That is true for some licenses. Copyleft licenses like GNU GPL and MPL are also Open Source. They do not allow the creation of non-free versions.
That is not specifically the same as open-core because in some cases of multi-licensing, the project puts 100% of their code out as open source and the alternate license is only to allow others to use it in (differently named almost always) derivative projects that are closed.
With open core, the main project itself under its own name (usually) makes a product which uses a mix of open and closed terms.
YES! You are understanding. I have concerns that Baserow does not prioritize. Otherwise, if they had my exact values, they would not make any of the code closed. And this is a topic where I objected to them saying without qualification that Baserow is open source. And they responded by at least adjusting their marketing to be more fair, good for them. They responded because they recognize my concerns as among those that people have, and they don’t want to be criticized for dishonest marketing. I don’t know how many people in Baserow community or company understand or care about the issues. Maybe some of them see the proprietary code as an unfortunate but practical compromise. Maybe they think it doesn’t matter. They do seem to have good-will toward the community and the wider society.
So, indeed, I am not here to represent Baserow’s business values, I am here presenting my values and concerns which happen to be shared by a large portion of people in the Open Source movement (but by a smaller portion of developers-who-sometimes-work-with-open-source).
There was a time when “organic” was not legally recognized, and there was a time before even truth-in-advertising laws. The distinction about legality is something I acknowledged. You haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know. I would support a law regulating the use of “open source”. Under such a law, Baserow could say that their open source repo is open source, and they could say that most of Baserow is open source, but they couldn’t just say “Baserow is open source” because they use the name “Baserow” to refer to a product that includes proprietary software. You might not support a law. I am not arguing that it is or isn’t in Baserow’s business interest to have such a law. And you’d be missing the point if you were to emphasize that such a law does not now exist.
In practice, the social norm of deference to the Open Source Definition is the farthest we have in terms of regulation of the term, so I can appeal to it only on that social norm. Thankfully, Baserow folks respected that and heard my concerns. So, there wasn’t anything added to the discussion to try to break apart my points which never had anything wrong in them. They do include some opinions, and you don’t need to agree with them.
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).
Hey everyone again.
It’s not so true, GPLv2 is incompatible with the GPLv3 license. GPLv2 allows a process called “tivozation”, which includes proprietary code. That’s why they say that Linux is not open, even using code licensed under GPLv2. For example, GPLv2 and GPLv3 are licensed as Copyleft, but there is no guarantee that everyone will have to contribute if the use is private or multi-licensed. Also, “open source” does not mean “open contribution”, “open use or fair use”, “open distribution”.
What I mean here is: “The big general problem with software is its use and distribution. These problems were never resolved. There are some academics who argue that the style of licenses created is unfair, because the reality of the software is shareware. As the software is public, there is no way to guarantee that you have the same resources as n people. Because each person can modify the software for private use. Which means you will have different features to anyone else. What makes “open source” is not a “certification” but a company, government, individual or community that maintains it.” Hence the importance of choosing a license and a community that maintains this.
That’s why I don’t understand the concern with marketing and advertising because it’s outside the software. And generally the problems you cite are not with marketing or advertising, but with the use and distribution of the software. Which in fact was never resolved. What is currently happening is companies using the cloud to manage software under the same license and avoid distribution or incorrect use.
But once the software is opened, this is also irrelevant, because someone can use it in any other way. Another thing I wanted to talk about is that once you use the cloud, this is bad from an environmental point of view, because a lot of computer processing harms the environment. In other words, there is no such thing as “100% open” or “free code”. I’m not arguing against the Open Source Definition, GNU etc. But by the dictionary definition, open is not something trapped or closed. It is something that has no definition.
To what extent do we consider something open: “license software”, “code of conduct”, “tos(term of service)”, “business model”?
“Multi-licensing”, “open core”, “financial donations” are types of business models. I cited multilicensing as an example, not an argument. As I mentioned earlier, each business model depends on the company, community, nonprofit, government, or developer. It is never a decision of the user, client, individual. We can discuss alternative models to open core here. What do you think?
As I said earlier, this is not always true. There may be projects that are 100% open, but with an outdated license, as is the case with the linux kernel, which has proprietary drivers.
Now that you understand my point, I would like to argue that your alternative when a company does not change the “license software” is for you to change software. For example, if you want something “libre/floss/free” you could use NocoDb, instead of Baserow which is MIT licensed and open core. Another option is to fork Baserow and launch it under your own license if you want.
Another option to solve this problem is for you to suggest changes to the license if everyone supports your idea here. But I, for example, am against this, as it violates the principle that software distribution must be maintained under the original license.
I really understand your point of view now, but like I said your options are: 1) “leave the Baserow community because it doesn’t represent your values or ideas”, 2) “create an open project with your values and ideas”, 3) “use an open project licensed with the license you think is great”, 4) "suggest real changes in the company’s culture, such as changing the license or some terms of service. But don’t change the “label” (what do I suggest as an alternative to saying “100% open”), 5) Another suggestion of mine that I think you should consider would be “multi-licensing” as an alternative to opencore, 6) What I said at the beginning is that I do not represent the Baserow company and not the community. What I said is that based on the MIT license within Baserow, your concern doesn’t make sense. In that sense, I said not to have too many expectations with open source, because you could be disappointed. Because each company or community deals with its software in a different way.
I didn’t say that your concerns were wrong, I just said that the focus of your concerns is not directed at the main issues of the software. Your concerns are clearly changing the Baserow license, or using multi-licensing. Regarding such concerns, I said that it is possible to think about this with greater participation from anyone in the community here. I just said, however, that changing the Baserow license or changing the business model still doesn’t solve general problems that people may have.
