List of formerly open-source or free software
en.wikipedia.orgCan't believe I missed this Redis change. I know that one path for open source is to build a company around it, but it seems that so many of the big players that have done that do it for the early clout and move to a closed license later on.
After doing some quick reading on the SSPL, I actually don't hate it though. It seems to be completely open for those who use it themselves, but prevents the cloud providers from capitalizing on hosting your software as a product. Not truly open, but I think this is probably an okay middle ground if you want open source software from a business that's developing and selling products around that software.
The consequence is that the cloud providers just implement the Redis protocol on top of a more conveniently-licensed backend.
This turns out to not be that difficult. Postgres can be a great KVS.
And they all have existing KV storage, so they don't even have to use Postgres.
OpenRedis anyone?
> I don't hate it
But what's the point?
It's not open source, so why bother?
Whether you agree with BSD or GPL, OpenSource means you aren't locked to a vendor. The SSPL means that essentially for Redis, you are
The point is to deliver value to Redis' investors by taking advantage of customers' sclerotic executives and managers whose lack of code-level knowledge of their products means these people will pay a license fee instead of letting the engineers replace it with a FOSS alternative.
I wasn't asking why Redis would be okay with this, because that's obvious, I was asking why the gpp was happy with this.
The presence of a game named Tux Racer is an amusing one
Wow, I had no idea they close-sourced Tux Racer, that game iconic for being The Only Game For Linux!
Note: I'm joking, there was also Chromium BSU.
Don't forget FreedroidRPG, Pingus, SuperTuxKart, Neverball not to mention countless FPSs like Sauerbraten, Nexuiz (also in TFA) and a million clones of iD software games.
And that's only open source and freely redistributable games - on the commercial side there was also iD, Loki Games, LGP as well as a couple of indies even before Steam for Linux.
It'd be interesting to see a more exhaustive list, and see if that list retains the pattern of more things being closed off after interest rates rose in 2022. Suddenly "you can do whatever you want with it, we love the developer community!" idealism is replaced with "my VC will literally harvest my organs if we don't relicense this and start turning a profit." Sometimes it doesn't even make sense for it to happen.
How do they get away with relicensing GPL code?
My understanding is that you can relicense code for which you own the copywright, but if you have any other contributors, those contributions are still under GPL. So, you'd have to either get their permission to relicense or revert all their changes and subsequent derivatives.
1. Some projects only really had one maintainer, or a small group, so relicensing is a relatively easy discussion.
2. Some projects have a CLA, so all contributions have the relevant rights transferred before the patches are accepted.
3. Some projects are “open source, not open contribution”, though this wasn't common until recently, effectively making them match point 1.
4. Some relicensing is done without consideration for other contributors, in the hope that no one with skin in the game will notice (or take action if they do), so it won't bite.
5. Sometimes getting the relevant permission after-the-fact, if a CLA was not in place, isn't difficult.
Contributor agreements are often used at the time of contribution to get permission to relicence later.
> but if you have any other contributors, those contributions are still under GPL.
You hit the bull eye.
These all projects as I could see, have relatively low number of important contributors and narrow circuit, and they are mostly relatively young projects, without large number of inherited old code, so when need to throw out some code, they just need to make internal deal and rewrite all "external" code.
Once, they have all code owned by limited group, could make deal within this group, to re-license whole project with other license.
And yes, you are right, this is near impossible for big projects, because need too much resources to rewrite "external" code.
And in many cases, for big business this mean, for them is easier to just make their own new project from scratch, than to use GPL-licensed code.
Often these projects had a CLA from the beginning, so they own all the code by other contributors.
I'm surprised LiveJournal was open source. Used it so much as a edgy teenager.
I used to host such scripts on my 233mhz pentium 2 that my parents allowed me to have in my bedroom.
Exploit ridden PHPNuke anyone?
A good thing is that lots of these projects have been forked over.
But still a good lession never to sign a CLA unless you either don't care about future ownership or 100% trust the organization you are transferring your rights to.
I don’t think you can 100% trust an organization. An organization is not like a person who has a true continuity of identity and personhood. An organization is just the sum of whoever its people are. As people come and go, an organization changes. If enough people change, or have changes of heart, the organization can change completely to one you don’t recognize.
Edit: for example, Google: “don’t be evil” lasted as long as Google was run by people who cared about the technology more than profits. It used to be a search engine run by such types. Now it’s an ad engine and competition-extinguisher run by completely different types of people.
> I don’t think you can 100% trust an organization
But you have to trust. Because lifespan of human is limited (just about 40 years at most), so you cannot consider to make long term foundation based on any human. And unfortunately none human-free technology at the moment could even get close to human or human based bureaucracy as management force.
