Corporate Open Source is Dead
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 พ.ค. 2024
- Nobody likes being rugpulled. But lately, it's going around like a virus.
Why are so many former open source darlings selling out or relicensing? And is there anything you can do to fight back against these anti-open-source practices?
Resources I mentioned in this video:
- IBM's $6.4b HashiCorp Purchase: www.reuters.com/markets/deals...
- Hacker News comments on IBM and HashiCorp: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...
- HashiCorp meme: / 1783303926042996928
- Redis' new licensing: redis.io/blog/redis-adopts-du...
- My article on Red Hat's license changes: www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/202...
- Article on Hashicorp and other license changes: thenewstack.io/hashicorp-aban...
- OpenTofu fork announcement: opentofu.org/blog/the-opentof...
- Redis fork battle: www.thestack.technology/battl...
- Everybody hates the Redis forking mess: arstechnica.com/information-t...
- Redka SQLite Redis not-fork: github.com/nalgeon/redka
- OpenELA press release: www.suse.com/news/OpenELA-for...
- IBM job cuts in marketing and communications: www.cnbc.com/2024/03/12/ibm-t...
- Shouting in the datacenter: • Shouting in the Datace...
- Fork Yeah! Bryan Cantrill's presentation: • LISA11 - Fork Yeah! Th...
- Drew DeVault's blog post on CLAs: drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Do...
- GNU - 'Open Source misses the point': www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-s...
Support me on Patreon: / geerlingguy
Sponsor me on GitHub: github.com/sponsors/geerlingguy
Merch: redshirtjeff.com
2nd Channel: / geerlingengineering
#opensource
Contents:
00:00 - What happened
00:34 - The rot sets in
02:01 - The year open source dies
02:47 - CLAs considered toxic
03:52 - Free vs open
04:31 - Opportunity knocks
05:48 - Freeloaders - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![🔴 [TRỰC TIẾP] Tứ Xuyên (Trung Quốc) VS BCTT Trường Tươi Bình Phước | Cúp VTV9-Bình Điền | JET STUDIO](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/5nF-PCh_Ojw/mqdefault.jpg)
Long live open source
yess
Actually, rather "long live free software" ;)
Long live Free Software. I remember meeting Richard M Stallman years back and thinking, "this fella is a little extreme." Lately, I'm thinking, "he's right." This morning I read an essay "The Man Who Killed Google Search," and I see a pattern emerging.
Open source doesn't deserve this. Long Live Free Software.
Long live the open source
I blame Amazon. They built AWS on top of these open source projects and never contribute back anything.
That's what the elite does, they only take.
Every company does this, unfortunately.
Apple - Build their macOS/iOS/watchOS/*OS on the open source Mach Micro-kernel (they later convert this to a hybrid kernel), the BSD userland and networking stack, and all other open source programs which are out there.
Amazon - Their entire stack is build on open source projects, except a few proprietary ones.
Microsoft - They've took the BSD networking stacking and plug into Windows, long ago. This is still the case. Though most of their products are proprietary (build by "them"). Microsoft isn't too "worse" and at least do give back their contributions to the community
Google - Same as Microsoft.
And many more... Apple is the most evil one here in the list.
Freeloaders though have indirect revenue benefits which are often ignored. The same people that will be running home labs are the same sort of people that will spend time in technical forums and implementation at large organisations. You are winning hearts and minds the same way that Adobe used to give out free software to education institutions. You familiarise your product base and the people who will be making implementation decisions at companies with your product so that when the enterprise money rolls around you’re the top pick. By making the nerds hate you, you’re not gonna do well.
This is exactly what the MBA folks who make the relicensing decisions don't get. Though, in the short term they do juice the numbers, the bonuses get paid out, and when they are eventually dismissed with their golden parachutes, they rinse and repeat somewhere else.
Sadly, a tale as old as [corporate open source].
This is basically Cloudflare's entire model. Get the home lab users and small time VPS users absolutely hooked on free services, and then when they need DDoS protection, CDN, etc. services at work, the first place they turn too is Cloudflare, maybe even the free plan initially, but eventually, that business will pay for those services, and usually pay a really good premium for it.
It's enshittification. Earn hearts and minds until your product is dominant, then take away free options and crank up prices once businesses will struggle to switch to a competitor.
The home lab tinkerers are also somewhat likely to run more or less "exotic" system and bump into bugs. Reporting and fixing them helps everybody. Freeloader? It depends.
They are after the corporate freeloaders. At work we have whole departments that exist on running Ansible and Terraform. Nobody pays nothing to redhat/IBM/whatever owners. All firewalls we use are pfsense community and so on. If we had to pay for all the opensource we are using, the company would shut down
They complain about freeloaders yet won't offer minimal support plans small businesses can afford.
That's by design. IBM caters to the cream of the crop
@@Mordecrox"oh yeah"
Who are they?
Mayor corps who have fat pockets
@@Mordecrox and yet IBM itself is not the cream of the crop . It is the DINOSAUR in the room
It strikes me as weird when companies do this kind of thing. Linux and open source is virtually built on pooling resources, adapting and bringing in new ideas. It feels like it's just a matter of time for users of the rug-pulled software to move onto something different.
Yes, but short term it likely means a lot of money from things like IBM. It's just basic greed. I don't think that in most of these cases, anyone in management actually cares about the product.
Linux is developed on top of corporate giants. One is delusional if they believe Linux and other open source projects can be as big as today without the support of corporate money and people.
Literally yesterday I have seen a similar discussion on another video of completely different topic.
The person said that companies just look at short term gains completely ignoring long-term effects.
Quoting him it was something like "If you can earn 1 billion dollars now and loose 2 billions next year, all big companies will go for that deal".
@@hubertnnn Look at Boeing being at the future of all these big companies putting profits and stakeholders first. No one will learn, because the ones that drive these kind of decisions will jump ship after the damage is done, but not visible, and earn another big fat paycheck along the way.
@@bzuidgeest Not greed (though I am not saying these ghouls aren't greedy) just the nature of capitalism. There cannot be any such thing as "corporate open source" this video is complete nonsense. It's either collectively owned in common (open source) or it is locked down by a corporation or private IP holder.
