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It’s always been possible for these companies to pull the proverbial license rug from under the community’s feet. It was just a matter of time before they did it.
Point is, you can’t trust one powerful entity, especially not when money is involved.
It’s not really a rug-pull in the usual sense though - of “all of a sudden you cannot use this product anymore”
You can still use it up to the commit where they changed the license. And then people just make a fork from there and the community moves away from the initial project to the fork
exactly. Forking for any reason is the essence of FOSS.
Scenarios like OPs were taken care of right from the start. That’s just the legal side, tho. But someone still needs to do the actual work which is why it sometimes fails.
Another opinion about how it’s OK for mega-corps to reap the benefits of opensource without contributing back and how we should just suck it up because of principles.
I understand he’s a big contributor to ansible and other IaC, and most (all?) of his stuff is opensource. It’s cool that he has the money to sustain himself and that he can stick to his principles with the money he has, but IMO either he lacks empathy or understanding for those in a place trying to make a living from opensource or in his opinion companies just can’t be trusted with opensource if they have a CLA.
He’s entitled to his opinions, but I don’t share them.
I don’t really understand the connection between the blog post and your comment. Could you expand on the connection between his stance against CLAs and your paraphrase about mega-corps and how we should “suck it up because of principles”?
It’s the freeloading part of his post.
From a company’s perspective, if they want CLAs or if they want to use an anti-open-source license, they do not care about your freedoms. They’re protecting revenue streams. They’ll often talk about freeloaders, whether it’s Amazon building a competing hosted solution, or some startup that found a way to monetize support.
But in the end, even if you have GPL code and you charge people to get it, it’s not truly free as in freedom, if the company restricts how you can use, modify, and share the code.
[…]
Freeloaders are part of open source—whether they’re running homelab or a competing business.
I agree, I don’t like CLAs, but the handwaving of the distinction between freeloaders is what gets me. There’s quite a big difference between somebody running your opensource service in private and not making any money from it vs a business actively competing against you with your own code, creating support tickets, and not contributing back code (or minimally at best).
The argument is basically one of principle. “It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s wrong”.
I guess I read his point more as being that it’s effectively impossible for a license or CLA to distinguish “good” freeloaders from “bad” freeloaders, so it was inevitable that businesses would start doing license “rug-pulls” like the examples he gives.
That seems like a more reasonable interpretation.
“It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s wrong”.
I think it’s more “It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s not open source, don’t pretend it is”.
The “wrong” part would be derived from claiming its something that it isn’t to gain some advantage. I’m this case community contributions.
There’s not a handwaving distinction between open source and not, there are pretty clear guidelines.
“Only X is opensource because OSI says so!”. It’s like believers referring to the bible for stuff without thinking themselves. “The bible says it’s so, so it must be right!”, while disregarding that circumstances have changed.
What many open source softwares do is write 5 lines of code, use autocode generators to convert 5 lines to 1000 lines and then automate code to have 200 commits in git repo with different datetimes. Basically, it is shown to the outside world that software is very complex.
We should all shift to Suckless
This is not the craziest conspiracy theory I’ve read today, but it’s definitely top 3.
Craziest all week for me, guess I curate my feeds different…
