they could today, I don't see the AGPL preventing them to. As long as the modified source is available under the AGPL I suppose they'd be good to go.
A license that forces someone to release software for specific hardware would be non-free I suppose.
I don't see this being practical though. Running proprietary hardware just for this reason would likely be costly, and not really efficient: someone could restore support for general hardware from upstream / only keep the interesting changes.
In reality, I think it’s an emergent property of software development, where very few people can make a living using the platonic ideal of a free license. People start projects that are free, then see that they can’t pay the rent, while users (including companies) keep asking for more support and more feature work (for free, naturally).
So the projects evolve, and get closer to business, both to attract contributions from developers who are paid (by big business) and to position project owners to actually make some money.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, or if we even need to make such a judgment, but I think the phenomenon is easily explained without resorting to some kind of shadow campaign on behalf of business.
The first is Open Source vs Free Software. There's nothing shadowy about it. It's right there in the open. You can see who finances OSI. You can read what have to say about making Open Source business friendly and branding a new term vs "Free Software".
And you can see how shortly after they started promoting the term it took off in popularity. They didn't invent the term, but they definitely popularized it.
The 2nd PR campaign is OSI convincing devs that only software that only software that uses an official blessed license is pure.
Then don't actually do that or offer to implement/support them in exchange for money?
There are always assholes (expecting free work), but you can just ignore them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
Freedom 0 is important. It's not some big tech conspiracy.
I think freedom for the end user to use the software for any purpose is much more in keeping with the original spirit.
Side note: Stallman was right all along, before everybody else, in 1985.
This is below Open Source. And it's claiming to be Open Source. You've made the case of why Open Source is a lowered standard, but you seem to be doing it to defend an even lower standard.
This is like defending an Open Source product calling itself "Free Software." It doesn't make any sense. People can release under any license they want, they wrote the software. The problem is lying about it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...
> Why I (A/L)GPL
> Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.
> If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you.
> If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
> To the Beggar Baron, open source's value is its free donation.
> You would never stand on the street and offer to buy the wallets off people who are about to donate a few dollars to you. That'd be stupid.
> They're giving you their money for free. Take it and run.
Always slap AGPLv3 onto everything you make. Always choose the most copyleft license imaginable. Permissive licenses yield zero leverage. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. Nothing else makes sense.
The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction.
That being said, commercially supported OS software has essentially become shareware - just enough to get you hooked, and then the price jump is enormous.
I'm not convinced. Compromise is the root of all evil. It allows self-contradictory and mutually exclusive ideas to exist.
I make a conscious effort to develop my morality by eliminating contradictory ideas and forming self-consistent world views. If the conclusions are extreme, then so be it. I accept the consequences.
Before Microsoft added TCP/IP to Windows, there were third party ports of the BSD TCP/IP stack to Windows. The winner ended up being Trumpet Winsock, until Microsoft wisely used the same winsock API for their own implementation and embraced and extinguished.
Those ports would still have occurred even if the BSD TCP/IP stack was GPL'd.
But if there wasn't a bunch of people pushing various implementations based on a permissive licence, it may not have been clear that the demand was there. Winsock (the API) heavily leveraged BSD sockets in its implementation, too. V1 was for all intents and purposes designed to deal with unifying their BSD implementations that had problematic issues because Windows didn't have a lot of the system calls that UNIX/POSIX did (though POSIX was available later on in NT) and allowing inter compatibility. It's not clear that Peter Tattam would have written Trumpet if the API wasn't already published, which was driven by the BSD code.
Also, Trumpet was not free or open source. It was notoriously pirated and illegally distributed.
Some history is here: https://windows-pride.fandom.com/wiki/WinSock#Background
One example is code that deals with data formats. It's better to have a liberally used license here that can be adopted by corporations without giving anything back if the alternative risks those corporations adopting and popularizing proprietary formats instead.
Best but not 100% secure way to protect yourself is to donate the software to a well meaning non profit. If you control the non-profit, the barrier might not hold, if you don't control it, it's not your software anymore.
Update: Thinking of it: AGPL might at least offer some protection as many integrators shy away from using software with this license.
