Open-core concerns

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31

Hi everyone.

Disclaimer
1. I’d like to insert a brief comment that might highlight my point of view on open source development that might be of interest to this discussion. I think to help as many people here as possible about what open source is.
2. As I said before, my goal is to answer possible questions related to open source and not to start a personal attack. Given that, by: community, society, humanity, philosophy, conduct, norm: we must help each other and respect ideas that we do not agree.
3. I think this thread is very interesting, and has a lot of good and bad arguments about what open source is.
4. This text is going to be big, so I hope you all have the patience to read it and possibly point out criticisms, general problems later.
5. I don’t want to be right or wrong about any point of view, but always doubt so that it’s possible to think about different things.
6. I hope I helped, if I didn’t, I apologize.
7. I’m going to use the concept of “counter-argument” to enhance the discussion about software and community concerns.
8. I will be direct, frank and sincere in my views. Please do not think that my being direct, frank and sincere with you is the same as thinking that I am rude or disrespectful. I’m just pointing out criticism, general comments.
9. I am not a lawyer, law student, prosecutor or judge. If in doubt, consult your lawyer (I am not providing any legal advice).

I agree to disagree, because its definition of GNU GPL is not in accordance with the definition of the dictionary, the dictionary says something like: “preamble ¹: the introductory part of a statute or deed, stating its purpose, aims, and justification. preamble ²: a preliminary or preparatory statement; an introduction. preamble ³: “the main purpose” of a preamble is to introduce a text. Preambles can be part of novels, films, pieces of music, or legal documents.” That’s what I understood, and I found when researching the word “preamble” in the dictionary too. In other words, it is part of a “philosophy”, “rule”, “law”, “social contract” and “terms legal”.

Please, see this: “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.” This statement is philosophical and also an “legal term”. Because if a project or software is licensed as GPL and is contrary to GNU philosophy, in such cases, this “software”, “open project” or “closed project” should be processed. As in this case: “What should I do if I discover a possible violation of the GPL?”

I agree here.

I agree here. But this does not happen in practice, generally programs are licensed under GPL because of the GNU philosophy. Please, see this: “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.” This statement is philosophical and also an “legal term”.

It’s true, and this philosophical view is contained in the GPL software license. Please, see this: “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.” This statement is philosophical and also an “legal term”.

There are several software licenses with greater permissiveness: MIT, Apache, Unlicensed, BSD, Mozilla Public License, Microsoft Public License etc. Please, see this: “The MIT license is permissive, placing very few restrictions on how the software can be used, while the GPL license is restrictive, requiring that any changes made to the code be released under the same license, and any software that uses the code must also be released under the same license.”

The “proof that there are permissive licenses” is because the GPL license is restrictive. Therefore “software freedom is less” and greater in the permissive license. But it depends on what you consider freedom whether it is something restricted or something permissive.

Most of the libraries and frameworks on GitHub are MIT licensed and not gplv2, gplv3. Some famous projects like linux is licensed under gplv2, bitwarden is licensed under gplv3.

I think it would not be interesting to use the “utilitarian”, “practical” or “popular” argument. But in general, there are several good reasons not to use GPL: “The GPL attempts to force people and businesses to release their source code. There is nothing wrong with that, except I don’t think it qualifies as “free software”. I want anybody to be able to do anything they want with my programs and/or its source code. I have no reason to restrict their activities. A majority of companies have already decided that their products will be closed-source even before they start designing them. If a closed-source company decides it could use some open-source code in its product, and if the code is licensed under the GPL, the company will do one of two things: use the open-source code and not tell anybody, or write their own code from scratch.”

Another good reason is this: “While GPL licensed software can be modified and redistributed as long as it remains free, BSD licensed software can be modified and redistributed under another license (including those of closed code).”

Another good reason is this: “The GPL is a complex license so here are some rules of thumb when using the GPL […]”

In short, people do not use the GPL for philosophical reasons because they do not agree with the GNU philosophy, as well as for practical, utilitarian reasons and also for other philosophical reasons, for example, by restricting development freedom, it reduces user freedom, Bearing in mind that the user will only have the available options that the license allows.

Additionally, there is the “orphan software problem” that GPL doesn’t solve as well as BSD, MIT, Apache, etc. Any company can continue a proprietary product, if the license allows it, which differs, for example, from the restrictiveness of the GPL license.

This is not what happens in practice, why would the gnu philosophy make another software license or change its own philosophy? Why would they think they are wrong when they defend “open source or that they are right”?

For example, most open projects do not follow the gnu philosophy nor, in general, follow the GPL license. In fact, this criticism is still valid today, to what extent is something “open”? Until a person decides “what is open”?

Note that I’m not talking about a moral or immoral argument, I’m not saying that the gnu philosophy is good or bad or that the GPL software license is good or bad. I’m saying in general, the criticisms of which are still valid today.

The LGPL is not a license of its own, but an extension of the GPL. See this: “This version of the GNU Lesser General Public License incorporates the terms and conditions of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, supplemented by the additional permissions listed below.”

It is not true for the previous reasons I presented. GPL licenses only produce GPL software. This alienates many people and companies who do not understand the jurisdiction of the GPL license nor the GNU philosophy.

I could argue the same for Baserow: “Baserow is itself permissively-licensed free software that is usually delivered as proprietary versions to customers.” Even because Linux and Android are still “open systems” because of the software license, and not in the practical sense that many think it should be.

In this case, Linux, Android and Baserow are still “open source”, even with “something proprietary”. For example, the fact that you have a version that doesn’t have the features you want is not unethical or immoral.

For example, there are features in different Linux distributions, and this does not mean that each Linux distribution is “proprietary” or “non-open”. In fact, the set of features that one or more Linux distributions can have is generally “guaranteed” by the community in which it was created or is maintained.

The same happens at Baserow, there are community features and features for the business model. Therefore, there is no sense in saying that Baserow is “partially open source” or should be “fully open source”.

The same case is for Baserow, it continues an “copy-center”, even though it has a proprietary part. In fact, the Baserow version is delivered openly. But it has extra features that you may or may not pay for. In this case, you can create these features if you have the money to hire a programmer or have programming knowledge.

I can say the same of the permissively licensed projects like MIT, Apache, BSD. In the case of permissively licensed projects like MIT, Apache, BSD we call something like: “copycenter” - the idea is to increase the number of distributions, versions and modifications. So, Baserow is a very interesting program and is licensed by MIT license, you have the freedom to do whatever you want in it. “This proves that MIT licenses are also as good as copyleft,” although I don’t like the idea of copyleft (for various philosophical, social, practical, intellectual, academic, commercial, personal reasons).

Also, I must emphasize that the concept of “freedoms of free software” was inspired by an old term created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 and there is even a memorial in his name with these freedoms. “Free software has not even created something so new.”, “free software” has achieved some projection thanks to famous projects such as “android”, “linux”, “emacs”, “activism”.

But most existing technologies are not open code, let alone copyleft, the internet is an example of this, “copyfree movement” is also (although I don’t like the political idea of “copyfree” and prefer “copycenter”). But in addition, there are several license versions available that are conflicting or incompatible: agplv1, gplv2, gplv3 etc. This is problematic from the perspective of which software license to choose.

It depends on what you consider “successful” or “succeeded”. For example, I consider that a technology is successful when there is a “credibility or social confidence” in this technology or when people usually “recognize the work of independent programmers.” Or when a high number of companies, governments and communities that use open software. About this, copyleft doesn’t seem to me to be “such an interesting movement.” part of what we have is “copyfree”, “copycenter” or even shared rights as CC (Creative Commons).

Also, only “2%” of GitHub projects are licensed in GPL, so it is not as “successful” as it should have. Maybe this happens because of the difficulty in finding easy information about GPL, or maybe because programmers don’t want to use GPL.

From the point of view of “copycenter”, it is best to have the “open core” software, “multi-licensing” than just the proprietary software. Also, nothing in life is: “100% free”, “100% do not pay”, “100% Libre”, “100% honest”, “100% public”, “100% commercial”, “100% private” , “100% owner”, “100% idealist”. Everything in life costs “time”, “money”, “dream”, “social relations”, “recognition”. When I speak of “cost”, I do not say in the “strict and economy” sense, but in the sense of “philosophical value”, “utility” as a “starting point to understand certain points” if “we are free” with “open source”. In this sense, there are always “risks”, “benefits” and “damage” to “open source”.

And all this can change to the “better or worse”. In this sense, we should not think that there are things in reality that they are - “unrestricted” or “restricted”. But there is an “intermediate layer or intermediate freedom with software”, which is “permissive”, “deliberative” as we may or may not solve life or software problems. What I mean here is that there is no “better and worse” scenario in software or open software licenses, it depends on what you want.

I never said, for example, that I don’t think “copyleft has no merits in terms of marketing and publicity around open software”. However, my criticism of “copyleft (gnu, fsf or projects licensed with gpl etc.)” is that the software was being left aside and continues to be left aside. Just like I talked about the “programming language and software problem”, where people with “copyleft” were much more concerned about bureaucracy than the end result of something open. Somehow this became “copyleft, a certain authoritarian copyright board for open software.” Although they (GNU or people who license things with GPL) say otherwise.

An interesting proof about this is the “many incompatibilities between the licenses produced: agpl-v1, gplv2 etc.” If there is incompatibility between licenses produced by GNU, in theory, they should be “non -free licenses” by OSD (Open Source definition). However, this does not work in practice. Since most “organizations have their own interests regarding what is opened”.

In addition, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) community has a different view of OSD(Open Source Definition), so there is an interesting problem with “who to talk about the open software.” Also, this returns to the question of “language programming and software”. If OSD (Open Source Definition) has a different point of view from the FSF (Free Software Foundation), the software licensed by FSF (Free Software Foundation) or GNU, will be open?

If you believe that “open software/open source” is “open” when there is “decentralization”. Therefore, FSF (Free Software Foundation) and OSD (Open Source Definition) should not be used as an argument - because we should consider other open source communities to check if we have “open software”, right?

Also, for example, most programming languages are made in english, so most programmers have to write in english. Therefore, there is a greater “language restriction” and “programming language” in software production for some starting programmers. If the source code is written in English, are the freedoms of the software only for those who speak or write in english?

Also, there is a problem of formalizing what we want to solve computationally or even developing a specific software license for the biggest use case. These formal problems are contained in what some call “bureaucracy” or for a better term “principle and practice”. How can we have less bureaucracy? How can we have greater principles and practices with open software?

Part of these problems occur in my analysis when there is a “formal metaphysics or formal materiality in open source”. In other words, when the principles do not work in practice, or when the practice is contrary to the principles. In the same way that people say that to have free software you need open hardware. In this case, “open software” is no longer relevant. Which isn’t quite true. One thing does not depend on the other, for example, the GPL does not talk about “hardware freedom”, but software freedom.

Therefore, if there is an even greater restriction on open software, perhaps the license will also be left aside as it does not represent the philosophy for which it was created.

In addition, all freedoms of open software require programming knowledge, so it makes no sense gives freedoms to users, because freedom should initially be for developers. Despite most people justifying the opposite.

What I mean by all this is that there is always dissatisfaction from developers or users, and there is not always a balance in all of this.

true.

This is true ±, because generally the GNU has a “purist” view of open software. This differs from the permissive view of licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, Unlicensed etc; with “GPL”.

This is not true, because generally the GNU has a “purist” view of open software. This differs from the permissive view of licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, Unlicensed, etc.

This I agree, that’s why I don’t understand people using things like GPL to launch “open software”, and in practice there are freedoms that are out of software. In this sense, GPL remains a “restricted, fanciful license” because it does not fulfill what it promises.

I agree with you here. I am really not trying to convince it otherwise, but that is why an permissive license like Apache, Mit, BSD has a longer reach to get a GPL license. So much so that the “copyleft community (GNU etc)” created the LGPL version as “alternative to MIT license or BSD, Apache”. In the sense of being a middle ground.

For me, these topics make no sense, because in a practical way discuss aspects of economy and politics, make no sense. It is better to discuss the aspect of culture or society with open software.

For me “copyleft makes no sense”, so I prefer “copycenter”. This is an interesting topic, but it is different from what we are proposing or discussing here. But there is something you would like to add very interesting here: Copyfree is not so different from the vision of the “transcopyright” license. According to the vision of the “transcopyright” license, everything we have in the world was done by someone today, in the past or in the future. So everyone has the same rights, duties, obligations in the legal sense, social of the word.

In this sense, even “copyleft” is a “shared rights movement”, in the sense that it allows for anyone the continuous manifestation and extension of their right. For example, by letting everyone freely copy your work, you are allowing people to manifest such a right. What does not nullify the objective to which copyright was made, although companies and industries in the past or even today have taken the fundamental rights to which copyright is still present.

“Transcopyright license” understands that any published material on the Internet is the right of everyone, so people can do whatever they want with this material, from charging a fair, expensive or free amount. For this reason some say the truth of “open software” is that “open software is a shareware”, it is software with few resources to which people use.

“Proof of this fact” are the different Linux distributions with different types of features and different types of target audience. In this case, it is still possible to have a trademark right on open software, as long as open software is shared with everyone.

It’s the same as Baserow, anyone can keep this software with any feature you want, now if you don’t want to keep this by a cloud feature that is kept by the brand that initially created the code. The overall and ultimate aspect of this is the right to reparable, that is, how something is open anyone can charge the price they want to repair their software, hardware etc.

Some copyleft problems may be more or less known, but some that I can mention are these:

“Ideology”: One of the problems that people complain most about the copyleft movement is that it has become a “sect”, an “ideology”. What has distanced and still distances many people and programmers with the GPL license. In addition, it distanced many companies, because companies could not understand the legal aspect of GNU philosophy or the aspect of GPL license. What created an even narrower division of the users with developers, where users thought developers were “employed” from the users. The GNU was so concerned with open software that it stopped creating open software. So much so that there is a relevant discussion here: “What is the reason that GNU Hurd did not become more popular than Linux?”

“Copyleft movement”:" Another problem related to copyleft is that the “copyleft movement” stopped worrying about the software, and was more concerned with the economy, politics leaving the software aside. Because of this, there was not so much mass adoption of something really open. For many, the biggest problem was the concentration of certain political and economic activism, failing to build an open ecosystem. Furthermore, there were many controversies said by the Richard Stallman.