I suggest several interesting things, please see this: Add software license information within the Baserow plans page . I tried to help in many ways. I asked if they should change the license to GPL, AGPL. As well, I asked about Baserow’s terms of service are good or bad.
Maybe “your concerns are changing the Baserow license or using multi-licensing etc”. Regarding such concerns, I said that it is possible to think about this with greater participation from anyone in the community here. But I just said, however, that changing the Baserow license or changing the business model still doesn’t solve general problems that people may have: such as private use, commercial use and software distribution.
I have said at various times that your concern is similar to mine, although we have a different focus. I, for example, believe that we should not be restricted by software, because what is restricted is within the software license.
Furthermore, I argued that any marketing problem is the responsibility of the person responsible for marketing, and that if that person had done something in bad faith and was proven to have done so within the company, any company should have removed or fired him. Just as you expect when driving a car, there is “driving knowledge” as well as a “driver’s license” or “car”. The software license does not grant you “open source knowledge” or a “server”. So you depend on who sells the software and who maintains it. So, soon the process of independence occurs when you have the knowledge and money to keep a server working your way. Also, external concerns do not make sense according to a minimalist, commercial or even epicurean vision. Or a Buddhist view, where suffering is part of life, but choosing to suffer is optional.
I also said that justice is not one-sided. Just like, saying that a company is bad, there must be some proof of this, otherwise it is a false allegation. I also said that in many cases open source terminology is not relevant.
It also said that any open source license does not allow proprietary things, which is false. There are licenses that allow such as GPLv2, MIT, Apache, LGPL etc. And even the GPLv3, AGPL licenses are not restrictive when any person in bad faith uses them privately. Or when people take private courses with private technology to teach open software.
Or when people use something openly, but don’t contribute or help financially. Or when people in the community themselves have toxic attitudes when they don’t listen to the opposing argument or consider it irrelevant.
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 think your comment is very relevant here, because maybe more baserow users have the same question. For example, it would be worth asking what the business model is and why: “It’s open core, why?” or “It’s multi-licensed, why?”
This is an interesting point that we can discuss or not. I would be happy to see more comments from you on this topic or from anyone here.
This is getting into tangential weeds. I am familiar with all this. I notice that I was assuming you had confusion since you said “People are free enough to create non-free versions” as a blanket statement about Open Source. I was pointing out that this is not entirely or always true. Clearly, you know about many of the details. I’m not sure why this confusion is tripping up the conversation.
But “they say that Linux is not open, even using code licensed under GPLv2” is a confusing statement. They (some people anyway) say that the particular Tivo-ized case of linux is not respecting software freedom. But nobody says that Linux is not Open Source — except in the many cases of binary blobs without source, which some people emphasize is in violation of the GPLv2 license. Hence the existence of ::[FSFLA]:: GNU Linux-libre project
I hope we can clear up the mutual misunderstanding of thinking one another is ignorant about details in this space. It’s not been helpful to think we’re educating each other when we just are clarifying things we seem to have known all along.
Along with other things you’ve said, you seem to be getting into the real practical issues here. I agree with the concerns about “cloud” and whether or not various licenses actually result in real freedom.
Yes, I considered those options as I explored the no-code ecosystem. We clearly are indeed seeing the same issues here overall.
Yes yes. So, the pragmatic (reformist if you will) step is to advocate for at least clarity, for consciousness-raising… While I would wish Baserow to publish all their work as Open Source, my suggestion about marketing was to at least make the business-model open-core decision transparent. In other words, I would like people exploring the ecosystem to readily understand which projects are doing open-core so that they can thoughtfully consider that in terms of how they feel choosing that tool. The reasons why open-core might give one pause is the rest of the topic (the things mentioned already about power and forking and full software freedom).
Anyway, this thread is now too long for most people to read. Oh well. Glad we found common ground here.
It would take too long to fully get into discussing the whole complex issue of business models and our entire economy. Suffice to say, in most cases software isn’t kept proprietary for malicious motivations but for economic ones. Projects are choosing their approach to get adequate revenue to fund their work. If we, as a society, found better ways to fund software development, then the tension could be eliminated. There would remain some other issues about the risks and benefits of widespread software freedom, but we would no longer have the issue where companies feel the need to keep things proprietary in order to fund the business. That is a whole big separate topic, and if you really want my take on it, check out my talk from LibrePlanet 2022: Why our economy fails public goods like free software — GNU MediaGoblin
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).
Maybe some of the confusion gets in the way of our conversation because we think differently and have a different worldview. We may have a different education, different knowledge. Maybe we are here in the process of “dialectics (debate where there are different ideas, where a position is defended and contradicted soon after)”. I would like to continue this part by saying that gpl is not “free software license” for a series of good reasons that I would like you to read very calmly and patiently. Because truth is not something abstract or concrete, but something “subtle”, “sublime”, “simple”.
First, I would like to talk about the problem of programming language and software. In theory, if a programming language is licensed in the “copyright”. In theory, any software written using this same programming language could not have its own license, as having it would result in incompatibility between the software produced and the programming language in which the software is formalized. In this sense, some of the gnu programs(who are GPL licensed) are not compatible with the license of some programming languages as Java etc. “This confirms and explains my thesis”, that it is not possible to have free software(which is licensed by the GPL) without first having a free programming language(with some open license): gplv3, agpl, lgpl etc. Furthermore, even a language like Vlang that is licensed by MIT (which in theory is an open license) is contrary to the gpl philosophy.
In this sense, I can’t imagine why many programmers who like the GPL don’t use programming languages also licensed under the GPL. An interesting question I have is why there is no GPL licensed programming languages. On the other hand, I know that GPL and MIT are compatible because they are open source. I should also point out that, despite this, they do not have the same purpose. This is why my critique is still present today. There is hypocrisy on the part of some people who license programs under the GPL and say that BSD is no good. However, they use different programming languages that are not under the GPL.