And if the corporations don't like it, why don't they just... buy the developers out like the good capitalists they are? They want the software so badly? Contact the guys who wrote it and and get down to business. Make them millionaires and I'm sure they'll have no issues giving them special permission to violate the AGPLv3. They are the copyright holders, they can do whatever they want. I even emailed Stallman to confirm that he thinks it's an ethical practice, and he does. The emails are literally recorded in the commit messages, just get in contact and talk business.
If they won't do that, then let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own full time developers to write their own version. I'm sure their lawyers will also advise them not to even read our free software source code since it can taint the final product. Works for me. If they won't contribute back on our terms, if they won't pay us, then they should get literally nothing. That's leverage.
The article you linked is not convincing at all. Who said we're "gifting away" our free software? We're not. We're publishing it so that fellow hackers can enjoy it freely. People who are like us. I for one don't really want corporations taking advantage of this generosity at our expense. Either they become one of us, or they pay for it, or they leave empty handed.
People really need to stop feeling sorry for trillion dollar corporations. Won't you think of the poor billionaires with nothing to their names? Give me a break. I care a lot about individual hackers who code for a higher purpose. These are the people I want to help. You'd have to pay me big bucks to spare even one second of thought towards some billionaire technofeudalist organization.
You need to have an actual ethos behind these things. You need to have an actual foundation organization behind these things like the PSF, FSF, or Linux foundation that drives the development, not corporate overlords who have a profit motive.
The people involved need to understand that they're not going to create untold amounts of value that can be measured monetarily. At best you might get hired as a fellow for a while and get to draw some money from donations. Linus only got rich because some very generous people offered him shares after they built a company on his project.
15-20 years ago, someone at Google thought, "Jeeze, these little smartphones are great, but they could be better, and imagine all of the data we could get off of users if they did everything in their lives with one?", so they bought into Android, which was a completely independent startup until 2005. That is the platform's raison d'être. They wanted to compete with PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and later iPhoneOS, for the data that people were entering into smartphones, so they introduced a software product that was open source so that OEMs would buy in. And it worked.
Android would not have had a use to Google as a GNU/Linux-style project where there is no gatekeeper. If I can easily tear out Google's proprietary software, and replace it with something else without losing access to things like the Play Store, then Google just lost out on the value proposition on their purchase of Android in 2005 when it came to my use of it. They did it to make money off of my use, not to graciously support a FLOSS project.
And now we're seeing that playing out as all of the FLOSS projects you mention are under direct threat from Google's handling of the project.
"Everyone who disagrees with this is a large freeloading corporation"
1. They certainly came from the free software movement, but they don't call it "free software", they call it "open source". It is a detail but the name acknowledge the distinction, "open source" is a more practical term while "free software" is more idealistic. And I think it is a good thing we have both a business friendly OSI for getting stuff done and a more militant FSF to keep businesses in check.
2. I never needed this convincing so I may be biased, but open source is I believe superior to proprietary. Think of the source code as documentation, the best kind because it tells the truth. Think of the ability to change and rebuild the software as unlimited extra settings you get for free.
3. Their definition of open source is as much canon as the definition of free software by the FSF is canon.
4. Most developers aren't lawyers, we can't really trust them to pick licenses, or worse, write licences that will do what they think will do. So having an approved list of well tested license is a good thing.
That big tech and big money is behind it is not a bad thing. Developers want to get paid after all. Big tech have the best lawyers too, so by picking a licence they acknowledge, you know what you are up to.
And note that some of the OSI approved licenses, like AGPL are particularly hated by big tech.
The key problem with your argument unfortunately is this part.
>> they don't call it "free software", they call it "open source"
The problem with this is that "Open Source" is already a phrase with meaning. Trying to co-opt that term for marketing reasons is disingenuous.
I happen to think that a source-available license is better than a closed source license. I ship my own code that way. However what I create is not Open Source, and I don't market it as such.
Liquibase is using a known term to market their product, when their license is not compatible with that term.
Their license is absolutely fine. Trying to pass ot off as OSS is not.
‘The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.’
Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
I think it's very intentional that a restriction on what you can do with software -- including reselling it -- is a violation of the "four freedoms" -- freedoms for what someone can do with software, including redistribute it or use it for any purpose they want (including reselling it).