“Copyright”: Another recurring problem was his own philosophy, which stated “created”, “could create” open software. But in general, it has removed rights from developers, and most programs are done by programmers and not by users. In addition, it brought a lot of greater “bureaucracy as much as the owner software companies”. To prove this, see that the source code is 2% of the source code is used for the GPL. Furthermore, for many, the copyleft movement was actually a “copyright hack”, which did not abolish copyright as you mention.

“Problems never solved:” Another problem was that the software was open, when there was never such a possibility that the software was opened by restricting licenses. Such proof is the versions of AGPL, GPLV3. In general, the problem when licensing copyleft software is version incompatibility.

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Hi everyone.

Disclaimer
1. I’d like to insert a brief comment that might highlight my point of view on open source development that might be of interest to this discussion. I think to help as many people here as possible about what open source is.
2. As I said before, my goal is to answer possible questions related to open source and not to start a personal attack. Given that, by: community, society, humanity, philosophy, conduct, norm: we must help each other and respect ideas that we do not agree.
3. I think this thread is very interesting, and has a lot of good and bad arguments about what open source is.
4. This text is going to be big, so I hope you all have the patience to read it and possibly point out criticisms, general problems later.
5. I don’t want to be right or wrong about any point of view, but always doubt so that it’s possible to think about different things.
6. I hope I helped, if I didn’t, I apologize.
7. I’m going to use the concept of “counter-argument” to enhance the discussion about software and community concerns.
8. I will be direct, frank and sincere in my views. Please do not think that my being direct, frank and sincere with you is the same as thinking that I am rude or disrespectful. I’m just pointing out criticism, general comments.
9. I am not a lawyer, law student, prosecutor or judge. If in doubt, consult your lawyer (I am not providing any legal advice).

There is no “proprietary code” from the “copyleft” license perspective - or the software is “open” or “not open”. For example, you are talking about the community version (that she is licensed by MIT, and that in her opinion; and from what I researched it is still acceptable if you don’t include the owner code).This license is community-based and does not have a proprietary code.

Therefore, it makes no sense to complain about the version of the “Community of Baserow” if it does not have the resources you want, as it is an open and community version. It is like having an open source license, but complaining about not being entitled to the server or programming knowledge.

Also, what I said from the beginning is that there is no guarantee of the same resources in open versions. “The fact,” for example, the software is licensed in MIT, the GPL does not guarantee that it will be opened. Because from the moment everything is open, it is difficult to know what is open. Why do you worry about the fact of the self-host version Baserow in to be like the cloud version?

I mean, your concern is not much sense, because you are complaining about the community version in “self-host”, which is different from the cloud version, are different licenses. The goal of each of these licenses is different and is for the different audience. Although they have a common code base. Why do the versions of the “cloud” and the “self-host” should be the same or have the same resources?

I ask forgiveness. but I said in the “organizational sense, in the sense of reference of authority.” Just as you said the open definition is made by OSD(Open Source Definition), I said on the other hand that open software is made by FSF (Free Software Foundation). That is, there is a demand for “very loud control” about “what is open”, more than in the past, when there was a lot of worry when a company with some software has copyright.

What I said was exactly that: “Everyone else has permission to use the software under the terms of the license.” On the other hand, I stressed that, despite this, implicitly here that there are certain rules of conduct in the distribution and commercialization of the software in a given community. That is, despite the license there is a certain shared right in the sense of the conduct norm in which the software is inserted. In this sense, although copyleft is different from copyright, there is a lot of “bureaucracy” in the legal process of open software. In other words, although the public does not share copyright, what happens is that there is a lot of processing and process when dealing with open source. So much so that some open communities choose software only with “GPL license”, such as: Dragora GNU/Libre Linux. That is, usually these software begins with the idea of GNU philosophy. And are usually licensed with GPL only.

In general, there is a “shared right” towards what comes in and what comes out within certain Linux distributions. I’m not talking bad about copyleft or using some moralizing argument. Generally speaking, the idea of open software is something different from the philosophy for which GNU has as purpose, plan, proposal, dream and desire.

Overall, any programmer has to ask permission to add or remove features in packages. This permission in turn is an imposition of those who own the Linux repository or distribution, that is, we must be allowed by those who authorize or have a copyright right to authorize our changes. Otherwise, our fork only stay with ourselves.

That’s exactly what I said, but although “copyleft grant public freedoms”. In practice, this right or condition of law is not done by bureaucracy and also by a certain authority of those who have the repository, a source of code. Although the code of code is not of this person, in the economic sense, some people have some recognition.

For example, this is what I said in a contradiction that there are “shared rights” in the sense that there is an imposition of “right accepted changes and other that are rejected” for it. There are copyright Within copyleft when there is no right dialogue Between developers. When only one or more developers decide what enters and comes out within the open project.

There are people who think they can have the code of something produced, when that same thing should be of everyone’s right.

You never know why people choose open code, only the company, government or some community can know. For a final user, the only question is, “do I have to pay for it? Is it not paid?” instead of something like “How can I help?”, “How can I contribute?”, “What problems can I solve here?”

It’s not logically valid, but most people also use this argument to defend the GPL.

This is what I have argued several times.

I like the idea of a copycenter (without ideology), is practical, is apolitical (they don’t care about politics, economics) but creates things the way you want.

That’s not so true. The truth is that the “open movement” and the “internet itself” began with “anarchism”, but later lost focus to another political field. About GNU, FSF and OSI today and before there are important differences. The GNU, FSF and OSI were “anarchists”, today they are no longer.

There are several anarchist philosophers that you forgot or forget with this statement of yours. A curious fact is that the “internet is anarchist”. To prove this “historical fact (because we must start from someone who recorded the historical period)”, there is a text that talks about the internet and includes this passage that the internet is anarchist: “the idea of a decentralized stateless society in which people interact with purely voluntary ideological and moral transactions exemplifies the internet’s inherent architectural anarchism. Although unpremeditated, the internet is the perfect example of a large scale anarchist organization.”

In other words, there are many interesting things that anarchists propose and that today are still a good way to debate and problematize: “decentralization vs centralization of power”, “dehierarchy vs hierarchy” etc.

I think in this sense that we should be open to criticism and commenting on anything.

This is a good starting point if you have time to talk to me sometime.

This is very complicated in practice, because my opinion is irrelevant to the organizations that take care of the code being open.

I understand your concern here, but there are several problems that are difficult to resolve.

There are several famous projects that are forks, such as Linux, which is a fork of Minix, and which later became its own open source version and implementation.

If you only care about politics, economics or the opinion of the FSF, OSD etc. It doesn’t care about the idea of open source, but about the ideology of open source. Also, you said you like the marketing and advertising of the code being 100% open. I said that open source is not intended for marketing or advertising.

My criticism regarding this is that we should have love for technology and not for ideology.

The fact that a company or community says that it works with open source is not marketing or advertising. It would only be marketing or advertising if you changed the label and said it was 100% open. As I had already said, this labeling position is wrong and does not involve technology.

That’s exactly what I said, that the GNU philosophy and the GPL license itself, makes people leave the path of technology and go to the path of ideology, to the point of forcing companies to be open. This decision is not made by the user, but by those who work at the company.

In technology there is no such thing as 100% open, as I said there is no such thing as partially open or completely open. What’s on the license is what’s on the license.

From what I researched and read, your concern was not with technology, but with marketing or advertising around open source. I said that on the other hand, technology has no marketing or advertising. For example, the fact that the FSF or OSD says that something is open does not imply that the technology is open. One thing is technology and another is the ideology of “open source”.

I care about open technology, not open source ideology.

My impression is that you are forcing the company to have an open source version with features that you didn’t pay to have. I said that this concern is not necessary when you are in a community and have read and accepted the terms of use. Just as this concern is outside of what the software license allows.

I have more doubts than certainty, so I always ask someone to present criticisms, extra comments or different points of view.

The Baserow self-host license is different from the Baserow cloud version.

I don’t judge anyone, I just said what I think. In the same way that you think the community version of Baserow is bad, I don’t think it is.

I agree. What I said was that your concern may not be that of most people here. This does not mean that your concern is not true, just that it is not directed to the business models or what the license proposes that you want.

Remember that distributing software under a permissive license like the MIT Software License allows you to do whatever you want. Therefore, the company or community decides whether to maintain a proprietary version and a community version. Or a single open source version.

I like the idea of transparency, but not the appearance (advertising and marketing). For me, and I know I can be wrong, but we should solve the specific problems. For example, I suggest some ideas here, and I hope people point out what is good or bad of these ideas.

In addition, there are programs like MulladvPN that don’t worry about marketing or advertising to be opened, because they believe it is more important to have a good tool from a technological point of view than to create something of empty value.

I’m not saying you care about your appearance, but it seemed like that before. After talking to you, overall I think I can understand and realize that there are similar problems that we have in common but differ in some ways.

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yes yes, fine. The preamble in the GPL is legally significant because it explains the philosophical motivation and thus is usable when lawyers and courts work to interpret the rest of the license. I accept that. This just again shows the fuzziness in that there’s no hard line between philosophy and legal rules.

Yes, it is. But you could also say “protective”. It adds limits, limits which are designed to protect freedoms. Is a law against slavery “restrictive” because it rules out selling oneself into slavery? The question isn’t whether GPL has these freedom-protecting restrictions, the question is whether they are indeed more or less effective at maximizing freedoms. People who care about anarchistic removal of rules as “freedom” do not support copyleft. Hence the copyfree stuff I linked. If you want to read a statement that summarizes all these issues from my perspective, see Snowdrift Wiki - FLO Licensing Discussion

FWIW, RMS has taken to calling “permissive” licenses, “pushover” licenses. They absolutely are free, but also they permit people to just discard the freedoms and not pass them on to others.

Despite the decent reasoning of many of your points, you really have not made an argument that supports this conclusion. “X is Open Source” implies and arguably directly means that the entire software that is X has source code available under an Open Source license. That is simply not true for Baserow because the proprietary features are considered part of the software that is named “Baserow”. If they were named “Baserow-extras” or something so that “Baserow” as a name referred reliably only to the Open Source core, then “Baserow is Open Source” would be more valid. As long as “Baserow” refers to the whole service or company or the full software including the proprietary parts, then it is not clear (and is easily seen as a misrepresentation) to simply say “Baserow is Open Source”. None of your other points about the practical issues of business models or decisions etc. affect this basic issue of clear, accurate representation.

You can have an opinion that clear accurate representation of the Open Source nature of the product is unimportant, but then we just disagree. I have expressed why I think it is important and what motivations underlie that view. You have brought up valid issues that show how complex the issues are. However, I still think it matters for the public to generally care about Open Source (more than they do now, that’s a concern) and to care about whether products have proprietary aspects or not.

I believe you are mistaken. Free Software did not even originally have four freedoms. RMS started with fewer and added more over time when he decided some important point was missing. You can look into this history if really curious. So, the “four freedoms” of RMS and of FDR are a coincidence. FDR was not the model for RMS.

Well, tons of GitHub projects are not even licensed. And there’s entire complex discussions about this pattern where people claim a move away from GPL. I think the pattern is real, but it’s not that simple. I don’t have time to find the links, but I’ve been at several talks and discussions on this topic. Suffice to say, this is another case where it’s complex once you really look into it.

Even the GNU perspective agrees with that.

Well, here you are just plain wrong. GNU does have a purist view. GNU does say that all proprietary software is bad. But GNU very explicitly says that more free software is better than less. GNU does not say that MIT-licensed software is bad or wrong or might as well be proprietary. It explicitly states that MIT-licensed software is perfectly fine, and it says that making proprietary versions is bad and wrong.

But again, you brought up copyleft vs permissive, and that wasn’t even my focus in any of this.

First I’ve heard that term. But yes, copyright as a whole is problematic. A top-down legal enforcement of software freedom could be:

  • abolish copyright
  • mandate source release for all published works
  • prohibit DRM or other technical limitations that frustrate freedoms

Obviously, this isn’t going to happen. And obviously it would be such a change to the world, I can’t predict all the ramifications. Copyleft is a hack of copyright law, and as such, as acknowledged by GNU and otherwise, a hack is a workaround and has pitfalls and problems.

No, this is the whole issue. I’m not just talking about the community version. If I was, there would be no issue. This whole topic is about

I know much of the history and many of the people in all these things, and it’s just not true that they were all or mostly anarchists. That anarchists were among them, sure. RMS has never been anarchist. All his life, he’s supported various sorts of state rules and government and simply expresses opinions about what laws are better or worse within that.

Well, if it wasn’t a marketing issue, then Baserow and others wouldn’t be advertising the term. You can have an opinion that it ought not be a marketing topic, but in reality it is a marketing topic.

The topic is “Baserow is Open Source”, and that is correct if “Baserow” is the MIT-licensed repo and incorrect if “Baserow” is the whole product as described at the homepage. And that is the topic I brought up. And “in technology…” is irrelevant rhetoric as are the side-issues of all the practical issues of freedom in the complex reality of the world.

This can come across as “you care about open source ideology” though you didn’t say it that way. And I have expressed why I care. As in, I care for real-world reasons, not for ideology as an end in itself. You have mostly stuck to distractions about copyleft, assertions about dictionaries, and some reasonable side topics and agreements and opinions… you simply responded not at all to the core points about the power dynamics and patterns of how open-core projects can (and have historically) become less and less open and how forking by the community is more limited when only a portion of the product is Open Source. So, the issue you could deal with that is actually the point is: If the community wants to fork Baserow because of objections with where the company is going, they cannot include Kanban and other proprietary features without the work of reimplementing them. This creates friction in moving the community to the fork, and this challenge gets greater the more Baserow adds proprietary features to the product over time. Thus, Baserow’s proprietary features serve as a practical lock-in that makes forking less likely and less effective. Thus, if I come to rely on Baserow as a user, I am at a greater dependency and greater impact of their future decisions than if all the features were put into the Open Source MIT repo. This is not ideology, this is specific concerns. Ignoring all these points and just saying “I’m not into ideology and you are” is not a constructive discussion.

What do you think about this actual point that Baserow reserving proprietary features serves to reduce the capacity of forking as a check on their direction as a company?

Again, the idea is that a company that puts all their code into the Open Source repo is a company that must work that much harder to not do things that would upset the community and lead to a fork. And again, there is a history of many cases of once-mostly-Open-Source projects that got more and more proprietary over time and maybe even went full proprietary (stopped putting any updates under Open Source terms), and this contrasts with cases where fully Open Source projects were forked and continued (even sometimes leading to the death of the original in practice) when the community objected to a direction. This pattern also has cases where we could speculate about whether Open Source projects choose not to make user-hostile decisions because they understand that they do not have the community locked-in.