The whole thing about "freeloaders" reminds me of a bit from Extra Credits back in the day. An exec at an MMORPG developer had asked him "How many players who aren't paying us do you expect me to pay for server capacity for?" The answer was "As many as you can get," because those games live and die by their community. Open source software is the same. If nobody wants to use or work on the software, it dies.
Yeah, I remember something similar from a guy talking about a dead Korean game, quote more or less was "Cool skins are cool, but why would you drop hundreds of them if there are no other players to use them against?"
Back when they were a great source to listen to and learn about game dev rather than a poisoned well. Man, I miss the days when people weren't crazy. 😢
It's also bizarre to even talk about freeloaders when IBM bought Hashicorp for $6.4billion. And that's due to the popularity of its open source software and the services and support it profited from by releasing it as such.
@@KiraSlithExtra Credits is a poisoned well these days? That's unfortunate. Their Skinner Box video shaped how I look at mtx-based games.
@KiraSwhat what happened to them
It's a good thing you let us know you were Jeff Geerling at the end. I thought for a moment I was watching Louis Rossmann.
With the way things are going, we need more Louis Rossmann -type attitude about things.
I dread the day Jeff doesn't promise to be Jeff until next time and stops being Jeff forever.
@@hellterminator Prophecies have foretold it! One day, he will be _reborn_ as the Fejj, and the brutal Age of Reegling shall then commence! All of TH-cam subscribers will _tremble_ in fear, as he watches us and plays us, controlling his audience to his very whim.
And I was expecting Jay Foreman to pop up next to him...
Lol, did I miss the giant weird recliner?
The problem is corporate America has this very weird trend lately where every year there must be double digit growth on numbers which is not sustainable. So we are in a period where they are firing people, rug pulling open source software, and doing other nasty business moves to try and squeeze every last drop of revenue they can to satisfy that double digit growth. The problem with this strategy and this mindset of always seeking double digit growth is that it isn't sustainable at all. You can only lay off so many people until you have no one left to run the business and you can only squeeze so much money out of people before they go find another product (or a free fork of yours). It'll only be a matter of time before this mindset gets turned upside down and they start looking at hiring a bunch of people and looking at long term revenue again. Then of course, the cycle will repeat itself...
Long term hasn’t been looked at in at least a decade, possibly more.
@@c1ph3rpunk Yep. It's all about the growth numbers this year and only this year. It's just not smart business to only care about right now and it's why these companies kill off so many products in early development too.
This is why companies such as Spotify have increased their prices for the second time in 6 months. They have no additional value to offer, and there is almost no growth, so price increases are the only only way to increase profits. As long as people are prepared to pay those prices (and they appear to be), the corporates will keep increasing them. I’ve ended two subscriptions this year, and TH-cam is next; my family subscription price is being doubled next month, and I’m not paying that much, nor will I be watching the appalling adverts. I’m happy to pay a fair price for a service, but I’m not paying more when there is no additional value.
@@Watchandlearn91I've seen way too many phenomenal ideas just killed in less than a year because not making enough money
Isn't that the nature of public trade company? and isn't that why Valve's competitors keep killing themself?
Any time greed gets involved, things go south. I never trust corporate open-source.
I actually ran a software company for 19 years. We published some free software (GPL license) but our commercial product was not open source. We didn't pretend that it was; it was proprietary from the start and people went in knowing that.
Hey, what do you think about this: a proprietary software with an open-source covenant; so it becomes GPL automatically after a certain date or after a new version of the proprietary software is released?
I've been thinking about writing some programs and this is currently my plan for monetization without restricting freedom.
@@josephbrandenburg4373 I think that still restricts freedom, and there's no guarantee the covenant will be adhered to or be enforceable. If you ever hit it big and want to sell your company, a purchaser will demand removal of that covenant.
If you want to monetize your software, make it proprietary and sell it using the normal proprietary business model. If eventually you decide to open-source it, then that's just gravy.
If they can effectively monetise the code by selling it (rather than it driving customers to the stuff you are selling) then it's crazy that companies were making it OS in the first place. Or maybe they can't actually monetise it.
About the 'just make your software proprietary' argument at 6:20: that's the thing with the bait and switch: these projects would never have grown as fast had they not been open source. Open Source instills trust in users (and business decision makers who think it's free), which is abused through CLAs and rug pulls.
I never batted an eye at CLA's before because I didn't understand the implications. Thanks for educating us, Jeff!
I had a couple of small features I was considering implementing in VSCode, until I noticed the CLA. Nah, I'm good. I don't want to build on top of a rug.
The tradition of CLAs stated with the FSF, which they did for possibly good reasons suchbas making it easier for them to negotiate with bad actors. Some still feel the FSF is above reproach, but i think the years have shown it's a model with serious problems. ID rather they led the way in showing how to do this better to ensure free software stays free.
Gilder said it right, what you get when you give out software for free is market share.
He meant it in the context of trapping people into the AI advertising machine of the "free" Google products.
If free software as in gratis did not exist, software made for small size or individuals would still exist.
Check out the price of TurboPascal in the 80s and an actual commercial license of Visual Studio today.
Big-business and especially big service providers with captive audiences benefited by open source, eliminating cheap actual solutions for their small competitors.
My current customer wanted to look at at an enterprise LDAP solution to replace OpenLDAP, and was interested in Redhat Directory server, and their whole IdP suite. Reaching out to sales, it took almost 3 weeks to even setup a technical call to demo the product, and then the engineer that was do demo didn't bother to show or setup anyone else to do it. After that I literally just never heard a word from sales again like we weren't worth bothering with.
Apparently they really don't like to sell things, so why do they bother buying anyone?
Sometimes the response times depend on how many zeros you represent in ARR... if you're not big enough, or an existing client, it can be weird. Like, you want to pay them money-but you don't have enough money to make them want to take you on!
Quite exactly said, but you'd think with a little decency they'd just tell you that you're not worth the hassle and to fsck off.
I just had a call last week with an enterprise pki vendor I won't name that at least said exactly that. He was cool about it, but he was like "look, we're not really structured for smaller customers like you, I don't think you'll like the price". While annoying, I appreciate they didn't screw me around, even setup a follow up call to discuss the product anyways.