These licenses meant to prohibit users from using the software in ways that harm the business interests of the programmers -- I am confident the original creators of free software four freedoms would agree they are not free software. It is very intentional that they were saying the freedom of users to do what they want with software should not be limited for the convenience of the business interests of those who wrote the software.
This license isn’t about users. If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.
This license in particular isn’t my favorite, but I’m totally fine in theory with licenses that attempt to patch loopholes exploited by bad actors.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.
The whole thing was thought up when residential internet couldn’t be used for much more than email, BBS and Usenet, and it wasn’t viable to use it for downloading a text editor.
It’s not a timeless set of principles to live by forever after, proprietary software —that’s not charged for- dominates everyone’s lives more than ever in the public and private sphere, precisely from companies that benefited from the open source ecosystem of software engineering tools.
> Meanwhile, the users who know nothing about computers need handholding: doing things for them which they could easily do themselves but don't know how.
> Such services could be provided by companies that sell just handholding and repair service. If it is true that users would rather spend money and get a product with service, they will also be willing to buy the service having got the product free. The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one. Meanwhile, those of us who don't need the service should be able to use the program without paying for the service.
"The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one."
In the Free Software community, this line was always blurry, almost non-existent even.
Even if the receiver of the Free Software package is not a programmer by any definition, at worst case, they can ask for a friend to patch something up, and if another friend wanted his patched version, the modified source code has to move with the software package.
Open Source software can block even this simple pathway by not giving back the modified source from friend to the user, creating a dependency. It'd be heartless to do this between two friends, but companies will happily do that.
My most vivid example of this is SDKs for hardware. Half of the API is open, but the patched version of the (open source) libraries cost $2K+, several NDAs and allegiance to company for the rest of your life or you can be sent to a concentration camp operated by an alliance of companies doing the same thing.
...and this is just for a small biometric scanner you happen to find in a piece of 10 year old discarded tech.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. Freedom 0 applies to everyone.
Giving a gift does not confer an obligation, and "contributing back" is meaningless in this context. Someone using a gift you gave them to run a business does not harm you in any way whatsoever.
Free software has never been about giving gifts with no obligations.
It's not, it is an exchange.
You gain the ability to use the library or program in exchange for releasing your changes and modifications.
Well, unless it's MIT licensed, in which case you're kind of a sucker and it all but _is_ a gift to Big Tech.
There is plenty of FOSS that is not copyleft.
Somehow the service+infra is the same cost or cheaper then buying the infra alone and trying to deploy the open source version to it.
The GNU Project and Richard Stallman, who made this statement, would agree that it's not free under even this earliest definition. They in-fact made it even clearer when they defined freedom of "use" as the distinct 0th freedom eventually to make it even clearer that being able to use the software freely is fundamental to their idea of freedom. Again, freedom isn't about price, it's about usage, availability, redistribution and lack of restrictions on this. I cannot freely redistribute FSL licensed code under the original definition of free software.
"Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then."
Yes, the GNU project were acutely aware of this and designed the GPL licenses around such scenarios - they just didn't design it for SaaS businesses, where if you redistribute the built program externally after modifying it but only distributed its responses over a network, you technically weren't obligated to open source that modification. AGPL resolved this issue, and has more case law behind it than this 2 year old license, and has certainly less daunting implications than a not legally well defined 'competing purpose'.
Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with whether or not Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, and the license was made by lawyers to clearly provide protection. Did you create this legal theory yourself? Because I've not seen any writing from a lawyer on the internet that suggests that Amazon could firewall themselves off in a friendly jurisdiction under any reading of the license, and I read a lot of AGPL lawyerblogging.
Sentry, the company who created FSL, even states that this license restricts user freedom explicitly - for the sake of the business interests of the original developer.
So summing up.. Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GNU Project, the OSI, the creators of the FSL, the company now currently using FSL, all agree that this source available license does not meet the definition of "free software". So, whose definition are we using out of thin air?
You’re free to distribute it to your neighbors for free for any purpose. You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one. You just can’t commercialize it as a competing product.
“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.
This isn’t my favorite license, but it provides a lot more freedoms than merely looking at the source code.
With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.
So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?
>“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.