Again, these concerns are not a matter of dogma and ideology.

FWIW, I am not saying that all open-core projects eventually sell-out their Open Source foundations and go more and more proprietary and get more user-hostile. I’m saying that this pattern has indeed happened and that without check-and-balances and things to discourage this pattern, companies are more tempted to make decisions that might serve profit over people. A project that commits to making all their work Open Source (e.g. Discourse, the software we are using here in this forum) has avoided any temptation to abuse the power they have with exclusive control over some proprietary features — because they have chosen not to have that control. They have instead decided to focus on hosting services, paid support, pay-for-custom-development, and other business models that don’t compromise their Open Source status; and they maintain their leadership position as a company by not pissing-off the community (which is why nobody has made a push for forking Discourse).

1 Like
34

Hi everyone.

Disclaimer
1. I’d like to insert a brief comment that might highlight my point of view on open source development that might be of interest to this discussion. I think to help as many people here as possible about what open source is.
2. As I said before, my goal is to answer possible questions related to open source and not to start a personal attack. Given that, by: community, society, humanity, philosophy, conduct, norm: we must help each other and respect ideas that we do not agree.
3. I think this thread is very interesting, and has a lot of good and bad arguments about what open source is.
4. This text is going to be big, so I hope you all have the patience to read it and possibly point out criticisms, general problems later.
5. I don’t want to be right or wrong about any point of view, but always doubt so that it’s possible to think about different things.
6. I hope I helped, if I didn’t, I apologize.
7. I’m going to use the concept of “counter-argument” to enhance the discussion about software and community concerns.
8. I will be direct, frank and sincere in my views. Please do not think that my being direct, frank and sincere with you is the same as thinking that I am rude or disrespectful. I’m just pointing out criticism, general comments.
9. I am not a lawyer, law student, prosecutor or judge. If in doubt, consult your lawyer (I am not providing any legal advice).

I accept this statement, idea.

yes yes, fine. But maybe “it confirms my thesis that the GNU philosophy and the GPL license are imprecise and rigid.” Please, see this: 1- Why I Don’t Use the GPL, 2- Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project

One of the general problems with software is that if you don’t have money to pay a lawyer or someone who studies and understands the law, many of your rights will not be possible. Due to ignorance and lack of knowledge.

In the case of the GPL, some people don’t license it because they don’t have time to read all the documentation about it. That’s why some people don’t risk using it. Furthermore, some people also consider it imprecise or rigid in some points.

Linus Torvalds considers the error to be the GPLv3 license, Google considers the AGPL license also to be an error, as it appears to be something “judicially malicious” - to legally force the delivery of the entire code base of customers or people.

In the same way that creating malicious code is considered bad legally, forcing someone to contribute source code is also considered bad (at least according to Google, Linus torvalds)

Which is “unnecessary”, considering that most of the open projects licensed by the GPL are contrary to its philosophy. Furthermore, permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD, Apache have been gaining more strength than the GPL license. Which proves that such designed limits do not protect the freedoms for which it was created. Therefore, I think imposing freedoms on software is unnecessary and inaccurate.

I would like to include your own phrase and argument: “The question is not whether the GPL has these restrictions that protect freedom, the question is whether they are in fact more or less effective in maximizing freedoms.” In this sense, I don’t think the GPL maximizes, protects the freedom of users and developers.

From an ‘anarchist’ point of view: “Is this GPL in fact more or less efficient in maximizing other freedoms? What are the other conditions under which GPL might restrict further abuses?”

I would like to include your own phrase and argument again: “The question is not whether the law has these restrictions that protect freedom, the question is whether they are in fact more or less effective in maximizing freedoms.” From an ‘anarchist’ point of view: “Is this law in fact more or less efficient in maximizing other freedoms? What are the other conditions under which this law might restrict further abuses?”

I accept this statement, idea.

I don’t think that statement is true. It is not necessary for people to remove the freedom of copyleft, copyleft itself removes the conditions under which it is possible to have copyleft. Also, copyleft freedoms are contradictory, they cancel themselves out. Also, there are people leaving copyleft to go to “unclicensed” or “copycenter” type licenses - these people didn’t need to remove any copyleft freedoms. Also, the copycenter movement (MIT, BSD, Apache…) and “unlicensed” licenses are already used to a certain extent and have the freedom of copyleft.

I didn’t say I was an anarchist, I just used arguments to point out what I was trying to say, that we have different concerns with open software. Also, the “GPL software license” is more of a code of conduct than a software license, the “GPL software license” was created by the GNU philosophy, so in a way it is more of a code of conduct than a software license. Although they say (people who license in GPL or like the GNU philosophy) the opposite.

People may have different opinions about the code of conduct or licensed software, which does not imply that the different opinions are good or bad, but that they are incompatible with each other or may differ, in which case freedoms may change from person to person . This does not mean that freedom was taken away, but that it was redefined, that is, people can give new meaning to something that does not necessarily mean removing what was old or current. For example, non-copyleft options like copycenter are interesting to me. And in some ways this still supports copyleft freedoms in another way.

I’ll read it when I have time and calm, but thanks for the comment.

This is why many people stay away from copyleft (fsf, gnu) because of these opinions. But something interesting is that even the GPL license, which is restricted in a certain way, also does not guarantee that the distribution is 100% open. Even if someone says otherwise, there is a problem of principle and practice, as you already stated, that confirms the suspicious position about whether the GPL license is actually good or makes sense for software development. Some people call the GPL license the “crayon license” - as you also confirmed by saying that copyleft is a “hack” of copyright.

I already argued about this, I said that your concern with the term 100% open is not always accurate, and I also said that open source code is what is included in the software license. In my opinion, you are complaining about features you don’t have, but by using an account on Baserow, you agree to the terms of service. You cannot complain if you are not a premium user, if you have not previously subscribed or agreed to the premium plan.

That’s exactly what I’ve been saying since the beginning. A clear and accurate representation of the nature of open source nor under a product or service is not required. I defend this point of view, as it is what the MIT license defends, and it is the same software license that the Baserow version is placed on.

That’s why I said we have similar concerns, but we have a different focus.

For example, your concern is outside the software license and business model for which Baserow was designed. Furthermore, your concern is outside the “copycenter philosophy” to which, using the MIT license, Baserow was placed. Also, your concern is not the same for OSD (Open Source Definition), FSF (Free Software Foundation), GNU (GNU’s Not Unix!). All these organizations have different concerns and objectives, that’s what I’m arguing from the beginning.

You are very intelligent and have great points of views. Although we agree differently. My concern is with technology, with the code itself. So much so that I created several Baserow technologies, I could help you create the missing Kanban features if you want.

As I said from the beginning, having part of the code can do a lot of things, there is no need to have 100% open source. Not everything in life is open, see for example “open software policies”, which do not always consider divergent or conflicting opinions.

thanks! I’m creating free (not paid) Baserow extensions, all under the MIT license: awesome-baserow. I made some forks and I’m still going to rewrite the implementation part from scratch.

It depends on what you consider “proprietary”, for example, is the trademark right owned by one person or a group of people?

For example, there are open software communities that grant trademark rights to everyone who helps with open software. In other words, it is not necessary to abolish copyright, we can create this right for as many people as possible.

It’s the same “socialist vision”, there is no need to eliminate capitalism, just use capitalism in a favorable way so that people are able to live in the most appropriate way.

Yes, I could be wrong, I said this because of the huge coincidence.

This is partly true, the fact that it does not have a license does not mean that it does not have copyright. Projects licensed without a license on GitHub are copyrighted, so there are so many projects licensed with copyright because they do not include a license, as are many licensed on MIT.

But my argument was only about licensed projects. Perhaps this argument “is still valid or could be valid or should be valid.” Because if the license changes for several projects, the opposite argument may be valid, if people license the GPL, the reason for the increase may be that people felt the MIT license is too unrestricted, restricted, or meaningless - for the they want to use.

If they (the programmers hosting code on GitHub) start not using licenses like MIT, GPL etc (maybe they use licenses like unlicensed). Perhaps we should be concerned that open source is no longer important to some or most people if these licenses (GPL, MIT, etc.) are no longer used.

An interesting problem is relicensing, when a project becomes proprietary and then opened. Or it was open and owned. Software licenses like BSD, Apache, MIT are easier in a legal sense to do this, as the distribution can be proprietary. But I moved away from the GPL for several reasons that I have already explained, from philosophical, personal reasons etc.

Additionally, there are several complex problems that I don’t think the GPL is applicable or makes sense to. The famous case is GPLv3, which Linus Torvalds himself also doesn’t think makes sense.

Another curious problem is that a “harm-free license” was considered bad. But from a logical point of view, the GPL should also be considered bad because it is not applicable in many cases and restricts the freedom of developers and users. In some cases, companies don’t use the GPL for fear of being sued for anything. For example, someone could say that charging for software is legally wrong, only no GPL-licensed software in these (for these people, companies) could charge a fair price, because charging a fair price goes against what the GPL says. has as a proposal.

The GPL argues that such a license is more a practice of conduct than an actual software license. But the GPL was made by the GNU philosophy, so in that case shouldn’t the GPL be considered as a guide to open software conduct?

This I really agree with you.

What I wanted to say is that the fact that Baserow(the community) has a proprietary part is not the same as saying that the community version must have the same functionality.

Because if the software is open, anyone can implement the missing functionality, people generally choose to pay for the extra functionality, they want to help the company grow and also because they don’t have the money to maintain their own server, so it’s fair to have a functionality extra, to which a 100% open version will cost more to maintain.

That’s not true, in discussion groups, I’ve been called a “sellout.”

This information is “biased”. If you don’t fully support the license, you might as well say it’s not “free/floss/foss/libre”. But this is not possible, because the GNU philosophy would go against the OSD (Open Source Definition). For example, the license for “unlicensed” software was considered “non-free” for the OSD (Open Source Definition) and later reconsidered as “free/libre/floss/foss”.

But now, the "Hippocratic License” license was and still is considered non-free for GNU. GNU’s argument was that the “Hippocratic License” license is ‘this is not a free software license, because it restricts what jobs users can use the software for.’ Now, the GNU philosophy produced the GPL, so from this point of view, what they want to consider as something open is outside the software, it is more of a “guide of conduct as well”? this same argument could apply to the GPL license, right?

This is a confusing argument. If you say that proprietary versions are bad and wrong, and if there is a software license that allows this, by logical conclusion(explicitly or implicitly), the conclusion is that the MIT license is bad or wrong. Furthermore, there are several statements from RMS that confirm that this position of software licenses like MIT are bad. Please, see this: “FWIW, RMS has taken to calling “permissive” licenses, “pushover” licenses. They absolutely are free, but also they permit people to just discard the freedoms and not pass them on to others.”

Furthermore, you yourself mention in snowdrift/licenses that MIT licenses are bad: " The main issue with permissive licenses is that they enable proprietary derivatives. For our discussion here and in-line with the Snowdrift.coop mission, we’ll assume a goal of promoting openness and freedom (as opposed a goal of maximizing profit or business success"

You didn’t talk about the MIT licensing problem: code control. The biggest problem with MIT licensing is the control of code changes, not the fact that it is just proprietary distribution.

Maybe “you are wrong here too”, I would say copyleft vs copycenter. I said this because your idea of open software seems to make more sense for copyleft, and here it is more copycenter, it is something more permissive. I argued something relevant here, I said that there is no such concern of yours according to permissive software licenses like mit, the fact that the software is “100% open”.

Firstly because this term is not very precise, secondly because it is not in accordance with what the license proposes, thirdly it is outside of what the software is being made and maintained by the term of use. Furthermore, the concern about something being “100% open” violates principles of individual rights that no software license in theory should abolish, in addition to your concern with the term “100% open” - this demand of yours seems to me to suggest or confirm a rigid line between philosophy and legal norms, which I don’t agree with and don’t think makes sense or is applicable. For the same reason that there shouldn’t be a strict philosophy and rules, otherwise we will be limiting people’s individual freedoms. Or as you said here: “this just again shows the fuzziness in that there’s no hard line between philosophy and legal rules.”

35

Hi everyone.

Disclaimer
1. I’d like to insert a brief comment that might highlight my point of view on open source development that might be of interest to this discussion. I think to help as many people here as possible about what open source is.
2. As I said before, my goal is to answer possible questions related to open source and not to start a personal attack. Given that, by: community, society, humanity, philosophy, conduct, norm: we must help each other and respect ideas that we do not agree.
3. I think this thread is very interesting, and has a lot of good and bad arguments about what open source is.
4. This text is going to be big, so I hope you all have the patience to read it and possibly point out criticisms, general problems later.
5. I don’t want to be right or wrong about any point of view, but always doubt so that it’s possible to think about different things.
6. I hope I helped, if I didn’t, I apologize.
7. I’m going to use the concept of “counter-argument” to enhance the discussion about software and community concerns.
8. I will be direct, frank and sincere in my views. Please do not think that my being direct, frank and sincere with you is the same as thinking that I am rude or disrespectful. I’m just pointing out criticism, general comments.
9. I am not a lawyer, law student, prosecutor or judge. If in doubt, consult your lawyer (I am not providing any legal advice).

If you have time, take a look, it’s very interesting.

true.

I don’t think this makes sense, generally laws should reflect what the people want and not something that “someone in the organizations decides for us”. I say this from the point of view of “infrastructure” and “suprastructure”, something that Karl Marx talks about. The idea that we should try to have a certain dialogue from top to bottom, bottom to top.

I don’t know if this is possible from a legal point of view, as I have no knowledge of the subject. But an ideal path for me is copycenter and not copyfree or copyleft. About DRM is something we can talk about, I know that in more depth.

Someday we can talk about this if you have time, I’m usually on GitHub creating open source projects. In general, the transcopyright license is the idea that everyone is entitled to and that can be shared among people who create modified versions. Let’s say transcopyright is the version of the GPL license in the sense of the MIT software license. For example, not only is the distribution proprietary, but any modification can be opened or closed.

That’s exactly what I said when I talked about “shared rights”, it doesn’t nullify copyright in a practical way. That’s why I said that copycenter licenses would make sense. Although as I have advised I do not know and have no knowledge of the law, although I have taken the time to read the GPL documentation.

From what I understand you were complaining about not having the features you wanted like “Kanban”. In addition to complaining, with good reason, about the fact that “Baserow is not 100% open” in the sense of the terms of service and the software license.