In the same way that some BSD people use the GPL, and criticize it (the gpl license in this case). The general point is that if you don’t like something, don’t use it.
Of course, I must emphasize that this criticism works for the software, if you don’t like the software, don’t use it. I must also say that licensed programming language and licensed software are different things, and have different purposes. Likewise, it is a community and its toolset.
What I want to say here is that: 1. Defending 4 freedoms for users or development is difficult and complicated, and to be impossible. Because in reality, we don’t always have these 4 freedoms. And because the relationship between these 4 freedoms is not always the same concerns that we have.
2. Furthermore, the 4 freedoms are contradictory, it is not necessary to have open source to study open source. People used to use “reverse engineering” to find out how a program works. Today this practice is unethical, but it was common in the research environment of many universities and around the world. Even part of the linux drivers were made by reverse engineering, just as many linux programs were a little done in this way as well. But this is not exclusive to the Linux kernel, but rather the programmer’s responsibility when he does not have access to the hardware code.
3. Furthermore, from a philosophical point of view, it is not possible to have free will in relation to the code as the GPL does. Web applications that do not need a source code from the moment they are hosted and maintained by a server. Furthermore, the freedom proposed by the GPL does not make sense, so much so that those who defend the GPL license (say that for it to be useful and necessary, the GPL license, must have free hardware etc).
4. Additionally, there are software such as: nocode, low-code (where people don’t care about source codes). Furthermore, programming knowledge is necessary, otherwise the GPL license makes no sense. If the medium user has the code, what difference would it make if it won’t contribute or improve the code?
Second and no less important, you talked about the problem of marketing using open software to promote itself. This is not a problem for free software. Given that there are open software licenses such as BSD, MIT and even Apache, which reinforce the idea that you should not endorse any software products or services without prior notice from those who contributed to the software. However, the people at gpl (or gnu or fsf - whatever you want to call it) thought that such prior notice would mean having some image copyright. Therefore, in this case, such a notice of non-endorsement of the image was removed from open licenses such as 3BSD, which removes clause 4 of the notice of non-endorsement of the modified distribution.
What I want to say here is that: If you care about the code being “open”, don’t use gpl. GPL concern is not that the code is open or free, just by which imposed authority the code is maintained. They say they are(the gnu/fsf) “the authority that maintains the code” with philosophy(gpl) - but this is not so different from the company or community that they want to keep the code restricted the way they find it better. But Open Source also says it is. As I said, no one has the authority to say what is “open”, even those who license the software.
Third and not least, the gpl license itself is an “ideological license” It’s outside the software, it’s outside the environment of choice or freedom. If for freedom you defend any idea, be it capitalist, non-capitalist, etc. You do not defend freedom, freedom is eternal vigilance, we must always be attentive to those who tell us what we should or should not do. For Karl Marx, freedom is a concrete alternative in reality, if we have no concrete alternative in reality, we have no choice. For Nietzsche, freedom is self-responsibility and self-awareness, that is, part of the individual’s subjectivity. Therefore, for both Karl Marx and Nietzsche, the foundation of freedom is a concrete alternative in reality and also, on the other hand, people’s self-responsibility and self-awareness. Which the wildebeest and his philosophy seem to ignore. The proof of this is that Edward Snowden himself states this: “This community that we have, that we’re building, that does so much, has to grow. We can’t compete with Apple, we can’t compete with Google, directly, in the field of resources. What we can eventually do is head count and heart count. We can compete on the ground of ideology because ours is better.” That is, they are not concerned with the software, just the “appearance” or “ideology”.
What I want to say here is that: Although gpl cares about the idea of open software, it does the opposite of what it promises. It has strange concerns that are outside of what the software should have or do. These concerns do not unite people, on the contrary, they divide people on increasingly extreme points, to the point that there is no dialogue. Furthermore, they divide people in such a way that no one makes better products or services with the software or even produces anything relevant. The proof of this is that there are not many updates to kernel-hurd.
Another interesting point: The 4 freedoms of the wildebeest are outside jurisdiction. Just because something is open doesn’t mean you can use it incorrectly. GPL forgets this point and detail. Once the software is public, anyone can use it however they want. Privately, commercially. You can’t quantify how many open projects are actually open, because they may have versions that haven’t been shared with the community, because people may have used them commercially or privately. Furthermore, from the moment everything is public, anyone can misuse it, not because I defend the idea that people misuse something, but from the moment something is public, it is hardly possible contain content outside of versions.
There may be software with legacy versions because it no longer has updates or even bad versions because someone inserted a harmful functionality and distributed it to most people. For example, a user who installs a third-party repository on Ubuntu runs serious security risks, just as anyone who installs software without reading the installation guide can install malicious programs on Windows.
Also, it is not because the software is closed that it has malicious features. For example, Baserow is amazing software, and I don’t see which features are so malicious if there is only a certain functionality restriction on the use plan.
Linux has never been open software, despite there being people who say otherwise. It’s like arguing with people who think that capitalism is the best system in the world, without mentioning the recurring problems we have with the economic system. The fact that people say that Linux is not open is for a number of good reasons:
1. Monopoly: n Linux distributions were created from Linux, but this creates a monopoly. There are no alternative projects to Linux, because it dominates everything. In the past, people complained that Microsoft dominated the user’s desktop, but today, practically in terms of cell phones, servers and routers, Linux has 80% of the market, more than OpenBSD, Windows, MacOS. So I don’t understand, why people at open software demands from companies, as it has a greater market share. The 80% number is from WorldCount, it is not my imagination, it is based on market research.