No, the source is available to read and the software is not free based on the historical definitions you're providing, unfortunately. Happy to understand from a different lens, but Stallman specifically meant freedom in the way even FSL writers agreed with.
Also, please refrain to using commonly used terms in the common way as 'disingenuous', it doesn't lead to interesting discussion and is how these threads end up needing to be patrolled by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.
So, this is a personal non-legal theory that does not have a basis in jurisprudence, then? GPLv3 is proven as enforceable, and is what AGPL is based on. No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control". That's just not how copyright or licensing contracts work. You may want to disclaim conjectures like this with IANAL..
My entire point is how big tech has captured the zeitgeist, so the common use of that term is irrelevant.
>No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control".
You are 100% incorrect. Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.
>So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?
The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
It's not dirty, it just doesn't follow the principles the rest of us espouse. We're interested in software that follows these principles via a license like this.
That you're ascribing malice to the entire FOSS community seems a bit strange, when they're the ones who created the free software definition in the first place. The source is available but is not free software even in the original definition.
>Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.
So, personal theory, wrt AGPL. Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.
>The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.
You're right that a business might offer a fee for free software under this definition, but that's unrelated to it being free to distribute under any clauses.
Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.
I've been involved in this for decades at this point. Free Software and Open Source folks generally "source available" as a pejorative.
By using a term that implies the lowest level of freedoms possible for software that doesn't restrict access to the source code, you are implying that no freedoms exist beyond reading the source.
>Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.
AGPL significantly changes GPLv3. If you want to understand how that could cause it to be unenforceable read up on severability and its limitations in various jurisdictions. Courts have wide latitude in most jurisdictions to decide how much of a contract or license (in civil law jurisdictions they are always the same thing) to uphold if certain parts are invalidated.
>Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.
Free speech has restrictions in every jurisdiction in the world. Saying in something is "free as in free speech" has no implication that it is absolutely free from all duties, obligations , or restrictions.
If that is a requirement for free software, the GPL isn't a free software license because it does place obligations on distribution.
>Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.
I don't care what a single individual says about what he believes now. I'm more interested in what he said in 1985 and what the people who made up the community believed.
Mostly though I only care about any of the past cruft because Open Source and to a lesser extent Free Software has takes the air out of the room in any discussion about software freedoms.
I'm interested in realistic compromises to make more free software more viable in a world where Amazon, Google, and Facebook exist. I'm not interested in ideals about a very specific meaning of absolutely free software.
Okay, I'm confused why you bring free software or the free software definition into this at all then if you're just picking and choosing what parts of the original statement/bulletin you care about and what parts you choose to disregard, on top of disregarding the original movement and organization founded at its inception.
If you're hoping to rebrand source available software, why not call it something other than _free software_ if you want to do a rebranding? You could propose similarly internally consistent principles and attempt to cultivate a community. Call it 'fair source' or 'managed availability' or something. Refer to the 'freedoms' as rights, instead. You'd convince a much larger group and wouldn't have to pretend that principles for commercialization wasn't considered in 1985.
Since, again, from the start there the goal of free software was that no single company was supposed to be the single commercializer of a piece of software. That principles carries to the GPL.
If you're hoping to convince us that source available software is actually free software, you're giving me a great platform to talk to others about the history of actually free software and making yourself appear wrongheaded as if you didn't read the original bulletin or understand the larger software development community, or worse that you're attempting to co-opt our very specific yet widely accepted professional definition of free software.
1. It's important for people to understand how OSI co-opted the goodwill and some of the ideas from the Free Software movement.
2. I think they have some good ideas even if I don't agree with all of them.
>If you're hoping to rebrand source available software, why not call it something other than _free software_ if you want to do a rebranding? You could propose similarly internally consistent principles and attempt to cultivate a community. Call it 'fair source' or 'managed availability' or something. Refer to the 'freedoms' as rights, instead. You'd convince a much larger group and wouldn't have to pretend that principles for commercialization wasn't considered in 1985.
I'm just a guy with 3 kids under 5 and not enough time to run any kind of rebranding project. I'm just angry that whenever someone launches a project that is more free than proprietary software but that isn't OSI approved, 90% of the comments are about why it isn't free or isn't open source.