Thank you very much for this important footnote. But for people in general who didn’t follow the story, RMS attitudes were very anarchist, in the sense of shocking some people through their public opinions against the “exploitation of proprietary code”. This shock meant for many a certain “anarchism”, in the sense of activism. For most people, this meant that avoiding “exploitation of proprietary code” would be a way of avoiding “exploitation of capitalism in software development.”

This is very interesting to talk about. That was exactly my question: “You can have an opinion that it ought not be a marketing topic, but in reality it is a marketing topic.” - Are we talking about open source in the marketing sense? Why should open source be a marketing topic?

From what I know, the plans are different, there are cloud plans and self-hopped plans. I thought that since they were separate plans, you were complaining about one of the plans on the home page.

true.

I agree with your argument. I have expressed why I care too. As in, I care for real-world reasons, not for ideology as an end in itself. But I don’t care about marketing or publicity around open source.

I agree with your argument. I could use your argument in the opposite sense: "You have mostly stuck to distractions about copyleft, marketing, advertising, product analogy, organic services, assertions about FSF(Free Software Foundation), OSD(Open Source Definition), GNU(GNU’s Not Unix!) , and some reasonable side topics and agreements and opinions… "

I agree with your argument. I could use your argument in the opposite sense: “you simply responded not at all to the core points about the power dynamics and patterns of how open-core projects can (and have historically) become less and less open and how forking by the community is more limited when only a portion of the product is Open Source.”

You just said that marketing and advertising can be bad in technology, in the cases of Baserow and Gitlab. But he didn’t mention problems like I mentioned related to technology, such as orphaned software, future relicensing, etc.

You criticize me for something - that you didn’t even mention in general, which is really open to you.

The reimplementation of something should not be a relevant argument, many open projects are reimplementations of what is proprietary. The linux libre kernel is a version of the linux kernel without proprietary blobs, just like the android room versions that are non-proprietary customizations. Generally speaking, anyone can reimplement any functionality they want, what you say here is biased.

This is not true, there are several open projects that are famous forks, the Linux Kernel is a fork of Minix/Unix, etc. Nothing prevents there from being a fork with all the features, I’m making my own version of Baserow myself.

This again is not true, you do not depend on Baserow, use a self-hosted version. This text is very interesting and returns to the problem of “orphan software”, in theory any closed or open software is “orphan software” – is an end in itself. Please, see this:

[1] “One of the serious problems associated with proprietary software is known as “orphaning”. This occurs when a single business failure or change in a product strategy causes a huge pyramid of dependent systems and companies to fail for reasons beyond their control. Decades of experience have shown that the momentary size or success of a software supplier is no guarantee that their software will remain available, as current market conditions and strategies can change rapidly.”

[2] “The GPL attempts to prevent orphaning by severing the link to proprietary intellectual property…”

[3] “A BSD license gives a small company the equivalent of software-in-escrow without any legal complications or costs. If a BSD-licensed program becomes orphaned, a company can simply take over, in a proprietary manner, the program on which they are dependent. An even better situation occurs when a BSD code-base is maintained by a small informal consortium, since the development process is not dependent on the survival of a single company or product line. The survivability of the development team when they are mentally in the zone is much more important than simple physical availability of the source code.”

Furthermore, his concern turns to the question of the future of software development. Please, see this:

[1] “No license can guarantee future software availability. Although a copyright holder can traditionally change the terms of a copyright at anytime, the presumption in the BSD community is that such an attempt simply causes the source to fork.”

[2] “The GPL explicitly disallows revoking the license. It has occurred, however, that a company (Mattel) purchased a GPL copyright (cphack), revoked the entire copyright, went to court, and prevailed. That is, they legally revoked the entire distribution and all derivative works based on the copyright. Whether this could happen with a larger and more dispersed distribution is an open question; there is also some confusion regarding whether the software was really under the GPL.”

[3] "In another example, Red Hat purchased Cygnus, an engineering company that had taken over development of the FSF compiler tools. Cygnus was able to do so because they had developed a business model in which they sold support for GNU software. This enabled them to employ some 50 engineers and drive the direction of the programs by contributing the preponderance of modifications. As Donald Rosenberg states “projects using licenses like the GPL…​live under constant threat of having someone take over the project by producing a better version of the code and doing it faster than the original owners.”

For this same reason, there are those who argue that what exists is a copycenter, the rest is “fantasy”(in the sense of not being real). Perhaps part of these problems occurs because we cannot know the future. That’s why I said that the “community version of Baserow”, even though it is small compared to the other features in the premium version, it is still possible to develop new features that are not premium or that are premium.

I think that when we have any open source it is possible to do a lot, Linux was born with minix, and minix is the non-proprietary version of unix. I’m currently creating Baserow extensions.

Now we are talking about the same things, this is the case that happened with the Bitwarden software. Some said they strayed from the open source path. Your concern is real, but know that I also have the same concern. As I said before, nothing is really open and everything can change. In this sense, even if a company is open to the community, I mean in the sense of marketing or advertising. Even so, we must consider their attitudes and not what they say to the outside.

Therefore, I said that we must be honest from the beginning, in this case having a license that is faithful to that purpose. You don’t need to worry about this as the features offered are already proprietary. What you can do is if you have the money to keep the software open source or even use other software like Nocodb that works locally and has all the features.

The concerns of copyleft are “exploitation of proprietary code” which seem to be a response to “exploitation of capitalism in technological development”. Generally speaking, any concern about open source is a dogmatic and ideological concern. “So much so that programs should only be licensed under the GPL” for some people. If the program has any poor or unacceptable proprietary features, or includes charging money for some functionality.

That’s why some people think that open software is “anarchist”, “socialist” or “communist” - because the premise is very similar to one of these political ideologies. For example, I’m not saying that any political ideologies are good or bad, it’s just that they seem very much in the sense of a “non-capitalist”, “non-proprietary” focus.

But anyone can fork Discourse, Baserow. Furthermore, each company and community has its own rules, this does not invalidate Baserow’s business model. As a developer, I am happy with the path of this community and company. As I said at the beginning, if you don’t like something, you couldn’t use it. I’m not saying you’re wrong or that your concern is bad, I’m just saying it’s not the same as Baserow initially. The concerns we have are not always the same. But it’s interesting to talk about doubts, because there may or may not be right solutions to some general problems. But like I said, I don’t speak for anyone, but I try to help everyone here in some way.

36

If we try to discuss this here, it’ll take years. “What the people want” is not a simple concept. People today want convenience, and people say they want cheap gas for their cars, and people say they want to pay less taxes. But people don’t want to live without public services and don’t want the ecological collapse that many other things we “want” lead to… How should laws be made? Again years of discussion. I didn’t say anything about whether the laws I suggested should be implemented today or how or by who, I just said they would serve the end of software freedom. The point is to understand that copyleft is a pragmatic hack a workaround of current law. Copyleft is not itself an ideal (regardless of whether you agree with the ideal that copyleft is not).

I can access Kanban by paying for the proprietary hosting. My concern was only about it being proprietary. So, I wouldn’t even have had the complaint if Kanban and all other features were in the MIT-licensed repo but turned off for the hosting service free level (which means self-hosters could have Kanban, but self-hosting is a hassle, the point is for the code to be FLO). I might then happily pay for the hosting convenience, happily knowing that I’m supporting uncompromised Open Source software.

You should read my very first intro post that led to this topic: Introduce Yourself: New Member Monday [September/October] - #2 by wolftune

RMS is not an advocate of capitalism per se. People can be critics of capitalism without being supporters of anarchism. But okay, yes, some ideas may happen to be anarchist-enough or anarchist-compatible. That doesn’t mean everyone who supports such ideas is ideologically anarchist or in agreement with anarchy overall.

The same reason that “sustainable” is a marketing topic — because people should (and many do) care about it as a value. Hence, marketers like to use popular ideas, and the ideas should be popular because they are good ideas, and people caring is one step, and products living up to the marketed values is another step.

By saying this, are you also suggesting “don’t talk about or engage with products you have concerns or criticism of”? It’s easy to infer that. This is somewhat common rhetoric, and while there’s an aspect of it that is sensible (the part about checking that people consider their options and not only complain), the idea of “don’t complain” is not really good (and people who say it are usually hypocrites who are complaining-about-complaining). In this case, Baserow representative responded graciously, my concerns were expressed and heard, and some small actions were even taken. Projects that are in good faith and care about communities want to hear complaints, and complaints can be constructive.

“if you don’t like something, don’t use it” often sounds like “don’t mention complaints, keep them to yourself”. For the most part, I think this rhetoric is usually more harmful than helpful.

I do appreciate and agree with many of the things you’ve said in this exchange. The issue of orphan software is indeed part of the issue, but that doesn’t bring up the concern about VC-funded software companies going in user-hostile directions after initially gaining enough adoption and lock-in — a pattern which ends up with non-orphaned software that is controlled exclusively by a company that has a lot of power over users. In the case of Open Source, the users have more of an easier out, and having that also discourages bad behavior by the company in the first place.

1 Like
37

Hi everyone.

Disclaimer
1. I’d like to insert a brief comment that might highlight my point of view on open source development that might be of interest to this discussion. I think to help as many people here as possible about what open source is.
2. As I said before, my goal is to answer possible questions related to open source and not to start a personal attack. Given that, by: community, society, humanity, philosophy, conduct, norm: we must help each other and respect ideas that we do not agree.
3. I think this thread is very interesting, and has a lot of good and bad arguments about what open source is.
4. This text is going to be big, so I hope you all have the patience to read it and possibly point out criticisms, general problems later.
5. I don’t want to be right or wrong about any point of view, but always doubt so that it’s possible to think about different things.
6. I hope I helped, if I didn’t, I apologize.
7. I’m going to use the concept of “counter-argument” to enhance the discussion about software and community concerns.
8. I will be direct, frank and sincere in my views. Please do not think that my being direct, frank and sincere with you is the same as thinking that I am rude or disrespectful. I’m just pointing out criticism, general comments.
9. I am not a lawyer, law student, prosecutor or judge. If in doubt, consult your lawyer (I am not providing any legal advice).

You suggested “open source concerns”, which suggests that you have not just one concern but several. So I asked what their concerns were about open source. In general, I also have several concerns about open source. Therefore, I initially thought that your concerns were not just about Baserow’s marketing plan, but involved other points of view. That’s why I said from a pragmatic point of view, it was better to think about the terms and services or the software license in which the software is included. In this sense, we will go through several paths from legal aspects, philosophy, technological problems etc.

In general, open source definitions are OSD (Open Source Definition), but that is what is under the license and not under the business model. Even if you consider Baserow’s business plan bad, it’s not bad from the point of view that there is no “open source law” - because usually the community or company makes the business model.

I’m not saying this is good or bad, or that you’re wrong. But the central question is: “who is right? or what is right?”

From an MIT software license perspective, it is okay to have a proprietary distribution with certain different features, than to have just a proprietary version. This is where we disagree, I think we should follow what the license provides and not what we think is correct. Because we can be wrong for the right reasons.

In that sense, you have great arguments to say the opposite of what I believe. But overall, I also “think I’m right”, because my question is: “Why should we change what is stipulated in the license? From a license point of view, we are doing what it predicts, correct? it’s wrong? Why should this be wrong? What are the reasons we should change the software license? Why should we be 100% open in relation to the code, when the license already says that we can have different versions of the software? What do we consider fair or unfair? Do the Baserow terms of use allow for a version other than the “self-host version” available? Can we vote on the changes we think are necessary for the community, company or software? Are we allowed to request these changes in accordance with the terms of service and community code? How can we request these changes in a way that is compatible with what everyone wants?"

My concern is whether your concern “is correct about the Baserow terms of service” or whether it is in accordance with the “Baserow terms and services”. For example, if Baserow software has a “term of service” that allows something proprietary on paid plans, your requirement to change the “term of service” makes sense, but if it is the fact that it is proprietary – it makes no sense. Because that is what is stipulated in the terms of service.

Your concern is the same in the Google x AGPL case, in theory no license should force the company to be responsible for anything that is legally responsible. For example, you cannot demand that a restaurant give you a car. Just like, I think I couldn’t demand the same “code base”, because that conflicts with the “term of service” and the “software license”. Which does not go against the “community code of conduct” since it is a request. But in this specific case, your concern would be to change the software license, term of service as well, correct? makes sense, what did I say?

Another doubt that I would like to highlight is that according to copyleft “freedom has no price”, this should conflict with the business vision that a company charges for any program. In this case, will Baserow change the MIT license, given that copyleft for some companies is “anti-capitalist”? in the sense of not wanting to charge a license for the software, because that would be contrary to the idea of software freedom?

In general, if the software version is 100% open, there could not be a paid version. Even if they argue otherwise, because it would be against the idea of freedom that the GNU philosophy launches under the GPL license. In other words, the business model would have to change to financial donation or become a public program in which a government or third-party company provides the financing.

Which doesn’t change anything, since most software works through technical support. But it changes in financial terms to which the software is used.

I agree with this.

That’s why I said we have different concerns, technology is a “tool” and not an “object of desire”. That’s why I don’t like capitalism, because everything is transformed into an “object of desire”, things lose the meaning for which they were made.

This does not mean that I am against capitalism (i.e. anarchist, socialist, communist, etc.), but that I understand the economic problem that this economic system has. The same happens with the “source code with the 100% open seal”, this may work for marketing and advertising, but it doesn’t work for technology.

I understand that companies use open source terminology, and it is one of my concerns. It’s just not the main concern, there are secondary concerns that I think are very important.

An interesting idea would be for Baserow to have its own infrastructure, precisely to provide greater security and credibility, not that Baserow is bad or insecure, but it is a practice that some communities adopt, which is to have their own infrastructure. What do you think this idea makes sense?

This is the point that I find very interesting and relevant that you brought up. Do we need to have more laws about this? how should laws be made?

The point of “source code having no law”, is the fact that it is “impractical” to have all legal situations in which open software is fair, unfair or applicable. Which is why some people think the GPL license is very complicated to understand.

A big general problem with technology is the “alignment” problem. The idea is to create conditions so that the technology can be made, without causing complex or legal problems in which the technology would be difficult to make.

Copyleft as you said and I consider it a very interesting point is a “copyright hack”, which I always said was good. But over the years it became very large, robust and imprecise. The proof of the impracticality of copyleft was sass (software as service), which is why almost no company uses copyleft, because as I said, Google considers it “malicious legal code” to force people to contribute with open source, even when it is not possible legally in contract.