IBM was just sort of weird about it. The sales person was admittedly new, it wasn't like a large product to them, no one seemed to know or care to talk about their Directory Services product or IdP. I have dealt with likes of Cisco off and on for 25 years, I know this sort well, but IBM just seems clueless and broken to even handle modern business.
I imagine IBM will drive these acquisitions into obscurity outside anything but the "too large to fail" customers of theirs. For everyone else, there's a fork for that.
Why though, OpenLDAP is perfectly capable.
@@robertb6276 Current systems are very old/unloved, and have problem. Plus the customer was interested in something with a nice gui to tie it together, ala IPA, or whatever it morphed into after IBM borg'd them. Sadly I guess I'll never know, as I'll not make the call twice.
Yes there's FreeIPA, but there is some desire for something at worst case I can call and have someone walk a person through support, upgrades, whatever. A prior org I worked for used FreeIPA prior, it had issues there too, usually in bugs and support that everyone just wanted it replaced.
Just need an easy button really, and they're willing to throw money at the problem, at least short of getting some in-house expertise to run it.
@@MikeButash True; when I worked at Acquia, they did have a policy to basically figure out the size of the company, and if it was too small, just cut off the relationship politely, because it's a waste of both the sales and the small company's time. It'd be nice to have 'official smaller product recommendations' though, for those cases.
Makes me glad to know that I haven't a clue how to code even this sentence. I helped with the testing of a piece of ham radio software many years ago, it went from being free to users to paid to use and all that work that all of us volunteers did meant we had to pay for it to use it. Sucked.
It's the same everytime. Really often, it wouldn't even make a dent in the revenue chart to just give out a perpetual free license to every individual who helped the project. But no, gotta fuck over everyone!
Ham radio software is the worst. They'll say it's open source and not even have a license, or not adhere to the license.
@@someguy782 in most jurisdictions lack of license is license: proprietary copyright, but contributing to such code may violate basic copyright laws as it would be change without permission.
You can't go back once you're open source!
So go take IBM's legal team to court and let me know how it goes. The problem is that licenses mean nothing and it all boils down to which legal team has more money.
@@PsRohrbaughI think what they mean is that you can always fork the project before it gets that far.
@@PsRohrbaugh That is true for any legal system. Richer always wins, because he can just keep extending the case until the poorer runs out of money.
And many legal systems have to looser rule where the loosing side has to pay for winner's court fees.
That's why Japanese system is much better. I learned a few years ago that in Japan they have 3 days to rule a verdict, so you cannot just keep extending it to infinity.
depends, if they have BSD/MIT license or CLA, they definitely can.
Once a particular set of source code is released under a given open source license (GPL, BSD, MIT, LGPL, AGPL or whatever else) it will always be legal to use that particular set of code under the terms of that license.
Valkey became an official Linux Foundation project as the OSS fork of Redis. It maintains the original BSD license and has support from many well-known OSS-friendly companies.
It’s almost like Stallman warned us
Gotta love that clip of Brendan Gregg yelling at hard drives!
AAAAAAAaaaah!
@@JeffGeerling I think he's just stoking flame graphs hehe
@@MarkRose1337 He was testing acoustic vibrations of discs, I'm sure he has a flame graph of it somewhere
I'm going to the comments section, tell mum I love her.
😂😂😂😂
🍿🍿🍿
"And they're not even a pointless AI company"
love you man
Big FOSS projects should openly advertise adopting DCO instead of CLA or just generally not having a CLA. It's a poison pill and it should be loudly called out every time. My own rebellion is using AGPL for everything I make in my spare time.
I prefer to use AGPL even when the software can't be hosted, because at least if someone modifies it to add such features they can't get around the license
I too like the AGPL (if for no other reason it ticks of the proponents who think all open source should be MIT / BSD ... )
With Jellyfin we explicitly don't have a CLA precisely to keep us honest. By not having a CLA, we've made it functionally impossible to ever change the license (it was before, but that's not the point). Linux is the same way. More projects need to look at CLAs like the corporate cancer they are and ditch them. There is literally zero upside for contributors, only for the project owner (usually, a company just itching for the rugpull moment).
I'd recommend the EUPL. The AGPL has some fuzziness in how "linking" can be interpreted, especially in regards to your app using an AGPL licensed work via API, and if that infects your app (Minio believes this; MongoDB when they used AGPL did not). The FSF actually suggests that if you use an AGPL licensed reverse proxy, you should hijack the first request to the proxy to offer the user a copy of the source. And then presumably set a cookie.
I personally use CC BY SA NC (this is a free license contrary to what some capitalist pigs may believe)
The way corporates and media are using "Open-Source" term makes me afraid, that one day it too will have negative sentiment similar to term "Hacking".
It's a negative sentiment among idiots ... with power. OK, I see your point.
I work for a large global MSP which unfortunatly (much to my distaste) uses alot of open source products but dont give back to the projects, a few of us within the company are about to put a plan together to try and get the higher ups to either joine the linux foundation or create a team that's dedicated to giving back. I try to give back where I can mainly in issue creation (I'm more of the Ops in DevOPs at the moment). It frustrates me and I can see in large meetings in the office when open source products are mentioned alot of eyes dart to me cause they know the record is about to play again but it is starting to work and hopefully will have good news on that soon.
Keep fighting the good fight!
In an ideal world, all users of FOSS would at least contribute bug reports and/or feature requests.
@@devops1044 yeah definatly I've put in a number of bug reports but i've never done a feature request cause I feel like i'm being cheeky given that I'm not at the level to be able to provide code toward the features.
Companies are not going to pay you to develop software that they won't make a profit on. Let's get real here.
@@lakorai2 some companies definitely do or did that
To the multi-billion dollar corpos, you're freeloading off contributors, so calling people who use your stuff is hypocritical. If you want people to contribute, you need to contribute back, it's that simple.
Yup. We saw how many companies were relying on key OSS tools when we saw situations like Heartbleed happen.
Does the license oblige you to contribute back?
