alt Hacker News> protecting users' rights at the expense of developers' rights.
Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable.
Protecting the user's right to run the software for free on their own or in their company so long as they don't resell it is perfectly salient and should be enough for anyone. That's really all the freedom a user needs.
If you're asking for more, it's because you want to take the developer's business. That's 100% unfair.
The hyperscalers aren't giving back 1/1,000,000th of what they've taken. Yet we go after "source available" or "fair source" like it's some grave evil.
Where is there opportunity left for software outside of the major trillion dollar companies if we don't start giving developers the benefit of profiting on their work?
I make a point to cheer on every fair source, source available, or open core project I see. It's the sustainable path forward. We shouldn't be taking from each other - we should be finding out how to take back from the hyperscalers.
Replies
> Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable.
It's only unsustainable when you are interested in keeping "user" and "developer" as distinct sets.
> The hyperscalers aren't giving back 1/1,000,000th of what they've taken. Yet we go after "source available" or "fair source" like it's some grave evil.
No we are going after it when people try to pass it off as open source when it really isn't.
I like open source because it means I'm not beholden to the original developer in any way as long as I pay it forward. I'm OK if this means you can't find a profitable business model.
> Protecting the user's right to run the software for free on their own or in their company so long as they don't resell it
One company uses the software internally to create more value for a customer of theirs.
A second company uses the software internally to provide a paid service to a customer.
A third company resells software they bought to their customer.
The end result is the same: Company makes money, customer exhanges money for value. Somehow only one or two of those use cases would be legal.
Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
The hyperscalers are contributors to FOSS, both in code contributions and funding. They could easily far better though.
> Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable.
I agree with you, actually - but Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement more generally really don't. They exactly and explicitly believe this right exists and should ideally be a legal right, and the AGPL quite explicitly maintains this right.
Ultimately the Free Software movement is predicated on the concept that ideas can't be owned. They generally oppose both copyright and patents, and not just for software. Their licenses are meant as a stop gap solution. Ideally to them, or at least to some of the more die-hard members, laws would be changed such that what the GPL grants would not be a license predicated on copyright, but instead a legal requirement for all software, while copyright would be entirely abolished.
In addition to their general opposition to copyright and patents, Free Software people also view software as having a special role in terms of privacy and control - that, even more so than books and other copyrightable works, you have a right to know what the software in your house and business is doing, and to modify and fix it if it's doing something you don't like. This is related to privacy rights on one hand, and also anti-monopoly, right to repair concepts on the other hand.
This is all very different from the Open Source movement, even though they basically use the same kinds of licenses. The OpenSource movement is more of an industry group that believes competing on building much foundational software is a waste of resources. Instead, they believe the best way to build this foundational software is in collaboration with other commercial or non-commercial entities, building it in the open such that all may benefit from contributions and add their own contributions. However, the Open Source movement is completely fine with, and even expects, then making a proprietary product on top of this open source base.
To them copyleft licenses are a tool to make sure others don't keep their improvements for themselves, but have the downside of making it harder to build your proprietary stuff on top. Conversely, software that takes your contributions but then doesn't allow you to use it in commercial offerings is completely unacceptable, since the whole goal of the movement is for different companies to build a common infra on which they can then build their own commercial products.
Ultimately, both the Free Software and the Open Source movements will agree that a core part of open source is that anyone should be able to compete on delivering the original software, even if for entirely different ideological reasons.
This is a very business-centric viewpoint. I publish a small number of open-source libraries. They are not a business. I have no interest in making them a business. In fact, the idea of making them a business is repellent. They're just code for doing some tasks more easily than starting from scratch.
I made some of them because I needed them, and had no reason to own them. I made some because I thought another library was poorly designed and I could demonstrate a better way. I didn't make any because I wanted money or recognition. I don't care who uses them, or how. It is literally impossible for a user to do anything with any of them that harms me.
I am deeply suspicious of any world view that declares it bad when people use code I have released for free. I released it so people would use it. Good for them!