smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
#Lightbend (driving force behind the #Scala programming language) is making #Akka actor-based programming model a proprietary project.
They are moving from #Apache 2.0 to Business Source License (BSL) v1.1
> Sadly, open source is prone to the infamous “Tragedy of the commons”, which shows that we are prone to act in our self-interest [..]
They call their new model 'Sustainable Open Source'
> This means that companies using the software for profit need to give something back
so: Proprietary
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
The announcement:
https://www.lightbend.com/blog/why-we-are-changing-the-license-for-akka
HN discussion:
Arne Babenhauserheide
@humanetech that said: They can do that, for sure. It is legal and I don’t see reason to complain. You cannot trust a project to stay free if it is licensed without copyleft or requesting that you assign them your code without guaranteeing that it stays free.
I think people don’t take the license of projects they use seriously. The license allows such relicensing.
Use a copyleft-licensed project with outside contributors if you want the project to stay free.
Arne Babenhauserheide
@humanetech it’s basically a cc by-nc? https://www.draketo.de/light/english/politics/free-culture-danger-noncommercial
NC covered works trick people into investing in a dead end
tok 🕊️
@ArneBab @humanetech Exactly that: "Use a copyleft-licensed project with outside contributors if you want the project to stay free."
And as mentioned, the outside contributors must remain copyright holders of their contribution. So there should not be any transfer of the Copyright upon contribution.
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
@pixelcode yeah, you probably right. I just make the definition from a bit radical FOSS perspective.. could've nuanced or mentioned it is a 'non-open-source' model according to the FOSS definition of what that entails. I don't know if all the different variations and flavours that are 'almost' FOSS are helping or hurting the community.
Pixelcode 🇺🇦
@humanetech Why would you call that “proprietary”?
Proprietary means the comprehensive reservation by the author of all or almost all intellectual property rights to which he is entitled; and that's not what Akka do.
While they don't unconditionally grant the four software freedoms to anyone, they also don't reserve all rights. Instead, they grant software freedoms under certain conditions – that's not “all rights reserved” or “proprietary”.
Simon Phipps
@humanetech Another company that no longer needs to build a community to monetise. https://meshedinsights.com/2021/02/02/rights-ratchet/
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
@webmink that is a nice summary. Thanks. Will bookmark that.
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
@pixelcode ah, way better. I may have been one morning coffee away from typing that :D
Pixelcode 🇺🇦
@humanetech Yeah, I mean you can call it non-free software, at least. ?
Simon Phipps
@humanetech They are leveraging a CLA, as all rights-ratchet companies do - its' an early indication to stay away. See https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-license/
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
"Our lawyers created a unique legal situation without prior jurisprudence that you probably need a lawyer for to properly understand its real implications. But we know you probably won't do that"
Simon Phipps
@humanetech Hey look, they even cite Apache as justification and proclaim superiority to FSF because it is not a copyright transfer. https://www.lightbend.com/contribute/cla
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
Btw, great blog you are running ?
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@webmink @humanetech One of their “slight” changes to the Apache CLA is to outsource patent research to contributors. How nice.
Eduardo Mercovich
It is interesting that the so called "tragedy of the commons" is really "the tragedy of the lack of Commons" since in the case of a real, alive Commons, they would have cared together the common resource.
This can be done with strategies as "pool, cap and divide up" or "pool, cap and mutualize", or "pool and share" any of other many existent possibilities as they been doing for millennia before capitalism even existed.
1/2
Eduardo Mercovich
For those interested in advancements in Commons after Ostrom , Silke Helfrich and David Bollier did great work on those patterns and more in their excellent book http://freefairandalive.org/
2/2
Eduardo Mercovich
The book cited before has something about non-rivalrous resources in #Commons. Also, many other great insights and patterns learned from many different Commons around the world.
One could think that non-rivalrous resources would be easier to co-manage than rivalrous ones, but the issue definitively deserves some thoughts... :)
Simon Phipps
@edumerco
The "tragedy of the commons" those works deal with seem to me to be dominated by managing rivalrous goods and lack treatments to deal with non-rivalrous situations like software without eliminating their essential freedoms. I would be fascinated to see a treatment that properly considers non-rivalrous goods. Do you have any pointers?
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
@reidrac thanks for the correction. They were driving force when I last involved in #Scala, and with Jonas Bonér and Odersky at (then) Typesafe Inc.
reidrac
@humanetech I wouldn't call them "driving force". They already dropped Play and made it a community project, Akka was important, not sure now. The Typelevel stack (or even ZIO) seem more popular now. I wonder if that's part of the story.
YesBait
@humanetech reminds me of this old post by David A. Wheeler: https://dwheeler.com/blog/2006/09/01/
Emacsen
@algernon @aral @t0k @ArneBab @humanetech
I remember that Qt survived this way for a long time, using a dual-license scheme, and while I think that dual licensing is not ideal, I wonder about the issue of harm to the commons vs the benefits of an income to keep the economic viability of a project under the current economics.
Gergely Nagy ?
@emacsen @aral @t0k @ArneBab @humanetech Not an option unless the project in question requires copyright assignment, or can otherwise ensure you remain the sole copyright owner for the duration of the custom license, or the license is for one particular version, and does not cover future version, updates, etc.
That's a whole lot of legal hurdles for likely not a lot of money.
Emacsen
@aral @t0k @ArneBab @humanetech
Genuine question...
What do you think of the idea that instead of saying no, you had said "Let's negotiate for a non-transferable, annual license fee."
?
ar.al?
@t0k @ArneBab @humanetech There’s a reason I license nearly everything I do under AGPL ;)
Someone wrote to me recently asking if I could relicense it because he didn’t want to share his code. I told him it wasn’t nice to take from the commons without giving back to it and that yes, I could but no, I wouldn’t.
The nerve of some people… ?♂️
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.