2. Outdated license: The Linux license is gplv2 and not gpl3, this creates a certain incompatibility of what is open in gpl3. The Linux kernel is full of binary blobs without source. The proof of this is that the gnu community itself has been trying for years to promote kernel-hurd or linux-libre. By the way, it’s not as good as Linux.
3. Registered trademark: Linux is a registered trademark of linus torvalds, so any distribution with the name linux distribution violates the linux trademark rights. This is the same problem as with any software maintained by a company, community, or government. To what extent is the software open, if there is a brand that owns it in the sense of social recognition, market value or work?
4. Controversy: Linux torvalds does not look favorably on the gplv3 version. This is still a question today, whether gplv2 is not open source, and we should switch to gplv3. On the other hand, gplv3 is also not open source, my conclusion is that gplv3, gplv2 is also not open source.
Maybe “linux is open source” because most people like governments, companies and non-profits want it to be “open”, in the marketing sense here. I’m not talking bad about the linux brand, but about the marketing of “open source code”. What I want to say here is that usefulness can be something objective and subjective for people, it is not something exact. But things being as they are, what is open is what is under license. Also, I’m not judging Linux or GPL, I just compared it with the information I have.
I like licenses like MIT, Apache, BSD and I don’t think in this sense that Baserow is doing anything wrong. You have not presented any evidence that says there is false advertising by Baserow. Also, we have many points of disagreement, although some similarities. For example, your concerns are not something that new, they are the same as in the 80s or 90s with open software. And as I said, there is no partial or definitive solution: distribution, private and commercial use. “Worrying about appearances is easy”, but we must worry about the problems we can solve and the consequences they can bring.
Some changes I thought about in relation to this discussion, which someone can agree or disagree with here:
1. Maybe alternative to “google ads” as “ethical-ads” (I don’t know if Baserow uses ethical-ads or Google ads, it’s worth asking about that and why)
2. Maybe baserow should be part of the OSD(Open Source Definition) to “earn a seal of quality” as you want. (I don’t think this is relevant in a practical sense, but as I said to people who like appearance, marketing makes perfect sense)
3. Change software license from MIT to agpl, gplv3 (Changing the software license does not solve the problems of private use or commercial use, nor the distribution. But since people in today’s world want “something to look like open”, maybe it’s relevant for these people)
4. Ask what Baserow business model is and for what reason, and if there is a possibility of change (this I think has already been met with some feedback)
5. Another idea is to release baserow templates as open data for anyone to use (this was already thought of here a few years ago)
6. Maybe cancel the free plan next year or in a few years, so that people don’t confuse that Baserow is a freepremium. Or to avoid account spam, which is common on free plans. (Some open cloud software uses the no free account idea like Mullvad vpn, but this is bad when users want to know the tool before paying for something.)
What I want to say here is that: Regarding the future “change of license”, I think it’s a waste of time and something pointless. Furthermore, changing the license of something open doesn’t make sense. In the same way, I imagine that an affiliation with the Open source definition is a waste of time and something pointless too. In other words, these 6 concerns are meaningless and have no good solutions. In general, for a small company to implement all these changes is very difficult, it is different for example from a large company doing this.
Here we agree. But something I would like to include here is that some open source companies fund reforestation of trees. This would be interesting, because it would be easy to track through public reports or open data how many trees were planted in which locations. This is different, for example, from advertisements, where you never know how they were made or when they were made. An interesting idea would be to have open data related to finance so that anyone can follow what has been done, companies like Red Hat implement this.
We don’t see open software in the same way, but in a different way. The problem with nocode is open data and not the GPL. For example, your concerns don’t make sense, Baserow is a nocode platform, so no one here cares much about the source code, but rather the data. An interesting discussion would be to talk about private data, proprietary data and open data.
I don’t think this is important, but I’m not a reformist or a pragmatist (I’m a realist), there are things that don’t change. In the same way that “class struggle” for Karl Marx is something constant in the nature of capitalism and in history itself. I don’t see that private or commercial use or even open source distribution is a real problem, as it is something that has no real solution.
I don’t care much about advertising, marketing or transparency - generally it’s as if people demand impartiality from each other, when it doesn’t exist.
I would like everyone to draw their own conclusion about what is “open”. And of what is “restricted” and “not open, or relevant”. But in general, I think some of the points you brought here are really cool, although I disagree with some or most of them.
This is not true, people have different motivations. Also, there are openly closed proprietary software such as Linux and Mullvad vpn. Also, this seems to only give importance to money, and forgets about people’s social relationships with things, with objects, with the source code.
This is not true, as people are constantly in a process of struggle or material dialogue. An idea by Karl Marx, for example, is that class struggle is something inherent to history, and can be “deterministic”, “conditional” or “indeterminate”.
I agree ±. For Plato, freedom is not restricted or unrestricted. Freedom is what we take for ourselves, through what is sensitive in the world (the reality to which we are) and abstract (to our dreams, desires and aspirations) from what I briefly researched. In Plato’s sense, freedom is something permissive or deliberate that some people do with their lives and the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is not so difficult to see in the philosophy of Karl Marx or even Nietzsche such Platonic ideas of determinism, incompatibilism or even conditionalism. In other words, like everything in life, there will always be benefits, risks and harms. What changes is what we are willing to have.
I am not a supporter of the “GPL”, “free software foundation”, “open source”. Generally, I work alone. But It would be really cool to talk about the economic aspect if you want and have the patience for it. And if it makes sense for this community in the sense of whether this is in accordance with the standard of conduct for this software community. For example, today we live in a kind of “moralistic hypocrisy”, we only consider something correct with what we value. In technology there is no value, technology is a tool. Bu there is no good or bad technology, but uses of technology that can be good or bad. Regarding the functionality of a tool, we can consider it as relative, contextual or subjective etc.
