Open Source Is at a Crossroads  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: Open Source Is at a Crossroads - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/0ebe6abf-d44b-4ad6-a8cd-e5b915e8f529 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Developer Apathy** - Developers' apparent indifference towards open source definitions stems from not having to worry about them due to existing protections. - Arbitrary license restrictions based on usage create complexities for developers and businesses. Transcript: Jerod Santo You think? Steve O’Grady Certainly that's the argument. And with all due respect to Matt, who I think is a great guy, I find that argument nonsense to be honest. An example that I used in the piece that I wrote up is it's like climate change. It's like arguing that because your average citizen doesn't care about climate change, the climate change doesn't matter. And I think most people who understand the science and the implications of it would argue, no, actually it matters quite a bit regardless of sort of what they think. And so the fact of the matter is that developers don't care in large part because they haven't had to because of the definitions that we've had. And developers have been able to use this huge variety of open source software from operating systems, web servers, containers, languages, frameworks, pick them. We have this sort of immense library of a software that's been available and importantly has been available under open source terms without arbitrary use restrictions. So it didn't matter how many users your company had, it didn't matter how much money your company was making. And that's the thing is that the argument from folks behind these licenses is, oh, it's not a big deal, the source is available, which great. Look, if I had a choice between a source available sort of asset and one that was totally proprietary, I'd pick the source available for sure, because you want the right to inspect the Code, you want the right to take a look at what's happening. But the problem is that when you introduce these arbitrary restrictions, which the traditional definition of open source prohibits, all of a sudden things get complicated pretty Quickly, because it's not clear. But first of all, if you're using a bunch of these projects, okay, which restrictions apply to which license, in other cases, if you're a developer, you may not have access to that, right? You may not have access, for example, if you were to start up what your actual revenue is, you don't know that, right? So how do you ensure that you're complying with the terms of a license? So, you know, at the end of the day, it is sort of I don't quibble with the argument that developers don't care. I just don't think it's terribly meaningful, right? They don't care because they haven't had to because of this definition. And unfortunately, you know, again, kind of like climate change, you know, sort of that, not at all benign neglectity will is not doing anybody any favors in my view at this point. Right. ([Time 0:10:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/195563ee-8c23-4203-9868-88b33d05a418)) - **JSHint's Licensing Challenge** - The JSHint project faced adoption challenges due to its "for good, not evil" clause, which was eventually removed. - It was a huge headache to remove this clause from the license. Transcript: Jerod Santo Guess one piece of evidence to this point is the JS hint project, Adam, do you recall this episode? We did years ago with Mike Panese, I did recall this, who had to go around. So JS hint was a widely used JavaScript linter, and it had the MIT license, except for at the end was the phrase, the software shall be used for good not evil, which is an ethical kind of A thing. But it was just an addendum. And that was out there. And when Mike Panese took the project over, there's lots of trouble where it couldn't get adoption because that added vagary or just question marks around the license, even though Other than that, because like, how do you define good and evil, right? And so he spent, he told us the whole story how much work he went through in order to get that real license, he had to go back and find all the contributors from times past and get them all To sign a thing. And it was a huge headache. He finally got it all done. That episode was called You Can Finally Use JS Hint for Evil, which I thought was a good way of saying it. But that's, I guess, that's an evidence of like, if you if you if you make it vague and confusing, you really are presenting a lot of challenges for a lot of people. Yeah. ([Time 0:16:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2bcfec2e-13f6-4f93-94c1-5d3f07b9001c)) - **The Allure of "Open Source"** - There's a clear advantage to labeling software as "open source." - This incentivizes some to blur the lines for their own benefit. