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Corporate Open Source is Dead
(www.jeffgeerling.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Programming
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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.
Anti Commercial-AI license
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.
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".
Anti Commercial-AI license
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.
Anti Commercial-AI license
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.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I mean, yes? That's a good summation.
The part where you get to call something "open source" by OSI standards (which I'm pretty sure is the accepted standard set) but only if you adhere to those standards.
Don't want to adhere, no problem, but nobody who does accept that standard will agree with you if you try and assign that label to something that doesn't adhere, because that's how commonly accepted standards work, socially.
Want to make an "open source 2 : electric boogaloo" licence , still no problem.
Want to try and get the existing open source standards changed, still good, difficult, but doable.
Relevant to this discussion, trying to convince people that someone claiming something doesn't adhere to the current, socially accepted open source standards, when anybody can go look those standards up and check, is the longest of shots.
To address the bible example, plenty of variations exist, with smaller or larger deviations from each other, and they each have their own set of believers, some are even compatible with each other.
Much like the "true" ^1^ open source licences and the other, "closely related, but not quite legit" ^2^ variations.
^1^ As defined by the existing, community accepted standards set forth by the OSI
^2^ Any other set of standards that isn't compatible with ^1^
edit: clarified that last sentence, it was borderline unparseable