I think of the economy as a “tool”, in the sense that the word economy refers to it in the sense of “utility”, “work”, “consumption” or “production of merchandise or consumer goods”. Thus, the meaning of the word “economy” can be objective, relative, contextual, subjective, etc.
This gets a bit into principles vs practice. You are correct in much of what you are pointing out. If we dig this far though, we find all sorts of inherent problems with copyright law itself. Yes, there are all sorts of practical pitfalls and places where real freedom does not hold up, either legally or technically.
To be picky, GPL does not have a philosophy, GNU has philosophy. GPL is a legal construction that is a practical tool, not an ideology. And the GNU philosophy does not see MIT itself as contrary, it only finds the use of MIT in practice enabling proprietary derivatives as against the philosophy. In cases where MIT software never happens to lead to proprietary derivatives, then nothing in those cases is contrary to GNU.
You addressed this later, but please stick to being clear. GNU is the philosophy. GPL just means “General Public License” and there could be other GPLs, in fact other free/libre/open licenses are GPLs really, they just aren’t called that. It’s a matter of convention that GNU GPL is often shortened to just GPL.
There are not really many such people, and most of them are confused. GNU and FSF formally say that BSD is perfectly fine, and they advocate for copyleft as a tactical strategy whenever it seems to be the superior option for maximizing software freedom and minimizing proprietary software. There are many cases of GNU, FSF, and RMS advocating for compromises that they see as net beneficial for software freedom. Copyleft is just a tool, not a philosophy.
I don’t think it is unethical, where did you get that idea?
English is not your first language, right? You sometimes use picky interpretations of terms that seem odd to me. That sentence above for example does not make sense. I think you meant “not necessary to have open source to study how software works”, though that is a bit extreme as a conclusion. People can study Coca Cola and learn about it and figure out how to reverse-engineer it, but that isn’t the same as having the secret recipe. This is a practical matter. Having the source code makes it much easier to study and change software. The GPL terminology is about the preferred form for making modifications. The issue in part is whether someone has special exclusive access to a more preferred method of study and change that others would like to have but are denied access to. And yes, there are ways to technically meet the letter of the law on source code while obfuscating and frustrating others’ ability to exercise freedoms. That’s just messy complex reality. Intention and spirit matter, not just technical and legal rules.
What matters in practice is whether the community overall has access to the code. Just as not everyone has the skills to repair their own car or their own house, what matters in terms of freedom and power is whether there are people in the community who do have such skills. What matters is whether the tools and information needed are available to whoever can use them. I may not myself change the code of most software I use, but it affects me whether or not others have the capacity or whether some entity has an exclusive monopoly.
You mean “Open Source Initiative” (OSI) who claim authority over the term Open Source. They do have authority, respected by decades of general social deference and leadership, not by absolute legal enforcement. Authority is not merely a matter of absolute control.
As to what is “open”, in this case there’s a strong and respected assertion here: https://opendefinition.org/ and it is explicitly aligned with the OSI’s Open Source Definition. And the fact that people can reject, argue, disagree, make competing definitions does not mean there’s no authority in any sense. It’s debatable. For transparency, I was involved in the updating of the Open Definition when an international committee worked on the project several years ago (and I’m not involved now while they are working to consider updating it in light of “AI” and related changes to the information ecosystem).
I understand you have had such impressions and/or experiences. These things are complex. The practical matter is that it is not fair to blame GNU for divisions any more than the corporations that actively go against software freedom and are user-hostile for the divisions. There are arguments about tactics, style, and about the details in GNU philosophy. I have my own opinions that do not 100% match GNU positions.
Free/libre/open software indeed can have malicious elements, but it is easier to fork the software and remove them. None of this is simple, things are fuzzy and complex. And the GNU community discusses all these complexities. There’s no lack of understanding of them. And nobody in GNU disagrees with you about technology as a tool as opposed to being inherently moral or immoral.
These sentences don’t make sense quite. The complaint I had is not about the MIT license but about the proprietary not-MIT-licensed parts of Baserow. I started out from the beginning expressing concern about Baserow marketing as “Open Source” not because of MIT but because of proprietary “premium” features which mean that Baserow (the product marketed at the homepage, not the Git repo) is partly-MIT, which means partly-Open-Source.
I like that you finally are thinking about what might resolve the issues. I was proposing broadly that the term “open core” would be fair. I don’t expect Baserow to become fully-Open-Source and aligned with the OSD. I would love if they would.
Those are interesting ideas. I did suggest in the beginning of this whole topic ways that Baserow might achieve their goals with a more-open approach. I don’t have time today to discuss further.
In all of this, I should conclude with expressing my main fears: I worry Baserow will get more proprietary over time, that none of the premium features will ever be implemented in the MIT code because it is very weird for someone to contribute code that does something that the product already does. At some future time, Baserow will either close up or will get bought by some larger company, and there will be no incentive to then release all the proprietary features. Thus, my own investing in Baserow as a user (making it a core tool in my own work) makes me dependent on a product that will not be able to be forked and continued when the business goes in a direction that is a problem for me. Of course, all sorts of things can go wrong with fully Open Source projects too, but there’s both more easy path to continue the project as a fork and also the threat of forking discourages projects from going in user-hostile directions. I also sympathize with additional reasons for Open Source which I won’t enumerate here.
If you want to get into discussing economics of all this more broadly or even continuing all the abstractions in this discussion, I suggest that better fits either https://discourse.sustainoss.org/ or https://community.snowdrift.coop/ and you could ping me there. If you want to continue here, I suggest we get back to more Baserow-specific focus.