@@passenger175yes and no, depends. Many companies are in violation of GPL regarding Linux Kernel, but they're not legally chased as they contribute back in the end. Legal threat would cause them withdrawing their contributions.
Id rather a company rug-pull an open source project that can be forked, rather than see a bad decision ruin the software forever. Better there be a clean break than constant abuse.
glibc,systemd,fedora mentioned
*laughs (cries internally) in gnome*
@@HUEHUEUHEPonyHow is systemd ruined forever?
@@LtdJorgeit hasn’t, lots of contrarians yet none have reached the usefulness of the systemd suite
Never got the hate against systemd. Neither did many distros apparently 😂
Used to call it "free as in beer" vs. "free as in freedom". I'm sure I'm aging myself... that's a colloquialism I haven't heard in decades
That's still used fairly often, but I think many of the 'first generation' free software advocates have slowly been shuffled into the background while open source advocates have ruled the world.
@@JeffGeerling A lot of the first generation advocates have also retired or passed away. The 80s were 40 years ago now.
it's almost as old as "ackhtually it's GNU/Linux"
I'm relatively young (about Jeff's age) and I still consider it to be GNU/Linux. None of this exists without the FSF and GNU.
@@marcogenovesi8570 I just say GNU, the corporate OSS shills have ruined the community enough
The reason they even kinda hit that there project is open is so they can entice free coders / bug fixers and beta testers into the project. This is the real reason any of these projects do this because they know they cant afford to do this in house. Then when the product is in a good state they can rug pool make it closed and charge for it.
They attract with the promise of freedom then cut off once the growth doesn't continue accelerating past the hockey stick phase :(
You guys are really missing a key point here. Elastic didn’t set out to eventually rug pull. If you knew the founders at all you may understand that they had the best intentions from the very beginning. It wasn’t until AWS hosting Elasticsearch and causing mass confusion within the community and not contributing back, Elastic wanted to protect the investment and the community by drawing a line. Freeloaders are not the community and they never have been. It’s disingenuous to call them that, nobody at OSS companies I know call their community that. Why would they?! If a cloud company is going to use their unfair advantages against popular OSS projects, who wins in that situation? The community? No because AWS will likely not give two shots about your project they just want to make more money hosting it. Whereas elastic puts food on developers families tables every night. Including many other OSS projects like Lucene, thanks to both the community and their paid customers. This is a nuanced topic and I hope you all realize that things are never really this black and white. I’m hopeful for the future and think we could all take a breath and find a way forward that bring us together not tear us apart.
A product like terraform itself, no doubt relies on other open source projects. Projects to which they could be considered freeloaders. Another term for freeloader is basically a user.
The example projects have all been forked and IBM likely bought a dead horse. Good for them they wouldn't know what to do with a live one, likely to kill it.
Terraform is basically a single executable. The download is not even a zip. There are no prereq's. I haven't looked at the code so I can't say if there's other OSS encapsulated inside, but doesn't seem like Satellite which combines multiple projects. And think about what it does. It uses a proprietary syntax to make a bunch of different APIs accessible through a single syntax. They've built it based on API information released by cloud providers and virtualization providers. I'd go so far as to say, if your project provides resources on network or cloud, you want there to be terraform modules to deploy your stuff. "These two projects produce similar outputs. A is manual deployed, B can deployed using Terraform." "Give me B", every time.
@@devops1044Just by using Go they are depending on OSS
@@devops1044 Terraform is written in go, which compiles all the prereqs into that single binary. It does indeed pull in a variety of open source dependencies, of varying license flavors.
@@devops1044 that just means they linked things statically. If you don't know what it is, Google it, but it produces a single executable despite external dependencies.
Given what it does, static linking is smart.
There's an XKCD comic about this! I forget which ID it is though
It's really all about money for the CEO's and shareholders...
The greatest freeloaders of all.
@@aniksamiurrahman6365 shareholders are investing money, that's not really freeloading
and lawyers that contribute nothing, but run away with the most filled pockets!
the real cancer of our current world
Some say it’s why the CEO was hired and why the shareholders bought shares
Microsoft did the opposite thing with ThreadX.
They bought up a commercial RTOS, and ended up open sourcing it with Eclipse foundation.
These are indeed weird times..
microsoft with his war on open source lost servers, tyey are trying to not lose the rest they have by doing that, linux ran over them like a steamroller
windows on servers these days are mostly domain, sometimes shared folder servers and a couple of services that are easier on windows than on linux
Ugh, glad I switched from Terraform to Open Tofu
How different is it from terraform? I spent a couple weeks migrating a lot of my homelab to terraform... Is it gonna be a pain to switch?
Open Tofu is supported by The Linux Foundation. Go and take a look at their sponsors. You'll not use their projects if you want to stay away from corporations.
@@daidaloscz At the moment, little to no difference. If you want to change, now is the time before the forks diverge too much.
@@bltzcstrnx What if the Linux foundation gets bought?
@@RicardoSantos-oz3uj they have enough sponsors to not get bought.
Great video, man!
I've been thinking a lot about this since I lost control to an OSS project I created (python-kustomize) because it was versioned under an organization belonging to a company I worked for, so when I left the company I automatically also lost the ability to commit changes to that project. In the end, I had to fork my own project.
But before I did that, I thought, "I don't wanna fork it to my own personal profile, this is not going to be democratic", so I found a dev group which was willing to embrace me (Coherent OSS), and versioned it there. So I think we need to start building stuff under more democratic collective umbrellas, mainly OSS associations (formal or informal), to make sure they stay open and reduce the chances for authoritarian moves.
It's funny younger generations expected these large corporations to play nice and get all surprised when they pull the rug out from under you because it's not profitable.
that's why it's called Free and Open Source - there's a distinction right there people miss or forget. OS has always been known to be a trap in terms of not having a bait & switch happening, if a known corpo is involved. count on it disappearing. they have to from the get go have already in place measures that that move to closed source profit driven drivel doesn't happen. hence the need for the gpl and friends
Let's not lose sight of the fact that this is mostly happening because giant cloud providers take these projects and make paid services that undercut any paid hosting the original project can offer. Elastic didn't change their license because they were greedy, they changed it so that they could survive financially by forcing AWS and friends to actually pay for licenses.
