Comment by echelon
Comment by echelon 17 hours ago
Why is it okay to just accept that the hyperscalers are 100% closed, but the minute a smaller player tries to play "open-ish" with "fair source" we crucify them?
Fair source is amazing. You get the code. You can modify the code. You can redistribute the code. You just can't take their business from them and compete with them head-to-head with their product. You can reformulate it into something else, but you can't take their labor and cut their knees off with it. You have literally every other freedom.
Why in the hell are so many people against that?
Fair source is sustainable and equitable. You get everything except for that one little right with which you could compete with them.
Everyone gushes over Obsidian - that's not even "source available" or "fair source". It's completely closed.
I bet if Obsidian went "fair source", and you could download the code and compile it yourself, there would be hundreds of voices crawling out of the woodwork to call them the devil for not being pure OSI-approved open. How dare they keep one little freedom to themselves for all the hard work they've done?
I'm half convinced the anti-"fair source" voices are deep industry folks who want big tech to own the OSI definition. Who can use it strategically as they sit atop hundreds of billions of dollars in cash flows. Open source to the FAANGMAGMA Gods is just a way of outsourcing labor and dangling trinkets in front of underpaid labor.
n8n isn't doing a "VC rug pull." They're trying to be sustainable. The only thing that's been "pulled" is the wool over the eyes of every engineer satisfied with FAANG OSI-approved serfdom. Some of the pieces are "open" all right, but they own pretty much everything the sunlight touches.
If n8n can't build a business then it just becomes some side project hobby. What exactly do we think every other company is doing?
Please be more pragmatic and realize that "fair source" is sustainable. It rewards the innovators and you get almost everything for free. You just can't shoot them with their own gun.
Do you not want the ability to download the source and potentially tweak the software? To have a copy you can hold onto forever? To be able to analyze it for telemetry. To be able to potentially submit patches (if you're feeling generous)?
Don't you want them to make money? Rather than beg for Github donation scraps?
Be especially mindful if you're typing a retort on a Macbook Pro or iPhone and deploying software to GKE or AWS.
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I care that software I depend upon survives long term. In consequence, I care to some extent that the principal company or organization building that software also survives... But that finite concern is balanced against the simultaneous concern that the software itself can survive the organization's potential dissolution. I don't want to have to make a sudden, stressful, expensive migration because corporate buy-outs, bankruptcies, or mergers result in rug-pulls for software I use.
"Fair" source does absolutely nothing to allievate those concerns. The four software freedoms do.
It is true that for a quarter century software developers have naively licensed their projects under MIT and BSD style permissive licenses, and have then felt robbed when big companies come in and eat their lunch. Except it was never their lunch because they didn't actually use licenses that would have asserted their rights to that lunch.
Thankfully, that naivete is finally, slowly dying but, rather than use robust solutions that have been around for decades (e.g. GPL-or-AGPL/proprietary dual license), some developers have invented a new, largely untested concept and named it by dressing up their own sour grapes and spite as "fairness".
"Fair" source software is a non-solution in search of a problem.
Free software and strong copyleft licenses already exist. Dual-licensing already exists. Viable, profitable, healthy, ethical companies built on these strategies already exist.
I used to think Stallman was a crank and a fundamentalist, and he absolutely is, and thank goodness for that. I now think "open-source" is exactly as diluted as free software advocates initially pointed out, and the emergence of "fair" source is part of the damage it has done.