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).
Thanks for feedback.
That’s true ±. For example, saying that “Marxism” is not a philosophy of “Marx”, in my opinion, is a mistake. Why is GNU software licensed under the GPL? Why didn’t they license with unlicensed, mit, bsd, apache? GPL is part of the GNU philosophy, right? Is it correct to say that there are elements of GNU philosophy in the GPL? Wouldn’t the end result of the GNU philosophy be the GPL license?
yes, and GPL is part of the libre/open philosophy: GNU (although anyone can help or participate in GNU, or even make versions other than the GPL). Is it correct to say that there are elements of GNU philosophy in the GPL?
This is partially true, the GPL license was created by GNU. Therefore, there is a “certain ideology”.
This does not happen in discussions about “open software” that I have participated in or had experience participating in. Also, open software licensed under the GPL doesn’t always switch to MIT. In my opinion, there is a problem of philosophy for which the license was created. It is easier for open source software licensed under the MIT license to switch to the GPL license than the other way around, because the MIT license is more permissive than restrictive. Although I don’t want to change the licenses because that would go against the idea of the first software license maintained. Also, why do some people promote the GPL, but not also promote something like Apache, MIT, BSD?
I disagree, most people who use Linux use something proprietary like Android. Therefore, complaining about the MIT license makes no sense, when the popularity of certain GPL-licensed programs is used in a way that is contrary to their philosophy.
The difference is that MIT doesn’t promise that the software will be open, it says that the software can be open. There is a difference between stating that something will be open and saying that something “will”, “could” or “should” be open. For me, the mit license is transparent as far as possible.
Thanks for feedback.
Sorry, but you did not understand what I said. I said that creating software is a general problem, because in general there is no general knowledge about what we know or don’t know. In this sense, there is often an incompatibility in software production based on how we determine certain things in the software. For example, a text editor written in C++ will have n features that the programmer imagined. In this case, even with open software, the openness of the software is not the same as the way the programmer created it. There is, therefore, a problem of knowledge in software and software language.
I said this on the other hand too, that it is a “legal problem (although I have no knowledge and work in the area)”, in the sense that many programming languages today have a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) that determines what goes into the language and what doesn’t. In this case, it is a problem for you to produce the software according to the GPL license due to the bureaucracy and also the resources to which a team of programmers decides what goes in and what goes out.
Even if something is open, there are problems with implementing open source. For example, the bureaucracy in making the code open source following, for example, the GPL license or the desire of a group of programmers to maintain the programming language with certain resources.
For example, a) we have a team of programmers responsible for the programming language, on the other hand, b) we have a community responsible for distributing, marketing or licensing the source code. c) The “programmer who believes in open software” in this context has less freedom than he imagines he has. If he does not participate in the programming languages group, certain resources that he could use to build his software are left aside. If he doesn’t participate in the community, your software will certainly have a small target audience.
The problem here is that there is a certain authority on both sides, and there is not always a consensus on all of this. There are codes of conduct that are different for both groups: whoever distributes or maintains the source code. And whoever creates the technology or formalizes the technology.
There is a problem relating to open software that bothers me, which is the fact of misinformation or false information about open source. Not that this is a problem with the code itself, but with people’s communication. Given that we have different experiences and knowledge in relation to our language.
I don’t think people want to be misinformed, it’s just that being informed costs reading time and patience. Some call this problem “rational irrationality”. The idea of “rational irrationality” is that people believe in something that is not verifiable from a scientific point of view, but they still believe it as if it were true, because there is a certain dogmatism. For example, regarding free software some people demand more than what free software ou open source is.
This is interesting from a philosophical point of view, as it is a disappointment not to have something we want. Therefore, it is easier to believe that we have something that we don’t have, or that what we have is enough.
I don’t agree with that, when most of the programs are like Android, Linux. To minimize proprietary code, in my opinion the most valid path is permissive licenses like MIT or things like BSD, Apache.
This is not true, there are certain controversies that make me wonder if the idea of open software is really possible.
“Technology is a tool, a text is not”. A transcribed text is part of the ideas that the person added to it. A text is a part of people’s philosophy of thought. So much so that there is an area of knowledge called “literature”, as well as areas of knowledge called “linguistics”. That start from some philosophy, be it constructivist etc. In this sense, Copyleft is a “shared copyright movement”. Instead of a single person managing copyright, everyone owns the copyright. The freedom contained in copyleft is not something belonging to one person, but a group of people. Therefore, it is a certain philosophy or way of thinking.
If the software license does not allow this, it is an unethical practice. In the same way that using something open for your promotion is a mistake, doing something wrong from the hardware manufacturer’s point of view without their authorization is also a mistake.
I was writing very quickly and I didn’t see the error.
“My criticism regarding GPL licenses is that they are impractical”, most projects licensed under GPL like Linux, Android are against the GPL and are very popular. That’s why it makes more sense from a practical point of view to prefer MIT, BSD or Apache licenses.
Furthermore, there are many rules or legal aspects that we must know, and almost no programmer like me has the money to hire a lawyer specializing in copyright or intellectual property. In this case, it is easier to adopt permissive licenses.
Furthermore, there is a lack of control over private use, commercial use and the distribution of open software even with licenses such as GPL.
I agree here. For example, this happens with courses from private companies on open software. Or when a software is agpl, and offers third-party synchronization plugins, which do not have source code. As well as unofficial repositories maintained outside the community. The reality may be complex, but that does not justify restricting the freedom of developers or users.
With that, I agree.
It’s exactly what I said, authority is not absolute control, but relative to who says it is or isn’t open. Therefore, FSF, GNU and even OSD are open software authorities, despite having no control over the software. However I said, this starts with labeling what is “open” and what is “not open”.