And near only known example of private organization in big tech is Dell (Ford Motor company was build as organization by Ford himself, so it was bureaucracy even when Henry Ford was at head). All others are owned at least by some family (like Walmart), and most others are just open Joint-Stock Companies, good if have large share in one human hands (or one family, like Porsche), but in many cases owned by other JSC or by government (or large municipality, like was Volkswagen) and by widely distributed list of tiny shareholders.
I'm agree, organizations are harder to understand from common sense view, but from mathematics view they are more predictable than humans.
And I'm agree, it is possible to intentionally make so much HR chaos that organization will change constantly looking unpredictable way. But in real life, even very non-experienced manager, very fast see how to make organization predictable.
For about your example, Google is very predictable for its owners and its management, even when we don't like what it become.
Here is a very useful collection of 3D APIs: https://products.fileformat.com/3d/ It allows developers to Read, Write, Convert & Manipulate 3D Documents via .NET, Java, JavaScript & C++ and more. Most of them are free and can be used with ease.
Its a pity more FLOSS software isnt AGPL. That would keep shit companies like Amazon from plundering and never providing back.
Amazon can easily comply with the AGPL, giving back code isn't the problem anyway. The problem is money, AWS gets a lot of it and devs for the software they offer as a service does not. OTOH, I read that in some situations they do revenue share, but don't know the details there.
No, it's clearly the wrong license. I would not use any AGPL software in any SaaS.
It is only the wrong licence for that reason if the project cares that you won't use it.
Why?
In the cloud provider scenario it's clearly the right license, so that it remains opensource
I would completely agree with this sentiment.
The AGPL is to protect the software you made so it can't be bundled as a service and enhancements locked away because "they aren't giving away the software".
Enhancements to PostGIS would have to be published if it was AGPL. Not literally everything that's on the network.
If someone wants to take community software but not submit fixes then I would agree that they should avoid AGPL.
Unless I miss the point of your comment.
> Not literally everything that's on the network.
Unless you're a lawyer and confident in your ability to represent me in court, then this is in fact the point of my comment.
I have zero faith in your statement.
From your response, its the exact right license.
The GPL was meant to be viral, and require contributions if you change it. GPL@ didnt understand that would be a thing.
GPL3 also had the Affero, to deal with parasite companies, like what you seem to represent. If you want to use and follow the license? Cool. Elsewise GTFO.
AGPL/GPL does not require contributions back upstream, just giving code to your users.
To be exact, GPL requirement "distribute code limitations should not exceed distribute binaries limitations", and it include derivatives, and this is tricky thing. For example, if I will use GPL licensed code in some my commercial hardware and distribute update binaries, I must also distribute code including my additions with same conditions as binaries, so if I made patches or additions (with GPL code used), I must also include code of my additions, so people could compile binaries themselves.
Viral nature of GPL is really big headache, because make big troubles to use external libs as they could be closed source, so it will be impossible to client to compile binaries himself.
Imagine, if I'll use GPL for control of nuclear reactor and have to open control schemes to comply with GPL (in real life, these things keep secret to make more hard for bad people make something wrong with such dangerous object).
This solved for very few software packages, for example, GCC, Libc, have exclusion in license, directly allowed to make closed sourced derivatives and to link external library without give access to its code (only need api definition, for example as C header).
At the same time, GPL does not limit usage of open source software by hosting companies, who don't make any contributions.
That's why some infrastructure companies switched from GPL to different licensing schemes.
The goal of the GPL is user freedom (not developer freedom), so it is intentional that it is hostile to situations where proprietary software is involved. There is the LGPL for allowing those situations though.
The GPL doesn't care about control schemes though, so your nuclear reactor example seems strange.
The GNU family of licenses don't care about contributions, only about user software freedom. In the case of hosting companies, the AGPL was created to preserve user freedom for network oriented software, it isn't perfect but is reasonably good.
It is incorrect to say these companies are switching to different licensing schemes because of lack of contributions from hosting companies, the correct reason is that the hosting companies make a lot of money and the software companies want that money for themselves.
> The goal of the GPL is user freedom (not developer freedom)
I don't think GPL way is best to achieve this goal.
I see much wider goal of modern engineering, to REuse as much work as possible, because even with modern advances with AI, we still have very limited number of engineers, so users could not got quality products and services when reuse is limited by license, so GPL effectively limiting users freedom.
Must admit, other licenses also have issues, but for user freedom I think best MIT/BSD licenses and most similar to them (Apache, etc).
Any other approach means whoever receives the code has the opportunity to reduce end user freedom, in the world of modern capitalism, they almost certainly will.
“democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried", I believe, you know who said (or could google).
So, if you will invent something really better, I will respect.
I used Simple apps from fdroid. They were sold to zippoapps quite nasty company. It was forked. We have fossify suitr now, but it left a bad taste that something like that has been done.
Seems very non-exhaustive, notably missing memtest86