And then AWS and friends sponsored a fork that is thriving and still aren't paying for licenses.
A better strategy would be to be proprietary software to begin with, or have an open core with proprietary addons (which can run on a hypothetical hosted AWS service - Amazon Managed Grafana is an example of this model). Or do like Redis Labs used to do and have the best management/control plane imaginable on top of the open source thing that AWS can run. Since that's ultimately what you're competing on anyways.
Seems like it's time to modify licenses to disallow paid cloud hosting. While what Amazon did was legal, it was pretty unethical. If you're so good at hosting something that you keep the product's creators from profiting from their invention, you're in effect killing the product. Or... perhaps the model of corporations being based around open-source projects simply doesn't work any longer. The idea of a corporate "community" is somewhat dubious to begin with: there's an inherent conflict between stock prices and maintaining the sort of shared values that define a community in the first place. I'm pretty down on public corporations in general ATM: the shared value of quarterly profits too often supersedes their longer-term negative consequences.
@@jorymil That's what's happening with these license changes but since there aren't any good "free for the little guy, paid for the big guy" licenses they just go with aggressive corporate licenses. Open source was simply not prepared for cloud providers drinking everyone's milkshakes at the same time.
Not true, if they weren't OSS they probably wouldn't get that many costumers, it's not like they are the victims, they are pretty much the "bad" guys, they didn't want the bad part while also having all the benefits. If you want to make an OSS you should be aware that companies and other ppl might use without giving what you think you deserve, that's bad, but it's how the world works, just don't play the victim as if you didn't benefit from it, or as if you didn't know the consequences
@@jorymil This sort of thing is cyclic. Companies raise prices, they lose market share, they lower prices, the get some back.
I'm honestly confused as to why ANYONE would sign a CLA? To me it seems like you're giving a ton to the company, but not getting a single thing back?
The company would say 'you can have our software free!'
...(for now)
@@JeffGeerlingyou can also have that without a contribution. Just don't sign that cla
Realisitically, the alternative to signing a CLA is not having your changes incorporated upstream, and having a much lower chance of getting them incorporated into packages in major linux distros.
Sure you can maintain your own local fork, but that requires ongoing effort, means other people don't benefit from your changes and the more local changes you build up the harder it gets to merge new upstream versions.
Because maintaining your own fork is a lot of work. Sometimes you just want/need a bug fixed and aren't making major contributions.
And sometimes you just wanna help some other users with a fix or something.
What, you're gonna open a fork with just your fix and possibly maintain the fork on your own with any upstream changes? And even then, who the hell is gonna use your random fork unless it's a super enticing change? Outside of stuff like the aforementioned hashicorp shitshow where there is a sudden impetus for people to move elsewhere, probably not worth it.
Not saying CLAs are good, but sometimes it's just the path of least resistance to contributing something and that's sometimes all people want.
The few hobbyist projects I know well with open source licenses have some huge innovations because anyone can add onto it. Gridfinity (which has seen modifications to the core base units as way of improvement), the Dactyl Manuform (which is a branch of a branch and has its own countless variations and projects around it), these are just 2 of the open source projects that I know of that so many passionate, driven people have contributed to, and it's amazing to see what comes out of a project that's open like that vs a company trying to hide all their code so competitors don't get it. Kinda seems like that leads to resting on your own laurels which halts innovation until some other company basically rewrites your products but with better functionality.
This needs to be a series. Good video.
Hi Jeff, I am hoping you will stay Jeff in all time to come! Thanks for the information.
Developers: Open Source requires that you share for all to benefit
IBM: Open Source requires ShareHolders to benefit
Great video Jeff. Thanks , really useful insight into the current state of play 🤔
WOW I posted my comment to Richard Stalman's article and then you literally BROUGHT UP THIS EXACT ARTICLE. Love it.
Something that has always had a bit of a nagging feeling to me where open source is concerned, the all or nothing situation it demands.
There's a lack of some control over a project you start and created from scratch and "open sourced" I'm anti- open source in this regard. When I make stuff I make it with passion and I never want someone to come along and fork it as long as the project is being maintained by me and available to all to use, it is MINE, not yours - But what I do believe in is that software SHOULD be free to most people, and those who can afford it should share in the wealth.
I think my desire would be something like a source-available license that defaults to a very liberal open source license (MIT/BSD) upon death or say 5 years. OR it is the source available license and can never be any other license after that, if it is ever licensed in a way outside of the initial terms of the source available, or a MIT/BSD or (whatever the choice is) - the entire tree defaults to MIT/BSD
Effectively let me build my toy in my own way while sharing it with everyone else who wants to contribute, allow me to own it and be proud of it, allow me to nurture my creation allow me the privilege of selling it without the worry that some fork might take all the effort I put into it. And then let everyone have at it!
*braces for flame war*
I love the term "pointless AI company" - and I doubt a thing such as a "substantial AI company" even exists.
Heh. There are a few small slivers of hope. Just like with bitcoin/cryptocurrency, the smaller good ideas get drowned out by the 'billion dollar hype train' that people think will change the world.
I use Whisper for transcriptions now, and it saves me hours and hours of time (and helps me get good closed captioning on every video). I use generative fill to fill in little portions of images where I messed up framing for a thumbnail or something. There are good uses, but they're often covered up by sill things like Humane AI pins :D
@@JeffGeerling The problem is that a big company can spend a billion dollars on ads to promote their crap and overshout any good project that there might be.
The effect is that people will think of their technology as the main thing.
Think for example docker, docker sucks, its the worst container system there is, yet they won container wars and killed all the competition thanks to insane advertising.
And then came google and killed docker with Kubernetes, that thank god is at least better than docker (unfortunately it still uses parts of docker underneath, so baby steps).
@@JeffGeerling I would love to see a video where you explain the problems with AI. I know other people have done videos on it, but I suspect you would have other interesting points to make about the subject.
Revenue and profit are some of the least interesting things when a corporation is buying another company. They are looking at the roi of that project which is based mostly on the expected cashflows in the future (the discounted cashflow method is one of the more used methods out there). They are look farther than just the balance sheet and profit and loss statements. In their due dillegence researches they go through nearly everything.