From the point of view of anarchist philosophy, if there is authority there is no freedom. Because it produces social inequality in what people can or cannot do. For example, “open” is what people define as “open”? how could this be different from copyright (company, community)?
The same “open” entity that took months to add the “unlicensed” license as an open license. The same entity that said the “unlicensed” license was not open and then changed its opinion? and then contradict it by saying that this license was open? The same “entity” that says gplv2 is open, even though it isn’t?
Thanks for feedback.
Not for common users or people who don’t care about it.
I partially agree, because some GNU people consider Linux bad (for the reasons I mentioned previously), even though Linux has some proprietary blobs. That’s why I don’t participate in the GNU community, because in general I think differently and people won’t agree with me. Furthermore, I don’t consider Linux to be open(for the reasons I mentioned previously). I think it would be better for Linux to be licensed at MIT, this would lower people’s expectations of idealism to focus on something more transparent, concrete in reality.
However, there is so much “marketing” for Linux that no one will change the Linux license(gplv3, MIT etc). And even though “Linux is open”, not everyone believes that “Linux is open”, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Therefore, for some people there is a certain morality and immorality in the tool: Linux, Android etc.
You yourself care about the “appearance of something being open”, and not in a practical sense. Proof of this is the fact that you talk about marketing and advertising in open source. What I said before, which is not that important. The gnu philosophy itself is concerned with what “appears to be open source”, so it doesn’t create an “open ecosystem” that people feel like using.
I said, however, that this concern is not that important, considering that with the Baserow code you can implement any functionality you want.
No company should be responsible for something that is not legally necessary(For example, you cannot demand that a restaurant give you a car as a gift). For example, Baserow is a no-code tool, you expect that most users do not want source code, or that there will be features and integrations with different proprietary products, so a community version is enough for most developers to create something.
The fact that you have few resources is not the same as saying that the program is unusable. For example, “Linux is 100% open”, but it does not have several features that some modern operating systems have, such as an integrated graphical interface. Therefore, you depend on companies or communities.
You didn’t understand what I said, I said we shouldn’t be worried about the open label, that’s irrelevant. I don’t need to ask permission from FSF, Open Source definition to create my software.
thank for feeback, but I don’t agree with such “ideas or solutions” because they don’t solve general problems that people may have. Such as private use, commercial use and distribution of the software. There is a difference between having a license that proves that something can, should, will be open and using marketing or advertising to say that something is open.
I contribute to open source, but I do not participate in an open community. I’m joining this community for the first time because it seems to be very concerned about open source and not about how something appears to be open. I really believe that Baserow is a good company in the sense of the code of conduct they use and the MIT software license. The MIT license is very true, because it doesn’t promise what it doesn’t deliver.
A partial solution to this problem is to use something like Nocodb which is licensed under agpl, or use the data export tools available here.
But even if this actually happens, there will always be a community version available. It’s the same case as MariaDB, which is a successful fork of mysql, and there are people like me who use it on servers.
Baserow has an open source version, which you can fork. Recently, I am creating baserow algorithms and software. Please, look at this: [awesome-baserow](https://community.baserow.io/t/awesome-baserow/3315)
Here we are where I completely agree with you. That’s why I talked about Linux and Android, in the case of Android it’s an even more proprietary fork of Linux. Where applications are usually closed source full of malicious functions in some cases. But there is a difference between promising that something will be completely open, and saying that something open is something partial or that it is something within certain limits.
In the case of the MIT license, no one promises that the code will be completely open or partially open, the code will be open to the extent possible. To the extent that one or more people can keep it open. Whether by financial donations, whether by love or anything. This is why I believe in the MIT License, because they are sincere about open source. Not that I don’t think that those who do open source with GPL don’t work sincerely. But the MIT license has a very old and important concept of DIY (do it yourself), that is, doing things the way you want. For example, you can fork today and change the license if you want. You don’t need legal authorization for this, just fork.
My biggest concern with open source is the misuse of open source by malicious things. Another concern I have is the authoritarianism of those who say that this or that is open. And another concern I have is an empty promise about “open software” made by both companies, users, organizations defending the idea of “security, comfort” without mentioning the recurring problems for the user or those who will use this software. Without, for example, robust documentation or a consolidated license such as Apache, MIT, BSD.
Lately, I don’t have much time to brainstorm ideas. Lately, it’s just work and more work and I’m doing some things in relation to some software features. I’m happy, however, for the invitation, even though I can’t participate very often.
The GNU GPL has a preface which is itself philosophy and not legal terms. Other than that, the use of the GPL is influenced by philosophy but is not itself philosophy. Marxism includes philosophy, but a workers’ union is not in and of itself philosophy. The union might have a philosophy and might be Marxist or otherwise, and it surely would not have an anti-union philosophy…
GNU philosophy definitely does not require or mandate GPL. GNU Philosophy says that proprietary software is unjust and software freedom matters etc. So, if it could be shown clearly that use of GPL reduces software freedom in some case and use of another license would increase software freedom, GNU philosophy would oppose GPL in that case. If GNU were dogmatically about GPL itself, then LGPL would not exist. GNU advocates copyleft as a tactic not an end in itself.
Some people misinterpret the GNU ideas and get overly stuck on copyleft. But in my experience, nearly all advocates of the GPL do support Apache/MIT/BSD permissive licenses, particularly as true free licenses that are better than proprietary terms. In my experience, most GPL advocates engaged in this license topic spend a good portion of their time correcting the widespread misunderstanding of GNU and free software movement not considering permissive licenses as free. You can readily see at Various Licenses and Comments about Them - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation that all the permissive licenses are considered acceptable and appropriate for free software. From a GNU perspective, an MIT project that is never used to make proprietary software is absolutely and completely fine.