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak There's an obvious advantage to calling yourself open source. And I think that's the challenge here is like the definition is becoming blurred, besieged even as you as you'd said, in regards to the advantage you get from being in quotes open source. And so some will want to blur the line for their own advantage, whether intentionally or unintentionally, there is there's an advantage to being open source. And that's why there's a desire to be open source, even though you're not right. Steve O’Grady Yeah, clearly, we have ([Time 0:21:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c2a56ef-aa83-49b1-93df-2c75c3176e6d)) - **OpenTF Fork** - HashiCorp's relicensing of Terraform prompted a fork, OpenTF, due to community concerns. - The OpenTF effort highlights the value of open source goodwill. Transcript: Jerod Santo It reminds me of what Josh Padnick said, one of the guys behind OpenTF when he was on the show a couple weeks back about Terraform and his involvement and the sentiment from the large group Of people who decided to fork it. I asked him because the bait and switch aspect of what Ashley Corp did was a driving factor in their feelings. And I said, well, what if it would have been business source from the start? Because then you wouldn't have the bait and switch, but you would not have had an open source project. You would have had a business source project from the very beginning. And his statement was, we would have never invested like we did around a business source project. The fact that it was open source is why they got thousands of developers and probably tens of thousands of hours of labor put into the project because of the goodwill that exists with An open source project where business source is very close. I mean, it's even open source eventually, as they say, but it's not the same thing. And so people see the difference. And so they really want it to be the same thing because, yeah, you have your cake and you need it too. Steve O’Grady Yeah, ([Time 0:23:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29778211-5647-4fa9-999f-aa4b4d878301)) - **Goodwill and Trust in Open Source** - Recognize the multi-level nature of goodwill and trust, both at the individual and aggregate levels. - Consider the wider implications of relicensing on the development ecosystem as a whole. Transcript: Steve O’Grady And I think it's actually that that's sort of goodwill. And I would add into that, you know, the trust, right? I think is sort of multi level, right? Because in other words, we tend to think about it sort of on a purely on a single on a per project or per company basis. Right. So that's typically how we sort of look at this, think of this, etc. And it's like, Oh, hey, what does it mean in the context of this project? Right. So when we talk to vendors and every, I'm pretty sure every vendor that has realized and says, talk to us first, you know, at least to sort of brief us and say, Hey, here's what we're doing. And, you know, one of the things that we hear, you know, in those conversations is, hey, this is not a big deal. Our community will be fine with it and so on, which, you know, that's not typically how it plays out, but you know, some communities care more than others. But again, as we talked about earlier, it's selfish in the sense that they're looking at a purely from the perspective of of their company, which look, you know, you have shareholders To keep happy and everything else, I get it, you know, this is kind of capitalism that work. But the reality is, is that in the aggregate, right, the behavior is extraordinarily problematic, right? Because basically, if one company does this, it makes it easier for the next company, easier for the next company, easier for the next company. And ultimately, we end up in a world where, if you know, the stack that you're going to be working with is like, okay, I can't use that piece because we might compete with them. I can't use that piece because we have too many users, right? Can't use that piece because we're at this revenue level, or I can't use it because I don't know how many people we have, or I don't know, in sort of any of these. And, you know, for me, at least, you know, Redmunk is a firm that are, you know, we consider our first and foremost responsibility to be looking out for developers, frankly, even on things That they might care about themselves to try to say, hey, look, you're in the trenches, if you're building things day to day, you know, you are concerned with what you're building day To day, right? You are not saying, hey, what, okay, what happens if this, that's not what you get paid for, right? And so that's kind of our responsibility is to take a look at, all right, hey, what's happening here are sort of at scale, right? And the way that we put it to developers all the time, it's like, hey, if you're, you know, sort of, you know, in traffic, right, our job is to kind of, you know, we're a bit the earth like As a satellite and say, okay, we have traffic over here, we have traffic over there because we're trying to watch these larger patterns. And so yeah, I think it's certainly a self-motivated behavior, which is, again, sort of understandable from a capitalist standpoint, but, you know, like, a lot of things within capitals, And I say this as a capitalist, it definitely introduces some problems, sort of when you, when you scale up, right, and just, in the aggregate, it's not a great thing. Adam Stacoviak The, ([Time 0:28:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ecb40ea0-0b06-47f8-a4af-137a0882a314)) - **Open Source and the Cloud** - Existing open-source licenses accommodate cloud offerings, and companies have successfully monetized projects despite cloud competition. - Cloud providers adopting a project often validates its market leadership. Transcript: Jerod Santo Definition, it's not open source. Stephen, what do you say to folks who say, well, the definition of open source is old and too constrained and times have changed back when it was written, there was no such thing as AWS. There's no such thing as llama or AI models. And it needs to change with the times because we're trying to be open source, but we're getting our lunch eaten by large corporations taking our stuff and rehosting it or whatever they Say. And we need to change we need to expand what open source means so that we can have a broader tent and still