The licensing model is another thing that is going to be a big issue as the world moves into the cloud.
So far, many of the big names in FOSS, such as MySQL, have been using GPL to their advantage. By forcing competitors to release their modifications under the same license, GPL grants the copyright owner an effective monopoly on proprietary features. RMS probably isn't very happy with this situation, but it works.
GPL, however, is nearly useless in the cloud. You can add features to a GPL program and offer it as a proprietary service running on your servers. Since you're not distributing the program itself, you don't need to open-source your changes! AGPL was designed to prevent that, but hardly anyone uses AGPL.
Moving in the other direction are LGPL, BSD, MIT, and a bunch of other "permissive" licenses that are getting ever more popular among the cutting edge of the tech scene. In an ideal world, this should lead to even more freedom and better tools for everyone. But we don't live in an ideal world.
RMS has a knack of saying seemingly outrageous things that turn out to be highly relevant 10-20 years later, so I wonder what consequences the current proliferation of easy-to-convert-to-proprietary-software licenses will have on the tech scene of the next generation. Will all the good features get locked into walled gardens, or will companies continue to see value in releasing code under a permissive license?
Today's FOSS culture didn't arise on its own. It owes its existence to a dedicated group of people, such as RMS, ESR, Linus, Red Hat, MySQL, etc. who provided a large and stable copyleft core for the rest of the ecosystem to revolve around. But if the cloud makes the copyleft core largely irrelevant, how will the rest of the ecosystem adjust? Will it even survive? I don't know.
I think the situation isn't quite that dire, based on a couple factors:
First, keeping your own private fork of a GPL library isn't all that easy an option if you also expect to be able to benefit from any further work done by the project's maintainers. By going that route you're committing to spending a lot of time and money on a lot of hairy merging.
Second, for most serious companies the open source libraries they rely on are not a part of their secret sauce. You're really not maintaining a whole lot of competitive advantage by closely holding that tweak to MySQL's query optimizer that lets your social office supply reviewing site respond to requests with 1% lower latency. Unless fractionally shorter response times is really what your company has going for it, of course. In which case it's probably doomed anyway.
I think these two factors in concert mean that it's generally much better for a business to contribute back than to try and maintain an internal fork.
Of course, businesses only contribute back to projects that they've decided to use in the first place. Using GPL code for your SASS product probably won't cause any immediate problems. It can still be a huge strategic misstep, though, because it does still limit your options for how you can pivot in the future. If you're a startup that could also mean a big drop in your value in the eyes of a potential suitor.
Using GPL code ... can still be a huge strategic misstep ... that could also mean a big drop in your value in the eyes of a potential suitor.
Yes, I think this explains the dearth of GPL contributions from recent startups.
I didn't mean to imply that GPL was ever the perfect way to license code that you also intend to use commercially. It's mediocre at best for that purpose, and intentionally so. After all, why would RMS want to facilitate production of proprietaty software?
What is undeniable is that the cloud and the startup scene are leading a new trend in FOSS licensing. The recent Github statistics show more MIT/BSD/Apache licensed projects than ever before. This shift will have far-reaching consequences on the FOSS ecosystem in the long term, and I'm just not sure whether those consequences will be good or bad. We've got too many idealists and too many VC-chasers in the same room here ;)
Only as a commercial weapon (which was never the intent) - for other readers, MySQL is dual licensedm and it's possible to use it already without being subject to the GPL, obviously. There wasn't much pickup for Affero, all told. In many ways, it's nicer, because people who are not distributing apps are more likely to use GPL applications (though if they understand linkage, they shouldn't fear it anyway). License choices are not that important.
There are definitely ways to build proprietary application components without requiring GPL. (i.e. solutions around a GPL application that don't require directly extending the core of it with proprietary bits). Numerous examples.
The other model is basically building something that is a software consultancy / helpdesk / services org. And that's a lot of what Red Hat is.
Today, it seems many more projects are actually going full Apache. Because it's easy to extend something, it's not declining. It's accelerating.
If you make your own extensions to something and don't get them upstream, you lose the advantage of being able to consume easily what happens upstream. And that upstream development is increasingly funded by people who work at companies using those solutions - or selling them.
Cloud just makes everything to deploy faster and on even larger scale; being able to host something behind a .com in pre-widescale-cloud days was still a thing.