Android is itself permissively-licensed free software that is usually delivered as proprietary versions to customers. From a GNU perspective, the Linux kernel being copyleft means that part of the software in Android phones is still free while part (the Android versions that are not free) is proprietary. So, this is an example where copyleft succeeded better at passing on the freedoms downstream. From a GNU perspective, it’s better for Android phones to have a mostly-free kernel than to have had a proprietary kernel. The focus is thus on getting phones that have still more of the software freed.
Well, I think this can be summarized as: software freedom is not merely a matter of licensing. All these other factors affect whether software is more or less free in practice. I agree with you about all the issues beyond licensing. I have discussions about those things with many people. The whole conference I was at this summer featured people discussing these things, even including issues of Marxism/capitalism/conduct/decision-making/programming-languages etc. These are all big and important topics.
Again, this is a practical matter. And you might be right. There are software-freedom focused people with ideology about this like http://copyfree.org/ and there are cases such as one of the conference speakers who emphasized that he is questioning things after years of defending copyleft. He wonders if that strategy has been misguided and myopic. If it were absolutely clear that non-copyleft led to more software-freedom, then nobody in the free software movement would support copyleft anymore. It’s not currently clear either way. There are cases of copyleft and of non-copyleft doing better for software freedom. But again: I didn’t bring up the topic of copyleft at all because my point here was about free/libre/open vs proprietary. The concern I have and started with was around the existence of proprietary parts of Baserow. You brought up copyleft.
That’s legally false. Under copyleft, only those with legal claim as authors or with copyright-assignment have the copyright. Everyone else has permission to use the software under the terms of the license. The public does not share the copyright.
Copyleft grants public freedoms, yes. Choosing to do so indicates something about goals, but not directly. Thinking “I want the public to have freedom” is a philosophical statement. Thinking “I will use the GNU GPL for this software” is not a philosophical statement.
This is something like appeal-to-popularity. Here are some popular permissive-projects, therefore permissive licenses are better. That’s not logically valid.
But a stronger statement is: “Linux is GPL but it still failed to deliver meaningful freedoms for users of almost any product that uses Linux — therefore the GPL is mostly failing to achieve the freedoms it is meant for.” That doesn’t itself justify the conclusion that permissive licensing is better, because permissively-licensed software like Android itself is also failing to deliver freedoms to end-users.
Sure, and you would fit the copyfree ideology then. GNU and FSF and OSI are all not anarchist philosophically. I think there’s some interesting ideas in anarchism, but I tend to find anarchists too dogmatic and too myopically internal-looking rather than pragmatic. I appreciate David Graeber’s “lowercase-a anarchism”.
I think you are focused on the Open Source Initiative. That’s the Open Source Definition. The link and the reference to my work was related to Open Knowledge Foundation which worked on bringing the focus of open to data and cultural works, and they focused on accepting licenses for those, not software licenses. So, open data licenses and creative commons and such.
At any rate, you and others can say that GPLv2 is not an “open” license. However, the consensus that is respected by most in the software world, activist and corporate alike, is that GPLv2 is “Open Source”.
Right, but like anything else, the goal is to get people to understand and care more. Same again with the Organic analogy. The consumers who don’t care about Organic also don’t care whether the label is abused or used deceptively.
The fact that some people care is the starting point. Then the question is: how easy is it for those people who care to make a fork and publicly promote it and help the broader community get better non-malicious software? And the presence of proprietary parts of a project makes that step much harder — even for the people who care.
This is such a confused sentiment. If I cared only about appearance and not about actual openness, why would I have started this topic?? Baserow already appeared Open Source in their marketing. If that’s what I wanted, I would be happy and never have complained! Obviously, I’m complaining because I want things that are marketed as Open Source to actually be fully Open Source. Obviously, my concerns are not limited to marketing. Obviously this isn’t about appearances alone. Did you really have that impression?
You would do better asking these things as questions instead of overconfident statements.
You’re completely missing the point here. I like Kanban view for example. And Surveys are useful. Those features are proprietary in Baserow. That means if Baserow gets bought by some corporation who stops developing it in the end or who adds malicious things or otherwise the project goes in a direction that is problematic, a community fork of Baserow will lack Kanban and Survey features. Thus, anyone who wants those features will be tempted to stick to Baserow despite the problems, and it’s extra work for the fork to reimplement those features. And if the list of proprietary features grows over time (as has happened in many open-core projects), then the open source part gets relatively weaker and weaker which is a stronger lock-in of users to the main Baserow. But I don’t know this will happen with Baserow, it’s a fear based on cases of other projects where this has happened.
The core point is: Kanban being a proprietary feature has absolutely nothing to do with this being a no-code project where most users don’t want source code. Most software does not involve users caring directly about source code. The reasons to be Open Source are not in any case about most users getting into the source themselves.
Well, don’t judge this community by just you and me. We clearly have fallen into a compulsively extended conversation and are neither of us representative of the rest of the community. I will remind you though that my concern was NEVER about MIT-license. It’s only about the project having proprietary features.
I want transparency about projects marketing themselves as “open core” or similar rather than Open Source because the pressure to be transparent about this status is itself a social pressure to be more Open Source. It looks bad socially to say “we’re Open Source” and have 90% of the codebase be proprietary. It looks okayish but still a bit off to say “we’re Open Source” and have 15% of the codebase be proprietary. It looks honorable to say “we’re Open Source” and 100% of the product’s codebase is MIT. So, when companies are pushed to publicly explain how Open Source they are and to label things clearly, it provides a push for them to justify their decisions. Displaying values publicly pushes people to live up to those values. That’s why I care about the marketing in general here.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.