I could publish a new project on hacker news and call it "fair source" and then explain how fair source isn't free software, but it's like free software with an extra restriction.
The 5 freedoms:
-1: You can't distribute this software if your name ends in "ezos".
0-4 same as the rest.
I guarantee you 90% of the comments would be attacks on the license (even if -1 was something reasonable). And it would start off with negative goodwill. Most people haven't actually read the 4 freedoms or the OSD, most people just follow the zeitgeist and it says Open Source == good, everything else == bad.
I do not think that a group financed primarily by big tech should have this kind control on the goodwill doled out by the community. But they do. I think that the more people that understand that the better.
Okay I don't understand why this is happening in the same breath you're suggesting that OSI is responsible for making everyone in the free software movement believe freedom of use (even in commercial cases) is required otherwise things are source available. GNU foundation, OSI, and even source available license writers basically agree on this part. Can you be specific here?
Because otherwise you're just reinforcing the perception I explained above, since largely the disagreement between OSI and the original free software people is that OSI supports too _permissive_ and too many non-copyleft licenses, not that the permissive or copyleft licenses need to enshrine certain license holders or disenfranchise others, or block commercialization or competitors. That's deeply antithetical to the idea of free or open software, regardless of the camp.
>2. I think they have some good ideas even if I don't agree with all of them.
AGPL, despite achieving all of your goals to prevent hyperscalers from free riding, is not one of them?
>I'm just a guy with 3 kids under 5 and not enough time to run any kind of rebranding project. I'm just angry that whenever someone launches a project that is more free than proprietary software but that isn't OSI approved, 90% of the comments are about why it isn't free or isn't open source.
Because the community has largely agreed on the principles codified by OSI. The principles you propose seem to betray the larger movement's intentions significantly, which is much bigger in scope than OSI.
>-1: You can't distribute this software if your name ends in "ezos".
>0-4 same as the rest.
That's a lot different than source available licenses actually, which usually declares enshrines the original license holder, even though it's not technically free under the other principles. I think if you thought up of a new consistent principle that didn't enshrine a single distributor or disenfranchise entire classes of other distributors, people would be open to the idea of a variant of free software.
But I think the bigger issue is that you think AGPL is failing somehow in not being restrictive enough compared to source available licenses. Maybe you could articulate that more clearly, and _that_ would gather more mind share. Merely stating that OSI is bad doesn't really change people's opinion of source available. Mostly reinforcing free software/copyleft maxi's ideas and insinuating GPL needs to be more common.
I agree it doesn't need to be called "source available"; it's just proprietary software.
- Open Source software is about developer freedom.
- Free Software is about user freedom.
this is absolutely right, and the OSI has been successfully captured by these companies
would RedHat be able survive to IPO these days? I very much doubt it (see: Oracle Linux)
a new term is needed, "Open Source" is no longer fit for purpose in a world where the hyperscalers exist
"Fair Source"?
All you have to do is look at the name of the company on the building ...it still says Microsoft folks
"Since 2017, Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world, measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub, the largest host of source code in the world." [1]
Microsoft "open" source projects like VSCode exist to lock in developers, surveil developers and steal their IP. Developers should become dependent on GitHub, Copilot and stolen code until the open source ecosystem can finally be destroyed.
The entire thing is a big EEE that is beginning to pay off because of LLMs (we can still resist by moving off GitHub and rejecting LLM code theft).
During my frustrations I read blogposts saying you can implement schema version changes easily by yourself and I kind of see it... You have to do the thinking by yourself anyway when you declare changeSets?
I find it crazier that people use xml changesets.
My setup is to use sql files versioned by date. Each file has changsets (regions demarcated by comments) for single transaction actions (like creating a database), along with it's rollback actions written as comments in it's respective changeset.
I don't trust rollbacks, I mostly use them for dev purposes for scripts that are wip. If i have to "undo" changes to a db, better to write specific scripts that revert the actions (i.e. manually move columns around to a tmp table).
I essentially just use liquibase as a language-agnostic db-migration tool that can connect ot a db and run a series of sql files. I could write scripts for that, but it's nice to have a third-party solution.
For example, think of one install going from 1.0.0 > 1.0.2 while another is going from 1.0.0 > 1.1.0. Sure, you could write something to do that yourself, but I'd rather use an existing library that already covers tons of edge cases.