You say it yourself when you say this: “Because I see enormous problems with the power dynamics of proprietary technology (and proprietary limitations in other areas too, e.g. in music — my background mainly), I really hesitate to get locked into SaaS tools or even proprietary local apps.”

Your concern in my opinion is not with the software license term or Baserow’s business model, but the engineering model that Baserow was built on, which it cannot change. Because you have “software as service”, you never know which function is being used, you don’t access the server directly. That’s why I said, maybe your concern doesn’t make much sense.

I don’t think and can’t say if the saas (software as a service) model is maintained by Baserow. The saas (software as a service) model is maintained by Baserow?

In fact, people want something different, each person has a different goal. Which is why Baserow created different plans, despite whether or not they have a common base. That’s why I said that your concern may make sense, but I don’t know if it aligns with the community’s concern. Perhaps because people want something different is the main reason for human conflicts in the development of new technologies, and even why we, as a human species, survive. As is the reason why we are always in conflict and inequality. I say this is based on Darwin’s idea (the idea of adaptability), although socially Darwin compared to Karl Marx is not as popular.

What do you think this idea makes sense?

I said that because you said yourself that you didn’t want to be part of this community. You said that: “… I see my worries are largely too late actually. Baserow is not fully-FLO already, it’s open-core with proprietary stuff. I was thinking that the limitations for the free-of-charge stuff was limited for the free hosting but that the software was still FLO. Nope. I was wrong. How unfortunate. I started exploring competitors, but nothing is perfect. I’ll see. Not sure if I’ll stick around. I’d much rather be part of and support and pay for 100% FLO project that doesn’t have the weird power dynamics and anti-community issues that open-core brings up.”

That’s why I tried to help you by adding some ideas of what could be changed so that you were on Baserow, or interesting alternatives similar to baserow like Nocodb etc.

I also agree with many of the points you brought up. But there are things in life that no one knows, there are concerns about the future that we don’t know about.

That’s exactly what Baserow is doing by having open code in self-host.

38

This sounds like my last point. You’re saying something like “don’t say what anyone ‘should’ do or express complaints or preferences or concerns unless they are specifically about violation of some terms of service or license or technical thing”. That is almost an anti-morality, anti-ethical perspective. I don’t believe you actually hold it strictly.

I don’t need to appeal to the business model or the license unless my feedback is in the form “I think X is a problem for your business model” or “X is out of alignment with your license”. But that’s never something I’ve said here. I’ve been saying essentially: "I have concerns about the incentives and power structure and ramifications of the particular set up of the business model, investments, and licensing of the product… and I’m not speaking in terms of concerns as a business advisor or as a lawyer. I’m saying as a potential customer and a user and a community advocate. And Baserow community and staff can hear my points and can say whatever they want about them.

The specific point about “Open Source” in the marketing is that I worry it hides or deceives the incentives and issues that come from keeping some of the features proprietary. My complaint is first and foremost that this bothers me and could upset other people, that people can feel annoyed when they get an impression about a project and then are disappointed. It’s like later finding out an unfortunate catch. People see “Open Source” and think it might be a fully-open project like Discourse. Then, they find out some features are excluded from the MIT repo, they realize that MIT along with VC-investment might lead to a growing amount of the project being excluded from being open sourced, and this worry could lead to hesitance to adopt Baserow (indeed to move to some alternative… but unfortunately most alternatives that are currently fully Open Source or copyleft have Contributor License Agreements which enable the company to change away from Open Source later, which is still a concern).

Why should Baserow care? Well, it is a social issue to know that people have concerns, and Baserow as a company is made of people who hopefully care about not just code and profit but have pro-social values themselves. Also, it is a business issue to build trust with the community. So, Baserow has an interest in hearing my feedback and using it to consider how to strengthen their community trust and even to consider if they can adjust things to reduce any incentives that would encourage breaking of trust. None of this directly needs to appeal to whether they are out of alignment with their current business plan or with their current licensing.

Are you confused about the difference between “here’s some feedback about concerns I have while considering investing in using Baserow” and “here’s some legal or technical reason why you must change something”? The closest I ever came to the latter is to suggest that it violates the Open Source Definition to use “Open Source” without qualification in the marketing for a product called “Baserow” which includes both Open Source and proprietary features. And the OSD is not itself something Baserow has committed to following strictly, but it is a socially accepted thing in this world, and I can reference it when suggesting that Baserow could be more transparent about their open core status.

All your points about anti-capitalist or freedom and price and licensing… just look at Discourse. They do have a business, they do charge for their service (hosting and support), and they make completely Open Source software. That is a different business model than Open Core. And I can perfectly well say that I find it more trustworthy and better for society, and I have less hesitation supporting Discourse because of it. Discourse does NOT use a donation or government-grant business model. Baserow could choose to still offer their Saas service (hosting and such) and even have pricing tiers for whether the hosting includes different things. I suspect their VC investors would not accept that though because VC demands a more ambitious growing business approach. Discourse, as far as I know, is financially sustainable and stable enough, but is not growing enormously and does not have VC investors.

Yes, which is related to incentives.

Anyway, I did look at other options, and I may review them again. Currently the closest things to Baserow that I’ve found are either also compromised in some similar way (using CLAs and having VC investors) or are really not as good for me. I am testing using Baserow still, I just have hesitation. I’ve been using it but just slightly and unsure how much to really stick with it.

On all these other topics of incentives and capitalism and business models and licensing… I think it starts with broader awareness of the situation. So, I think it better if everyone knows whether a project has taken VC investment for example. Similarly, transparency about open core vs all-open and about other tradeoffs. The more the public is presented with and understands these issues, the more we can have the conversation. So, the conversation is stifled when people have to know all these things about licensing and investigate the situation with projects in order to understand the status. That’s why the marketing issue is relevant.

In short, to conclude all of this for now:

  • I feel most trusting of something like Discourse where the business model is clear (they aren’t just burning out and about to give up on the project), the licensing is completely Open Source, there’s no VC investors, and there’s no incentives to make decisions that would be user-hostile
  • Most technology out there is compromised on at least some of these things
  • I speak up about my concerns and politely encourage people to move in the direction I’m advocating for, understanding the challenges (it’s harder to get investment and to profit when giving up proprietary business models)
  • I advocate for these issues to at least be presented transparently

There’s nothing hypocritical or wrong in any of this. People could happen to not care about these things. It would be sensible if engaging in conversation to ask why I care if people don’t already understand.

I think we agree about a lot of things, but I don’t share your inclinations against consciousness-raising (though I am pretty confident that’s not your intention, you seem more to just have an engineering-technical sort of mindset that is hesitant to admit arguments that are based on personal, social, ethical appeals — perhaps if I just phrased things in game theory as being about incentives…). We could have interesting discussions in another context. Thanks for the exchange. I wonder if just maybe someone else ever will find this interesting (but I suspect it’s just way too much noise and wall-of-text for anyone else by now).

I don’t want to keep extending this here, but maybe we’ll engage more in other places or topics. Cheers

1 Like
39

Hi everyone.

Disclaimer
1. I’d like to insert a brief comment that might highlight my point of view on open source development that might be of interest to this discussion. I think to help as many people here as possible about what open source is.
2. As I said before, my goal is to answer possible questions related to open source and not to start a personal attack. Given that, by: community, society, humanity, philosophy, conduct, norm: we must help each other and respect ideas that we do not agree.
3. I think this thread is very interesting, and has a lot of good and bad arguments about what open source is.
4. This text is going to be big, so I hope you all have the patience to read it and possibly point out criticisms, general problems later.
5. I don’t want to be right or wrong about any point of view, but always doubt so that it’s possible to think about different things.
6. I hope I helped, if I didn’t, I apologize.
7. I’m going to use the concept of “counter-argument” to enhance the discussion about software and community concerns.
8. I will be direct, frank and sincere in my views. Please do not think that my being direct, frank and sincere with you is the same as thinking that I am rude or disrespectful. I’m just pointing out criticism, general comments.
9. I am not a lawyer, law student, prosecutor or judge. If in doubt, consult your lawyer (I am not providing any legal advice).

I don’t know why you sometimes distort my arguments to things I don’t agree with, and I don’t think you agree either. Maybe “you are distorting my arguments”, I did not use any appeal to the business model. I even asked several questions and suggestions that people may find good or bad. My central arguments are these:

1- Terms of service and software license do not hide anything from the user, although anyone might think otherwise

2- Everyone is innocent until proven guilty

3- Social and legal tools stop bad marketing or advertising today

4- Marketing and advertising is not as important when doing technology

5- There is no precise term like “open source” or a legal definition of what “open source” is

6- All simple or complex changes must be known to people and must be evaluated by vote

7- We cannot include a new term because an additional term would be contrary to the OSD (Open Source Definition)

8- Changing the term on the home page will not resolve old or new issues that the user may not understand

I will briefly comment on all of them here.

‘1- Terms of service and software license do not hide anything from the user, although anyone might think otherwise.’

Just because you distrust one or more companies that do not act in the way you consider most appropriate does not mean that one or more companies are in a bad situation. There are several legal problems with claiming that a company is doing something wrong)or not doing something) and actually proving such claims. I’m not a judge, law student or prosecutor, but I don’t believe you can say something that could compromise the company’s image without first having some responsibility for it or not.

In the same way that poor marketing carried out by a marketing team can harm the company’s image, we must consider that companies may also not be well received if they do not have greater contact with the community and do not make gradual changes (that allow for new technologies, that can be made and discovered from the point of view of market competition). Or even make relevant changes that increase trust and credibility so that one or more customers can join, participate and want to be part of it.

In other words, we have to check the options that can solve our problems. At the same time, thinking or reflecting - whether there is incentive, purpose or objective in these changes.

If you think there is an issue with the term of service and software license, you could have better addressed your concerns with just that. It wouldn’t be necessary, for example, to say that “there are bad business models, so we should change Baserow’s business model”. Likewise, it would not be necessary to make an “analogy about organic foods, products or services to actually say what your concerns are in relation to technology”.

I’m not saying again, that your analogy is bad or good, nor that your concern is good or bad. My argument is that the terms of service and software license do not hide anything, despite what you say they do. And despite not presenting such true proof about this.

You yourself said that you see no malice in software terms and services, which is contrary to what you believe or care about.

‘2- Everyone is innocent until proven guilty’
You can only consider that someone is guilty or that the marketing of something is bad if there is in fact a legal process that makes it viable. And again: I am not a lawyer, prosecutor or law student. That’s why I said that marketing is something that is thought about by the company’s values, which may not make much sense to me or you. From an advertising or marketing point of view, open source is not important, what is important is “selling” - the idea of the image of open source, but not the fact that it is open.

In fact, it is a point with which I agree that bad marketing can affect the image of companies or that there are companies that use the open term for something that is different from what they sell, but my disagreement with marketing and advertising is that marketing and advertising will never worry about whether the source is truly open source. So arguing new marketing and advertising for Baserow may not make much sense. The main reason to have an open source tool is to get help from different people along the way. Part of the mutual help process is coding, opening and closing bugs. This is different from those who think about advertising and marketing, and argue for a new standard of marketing and advertising. That’s why I said that from my perspective as a programmer, your concern doesn’t make sense.

Since you argue that Baserow’s marketing and advertising is bad (and therefore we should change marketing and advertising). I said against the argument that until marketing and advertising change, nothing changes, the technological problems are the same: ‘orphan software’, ‘future licensing problem’, ‘legal and philosophical rules that are never applicable, accurate’ etc.

For this good reason, I suspect that the concern is not in fact true. Also, this goes into the copyleft vs copycenter example, copyleft says that the code is open, but in reality this is not possible or viable. Furthermore, from the point of view of the GPL license, when thinking about other scenarios in which we should have a greater or lesser degree of freedom, the code itself is left aside. Therefore, I tend to like “copycenter” because there is no marketing or advertising, the code is what is included in the license.

Furthermore, I said that copyleft is a philosophical and political movement, in this case, not everyone should agree with the same political and philosophical movements, people should think about their own concerns for themselves.

Furthermore, copyleft licensed projects themselves do not follow the copyleft philosophy, it is very biased to think that copyleft is an open source movement, when it makes the opposite sense of what it should do. For example, marketing and advertising should not be an interesting argument, because they are contrary to the idea of freedom that copyleft defends. Copyleft says that freedom has no price, but who defends what is or isn’t a price? or what is or is not freedom? Under what conditions do we have priceless freedom?

In the same way that for liberals taxes are unfair even when justified by the government, the “surplus value” of companies is unfair even when justified. However, no one thinks the government or the company is unfair. But what is fair is the responsibility of which government or company manages the form and its resources.

For example, taxes are charged on public services. In which case companies charge their users the price of products or services. In the same way that taxes are important for the government, the price of products or services is important for companies.

It is not possible to argue that the government is wrong without blaming companies. In the same way that it is not possible to blame companies, forgetting the government. The main argument here is that if you consider someone guilty, that person or company has no chance of being innocent, as you are already pressing that they are wrong, even though you have no proof of such an allegation. This person is in fact guilty, but not because he is in fact guilty, but because you considered that he was already guilty before analyzing his innocence.

From an anarchist point of view, both corporations and the government are to blame, not because of politics, but because they are power structures. In the same way that we don’t want companies to have bad marketing, shouldn’t we worry about whether we are actually creating bad marketing around open source?

The point of criticism is this, which power structure do you accept or is acceptable to you?

I just said that arguing that marketing is bad for one company or another shouldn’t apply the same here. Furthermore, I said that we have concerns around different software.

Additionally, I would like to include an argument from you: “In the case of Open Source, the users have more of an easier out, and having that also discourages bad behavior by the company in the first place.” Once the software is open, the marketing or advertising surrounding it is irrelevant.

From the point of view of GNU philosophy, permissive licenses are a mistake and commercial versions of Android or Linux are also a mistake. The gnu philosophy itself is so rigid that it creates friction between developers, companies and users. Which leads me to think that the GPL license is more of a code of conduct than an actual software license, although organizations say otherwise.

Even the companies Bitwarden, Discourse are criticized by several users, the main argument of some users is the following: ‘This is just “open source” hidden behind a body and a bunch of random body “standards” that result in highly requested features that remain for years until who knows when’.

Even if open source is 100% open, the big problem would be the recurrence of updates that are no longer followed at a fast pace because there are quality standards in which open source is restricted. If before the problem was the capital of companies financing open source, today the problem is the slowness in updating resources.