have clarity, but just have more of us fitting inside of that definition. Steve O’Grady Yeah, so there's again, there's a lot to unpack there. So looking at it from a commercial angle, right, it's been interesting that in a number of times people have argued, well, oh, hey, it's a, you know, this cloud stuff is sort of a brand New frontier and people can pick this up and roll it. It's like, that's happened kind of forever, right? You know, commercial entities, and maybe how the networking stack, I think in, in Windows, in sort of famously was BSD license, right? And so companies have been picking up this stuff forever and sort of selling it. You know, in other words, you're like in sort of the IBM, for example, picked up and replaced and basically deprecated their own web server because they're like, not only patchy, once It's just as good or if not better. I see these models have been around for a long time, right? There's nothing new about that. And from a cloud standpoint, you know, really the argument that I always make is that there are, you know, sort of two different ways to look at it. One, which is in the early days in particular, I can't tell you how many conversations I had with, particularly people in the database space. And I was like, look, look at the growth here, you know, from a managed database standpoint, you have to spin up your own managed database, right? Otherwise, other companies are going to do it for you, right? And it took some of them a lot longer than it should have. And sure enough, they've done that. And guess what? The businesses took off, right? So in Mongo's case, I'll get the numbers probably a little wrong, but it was like about 10 years for them to hit a 100 billion run rate, you know, for the wrong-prem business, they did it In like two and a half, you know, sort of from a services standpoint, right? So, you know, sort of option number one is spin up your own services business. And oh, by the way, you can differentiate your own software in the services business by re-releasing a JSON feature, you know, features that maybe don't make it back to open source. You can differentiate pretty easily, you know, sort of when you do that, right? So there are easily ways to compete, you know, sort of on the cloud front. And then, you know, sort of the sort of other piece of this is that, you know, well, I had a conversation with, you know, somebody a while ago, which is, you know, hey, you know, nobody wants To see their work picked up and sort of just used and sort of repurposed, and you're like, that's what the licenses permit, right? I mean, that's just how this works. Like, if you don't want that, then great, don't release a note of that license. It's pretty straightforward. And the thing that a lot of the companies really don't want to hear as well is that they want to exclusively monetize an asset, which I get. Like you wrote it, you know, you want to sort of capture the maximum profits. But the interesting thing that we hear all the time is, you know, all these companies can't make money because they're competing with cloud. It's like, yeah, they've gone public, like they're multi billion dollar companies in many cases, you know, sort of, you know, while competing, you know, when they when they change Licenses, they're already multi billion dollar companies. And it's like, okay, you know, really, what are we talking about? They can make money. And in many cases, the sort of, I don't know, de facto anointment of these companies as market leaders, right? So in other words, if you're AWS, and you pick, you know, one of these companies, and you spin up your own instance, what you're telling the market is that, yeah, we've looked at all these Databases, search whatever it might be, we've looked at all of them and we think this is the best and most popular one, right? So on the one hand, that sucks if you're the company that's being competed with, on the other hand, it is a lot worse to be one of the competitors, right? Because you're like, oh, wait, so I'm not as popular. Like, you know, AWS is, you know, this is, I'm not the kind of opportunity that AWS is even interested in. So that's the thing, there are ancillary benefits, you know, to the cloud companies, you know, competing with these companies. And it's like, you know, anyway, you try to have these conversations with a lot of the vendors and don't really go that well. Perhaps not surprisingly. And ([Time 0:38:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/96ae422c-7bad-4218-866a-2e3e790f64ea)) - **Defending Open Source** - Understand that open-source definitions matter, even if you don't actively think about them. - Push back against misuse of the term "open source" by inquiring about specific licenses. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak We can't control to some degree, how we influence the weather in the area yet, or maybe individually. If the OSI is important in this ongoing definition of open source, and even the defending of it, what do you know about them that we can do this? We've never had anybody from the OSI on this podcast here. Like we talked to Josh Simmons when he was, I think, still part of the OSI, but not in light of the goings on at OSI by any means. So we've never had like a conversation. Yeah. Steve O’Grady I've reached out to Stefano, you know, for sure. And, you know, see, folk, you know, who come on, I'm sure he would. And, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, I think, you know, the difference between, you know, one of the differences I should say between climate change and open source is that there Are things that every developer can