Thanks for posting this! I use WhatsApp Web, so seems like this may cause me problems…
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Cake day: January 21st, 2025
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1·2 days agoOoooh, wait. I think I understood one of your points better now…
I done (don’t?) own the code I contribute. Technically meaning if you contribute code, and use that snippet in a commercial context, again, your in violation of the license.
So, I think you’re saying, what if you contribute some code to a source available project, maybe some boilerplate that’s the same everywhere, and then you use that same contribution in a commercial product? Then you’d be in violation of the source available license? Is that what you’re saying?
This seems like a good reason NOT to contribute to a source available project, which is totally fine. Whereas this is possible with GPL if you 100% own the code and didn’t sign a CLA.
However, not all projects are “I want everyone to pitch in and I want everyone to own the project.” There are lots of projects where 1 dude or 1 company want to retain ownership of their app and don’t need or want outside contributors. Normally, they’d probably just be closed source—maybe they might consider being source available.
(Just as long as they don’t pretend to be Open Source™, in which case fuck them.)
And I love how you glossed over all of that to get a little bit hurt at me. …
Sorry, the reason I glossed over that is because I didn’t want to get involved in that conversation. I was just trying to get the conversation back on topic. I don’t endorse the personal attacks.
So what if google also benefits?
Why are we ok with workers not getting paid for their labor? Would you still work at your job if they didn’t pay you? These companies aren’t small shops, they’re huge giants that in some cases are destroying countries. They’ll be ok if they have to share a tiny fraction of their obscene wealth with regular people.
TCP, SSL, and thousands of standard technology. Should those be charged as well?
That’s a great question. I’m not really sure actually. Btw, I don’t think Open Source™ should go away. I do think there could be a middle ground though. There should be more nuance than just 0% give away or 100% give away.
Even small utilities can contribute to people learning and adapting. … It’s such a boogy man at the cost of other people learning and benefiting from what you’ve done the same way you benfit from others.
I think you may be confusing Source Available with Closed Source. Source Available licenses don’t stop regular people from creating a community, contributing, learning, adapting, improving software. They do stop companies from making money off of your work though.
i will never understand what people hope to accomplish with these licenses
It’s simple. The point is to stop Amazon, Google, etc from selling your product.
not backed by a trusted group, it’s basically entirely pointless.
FUTO has money to fight for the FUTO license. MariaDB, Hashicorp, Sentry etc have money to fight for the BUSL license.
Here’s what I’ve found:
- BUSL 1.1: a source available license that grants the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use of the Licensed Work. If you release v1 of your app, 4 years later v1 becomes Open Source™. However, the latest version is still blocked from “production use”. This actually seems pretty reasonable.
- Post Open: a source available license (and whole organization) that’s broken into 2 parts: zero-cost license for regular users and a paid contract for commercial use. It sounds like the Post Open Collective would go out and enforce and charge companies to use Post Open software and then pay devs. (Not ready yet!)
Hashicorp recently switch to BUSL 1.1 for Terraform (and other things), which a lot of people got pissed about… which I understand! They took all of the community’s contributions and then changed the terms on them! I get that.
However, starting a project from scratch with BUSL 1.1 and then not claiming to be Open Source™ seems totally fine to me. Contributions from the public may come or may not. That’s fine. A lot of projects don’t have a rich community of people all over the world contributing. A lot of projects are just 1 dude or 1 company doing 95% of the dev work. That’s fine. If you don’t want to contribute to a project because it’s source available instead of Open Source™ that’s tooootally fine.
The regular user, however, would still mostly get the benefits of Open Source™. The people affected would be the ones trying to make money off of your app.
People believing in community built and owned software
Btw, I’m not arguing against this. I believe Open Source™ is valuable and has its place. This post isn’t about Open Source™, despite most people on this thread trying to label the FUTO license as Open Source™ and then getting mad because it’s not actually Open Source™ even though FUTO isn’t claiming to be Open Source™. This is something else.
The main thing I’m thinking about is how to prevent Google, Facebook, etc from extracting huge amounts of wealth from small devs who get nothing in return. The obvious answer has been to release an app as closed source. That blocks out Big Tech AND users. Source Available licenses might be a third option to block out Big Tech, but not regular users.
open source washing
I definitely agree with you on this IF the company is claiming to be Open Source™, but then uses a source available license.