For most of these users and including me, I don’t think you should include Bitwarden, Discourse or any company that charges for services or products. Firstly, because freedom is priceless according to the GNU philosophy and the GPL license, secondly because the examples you gave are not good or better, most users think that these examples, like me, are contradictory.

My main point is that you cannot defend capitalism and defend something that is contrary to capitalism. From this point of view, any software that charges a price, whether for a service or product, and that uses the GPL is, therefore, contrary to its philosophy. This brings me to the central question: open source, until when? what is ethical in open source? What do you consider to be right or wrong in open source?

So, I agree with open source examples that are not companies, but communities, associations, unions or just non-profits.

“That’s why I said your concerns weren’t important,” because you give examples of companies that have open source, but do the opposite where the software license is open. It’s like complaining that copyright laws are unfair when you use copyleft(which is actually just a copyright hack). Or when you justify new marketing and advertising standards that don’t solve technological problems.

What you said is very interesting and returns to the general problem I mentioned at the beginning. This is a wrong case from an ethical perspective, but it is possible from a legal perspective.

40

Well, for 1: I was concerned about the homepage marketing. For those who choose to investigate more, they can discover that it is open-core and that some features are kept proprietary. I wish for the whole ecosystem of software and technology that we have a norm of being clear about these distinctions from the get-go (not only available to people who investigate). This is analogous to crafty advertising on products that gives an impression of being healthy and then people who take the time to investigate figure out that it’s not quite as healthy as their first impression.

On 2: I didn’t assume Baserow was intentionally deceptive in their marketing. I do guess that they did not focus on (or maybe even consider) my concerns about open-core and VC incentives. The issue is that they are within the social norms here. Open-core and VC stuff is common, and probably Baserow folks are more acquainted with people who accept those norms than with people who have concerns about them. So, I’m bringing a different perspective for them to see. That doesn’t mean they are guilty of anything malicious.

Irrelevant to what?? Marketing and advertising is obviously relevant to something, and so I can discuss concerns with it. I never suggested that it is relevant to the legal status of the MIT repo or other stuff where it isn’t relevant.

The term “Open Source” is in use specifically because OSI clarified, defined, and promoted it. And OSI remains the sole entity focused on it and retains widespread respect. To say that the use of “Open Source” in marketing is “irrelevant” to Open Source makes no sense. The entire term only exists in terms of marketing and communication. The MIT license is older than the term “Open Source”. Obviously, if I talk about “Open Source” I am talking about marketing to an extent. If I was talking about license terms, I would be talking about MIT in this case.

I don’t understand what you’re saying here. None of this makes any sense in terms of how GNU talks about anything. There’s absolutely nothing in GNU that discourages charging for services and products.

Well, FWIW, I have no defense of capitalism, and I don’t know why this is coming up. I hate capitalism. But I also think that sentiment is so easily misconstrued, I rarely talk like that because it’s a crapshoot whether people understand me correctly. People assume all sorts of things, like that criticizing capitalism means a preference for authoritarianism or for anarchism. These issues are very important but are also tangential here. Again, David Graeber is probably my favorite author, but I also respect people like Naomi Klein and Cory Doctorow… you’re not going to get some apology or other defensive of capitalism from me. But I didn’t come here to broadly critique Baserow for working within a capitalist economy — not because I have no such concern, but because that’s too big an issue and isn’t going to do much of any good to bring up here.

There’s no hypocrisy in that. I also hate cars and sometimes I drive a car. I live in the world. I would be a hypocrite to tell people to stop driving and then drive everywhere myself. But I actually do what I can to drive less, and I advocate systemic changes to be less car-dependent rather than put it on every individual in a car-dependent place to make their own decisions. I can be driving (when in a context that makes that more convenient or safe than alternatives) while talking about all the problems with cars, and there’s nothing inconsistent with that.

I can similarly express anti-copyright ideas and also support the copyleft hack pragmatically. There’s no conflict there.

That’s an extremely broad question. In my experience, I’ve never felt satisfied or convinced with any simple answer to this question that I’ve heard anyone express. Life is much more complex, and almost all simple first-principles ideologies get messy when we get into the nuances and details. I think what you meant by “liberals” is what in the U.S. is usually called “libertarian”, but regardless, I’ve talked with many people who accept these various ideological labels and appeal to first-principles. They all seem to focus on wanting to know some absolute so that they have this coherent worldview and can avoid feeling unsure. I think it’s better to be curious and unsure and recognize complexity.

I urge you to read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They make an effort to actually explore the range of power structures and social patterns in human societies across the time of human existence. They suggest that all the simple philosophical stories of some simple linear process are misguided. People have always been intelligent, thoughtful, and intentional. People choose ways to live by going with or against things they’ve seen in how others live. Structures change… one main point they make is that many societies in the past had one or both outs: people could simply disobey authority or they could leave — and this means actually leave, get away from that place and go live in other perfectly-livable places that were practically accessible. The way we got stuck in current situation is that we’ve lost these options. Most people today cannot escape the mostly-global corporate capitalist state power structures by actually leaving, and authority’s commands are enforced strongly in various ways. They describe the status quo as a particular combination of violently enforced state sovereignty, competitive-charismatic-politics, and administrative bureaucracy. They do not just make up internally-focused logical assertions to defend some ideology around this, they focus on studying the evidence of all the many ways people have lived using all the insights they can from anthropology and archaeology (which are the specialties of the two authors).

And I don’t see a way to take all this complexity and then just say “here is the power structure I accept”. Power structures have issues, they are complex, and we should study and discuss them, discuss incentives, discuss morals and ethics and psychology, and we should care about checks-and-balances, about what methods exist and how easy they are to use when we have problems with power structures. In the end, people are capable of organizing ourselves in many ways. Some may be better than others for overall well-being of everyone and for environmental sustainability and so on. I would sooner accept an absolute monarchy that happens to make healthy decisions for society than a more distributed power in a society deluded with some unhealthy destructive misery-spreading ideology. Whether or not any particular power dynamic is acceptable depends on all sorts of details as well as the risks. I know of no system that can be reliably trusted to be both healthy and stable long-term. Nothing lasts forever. We would do better to be adaptable, focus on smaller, local, immediate steps, while studying and discussing big broad patterns than to come up with answers about first-principles from which we should build some ideal society.

1 Like
41

Hi everyone.

Disclaimer
1. I’d like to insert a brief comment that might highlight my point of view on open source development that might be of interest to this discussion. I think to help as many people here as possible about what open source is.
2. As I said before, my goal is to answer possible questions related to open source and not to start a personal attack. Given that, by: community, society, humanity, philosophy, conduct, norm: we must help each other and respect ideas that we do not agree.
3. I think this thread is very interesting, and has a lot of good and bad arguments about what open source is.
4. This text is going to be big, so I hope you all have the patience to read it and possibly point out criticisms, general problems later.
5. I don’t want to be right or wrong about any point of view, but always doubt so that it’s possible to think about different things.
6. I hope I helped, if I didn’t, I apologize.
7. I’m going to use the concept of “counter-argument” to enhance the discussion about software and community concerns.
8. I will be direct, frank and sincere in my views. Please do not think that my being direct, frank and sincere with you is the same as thinking that I am rude or disrespectful. I’m just pointing out criticism, general comments.
9. I am not a lawyer, law student, prosecutor or judge. If in doubt, consult your lawyer (I am not providing any legal advice).

Here I agree. Baserow official website explains everything in the most understandable way possible, so I said your concern doesn’t make sense. If everything is understandable and honest for the user the way things are; today on the home page website. So, why worry about something that has already been resolved?

As I said, it is a marketing problem to say that it is open source, but for Baserow I imagine it is not (because of the software license and because of the terms of services)

Legally, no entity owns(GNU, FSF, Open Source Definition) the “word open”, so there is no need to define what is open.

I don’t think you’re making a good argument here. This is related to my argument about divergence, the vagueness of the OSD (Open Source Definition) with which you argued that you have a 100% open view. And I said that wasn’t quite true. For example, if the license was “unlicensed” according to the OSD (Open Source Definition) they said it was not open source, and then reaffirmed that it was open source. Also, the issue related to the “Hippocratic License” license, where both GNU and OSD (Open Source Definition) don’t think it was or is open source. However, I have argued that the OSD (Open Source Definition) and GNU views are not equivalent, for example, from my point of view the GPL license is more of a code of conduct or term of service than a software license. And I have this view of the copycenter movement and also the copyfree view, that copyleft is not in fact true or accurate. So I suppose the term open source is not accurate or correct.

It is because of this “fact” that I think your concern is not relevant, because it somehow ignores the problems we face today. Also, “technology” or “advertising/marketing” are areas of different knowledge. And he has different concerns.

Here I agree ±. I thought I was saying the opposite when I said something like:

I thought you were considering changing Baserow’s marketing and advertising because you consider it unethical, unlegal, or unmoral. Furthermore, you argued that it is problematic to have proprietary open source versions, so you already made the assumption that the company was bad and that the marketing was bad.

In other words, what do you consider bad about a company? Why do you still use this company’s product or service if you consider it bad? Because you consider Baserow to be a malicious company, and what evidence do you support this position?

Marketing and advertising is irrelevant to open source, open source is against price. For example, for the GNU philosophy there is no price for software, or the software is 100% open and without financial incentives. Or it’s closed, proprietary. I’m not inventing anything, just look at the case of Google x AGPL, Android x Linux, Kernel Hurd/Linux Libre.

Unless you “consider the copycenter philosophy” to be the ideal here, the argument you present is not tenable. For example, software terms of service and license terms allow for a proprietary version. This would only be bad if the license and term of service did not allow it and somehow the company did the opposite of what the contract does.

I agree here ±. And the argument is this: “While the term “free software” is associated with FSF’s definition, and the term “open-source software” is associated with OSI’s definition, the other terms have not been claimed by any group in particular.”

So, there is no trademark ownership over the term open source, it remains open because it is said to be open: copycenter, copyleft, transcopyright, copyfree.

I agree with the OSD term (Open Source Definition), but I must say that even though the term is open for (Open Source Definition) it is not the same for the GNU philosophy. So much so that some only consider the copyleft movement to be right. They ignore, for example, the copycenter, copyfree or transcopy movement.

What I’m saying is that in the end the problem you say about marketing is equivalent to saying you’re right or you own the open term. For the reason presented above, that no organization is a donor of the term in the legal sense of the word. Anyone can say that something is open if there is no property in the term of the word.

What are you arguing ± true, let me explain. Here we disagree, there are “4 views of open source”: Copycenter(MIT, BSD, Apache …), Copyleft(GPLv2, GPLv3 …), Copyfree(unlicensed, public-domain, C00 …), Transcopy.

Baserow is a copycenter, so worrying about marketing is beyond that. In this sense, your concern does not make sense with the term open, since this term is accepted by the OSD (Open Source Definition).

There is no entity at the moment that validates business models. So your concern makes no sense.

Your position against marketing is complicated: In the first place, you said you don’t like capitalism, the assumption is that you wouldn’t accept a company with proprietary code and profiting from its users. Furthermore, the GNU position in saying “freedom, not price” - for many is to say that there is no capitalism in open software at least for GNU. Please, see this:

[1] “The GPL can present a real problem for those wishing to commercialize and profit from software. For example, the GPL adds to the difficulty a graduate student will have in directly forming a company to commercialize his research results, or the difficulty a student will have in joining a company on the assumption that a promising research project will be commercialized.”

[2] “A less publicized and unintended use of the GPL is that it is very favorable to large companies that want to undercut software companies. In other words, the GPL is well suited for use as a marketing weapon, potentially reducing overall economic benefit and contributing to monopolistic behavior.”

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I’m just gonna guess you are confused because they fixed the website to be more clear about open-core issues after my feedback. Way earlier in this topic, I thanked them for the adjustments.

The term is “Open Source” and not “Open”. And you are just flat out wrong to say that lack of legal ownership of a term means there is no “need” or place for defining a term. The definition of “legal” does not include “anything that has any need”. People can and do and have good reason to assert all sorts of things in communication and in society without legal recognition. If you are curious about the specific legal issue of “Open Source” see History of the OSI – Open Source Initiative

At any rate, if your argument were valid at all, it would lead to concluding that the Open Source Definition has no purpose existing. It exists, and all the people involved in developing it, promoting it, and advocating for it all have done so for reasons.

I didn’t use that language, don’t put words in my mouth. I said that the original (not the updated current homepage) was deceptive (which is bad) in its use of “Open Source”, and I think that proprietary software is unfortunate (bad in itself, but I understand the complexity of the context of the business model). Companies aren’t just good and bad, life is not black and white.

I use it because I find its functionality good for my needs, and I hesitate because I’m worried about lock-in and the future direction of the product. And I have already said explicitly that I do not think the company is malicious.

Open Source is not anti-price. In fact, a license that prohibits charging a price would violate the OSD and not be an Open Source license.

Making that assertion here is as silly as coming to a discussion where people are talking about a product marketed as “secure” and saying “marketing and advertising is irrelevant to security”.

I and anyone else are quite free to sensibly have concerns whether or not there are validation-entities involved.

:roll_eyes: geez, come on. Read above what I said about cars. I also don’t like the way the U.S. health care system works, but I don’t refuse health care. This whole idea that anyone who has a criticism needs to abstain from the thing they criticize is bananas.

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thanks for comment. This is interesting, because in part you were really having a good reason to request this change in the home page. However, part of my criticism is that other changes must be necessary. But in order for such changes to be made, everyone must vote or be aware of the implications it may bring.

But I never said I was right or wrong, nor did I say or claim that you were right or wrong. From the beginning, I asked what your concerns were. Also, I asked if there was any suggestions on one or more changes that could be good or bad about what we can agree or disagree.

Also, I said what points I thought you were right and what was wrong, and also brought points to which I suspected it was right or wrong, so you could also guide me better.

I have a very good justification, because I wrote the word “open” and not “open source”. The justification is that I was blocked for 4 hours here by the Baserow community. This happened due to the high volume of editions I was doing during the conversation here. Therefore, the word “open source” was not edited. That is, I had forgotten to correct the word “open” for the word “open source”. I really didn’t see what I had written before publishing here.

Anyway - really, you’re right. And excuse, for the lack of observation when writing.

I didn’t say exactly that: “lack of legal ownership of a term means there is no “need” or place for defining a term.”