Comments
The licensing model is another thing that is going to be a big issue as the world moves into the cloud.
So far, many of the big names in FOSS, such as MySQL, have been using GPL to their advantage. By forcing competitors to release their modifications under the same license, GPL grants the copyright owner an effective monopoly on proprietary features. RMS probably isn't very happy with this situation, but it works.
GPL, however, is nearly useless in the cloud. You can add features to a GPL program and offer it as a proprietary service running on your servers. Since you're not distributing the program itself, you don't need to open-source your changes! AGPL was designed to prevent that, but hardly anyone uses AGPL.
Moving in the other direction are LGPL, BSD, MIT, and a bunch of other "permissive" licenses that are getting ever more popular among the cutting edge of the tech scene. In an ideal world, this should lead to even more freedom and better tools for everyone. But we don't live in an ideal world.
RMS has a knack of saying seemingly outrageous things that turn out to be highly relevant 10-20 years later, so I wonder what consequences the current proliferation of easy-to-convert-to-proprietary-software licenses will have on the tech scene of the next generation. Will all the good features get locked into walled gardens, or will companies continue to see value in releasing code under a permissive license?
Today's FOSS culture didn't arise on its own. It owes its existence to a dedicated group of people, such as RMS, ESR, Linus, Red Hat, MySQL, etc. who provided a large and stable copyleft core for the rest of the ecosystem to revolve around. But if the cloud makes the copyleft core largely irrelevant, how will the rest of the ecosystem adjust? Will it even survive? I don't know.
I think the situation isn't quite that dire, based on a couple factors:
First, keeping your own private fork of a GPL library isn't all that easy an option if you also expect to be able to benefit from any further work done by the project's maintainers. By going that route you're committing to spending a lot of time and money on a lot of hairy merging.
Second, for most serious companies the open source libraries they rely on are not a part of their secret sauce. You're really not maintaining a whole lot of competitive advantage by closely holding that tweak to MySQL's query optimizer that lets your social office supply reviewing site respond to requests with 1% lower latency. Unless fractionally shorter response times is really what your company has going for it, of course. In which case it's probably doomed anyway.
I think these two factors in concert mean that it's generally much better for a business to contribute back than to try and maintain an internal fork.
Of course, businesses only contribute back to projects that they've decided to use in the first place. Using GPL code for your SASS product probably won't cause any immediate problems. It can still be a huge strategic misstep, though, because it does still limit your options for how you can pivot in the future. If you're a startup that could also mean a big drop in your value in the eyes of a potential suitor.
Yes, I think this explains the dearth of GPL contributions from recent startups.
I didn't mean to imply that GPL was ever the perfect way to license code that you also intend to use commercially. It's mediocre at best for that purpose, and intentionally so. After all, why would RMS want to facilitate production of proprietaty software?
What is undeniable is that the cloud and the startup scene are leading a new trend in FOSS licensing. The recent Github statistics show more MIT/BSD/Apache licensed projects than ever before. This shift will have far-reaching consequences on the FOSS ecosystem in the long term, and I'm just not sure whether those consequences will be good or bad. We've got too many idealists and too many VC-chasers in the same room here ;)
"GPL, however, is nearly useless in the cloud."
Only as a commercial weapon (which was never the intent) - for other readers, MySQL is dual licensedm and it's possible to use it already without being subject to the GPL, obviously. There wasn't much pickup for Affero, all told. In many ways, it's nicer, because people who are not distributing apps are more likely to use GPL applications (though if they understand linkage, they shouldn't fear it anyway). License choices are not that important.
There are definitely ways to build proprietary application components without requiring GPL. (i.e. solutions around a GPL application that don't require directly extending the core of it with proprietary bits). Numerous examples.
The other model is basically building something that is a software consultancy / helpdesk / services org. And that's a lot of what Red Hat is.
Today, it seems many more projects are actually going full Apache. Because it's easy to extend something, it's not declining. It's accelerating.
If you make your own extensions to something and don't get them upstream, you lose the advantage of being able to consume easily what happens upstream. And that upstream development is increasingly funded by people who work at companies using those solutions - or selling them.
Cloud just makes everything to deploy faster and on even larger scale; being able to host something behind a .com in pre-widescale-cloud days was still a thing.