For some years now, one has not had to look far to find articles proclaiming the demise of the GNU General Public License. That license, we are told, is too frightening for many businesses, which prefer to use software under the far weaker permissive class of license. But there is a business model that is based on the allegedly scary nature of the GPL, and there are those who would like to make it more lucrative; the only problem is that the GPL isn’t quite scary enough yet.
I’m sure we can have a civil discussion about the merits and demerits of the GPL.
True, but the article isn’t about the GPL. It’s about a derivative of the Affero GPL called the SSPL. (Also, a very disappointingly FUD-y title to see on LWN.)
The Affero GPL is a license that builds on the GPL by modifying the GPL’s “must share source with anyone you distribute binaries to” rule to say “If you run a modified version of this on a server, you must make the modified source available to anyone who accesses the server.”
According to the Article, MongoDB Inc. is pissed that so many businesses are selling access to un-modifed versions of MongoDB as a service without paying for a license fee, so they’re relicensing under a license they call the SSPL.
Looking at the excerpt given, it seems the SSPL turns the AGPL into what is effectively a Shared Source license (ie. you can read the source, but must purchase a license to use it) by requiring unsatisfiable terms for the infrastructure used in concert with it. (ie. By requiring that you share what is effectively your entire stack under the SSPL too, when nobody in the real world has the rights necessary to relicense their entire stack under the SSPL.)
As flussence commented on that article, “The company just XFree86’ed itself.” (GPL-family licenses are non-revokable to guarantee that, if someone tries to pull something like this, people can fork the last free version.)
As for having a civil discussion, kemitchell’s comment is a good starting point.
https://lwn.net/Articles/768812/
One of the takeaways is that they’re trying to close a hole that was left in the AGPL by design.
I find it especially funny that they claim to have submitted it to the OSI for approval when point 9 of the Open Source Definition clearly says:
If nothing else, it clearly violates the spirit of that.
Edited 2018-11-02 02:59 UTC
I have always thought that GPL only benefits hardware manufacturers and big companies and it has cheapen software to the point that people no longer expects to pay for it.
To be honest, I never expected to pay for it.
When I was a kid:
– I saw no problem with free copies of something that could be duplicated for free.
– I bought games for the service of getting access to stuff I couldn’t copy off my friends.
I discovered open-source software in my teens.
Now:
– I see no problem in sharing around copies of open-source software
– I pay GOG.com or Humble Bundle Inc. for the convenience of trustworthy updates and reliable off-site backups of games.
– I buy games not available on GOG.com or Humble Bundle Inc. as old CDs, cartridges, or floppies so I have something physical to collect.
– I write my own replacements for any non-game software I want to use which isn’t available as open-source… or at least freeware.
At the moment, I’m working on an installer builder (like Inno Setup or NSIS) for DOS for my retrocomputing hobby, since all the pre-Windows 3.1 stuff is shareware.
https://twitter.com/deitarion/status/1057460614916960257
Doesn’t sound too different from what Bill Gates fought against in the beginning, when he was trying to convince people to pay for something with no physicality that could be copied onto a provided floppy essentially for free. (Just human instinct recognizing that data is more like jokes and gossip than like food and toys. We have an intuitive grasp of the distinction between scarce and non-scarce resources.)
Edited 2018-11-02 05:55 UTC
So let’s say you have a business idea. You have a great idea to solve someones problem.
It’s not some game or library or hobby
You spent 2 years coding it.
Are you going to open source it and never get paid because someone uses your code and undercuts you?
Or are you going to charge a normal amount of money and get rewarded for your effort
You’re already operating on a flawed assumption. The only time I don’t open-source right near the beginning of the development process and “push early, push often” is when I didn’t practice proper commit hygiene and have private or copyrighted stuff in the commit history.
(I have plans for a GUI, currently code-named git-divvy, for efficiently going through the entire commit history of a Git project, to filter out files or hunks that contain sensitive information and/or split it into two or more subproject repos. Once that’s done, I’ll be rapidly making at least half a dozen new Git repos public.)
I also consider that “spent 2 years coding it, only to charge for it” to be too big a risk. If it’s really such a good idea, I could easily be beaten to market by someone with more capital, more manpower, or who’s already quietly working on it.