do. Right. So in other words, you know, just to understand and realize that you might not think this matters, but it does, it doesn't mean you have to do anything. Right. But also part of it is that, you know, hey, maybe you push back when somebody says, hey, I have this open source license and you're like, well, what is it? It's like a, you know, some weird non-commercial derivative. You can say, oh, cool. Hey, I appreciate the source code, but that's actually not open source. Right. And so, you know, that's the thing, like, you know, what can, you know, sort of an individual do about climate change? Probably not a lot. You know, you can make better choices, you know, from a household basis and a lot, but there are things that every developer can do. And if developers as a group, you know, sort of demonstrate that, again, not that everybody has to license everything in one way, but if they demonstrate that, hey, we care, like this, You know, these definitions matter to us, you know, even companies that are misusing the term will happen, you know, sort of stand up and pay attention. So hopefully that happens. And, you know, like I said, Stefano can, you know, coming on, I think would certainly help that. Yeah. You know, to that end. Adam Stacoviak Well, ([Time 1:12:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/77c091e2-8a5c-4476-9372-dcd921bb7b74)) - **Supporting the OSI** - Support the Open Source Initiative (OSI) by acknowledging their work and their importance. - Even small contributions can help the OSI maintain open-source definitions. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Listened to this podcast, maybe they're a CEO or a founder of said company that may be considering a bait and switch in the future. They've got a permissible licensed open source, commercial, open source software, costs, that kind of company, whatever, and they're considered, man, we've really got to get some Control here. What do you personally say to someone in those shoes to consider with this choice? Did they go to Red Monk and say, can we have you analyze our source code in our community? What do you personally say to them, you know, in regard to this consideration of, they may not mean to do a bait and switch, but it in if they do the thing it would be, ([Time 1:14:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c582a068-923e-4691-8975-2210ae9f4562)) - **Mitigating Bait-and-Switch** - Address business model issues with strategies other than license changes. - Differentiate your offerings with added services and features not in open-source code. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak What do you say to them? Steve O’Grady Well, you know, that's where it's kind of tricky in the sense that where, you know, because our responsibility is to our client, right? We have to tell them sort of what's best for them. I tend to in most cases not believe that a bait and switch is the right way to do things, you know, as certainly I don't believe it from an interesting standpoint, as we've talked about From a company standpoint, you know, basically my sort of argument, we talked about this little bit, you know, sort of earlier in the show, you know, was basically look at your model, Right? In many cases, people are trying to solve business model issues with a license. And that's not typically the way that, you know, at least in my view, right, things should be solved. So in other words, you know, if you're competing, for example, with, you know, or if you're poised to compete with, you know, larger clouds, what can you differentiate? Well, there's lots of things, right, you know, for, you know, you're offering a service, you need to offer service first, but then also you can offer a JCC, you can offer, you know, features That are not present in the open source code. And, you know, on the one hand, that's a burner because it means less open source. But on the flip side, you know, if you are still providing the code itself, the core code itself, unencumbered, you know, with these sort of complicated licenses, that's, you know, Probably a better outcome in a sort of longer term. So yeah, there's there's no one way to think about it. A lot of it depends on, you know, who wrote the IP, right? What is the precise license that you're under? What is the nature of your community? Right? What's the nature of your adoption? What's the nature of your market? So on, it's a lot of times we sit down with companies is just going through these and trying to understand, all right, what's your exact position? And, you know, what makes the best sense for you? And, you know, to the extent that we can steer people away from it, you know, great, we try and, yeah, you know, like, I think I can say that, you know, the majority of companies that have Revitalized our customers of ours, we try to talk them out of it. And in, I think the overwhelming majority of cases, and then, you know, once they'd said, okay, this is what we're going to do, then, you know, my job at that point is to try to provide the Best advice in terms of minimizing and mitigating the impact on the community, right? Okay, if you're going to do this, you know, here's what to do. You know, so for example, right, when Hashi comes out and realizes this, but it's very clear to, you know, be upfront and set expectations, this is not open source, that is the type of Advice that would give, right? Which is, you know, hey, if you're going to do this, there's a way to do it that is, you know, less damaging than the way that some other folks do. So ([Time 1:15:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/92e9a37a-b786-48fc-9b20-472ba3604bb9))