The number of Docker containers I've used that need to be rolled through a special incantation of several versions to get things upgraded cleanly make me shake my head sometimes. Every time I have to do that I still think of Liquibase and wish that I could just grab the most recent version and have the database schema magically updated like I could do with Java apps 2 decades ago.
Liquibase and Flyway are the only major frameworks on the JVM which could be embedded into a JVM application to get rid of a sidecar or a startup process which has to run before the actual application could start.
That's exactly why Liquibase turned source-available. These abstractions are leaky, error-prone and are better maintained via the money from support contracts.
"Make problem, they earn money fixing them" is a reasonable modus operandi.
Copyright/patent law says:
You wrote it at time T
Therefore from T to T+70years, you control it
Anyone who writes the same thing at T+1 is "copying"
But if we both arrive at the same solution independently, causality matters more than chronology. If your code didn't cause mine, why should your timestamp give you power over me?
This breaks the whole edifice:
If independent discovery isn't "theft," then copyright only makes sense for literal verbatim copying. And even then - if I retype your code character-by-character because it's the best solution, am I stealing or just recognizing truth?
1. The philosophy is completely different: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
2. Technically, mostly but not quite; there are technical differences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604258
If you mean free as in gratis: nope, you can sell open source software, there are several possible business models around this.
We can talk about Stallman's "vision", but frankly he's a commie who wants to dictate usage rights for others.
Free as in speech not as in beer. I read as total freedom. Not freedom to do what I think you should.
Although, on the other hand, "Two years after release, the license for each applicable version of Liquibase Community code reverts to Apache 2.0". So, it's like... eventually open source. Which is still misleading, as it doesn't apply to the current versions.
I think everyone thinks the way they understand open source is the way everyone understands open source. And yet every time an open source project, by any definition, changes their license, people debate what open source really means.
Unlike a term born with a specific definition, like "FOSS", open source doesn't really have a definition. The OSI has a definition that seems to be most popular, but that's not the only understanding of the term that is doing the rounds.
For plenty of people, open source means "source-available software". For others, it's software licensed under a subset of specific licenses (which licenses is also a subject for debate). And for some it means "software developed in a specific way that involves the community", like many Linux adjacent projects are, disqualifying corporate projects licensed under those specific licenses because they can do a Liquibase any time they want and there's very little chance a community large enough to maintain and develop the existing code will stand up when they do.
Liquibase now falls under one of the three definitions I've heard people agree about rather than two.
Funnily enough, the Liquibase project agrees with this sentiment too (or wants to avoid the fallout from open source gatekeepers): https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/pull/7380
It's like me starting the cheese initiative and trying to control what others call cheese, a job that's typically reserved for governments.
I also don't care if somebody in 1975 said "I like to be open, and I'll let anyone look at the source." Old McDonald had a farm before McDonald's was a restaurant, but that doesn't mean that if you open a restaurant called McDonald's that is decorated like a McDonald's, you're not a scammer. I know your plastic fruit is carbon-based, but if you label it as "organic" you're a thief.
If you're not trying to scam people, be creative and make up your own catchphrase for letting people look at your source code - or don't even, because the whole idea of having a branding for allowing people access (and rights to) the source is imitation of the FSF and OSI.
Open Source isn't a brand, it isn't a trademark, it was hijacked by OSI to enforce their specific interpretation of a phrase that was already in use. OSI wasn't founded until 1998, over a decade after the term open source software became popular and was used throughout the unix and linux communities and in businesses such as Caldera. Before OSI came up with the OSD many creators of open source software had non-compete clauses in the licence.
Like I said above, they're as official as the cheese initiative I just made up.
No government has endorsed them, and open source is not a protected name in any country I am aware of.
They're just some arrogant American organisation that expects the entire world to bend to their whim, as usual.
They have successfully convinced a generation of developers that “Open Source” is pure and holy, but a licensee that includes a term that says something like no company making more than $100 million per year can use this software for free is unclean and maybe even evil.
They don’t want alternative licenses to exist because it hurts their bottom line.
Paying a license and playing by the rules of a myriad licenses is a chore even for those who can afford it.