Now NA based companies are a lot more closed off than say companies here in Europe so they might do a bit more vague about their finances. Generally speaking they are produce less workable annual reports (due to them not needing to be made public for smaller companies).
Just to clarify, although Bryan Cantrill posted the video , the guy yelling at the computers is Brendan Gregg 🙂Both amazing engineers and worth following to learn a thing or two 🙂
And Bryan was the fast-action cameraman!
Applause! The juicer comment about IBM was spot on. one of the worst companies there is these days. Outside work I have completely stopped using Red Hat after they pulled the rug, and I have completely stopped recommending Red Hat when small companies asks me (as advice to friends working there) what to use. How I see them they are just plain evil.
What did Red Hat do?
@@tapwater424 Red Hat hid their source code behind a developer paywall basically. They did it to stop projects like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, and instead make users have to pay for RHEL compatibility. They also discontinued CentOS 8, and has turned that product into a rolling release, so basically if you need 1:1 RHEL compatibility, you HAVE to pay to use it. Angered a crap-ton of pro-FOSS users (rightfully so) and a lot of users, including myself have switched to using Debian for their servers
@@tapwater424: As I recall, IBM bought RedHat and has started going very corporate-y with it... which they admittedly probably did because of similar cultures between the two, if I remember complaints about RedHat correctly.
@@tapwater424 They changed into a source available if customer and logged in model. Umdermining the free software thoughts behind gpl.
Also, they ruined their trust.
When CentOS 8 was discontinued in 2020, organizations missed out on 3,186 days of their promised 3,650 day support window. To be fair, Red Hat owns CentOS, and they can provide as much (or as little) support as they want to. Therefore, Red Hat didn’t do anything wrong from a “can they do that” perspective. (They can, and they did). But that doesn’t change the fact that they promised one thing, and did something else. Multiple times. That harms trust. And operating systems are definitely one of the top things that an organization relies on and needs to trust. By stripping away the support window that Red Hat promised users of CentOS, they undermined that trust.
Totally understand but Red Hat/IBM together have been by far the largest contributors to the kernel for many years which will still support robust true free/open communities like Debian. As long as this continues RH/IBM are more of a benign evil, if that makes sense.
The second picture of the eclipse in the background looks very nice.
I knew this was coming.
I made a video about this called "The Future of Ownership and Modification in the Digital Age" where I talked about the fact that I knew corporate open source was going to lean more into commercialized open source over "traditional" open source.
Introduction of a NEW license that forbids introduction of CLA's at a later time, and should also be incorporated to the already available licenses that someone can't just decide they can rug pull with CLA's.
I like the idea, but I wonder how you would do that practically, the corporations would just choose a BSD/MIT license, as well as the obvious problem with more license fragmentation. I think that the best solution is to just encourage not using predatory CLAs and to encourage copyleft licenses. If I license my work under GPL and contribute it to a project, the project maintainers legally cannot turn around and do a rug pull. Also, some CLAs aren't predatory, see the FSF's for example, which requires copyright assignment for bigger contributions, but which serves to have a central body which can defend the GPL license more effectively. These situations may be rare, as there are few organizations as trustworthy as the FSF to keep a copyleft license, but it's worth considering IMO.
I would put one asterisk on "don't ever sign a CLA": If the company is privately owned by people you trust with a low likely-hood of it being sold or you trust the CEO of the company, know that they wants to do it for a long time to come and that CEO owns more than 50% of the shares (with voting rights), because the other shareholder can't to shit about that person in case.
About the latter case, if you are like "Can people actually do that?" or "Does a company like that actually exist?" (without the trust part): Tim Sweeney owns more than 50% of the shares of Epic Games.
It definitely comes down to trust. And the CLA part isn't 100% hard line. There are a few cases where certain CLA's could be okay (I have signed a couple for drive-by contributions to fix docs or a bug in software I build for a client).
But Epic is a shitshow...
@@plwadodveeefdv sure, but I just named him as a well-known example
Anyone spotted the new eclipse photo on the wall? Both are looking amazing!
Ha! It was going to make a surprise appearance tomorrow, but after the HashiCorp buyout, I made a quick video here today!
Bryan Cantrill also has a great interview with Andreas Freund (who discovered the xz backdoor).
This is why I won't use corporate owned distros like Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.
Or anything under the FUTO license. They have a clause that they can remove any forks they don't like, so that option is completely out if they ever decide to pull the rug
Fedora is great though
@@MohammedShuaybgreat _right now_
I'm honestly blown away Americans bitching about capitalism when it's simultaneously touted as the cornerstone of a free society.
@@TheGraemeEvansI agree but open source ideology itself somehow contradicts capitalism so anyone believing in opensource is almost against capitalism and not every American necessarily likes or supports capitalism
@@MohammedShuayb There is no open source outside of capitalism though.
There's life in the old dog yet. You may be able to pull the rug from under a commercial OSS project, but you cannot avoid the community forking the previously open version, like it happened with Audacity. What you can do is to provide a commercial version beside the still maintained open source version with better features, but you can again not stop the community from providing those features yourself; you can just ask them not to do it, which will only work if the relationship is good.
OSS has an incentive problem. Profit motive can help better align incentives, and makes things possible that wouldn’t be otherwise - just look at Linux and Kubernetes. Those projects are both too important to not have institutional backing.
But then, the profit motive seems to come into tension with the nature of FOSS. It aligns incentives, but not necessarily in a good way. We end up where private actors tear up the public commons, for self-enrichment.
We need to find ways to create institutional backing of OSS projects, while also protecting these projects from the corrupting influence of private rent-seeking. Easier said than done.
For-profit companies still have an incentive to contribute to FOSS as long as everyone is pragmatic; for-profit companies will never give away their entire competitive advantage, but if they keep a small part of the stack proprietary then most of it can be FOSS and everyone benefits. If you force a for-profit company to choose between more profit and contributing to FOSS, their choice is entirely unsurprising.
@@alex84632: You will never have a situation where everyone is pragmatic, and even the pragmatists will self-sort into long-term vs short-term factions.