I just said that your concern is caused by the lack of legal propriety of the term. Whereas, legal ownership of the term would mean ensuring that everyone has greater clarity and understanding of what it means. The correct meaning would be clear without further definition, and everyone would attribute the same meaning. Please, see this: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/open-source

In terms of etymology, the Cambridge dictionary does not mention "any open source organization such as FSF(Free Software Foundation), GNU(GNU’s not Unix) or OSD(Open Source Definition)… as owners of the term “open source”… . Therefore, “there is no official definition”, at least in the Cambridge dictionary, of what the word “open source” means.

Furthermore, the Cambridge dictionary itself does not mention or include the four freedoms that the GNU philosophy proposes, nor does it mention the GPL license, or any licenses approved in the OSD (Open Source Definition).

The definitions of the term “open source” that I found were these:

[1] “Open-source software is free to use, and the original program can be changed by anyone.”
[2] “used to refer to software, etc. that is free to use and can be studied or improved by anyone because it is based on a code that anyone can use:”

Although there is no “etymology” that mentions “open source organizations (there are several organizations that claim the term or may claim the term)”. Licenses approved by OSD(Open Source Definition) may say that they invented the term “open source”. Just as independent organizations that develop software can also say that the word: “open source” is maintained by them. This is not to say that organizations like FSF (Free Software Foundation), OSD(Open Source Definition), GNU are good or bad, just that they are not in the dictionary or are mentioned.

Perhaps the word “open source” – could include other meanings such as “open hardware”, “open marketing or open advertising”, “open knowledge”, “socialism”, “communism”, “anarchism”, “liberalism”, etc. Depending on the political view in which the software is maintained and by those who are maintained; and depending on the terms of service (TOS) where the software is also maintained or managed.

Maybe in this case, the “open source code” is what is licensed, which does not include an additional service term - because in this case it would be against the definition of OSD(Open Source Definition). That’s why I said that changing Baserow’s home page wouldn’t make sense, it’s like adding an additional new term that everyone already knows what it means.

Argument: Therefore, without legal aspect, someone can use the term “open source” for anything. Although I agree with your argument that there are organizations that do not need legal recognition to use the word “open source”. However, this creates “a problem”, because anyone can say that something is “open source” without really being “open source”. An example of misuse of the word “open source” can be used wrong for marketing in one or more companies. I must emphasize that this, however, is resolved by the available license terms. In other words, concern for marketing or advertising is set aside, if we look only at the software license. Although someone may say the contrary, and that this concern is important.

Our conclusion is that: “there is no “legal”, “social” or “etymological” aspect of the word open source”, but that does not mean that the lack of legal property * of a term means that there is no “need” or place to define a term" But if there were legal ownership of the term, it would mean ensuring that everyone has greater clarity and understanding of what it means. The correct meaning would be clear without further definition and everyone would attribute the same meaning.

Note: This information I took from this dictionary on this date and time: 14/09/2022 - 00h22 (Someone may then include or change this description of the dictionary to include or add those open source organizations known or not). I speak of this, that the information I have is this, but it can change.

But why is an organization like OSD (Open Source Definition), FSF (Free Software Foundation), GNU not included or cited in the Cambridge dictionary?

This is true ±, as companies or people can badly use the term “open source” for marketing and advertising, as I said earlier and you also confirmed this fact. I said, however, that this would also confirm my previous argument that it is not necessary to have a 100% precise term for open code.

Because legal recognition is made by the partnership between developers, companies and the community to which one or more resources are desired to be implemented. Although any change should be voted by everyone or by the majority before any side decision of the company or the user.

Even simple or complex changes should be voted and received by all.

Using your argument here: “The definition of “license, marketing, open source” does not include “anything that has any need”. People can and do and have good reason to assert all sorts of things in communication and in society without legal recognition.”

But this would conflict with the argument that the OSD (Open Source Definition) organization has the correct understanding of the software license. Why, on the contrary, you defined concerns – which can be inside or outside the context of the software.

Just as it contradicts your concern with marketing to actually be good for open source, because you can worry about any marketing. As there is no legal recognition of the open source or who that produces “open source marketing”.

Moreover, it would not be necessary to have a legal recognition of the term “open source” for those who contribute to the open source; or for anyone in communication(you don’t have to make a legal claim to any legal entity under the term “open source”).

This confirms my thesis that marketing and advertising around open source are irrelevant or not very important. Because most cases - people like I or anyone can talk about concepts to which there is no legal recognition on the subject.

You may think that the “open core” business model is bad, but it wouldn’t be the same for me. Therefore, marketing is not good or bad, but just something subjective. Argument to which I mentioned earlier before any change even small on the home page or future changes.

And although your concerns are real in the ethical sense of the word, I would argue that they are not real in the legal sense of the word. Because as you say: “People can and do and have good reason to assert all sorts of things in communication and in society without legal recognition.”

In other words, we are not worried about the legal implications of something, because no one will complain about whether the code is really open or not. Because there is no legal recognition of the term, although the term has an ethical concern for those who define and say it. And even this “ethical concern with the term open source” does not change the fact that marketing is good or bad, just that it is subjective to the target audience.

Therefore, in this case, people cannot complain about whether companies’ marketing is good or bad, because, as I have read and concluded here, there is no legal application that allows us to say that such marketing is in fact wrong or right.

This does not mean that the company does not care about the term open source in the ethical sense of the word, but that by only worrying about the ethical fact of the word, it forgets the legal aspect. And in this case, something ethical does not always lead to what should be law.

And in this case, taking into account that your concern is correct in an ethical sense, your analogy in relation to organic does not apply, as something organic presupposes that it is in fact organic, and there are those who prove this. In the case of open source, there is no legal recognition of who claims that open source is in fact open or not. It really is an ethical concern for anyone who says or asserts this.

In other words, we accept that the term open source means anything that people identify with. Or we accept the term open source only for what is defined by the license. In the first case, your concern is meaningless, because it’s something anyone can ponder about whether open source advertising or marketing is acceptable or not. In relation to this fact, there are companies that do not do marketing and advertising because they think that this violates the idea of neutrality with open source. In the second case, your concern would not be relevant because it does not meet what is defined in the software license. “Then it’s your concern, not mine.” And in this case, either one of them is not so wrong or is less right.

I would assume you were wrong if you assumed the company did wrong or incorrect marketing. Because your definition of marketing may not be the same as the company. I would also assume that you might be wrong if you have a concern outside of what the open source software license assumes. And I would say that it is wrong, if we use the “a posteriori fallacy”, to say that because some companies do something bad today or tomorrow, or in the future – we should, in that case, do this or that.

For this good reason, I said that everyone must agree in advance to vote if changes may occur. However, they made the update without actually consulting everyone here. For this same reason I think the marketing is wrong, not because there was just a correction of the word on the home page, it’s just that the majority of people didn’t vote on whether this small change was necessary.

Here comes our disagreement, licenses like the GPL, even though they are correct in the sense of approval by the OSD (Open Source Definition), are wrong. If you considered some of the BSD arguments about what the software license can and cannot do, the GPL software license would not be considered open source. A software license cannot, for example, prevent relicensing or future licensing or license revocation. For this good reason, many suspect that GPL software license approval is not very certain.

There are cases in which the software license was considered not open source, and then there was a new understanding on the subject. Why is there no understanding that the GPL software license is not open source for OSD (Open Source Definition)?

I think maybe, because that would conflict with the GNU philosophy and also contrary to the copyleft movement. Or even against the organization FSF (Free Software Foundation).

The same goes with “open source marketing”, which I am against what you believe in, even though you tell me about the benefits of it. Because for me, a technology must be accessible to everyone in accordance with the license stipulations, and not be an exaggerated and bureaucratic concern. It is the same as Bitwarden, although it is licensed under the GPL software license and has an ethical concern for its users. Resources are left aside due to the bureaucratic regime in which it finds itself.

That’s why he said that his concern could in fact lead Baserow to be a company that “appears to be concerned with open source”, but lose the sense that people like the company the way it is.

Does this point of view make sense?

thank for comment here.

This is exactly this point that I defend. This does not mean that open source organizations are not important or relevant. Even because, I have always participated in all or much of the open software community: Mozilla Firefox, Baserow etc.

My general point is this: One thing to define the “software license” and another is to claim the term “open source”. For example, let’s say that if you are talking about the kernel, usually people say something like “linux”. On the other hand, if you are talking about linux distribution, usually people can say, “gnu/linux”, “linux” too.

Conclusion: The general point is that one thing is to say ‘the software license’ and another is to talk about ‘philosophy’, ‘service term’ or ‘business model’. Also, the term may change accordingly with your perspective. For example, just as for GNU philosophy the correct term would be: “GNU/Linux”, for other people it is just “linux”. Another example, just as for GNU philosophy the correct term would be: “free software”, for other people it is just “open source”. This may include in this regard - something specifically related to the license.

But people are not saying the same thing, they are talking in the opposite direction. This is the problem contained in what I call it: “Programming Language and Software”. For example, writing a ‘software’ is different from “formalizing a programming language” that can produce software. Similarly, it is different, you “formalize a law” and another is the “responsibility for which people are in accordance with any law.”

For the same reason, I would think that GNU’s philosophy was not a philosophy, but a legal aspect of the word “open source”. So that no company use the term inappropriately. And within this legal aspect, it could have licenses approved by OSD (open source definition).

But in my opinion, this would be bad for companies or communities that can claim the term “open source”.

That’s what I said earlier, but without a legal aspect, anyone or business can say that it is “open source”, so there is the problem of bad marketing about the word “open source”.

Sorry. But I did not say that companies were good or bad, nor what models of business were good or bad. I didn’t say you were right or wrong. In fact, my suggestion was to open this topic for voting, to include new suggestions for improvement.

I said we should add the change to the home page (although I didn’t agree to this because such a change wouldn’t be very necessary, for several good reasons).

Just as you do not consider the company as malicious, I do not consider this company as malicious either. The difference is that you see an lock-in and you worry about the future direction of the product.

However, I argued that any lock-in someone can do, anyone can continue. Also, I said that the concern of future direction of the product is not certain or likely. From the Buddhist point of view, it is not possible to predict the future; Therefore, we must focus on the present time and try to solve the problems we want to solve.

Does the software license like GPL not violate OSD (open source definition)? In the sense that it says that software cannot price?

Please, see this:

[1] “The GPL can present a real problem for those wishing to commercialize and profit from software. For example, the GPL adds to the difficulty a graduate student will have in directly forming a company to commercialize his research results, or the difficulty a student will have in joining a company on the assumption that a promising research project will be commercialized.”

[2] “A less publicized and unintended use of the GPL is that it is very favorable to large companies that want to undercut software companies. In other words, the GPL is well suited for use as a marketing weapon, potentially reducing overall economic benefit and contributing to monopolistic behavior.”

[3] the GNU position in saying “freedom, not price” - for many is to say that there is no capitalism in open software at least for GNU

Also… please, see this:

9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software: “The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.”

From the point of view of developer Andrew Zuo, the GPL should not be considered as an “open source”. I’m talking about a quote that I read in the text of the Medium site: “The GPL is the license that many pieces of free software use. It is known as a ‘parasitic’, oh sorry ‘copyleft’, license because if you integrate your software with the GPL your code must also be licensed under the GPL.”

Why is GPL software license still “open source”, even with these conceptual problems that are contrary to OSD (Open Source Definition)?

This is true, and I agree with you.

What I said is in accordance with the definition of the dictionary: “Irrelevant means not related to the subject at hand.” - If you create a great technology, “it’s not relevant marketing or advertising.”

Since if you worry about technology, you may not give the same relevance to marketing and advertising. There are several technologies that are known and have not used any marketing or advertising, I could cite for example that the “unlicensed” license.

As I said, this is one of the cases where marketing and advertising are not so relevant or irrelevant. In addition, there are reports of people who find marketing and advertising surrounding the bad coding.

My central point is: there are good and bad marketing and advertising. And there is marketing and advertising in some cases that is not so relevant or irrelevant. If you are a programmer, you may not want or do not like advertising or marketing.

Adding a “value or price” to the open source is an interesting and very controversial topic.

“GPL runs counter to everything capitalism stands for.”
“That’s the point (or at least one of them). Though I personally don’t care if it is GPL or not, as someone interested in perhaps using this OS for commercial purposes at some point it’s not being GPL is a slight plus for me.”
“However, one key point of the GPL is to create a commons (of software, hardware, protocols, etc.) that can’t be exploited for gain by capitalists, that can’t be exploited for economic rent, that can’t be laden down with copyrights and patents. A system that is actually, truly free (as in freedom). Which is important to understand if you want to be intellectually honest.”

What I mean in general is that there are people who say licenses like GPL are not capitalists. Therefore, some ask why the software must have a price if everything is 100% open. What would be the incentive to contribute a company if all resources are 100% open?

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That’s why I stopped reading this topic a long time ago. wink:

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Hi @Peter, how are you? can we talk privately now?

I would like to talk to you, is something very important. Do you have time to talk to me or could you take time to talk to me? Can I send you a message?

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Go ask the Cambridge dictionary folks. They are not absolute authority about meaning of terms. Pretty much any jargon that is specific to a field, such as “Open Source” in software, is always going to be more accurately defined by an entity within that field than by a general dictionary. Nobody discussing medicine would ever defer to the Cambridge dictionary on anything in a discussion of the use of medical terms within a medical context. Same here.

The lack of legal status for “Open Source” does indeed make this less strong, and that is why “Open Source” is widely misused as a term. People like me do still speak up to encourage consistent use of the term according to the OSD anyway. Why do you repeat arguments over and over? You have repeatedly emphasized that my assertions are not legally-based, and I do not dispute that. There’s nothing constructive about continuing to discuss that. Same with the copyleft topic. I never brought that up, I clarified my views when you asked, and repeating your assertions about copyleft is just noisy.

I happen to be decently knowledgeable about that topic as well. The focus on the present moment is not in any way in conflict with planning for the future and considering the probabilities of various future situations. Any statement in that direction is naive and not supported by Buddhism or any other reasonable philosophy. We can do well to recognize that concerns about the future are mere thoughts in the moment, and we can do well not to hold them too tightly and not to be overreactive and so on. We can still with clear present mindfulness and equanimity decide to take actions (including talking about things with people) about concerns we have about the future. A full discussion of this topic could be even longer than the rest of this stuff. Suffice to say, I’m pretty confident in believing that we’ve both been compulsive in posting here — i.e. not always mindful and well-considered in each and every decision to type something and post it.