Also, “charge a normal amount of money and get rewarded for your effort” has always been a gross oversimplification. Sharing software around has always existed and building market share has never been as easy as you seem to think.
Finally, money isn’t the only reward one can get for their work. When I write software and I’m not being paid to write it for someone else, it tends to be for three purposes:
1. Scratch my own itches
2. Build a portfolio piece to get my name out there
3. “Be the change I want to see in the world” (I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to go back to a world where you had to pay for encyclopedias.)
Clearly for you software doesn’t have much value and it even costs you ‘money’ as you offer your spare time to code. This change in thinking makes it much more difficult to make money from Free Software as the perception is that it should be free (as in beer) too.
I used to be a proponent of Free Software, but lately I am bit more cynical. Over the last 30 years we have seen the slow but steady devaluation of software. Partially caused by millions of people picking up coding and the devaluation of software quality i.e. very little investment is put into creating a well crafted product as this isn’t the focus of companies anymore.
Free Software on top of this made software prices come down a lot as often it didn’t cost much compared to the shrinkwrapped box. We now live in a world where if the app is more than 1 euro on your phone or not free, you aren’t willing to pay for it.
In order to live of software you have to resort to advertising, or sell crack cocaine inside the product (addictive addons) or beg (like Wikipedia or Patreon sites). Big multinationals say they are Open Source, but they are only in name (Google Android, Oracle Java, many others), further hollowing out the ecosystem. They are laughing: rather than having a huge department of testers and coders, they use people like you who do the coding for free.
So am I against Free Software? I don’t think so, but I would only be willing to Open Source my libraries, possible domain languages and tools but not the business knowledge that I gathered through sweat and tears. If that software becomes more popular/is improved upon by other people, all the better for me.
Note: Google thinks the same, the Search algorithm or the tracking software aren’t Open Sourced)
As an aside: that’s why I prefer the GPL if I had to choose, at least if someone wants to build on top, it has to go back into the community.
Edited 2018-11-03 15:43 UTC
Agreed. The GPL is my default choice, though I will choose MIT licensing on a case-by-case basis if I feel that there’s more benefit to society in broad adoption than in getting patches contributed back.
Maybe you get me wrong, when I say I slave for 2 years on some particular business problem and I solve it, I don’t want a patent on it or eternal rights to milk it.
It’s totally free for other people to slave for 2 years too.
But I want some time period to make some money.
We can argue a long time about how long this period should be (certainly 15 years does sound too short – what happens if the book get popular only after 14 years??) but for me it certainly shouldn’t be zero.
Also, there is a *lot* of software that isn’t benificial to mankind, just a few people that like to pay for it. I don’t want to run the risk having it copied by making it Open Source.
And? Nothing is forcing you to open-source your code. If it’s really such a niche thing, the lack of demand is likely to be enough, on its own, for you to spend a decade playing whac-a-mole with software pirates before someone with the requisite coding skill, interest, and drive decides to put together a competing product.
Heck, just look at the state of video editing and Autotune clones in the open-source world and they’re not even all that niche.
Edited 2018-11-04 03:39 UTC
Linux finally has decent video editor? (and Autotune?
)
Kdenlive and the NLE component of Blender are the best I’m aware of so far.
As for Autotune, there’s a very primitive LADSPA plugin called Autotalent.
Hm, both are only so-so… still can’t really hold a candle to, say, Sony Vegas.
Well that must be “news” to the software industry that has grown in size and profits almost exponentially during those 30 years of “devaluation.
Prices dropping for many categories (well, definetely not all…) of software and size increase of software industry don’t have to be that much at odds with each other, if market greatly expanded.
What? BSD benefits big companies. IBM itself has very strict processes around using GPL software, whereas BSD and MIT license is pretty much a free-for-all.
MINIX is used by Intel, and Andrew Tannenbaum crazily tried to argue that resulted in more freedom, when it only benefited Intel and everyone else was left with a security hole.
GPL gets a lot of FUD thrown its way from open source developers who are paid by big companies.
Most open source developers that are paid by big companies write GPL software. This is just hand waving.
I agree. Your statement is hand waving.
So how many fallacies did you find in your post? Hint: there’s more than two.