Universally avoiding pay-to-use isn't the right solution, though neither is universally requiring payment. Right now, there's a need for more companies like RedHat, that provide support-contract services, particularly companies that provide support services for _other people's projects_ just for the sake of having known & vetted pieces of tooling.
@@absalomdraconisthis type of nuance is not welcome in the community that still equates “free beer” to “freedom”.
Unfortunately we live in a world where money rules, and I don’t think Linux and FOSS would be anywhere close to what it is now without corporate players with fiduciary ties like IBM, RH, Oracle & others.
I agree that the licensing rug pulls have been terrible. Full stop.
I also appreciate the forks, sincerely - but part of me would like to raise the alarm for security and maintainability. FOSS maintainers are burnt out and leaving in droves, we need to address that & the toxicity around FOSS communities (again, free beer).
This is where I hope OpenELA does not stumble.
I really, really hope OpenELA is successful, alongside Alma & others.
We need to step up and share the brunt of maintenance, and start realizing that upstream contributions are so vitally important to a healthy FOSS ecosystem. I am glad that this was recognized with the abrupt CentOS changes.
"We need to find ways of fixing the fundamental flaw in capitalism."
Yes, easier said than done, indeed.
Thanks for the note of actionable optimism here (especially as someone living currently living 5:15). Two steps forward, one step back, but comparing the FOSS world now to what existed even five years ago, and I'm feeling sanguine that the world is headed in the right direction.
I'm always optimistic; the nice thing about the original licenses is it gives us the power to fork and move on. A lot of times it doesn't work out and the project just dies, but every once in a while there's a Jenkins out there that succeeds.
Too late for IBM. Microsoft? After the Blizzard licensing change rug pull I will *never* give Microsoft another dime.
2:53 that's not Bryan Cantrill, it's Brendan Gregg.
I mention that video was posted (and coincidentally recorded) by Bryan-both of those guys are pretty awesome devs :)
Brendan Gregg actually. You have his names backwards.
@@MarkRose1337 corrected. Thanks.
Appreciated for a celebrity in open source community like you to voice out. But to be fair elastic was another story. They were betrayed by amazon in the name of open source. It’s legit for them to protect themselves after such a big crackdown IMO.
Thanks Jeff. Any insight on FSL-1.0-MIT (Functional Source License)
The GNU project uses CLAs for much of its software. This allows them to move the software to newer versions of the GPL if the need arises
I'm very happy and lucky to be working full time on an apache2 licensed PaaS, with no CLA
There is still good in the world :D
But the Jeff Geerling Channel is very much alive and thriving.
Good video Jeff. Something to note here is some freeloaders can possibly add value through feedback and suggestions. Redhat compatible distributions will continue, however IBM has taken it's last bit of the open source apple as it will never be trusted again.
Hey Jeff - What are your thoughts on the Home Assistant CLA? I've been focusing a bunch of my effort into HA as of late and now you got me all paranoid lol
The CentOS debacle is why I've moved all my stuff to debian over the years, including my personal machine. Community supported so I can trust it won't go away, though I totally understand why companies may prefer enterprise Linux (if engineer time is more valuable than money).
Sadly, greed is the engine seemingly driving these changes. It's interesting how private companies with strong leadership (Valve, Canonical, Nextcloud) have avoided these traps and specifically built products loved by the community while contributing to Open Source as a whole.
Thank you for reminding me there are still people and companies who care about their customers.
Same, been using Debian on home servers since 2006. Never been disapponted. When Red Hat announced that EOL for CentOS 8 was cut short by several years, I convinced everyone at work (MSP) that it was insane and foreboding and that we should switch to Debian from our all-CentOS shop. It took quite some time, but the rest of the fiascos have just cemented how right I was. We had just migrated our whole VI to VMware (because it's what larger enterprises do, right?) when Broadcom announced their "maximize profit and screw everyone including our customers" plan. It's hard to not become depressed.
I'm so disappointed in this greedy "all profit and bottom line" world, I'm thinking about leaving the IT field altogheter at least once a week. :(
Just waiting for IBM to crap on Ansible now. I know their execs want to.
Canonical is not on the side of users anymore. They're coercing people to use Snap despite it being inferior to Flatpak because it keeps them in exclusive control of the software supply chain.
@@alex84632 this is not true, there are tradeoffs between flatpak and snap and nobody is forcing you to use one or the other.
Personally, I use both.
@@alex84632 Thanks for the reminder; I'd forgotten about that. I was surprised to see Canonical in the list for another reason. I once knew a very good programmer and staunch open-source supporter who got a job with Canonical. In just a few weeks, he left to go work for a closed-source company, saying, "It's better to work with misguided smart people than with idiots doing the right thing." They were so stupid, he couldn't bear to work there even if he had to sacrifice his principles to get away.
I can't speak with the other projects but redis has already put a target on their back. Valkey, it's open source replacement already has a ton of industry support so as soon as it becomes stable projects will be migrated to that.
Already making plans to move my own remaining few bits of infra using redis to valkey!
Great video Jeff!
Yeah, this happened to us back in 2015 at a company I worked for, when we were looking at solutions for test automation, one was looking pretty cool, free and a great permissive license...thankfully we had not invested in it when the rug pull happened, it was still free to some degree but you were forced to pay if you wanted useful features and future useful features.
I'm happy you called AI a bubble, I've been telling my friends the same thing too. It's the 90s dotCom bubble all over again. I Think the only long term viable tech we'll get out of it is the (being real) On-chip ASIC designs to accelerate complex compute tasks in compliment with general purpose CPU cores, But the trend of shoehorning AI in to everything for the sake of trends will eventually fizzle out when companies realize replacing expertise with an algorithm that can't even manage a short story without hallucinating was a dumb idea.
Thanks for keeping an eye on things for us. Coffee / tea for you! ;)
Mmm, thanks!
As soon as I get a decent wage I'll be donating coffee too..