However, FUTO is NOT claiming to be Open Source™.
I think about it this way: either a business releases the app as close source and users can’t see anything OR the app is released as source available and users can see what’s going on. Contributions are not expected and may not even be allowed. Open Source™ wouldn’t even be considered as an option.
27·3 days agoI didn’t even realize you could install OpenOffice anymore… it’s doesn’t seem available in the Arch repos. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Apache_OpenOffice
Oh, wow. TIL https://www.openoffice.org/
TIL! Interesting!
Ah, yep. FUTO License is neither Free™ nor Open Source™ (nor are they trying to be). However, they still allow users to see, modify, and distribute code.
You may use or modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
But, yeah, they’re aiming for something different.
community contributions to the codebase, assuming that was an objective
I don’t think that’s the main objective of the FUTO license. I believe the main objective is to incentivize developers to create great software that respects individual users and fights back against the big tech oligarchy.
But that implies that for commercial users – like a corporation – they’ll have to negotiate a separate license
Yep. That’s the point.
they can buy their way into any sort of license terms they want, and the normie user can’t complain.
I don’t quite see the issue here. Can you explain a little more? A third-party would just get a license to sell the software, not to develop it.
trust that Futo Holdings won’t do something reprehensible with the copyrights, be it licensing to certain hostile countries or whatever.
Isn’t this currently possible with Open Source™? Like the whole point of Open Source™ is that anyone can use the software for anything, right? ICE probably uses Linux now to manage people in internment camps in the US. If anything, wouldn’t the FUTO license be better for potentially preventing this?
would corporations even want to contribute? … CorpA’s contributions are available for CorpB to use, but CorpB has zero obligation to ever contribute a line of code which CorpA could later benefit from
Isn’t this exactly the case in Open Source™? Google may contribute something to Linux, but my company will never contribute anything. Seems like Google is ok with my company benefiting from their work.
FUTO License is not open source. They do not claim to be open source. They’re not trying to be open source. They call themselves “source first”.
Hm. That’s a good question actually. I get the feeling this FUTO license is more designed for local apps, not SaaS.
If the license changes to something hostile. The users can keep using the version before the new license. Someone could even fork the project and offer it for free. This is allowed.
You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
But for SaaS, there’s also the cost of running servers on the cloud… so you either foot the bill and offer the SaaS for free OR you ask for a commercial license.
Which… actually… is this the end of the world?
You could still have your fork. People could still offer it online publicly. But as soon as you start getting so many users that you need to ask for donations, then you’d have to pay.
Seems like individual app users wouldn’t be affected much. Only people setting themselves up to be service providers would end up paying.
I still feel like it’s shady to keep calling it “open source” when open source is already well defined.
They are not open source. They do not currently claim to be open source.
https://futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/
calling our software “open source.” … we’re changing. … We’ll use the term “source first” instead for our projects.
Oh, interesting. Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) was involved BUSL (BSL) and Post-Open.
If you statically link against an LGPLed library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.
Yeah, I think this is the hard part with Go. I’ve never seen anyone do anything with objects in Go. Everything is compiled into 1 binary, often statically linked. I’m not sure it’s possible to build a Go binary by using object files.
TIL about Post-Open license. I’ve also been looking at BSL and FUTO’s Source First license.
LGPL
The license seems to be targeted towards languages like C/C++. On the other hand, languages like Go do a lot of static linking, so it may be impossible to comply with this license in Go.
MPL may be a good alternative here.
you don’t care that much about the AGPL clauses (e.g. because your app isn’t a server).
I’ve been thinking about this recently… Let’s say you develop some local CLI. You think it’s not a server, so you license as GPL.
Later someone comes and offers your CLI as SaSS. They write the server piece that just calls your local CLI on their server and pipes the input and output between the user.
So… should you always prefer AGPL over GPL?
FUTO specifically allows you to derive value from a project like this:
Yes, it’s a different set of value than Open Source™ gives you. Again, they’re not claiming to provide the same value as Open Source™. (They’re also not trying to replace Open Source™.) Yes, it’s not the value that you want. Yes, that’s by design.
Do you also think, what’s the point of Google Search, Windows, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, etc if you can’t derive any “value” from it, where “value” means Open Source™ value? Those apps are still insanely valuable to users, even if they don’t get Open Source™ value from them.