Name them and pinpoint them then. I did for another comment. Your delaying here right now amounts to nothing more than butthurt.
How the hell did you get that from what Tanenbaum wrote about Intel using MINIX in the IME?
You’re right. I only thought he said “more freedom” because I misremembered him as being reasonable. Turns out he said “maximum amount of freedom”.
Thanks for the correction.
Edited 2018-11-02 16:27 UTC
Except he clearly didn’t say more freedom was the result of Intel using MINIX for the IME.
he specifically said it was an example of freedom.
Those are completely different things.
Except I clearly didn’t say that he said this. I replied about the licence in regards to how the GPL doesn’t benefit large companies. And he specifically said the licence gave maximum freedom.
I quoted the exact thing I was making a point about. It’s no use you trying to argue something completely different.
You isn’t so clear that you did.
I read that part of the post as suggesting that MINIX being used by Intel is what Tanenbaum arged resulted in more freedom, not the license that MINIX is licensed under. It certainly isn’t clear from the way that specific sentence was structured you were talking about the license.
Of course it was.
I was replying to a very specific comment with a very specific point/question about licences. That MINIX paragraph was smack bang between two paragraphs about licences. And there wasn’t a preceding quote that reset the context. It was straightforward, uninterrupted comment. You also seemed familiar with what Andrew Tannenbaum said about MINIX when that bit of news came out, so you must have read his bit about the licence.
Why would I have a completely unrelated paragraph in the middle of two paragraphs that were related to the comment it was in reply to?
Every single piece of evidence is there that it was talking about the licence.
Do people not get taught how to write essays at school? Essays have an overarching point, with more paragraphs supporting the main point. Comments are not essays, sure, but come on! There’s a point where you’re supposed to not require hand-holding or spoon-feeding.
OSAlert has a threaded view, and on the comments link in the sidebar, you can also see the link to the comment that it was in reply to. Those features are available so that we can have context without having to spell the context out every single damn comment, or in this case, paragraph.
I have a sinking feeling that a lot of people here don’t read long-form writing. God help them if they ever have to read a novel that doesn’t tell them exactly everything so they don’t have to figure anything out. Bloody hell, how do people here even write programs? Do people see a white space separated block of code within a function and thinks it has nothing to do with the blocks of code before or after it in the same function? Are people’s comprehension depending on whitespace on a more absurd level than Python?
And my comment definitely wasn’t a novel. Maybe all these years of reading technical writing has rotted people’s ability to read anything that’s not a manpage.
Edited 2018-11-04 09:02 UTC
Or, instead of trying to turn a small mistake in understanding you comment into some broad indictment of society as a whole, maybe just accept the fact that your meaning wasn’t as clear as you thought it was?
Jesus Christ….
No, because, first, you were kind of a dick about your “small mistake in understanding” at first, and second, because it is happening too many times, and not just with me. Hell, there was another reply to a comment of mine right in this article that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking in about in the context of the comment I was replying to. And third, when I gave you my first reply and quoted the exact bit I was thinking of, instead of considering you made a “small mistake in understanding”, you still kept up with the red herring that I wasn’t saying what I was saying and what you thought I was saying. If I wasn’t clear at first, I was clear the second time around and STILL you pushed forward with your “small mistake in understanding”.
Many misunderstandings made here (and elsewhere) can simply be avoided if people learned how to comprehend things in context. Whether it’s accusing certain people of “bias” or some other red herring diversion argument that had nothing to do with where the conversation started from and where it is going, as a whole.
Every comment I make, I ALWAYS read the comments it was in reply to get the context, even for long reply chains That should be normal expectation on anyone. If you don’t do that and you make a “small mistake in understanding”, it is entirely your own fault. Both writer and reader have an obligation, and I showed I did my part – twice, while you showed that you expected to be spoonfed absolutely everything.
It’s not my fault if you don’t like being told that you fail basic comprehension skills expected of everyone out of primary school. I have done so for people who reply to other people’s comments without any attempt at comprehension, and I will keep doing it.
Edited 2018-11-05 01:59 UTC
GPL is so scary that Red Hat, a GPL company, was just bought for $34B… Seriously, Affero GPL is not GPL.
*Peter Parker’s boss laugh*
Yeah sure.