I will not continue discussing the already overly-repetitive points here. I do see how I can reflect myself on the extent to which I exhibit some of the communication patterns that I see as problematic in your posts. So, I can review this and think about what I did to add to the unhelpfully extended length and what I could do (short of just ignoring this) to keep things more concise, pithy, and on-topic. Cheers

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Disclaimer : I tried to read as much as I could of both arguments, but to be honest I didn’t review everything completely before writing this. However, I dare however writing this, hoping it could bring another point of view in this debate.

As a developer, I daily work on “fully open-source software” and open-core ones (
hence my presence on this forum :smile: ).

I do agree on the main issue raised by @wolftune about the difference we should make between free and open-source softwares, often supported and developped by a core-team that gathers members from different companies (examples that are coming to my mind : Ruby on Rails, Linux, Kubernetes, etc.), and open-source and partially open-core softwares like Baserow. These software often rely on a single company that is actively maintaining it (examples : Metabase, Airbyte, Gitlab).

I think Baserow has nothing to fear to say how they work, in fact, the CTO Oliver Maes talked about it recently on this same forum : Founder Chat: What was the process for defining the Baserow business model?

In practice, I suggest that using the terms Community Edition and Enterprise Edition would clarify things for everybody : many people are fine using what’s available, for a company paying a few bucks is ridiculous compared to the value the software could bring.

In a wonderful future I hope to see, it would be delightful to see other companies coming around not only to use Baserow, but to develop around it, hence allowing the Baserow company to focus on community features more than enterprise ones. It would be a win-win for everybody. As a community member, I’m actually betting on such possible future.

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FWIW, I dislike these because commonly the “Enterprise” features are actually useful for communities, big and small. These terms are meant to suggest to companies-with-budgets that the “Community Edition” is the wrong option for them. But typically the question of whether the Enterprise features are relevant to communities is ignored.

I really wish the simple term “open core” would get widespread acceptance and be used for all these cases. It is clear what it it means. There’s something open, it is the core, not just open around the edges (like in cases where there’s an Open Source client but proprietary main software). And “open core” makes it clear that there’s something else besides the core which isn’t open.

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This is not true. and you distort my argument. The argument I used was the following: “There are several types of dictionary for different types of knowledge area. There are general dictionaries like Cambridge, as well as specific dictionaries in the area of medicine like MedlinePlus. In other words, there are general dictionaries and specific dictionaries, each with a certain type of specificity, a purpose that may or may not be used in different areas of knowledge.” - which seems like you ignore this fact.

You argue that the Cambridge dictionary does not have absolute authority over the meaning of terms. Why would OSD(Open Source Definition), FSF(Free Software Foundation), Gnu have any authority related to these terms?

In my opinion, those who have authority related to these terms(open source, closed source etc) are not the government, non-profit organizations, companies - but programmers (the operational and working class). I argue about this, starting from the anarchist assumption, that we should avoid any central authority or trust anyone who tells us what is right or wrong. To check if something is open, we have to evaluate the terms of service, privacy, software license. And not having a central authority saying this or that.

Furthermore, I argue about this, based on the assumption of the MIT, BSD or Apache software license on the DIY (Do it yourself) concept, that is, we should seek self-knowledge, self-awareness and self-responsibility for ourselves. Proof of this is that no open source organization is legally responsible, any open source license is exempt from liability. Furthermore, since anyone developing open source software is generally responsible for the terms of service, there is no need for a regulatory body.

Also, let’s go back to the previous argument that OSD (Open Source Definition), FSF (Free Software Foundation) - all are applicable to open source. What changes is the purpose or specificity surrounding open source organizations with the meaning of the term open source. This is the same case as you said that the Cambridge dictionary has no authority on the subject, according to GNU philosophy, any license that is not GPL is not open or free software. Therefore, any license approved by the OSD (Open Source Definition) would be wrong in my opinion.

In other words, according to GNU philosophy, the OSD (Open Source Definition) would be wrong and should not be an authority on the subject. At the same time, if the OSD (Open source definition) organization is the authority on the subject, then the GNU philosophy would be wrong, as it is not open software. Again, let’s return to the central question: what authority, power or power structure is acceptable to you?

To answer this question, I will resort to six answers.

a) For some people, who defines open source is the community surrounding open source along with a set of licenses considered open.

b) For other people, who defines open source is the GNU philosophy, or the FSF (Free Software Foundation) organization.

c) For other people, this question is irrelevant - because whoever contributes to open software is the minimal authority on it.

d) For other people, there is a legal confusion of what is open software and free software, in which case there is no legal authority.

e) For other people from the moment open source, there is no legal authority on this.

f) For some people like me, open source is what is licensed. Or that it is approved by OSD (Open Source Definition). The problem here is that people forget that there are several important organizations like the FSF (Free Software Foundation) etc. Another aspect of the forgetfulness is that the OSD is not a legal authority for the term, even though there is a purpose for which the organization was built and created - which is to evaluate different types of software licenses to ensure open development.

To make my position more understandable, I will list two central assumptions (with problems and conclusions).

1. “The definition of “legal” does not include “anything that has any need”. People can and do and have good reason to assert all sorts of things in communication and in society without legal recognition.”

2. “the lack of legal status for “Open Source” does indeed make this less strong, and that is why “Open Source” is widely misused as a term.”

Problems and conclusions

1. If anyone can assert or say that something is open during some conversation on the internet or anywhere without resorting to some legal authority of the term. By logical consequence, this contradicts this statement here: “The Open Source Definition(OSD) is unambiguous and widely respected.” - because people have opinions that are contrary to what is proposed by the open source organization or Open Source Definition(OSD) ."

Furthermore, free software is not open software. As a logical consequence, free software should not be licensed as open software since it is free software, not open software. In this sense, why are licenses like GPL licensed as open source code, if they are free source code?

Why should we care about the code being open or free, if we have our own opinions and statements about whether the source code is in fact open or free? (opinions and/or statements which do not have a legal basis and may be contrary to open source organizations?)

This is in line with my central argument that “you or someone can have an opinion that clear accurate representation of the Open Source nature of the product is unimportant”" - even if people disagree with that type of opinion or argument.

2. Now that we look at some logical premise, as well as the problem of the logical premise and the conclusion related to the problem of the logical premise and the logical premise itself. Let’s evaluate some facts surrounding this:

2.1. There are various types of communities, open organizations or even open movements such as copycenter, copyleft, copyfree etc. So, this confirms the general thesis, that the term open source is not a legal concept and that everyone can contribute to open source, even if they have no knowledge on the subject.

2.2. Also, this confirms the general thesis, that “the lack of legal status for “Open Source” does indeed make this less strong, and that is why “Open Source” is widely misused as a term.” - first because there is no legal authority over the term, second because discussions about the technology are outside the software license and technology.

2.3. The problem with technology is much more about the person than the tool itself. In the same way that you said that the Cambridge dictionary does not have legal authority for these terms, I could argue that the OSD (Open Source Definition), the FSF (Free Software Foundation) do not either, because I am a programmer and because I contribute to open source and because any “people can and do and have good reason to assert all sorts of things in communication and in society without legal recognition”.

2.4 The same can happen with companies (they can say they are not required by law to contribute to open source).

Now let’s get to my general thesis:

1. I encourage people to create their own technology and to be more open to dialogue related to the source code. First, because there is no legal authority for open source. Second, to create the technology, some people argue that it can only be done without regulation. Third, from a popular and current statistics perspective – most technologies are made by programmers themselves and among programmers themselves. For example, the use of js libraries is very common in any web project and is usually licensed under MIT, BSD or Apache. Even proprietary and private projects use licenses of this type. IAlso, It is common for programmers to work on similar open projects (even as freelancers, or working in any companies of any size or even in different types of communities.)

2. “Social and legal tools stop bad marketing or advertising today” - There are consumer rights laws, open source organizations, activism as a way to ensure there is no bad marketing or advertising, whether about a specific technology, product or service. But for all this to be possible, self-awareness and self-responsibility are necessary. In relation to this, these things or part of all this, to some extent, are in the context of one of the aspects of freedom and free will.

Also, there is still a code of conduct and “terms of service” for which fines are imposed on employees or potential collaborators or partner companies if there is legal non-compliance. In this case, in my opinion there is no general concern with open source, if there are already ways to guarantee a certain openness of open source.

For example, in theory there is no open, closed, proprietary or private code that can harm anyone because… (in this case there are already legal measures to get around this problem, as is the case with spam, in some cases on some social networks there are post charges, which avoids high spam) etc.

3. In other words, no one is responsible for what is not legally necessary. If you use technology in a good and satisfactory way and with the well-being of people, there are no legal or bad problems surrounding it.

I agree ±. At the same time the lack of legal status for “Open Source” actually makes it less strong, which is why “Open Source” can be misused as a term. This is what gives the user greater access to open tools, libraries etc. Furthermore, I realize over the years that this encourages people to create their own technology and to be more open to dialogue related to source code. Also, “the definition of “legal” does not include “anything that has any need”. People can and do and have good reason to assert all sorts of things in communication and in society without legal recognition.”

I repeat some arguments and points, because I was concluding what I said initially, and because there could be anyone who did not read the entire discussion(I was speaking in general terms about the central arguments).

I talked about copyleft, because you said you were concerned about the code being 100% open, and in addition you said you were concerned about the marketing and advertising around open source.

I argued that one of the biggest problems people face with open source is not the technology, but rather a certain ideology and dogmatism. We can mention some facts related to this such as elitism, toxic community and certain false information that people spread or believe related to open source.

Furthermore, I argued that one of the bad marketing or publicity aspects around open source was the copyleft movement. Firstly, because it distanced… and distances developers from creating any open source, because if the hardware wasn’t open source, the software in this context wouldn’t be open source either. In general, this contradicts the OSD(Open Source Definition). Firstly, because it goes against principle 8 of the Open Source Definition(License Must Not Be Specific to a Product). Furthermore, this goes against principle 9 as well(License Must Not Restrict Other Software). In general, you shouldn’t have open source hardware to use open software.

Furthermore, if people today are increasingly strict about open source or concerned about politics, this is often due to the copyleft movement. On the internet there are several statements and controversies from some members of the copyleft movement (some people are afraid of this). This goes against principle 10(License Must Be Technology-Neutral) in open source definition. Another thing to highlight is that free code is not open source, right? What would be contrary to the definition of open source?

I didn’t talk about it or argue about it.

That’s exactly what I’m saying, as your concern was with the lock-in and direction of the Baserow product.

This is true and I agree with you.

That would be interesting if you have time to talk about it sometime.

I agree, but the cool thing about discussing is always seeing which arguments, premises are good or bad, or even problematic and open. I was thinking about moving away from the community since I have other ideas, values and concepts about software development. For example, I believe in the concepts of DIY(Do it yourself), Kiss(Keep it stupid, simple), “less is more”, “permissive licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache … in the context of the copycenter movement”.

Firstly, because I don’t think we’re going to have a fully proprietary or private society. As much as possible over time, people, for their own individual and collective well-being, share interests that change or are constant.

The technology of today and tomorrow is changing, there are questions we can choose. Which returns to the central question, how can we maximize people’s freedom with technology?

For me, this is done individually or between people collectively. But for this to be done, self-responsibility, self-awareness and self-management are necessary. Furthermore, I really believe in democracy.

If we are people with an open mindset, we can discuss and always have new arguments based on old arguments. In any case, I’m happy with every criticism you’ve made, it allows me to check where I made a mistake or where I should fix something.

Sometimes it seemed like you were distorting my arguments, other times it seemed like your criticism was unrelated to any argument. At the same time it seemed that some criticism diverted from the main focus that we were discussing about open source. Doing some self-criticism now, maybe I made the same mistake although I didn’t realize it.

I think we talked generally about these topics, I could list a few:

  • Principle vs practice (programming language vs software, or in a more precise term “copyright vs implementation”)
  • Problems surrounding the source code being open(private, commercial use and distribution of software)
  • Problem surrounding technology(problem of knowledge and freedom)
  • Argumentative fallacies about what common sense knows about technology or licensed software
  • Ideas on technology regulation
  • The problem of principle and practice in technology and open source
  • The lack of open source legal term or status
  • Good and bad examples of open source companies
  • The problem with software licenses
  • self-awareness, self-responsibility, self-management of open source
  • legal problems surrounding open source

I said that some of these problems are solved by education and literacy through technology. But I didn’t say that everything would be easy to solve or that there would be answers to all the problems in the world related to technology. I also said on the other hand, that people must have some degree of awareness and freedom related to technology. I also said that technology in general, in order to have a real and social impact, must be neutral.

In my opinion, the more liberal a society is, the more favorable it will be to the development of science and technology. Also, no one should be forced to use open software, so the policy surrounding open source is not good nor necessary in any sense.

I said that we should follow the tradition of consumer rights laws, focus on people’s technology education, and at the same time contribute to voluntary work.

Today it is very common for people to waste time watching videos on YouTube or arguing on the internet, not that I can say that this is right or wrong. But part of the problem today is paying attention to the important things. Because today we have access to any information, but the curation of this information is something we must think about so as not to get lost in an age of information, where there is a certain amount of vigilance and capitalism.

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What a long reply! There’s sometimes it makes more sense to accept people-out-there-can-be-wrong or we-can-misunderstand-each-other. I like those better than “agree to disagree”. We can say that we don’t know all the places of misunderstanding or disagreement and will not prioritize figuring them all out.

You tend to throw out terms like “proof” and “logic” in places where they are excessively strong, unwarranted. Most of your use of those terms is technically incorrect. It reads as effort to imbue your opinions with more weight than they deserve, as though disagreement would be as wrong as disagreeing with a mathematical fact.

All language is socially constructed, and no dictionaries, organizations, or laws have ultimate authority nor do we do well to deny any authority. As soon as we are in conversation with anyone else, it’s counterproductive to assert “for me,” as authoritative. At most, we can describe our inclinations and find agreement about how we use terms within a conversation.

If you have a chance to attend some free/libre/open related conference(s) like FOSDEM in Europe or in the U.S. things like Libreplanet or SCaLE or LinuxFestNW or SeaGL or FOSSY (I’m sure I’m leaving out a lot), you could have these conversations in a way that brings in the benefit of in-person facial expressions and tone-of-voice and conversational timing. I think that might be more productive than text-based communication, but there are places online like Reddit and mailing lists and elsewhere that you can get into these discussions if you really want to get more depth of understanding of the different views and arguments and test your ideas against people’s reactions to them. You won’t find it hard in general to find people who agree with your views or who disagree. The range of opinions is indeed far from total consensus. I am not going to prioritize further engagement on this specific forum topic.

Cheers

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