Edited 2018-11-02 09:55 UTC
Quite honestly, if I was a CEO of some software company I would double think it before I released my software under a license written by a bitter old beard with an axe to grind (RMS was fired, he didn’t quit as internet lore says).
Ah,the classic ad hominem fallacy. Also the genetic fallacy.
Never debate the actual legal merits of a legal document. Just attack the face of it, and not even deal with the other people who worked on the document.
Hi,
The debate isn’t about legalities (the document is a tool that fulfils its intended purpose). The debate is about economics and ethics, not legalities (should people use a tool that fulfils this intended purpose).
For an example, let’s say I want to destroy the market for children’s games so I write a few children’s games and let people have them for free; and faced with an inability to buy food (because I’ve maliciously devalued their work) other developers start adding manipulative advertising to children’s games. Is anything about this ethical?
For another example, let’s say that there’s many commercial Unix vendors and I want to destroy the market for Unix operating systems so I write a version of *nix and let people have it for free; and faced with an inability to compete (because I’ve maliciously devalued their work) commercial OS developers go bankrupt and/or discontinue their operating systems; and then once the competition is annihilated by predatory pricing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing ) I switch to a devious scam involving hidden costs where the price of developing the OS gets built into the amount people pay for unrelated products (hardware from lots of companies, goods and services from companies that have a support contract with Redhat, etc), such that people end up paying bucket loads of $$ for the “free” OS without realising it (including people that don’t even use the OS). Is anything about this ethical?
– Brendan
That… has nothing to do with what my comment was in reply to.
That’s odd. I’d assumed that if you were the CEO of a software company, your first priority would be to move from your parent’s basement.
BTW I looked at the MongoDB license quotes and the contributor agreement quotes. At this point they can just stick an EULA to the product and an all rights reserved notice to the code and be done with it. No reason to create more useless “source licenses”.
At least with Microsoft, what is their code is their code, and what’s my code is my code. Microsoft doesn’t force me to change the license of my software if I happen to run a Microsoft database as part of a commercial service.
You see, Linux beards are a weird bunch. They pretend to like communes but in reality they would like to be the next Steve Jobs. That’s what I meant with my “axe to grind” quote above. For the Linux beards, any corporation using a coder’s software to offer value-added services without redirecting a significant part of the resulting revenue to the coder is an anathema. Well, dear Linux beards, if you wanted to have a guaranteed revenue source when someone uses your product, just make it proprietary. No more exotic licenses creating jobs for lawyers, we already have too many of them, thank you very much.
Edited 2018-11-02 14:53 UTC
You can buy a commercial license of mongodb instead of complying with this new license, which is no different to buying a commercial license from microsoft.
Mongo gives you two choices,, microsoft typically only give you 1.
And if Microsoft had offered a free or open source product for years, and then suddenly made changes to the license agreement that that made their product completely unusable in an effort to force users to buy their premium version, you would be criticizing them rather harshly.
As one of the commenters pointed out, commercial licenses appear to start at $12,000 per year, which is quite the unexpected new expense on your balance sheet.
Depending on the size of the business and the expected revenue generated by the product/infrastructure using the software, a $12K yearly license really is a non-issue.
It depends on how competitive products perform and cost.
I have a beard and use Linux as my primary operating system. Does that make me a “Linux beard”?
If so, here’s me raising my hand as a Linux beard who only demands money (a scarce resource) for his time (a scarce resource) rather than the non-scarce results of that time.
Edited 2018-11-02 23:56 UTC
Why companies are scared about the GNU GPL.
1) If your plan is to close source the software on the future, you should be scared of the GNU GPL.
2) If you wish to hide a part of the source code since it gives you “advantage”, you should be scared of the GNU GPL.
3) If you plan to use/develop open source software as a “bait and switch” or as a “embrace extend extinguish” stragety, you should be scared of the GNU GPL.
As an individual I’m not afraid of the GNU GPL, as a corporation trying to “protect assets” and trying to get an advantage over the market is a different story.
I would go the way that users/customers should suggest or force companies to embrace GNU GPL.
Regards
Not even Stallman is that extreme.
The only user/customer that can “force” any company to use the GPL is if the government department putting out a tender has the policy of mandating any software developed for it.