My biggest problem with corporate open source has nothing to do with the licenses. Rather, traditional open source projects are guided for the public's benefit, rather than for a business benefit. Those two goals conflict with each other quite often. Ever seen a feature that would be really nice to have locked behind a paid license? Yeah, that's what happens in corporate open source. Traditional projects tend to be much more open to community involvement, at all levels: from accepting code contributions without agreeing to a CoC (that binds your activity even outside of the project) and a CLA and this and that; to keeping the code documented and readable for others to be able to contribute to; to ensuring you can run it yourself instead of heavily documenting the SaaS version and under-documenting the self-hosted version; to providing - and staffing - community support channels instead of requiring a paid support license even for basic questions that will then be answered by an outsourced rep who knows less about the product than the customer does...
Yeah. The license barely matters compared to the differing styles of development.
Interesting point!
Absolutely! You said outloud what I'm thinking. Thanks for being direct..
Wasn't there talk about monetizing docker in a non-FOSS way and thus podman was born? Or maybe I'm mistaken.
Jeff, speaking of FOSS could you do a video or maybe a series on FreeBSD on rPi? They don't get enough love but I know a distro exists for the pi.
Docker has some proprietary stuff built on top of docker engine(this one is actually FOSS), like docker desktop, it's proprietary built on top of a FOSS base. I don't know if this was one of the reasons to why podman was created, besides that the most notable reason is security (podman run rootless way easier than docker) and OCI compliance, docker is not aimed to follow any standard, they are their own standard, while podman has an aim to follow OCI's standards, so you are less dependent on podman itself and can move to another compliant runtime
4:50 - This is some really ancient stock clip right there...
How do I know? - I'm looking at a React component, when they were still written using classes, instead of these *spits* pesky hooks.
Hahaha I was wondering if anyone would look closely. Surprisingly I can't find stock footage of dev teams building LLMs yet lol.
At this point I'll have to write my own database with RISC-V assembly.
What about when very big companies like Microsoft or AWS depends on and lives by these open source projects that barely had any funding, and where the companies are not contributing? That's the kind of freeloading that makes me accept dual licensing for the projects.
I think the great philosophers of our time, the wu-tang clan, said it best; C.R.E.A.M (Cash rules everything around me). As complicated as people want to make this story, it's just about the money at its bottom line.
If I was president, companies who did the bait and switch with software would go to jail and the software would become public domain.
Hahahah okay...
@@billy5688 good economies need reliability and predictability. We don't need to waste people's time re-engineering code just because some company wants to hord some money. Tech is for the people.
I was a freeloader for a decade or so. Then I started my own business, and now I financially contribute very generously to all the open source (free software) projects my business has come to rely upon.
I started the same way; needed some tool to organize media in college and allow video playback over the web. I found Drupal and used it because it was all I could afford (free). When I got my first job, we poured $50-100k into the Drupal ecosystem for years, and were able to contribute dozens of modules, core patches, and community mentorship.
None of that would've happened if I didn't dip my toes in the water for it being the best 'free' option initially.
I hear from risk-adverse corporates that their CLA protects them in case (for example) a contributor contributes code whhch wasnt theirs to contribute (e.g. because it's owned by someone else, say an employer). Are there any CLAs which _don't_ allow for relicensing of contributions?
Coming soon to Home Assistant? Raspberry Pi going the same way.
Raspberry Pi has gone the same way years ago, now it's corporate embedded platform first and community second
fuck IBM. THis is why i dont use Fedora linux
Well Fedora has a separate community in the end though
Well, IBM was always kinda evil.
10 years ago I had a lecture at university done by an IBM employee.
He told us that it does not matter if your product is good or garbage, if you advertise it well, you will sell it.
I asked him "If I buy your product and its garbage I wont buy anything more from you".
His answer was: "Who cares, you already bought."
Pretty much that is the mindset of IBM and many modern companies.
And the sad thing is that they teach this scummy behavior to young generations.
OpenBMC tho
fedora is not that bad, is not the best, i personally rigth npw when i use linux i use mint
@@betag24cn Its not about being good or bad, its about supporting companies that tend to abuse its position and harm others.
Can you do a video on the best directions for those dealing with CENT? While there are videos out there, but there is something your approach that helps to find positive directions, rather than just sideways damage control.
CentOS I presume? I would just pick AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux for a direct migration (Alma is still close enough it shouldn't be hard). If you want something better for the long term, make plans to migrate to Debian.
I feel like the near future regarding open source is going is be very interesting
I didn't understand this. Why is signing a CLA for a project "bad"?
There may be a few CLAs out there that don't restrict dev's rights, but most of them require the code and licensing to become totally owned by the company in charge of the project. This means you can give them your valuable resource, but they aren't obligated to continue providing you theirs, and in general, it's a pretty rude exchange, because the company/org in charge of the project usually has much larger resources.
Basically, you're doing work for free for-in most cases-a company that will directly profit off your work. The least you can do is require they don't close off your contributions.
Long live Free software.
Richard Stalman was right all along. Calling it free (libre) software keeps it's reason to exist front and center.
How do you feel about CLAs for projects under entities like the Linux Foundation?
Be wary; but there are circumstances where I'd still sign one, if I had a level of trust with a foundation I don't have with individual companies.
Capitalism gonna capitalize. This is just another example of corporations chasing short term gains at the expense of of humanity. They just won't rest until they've squeezed out every penny. The older I get (pushing 40 now) the more I hate the current economic model and how it sacrifices people for the all powerful dollar.
"Wow! You're so rich. You must have invented something..."
"Nope. My employees and some randos on the internet invented my thing."
"Oh... Then you must have put it all together in a novel way..."
"Nope. It's not much different than all the others. We just market differently."
"Makes sense... You're rich because you're a marketing genius."
"Haha... Nope. I just hired a marketing company with the highest reviews on some open source review site."
"Crazy... I guess you must do a lot of work and expend a lot of energy to have made all that money."
"Guess again. I don't even know what our factory looks like... Heck, I'm not even sure what we actually make."
"Oh... I don't get it then. How are you so wealthy?"
"I own things."
finally Linux users recognizing capitalism's effect on FOSS. every linuxtuber just reports about the news and never connects any dots other than "this is bad". thank you
This isn't capitalism, it's short term greed, or maybe stupidity.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to make a living. That's what I call "capitalism." But being legally required to maximize profit at the expense of the community--it's contrary to the nature of a free society. The successes of Free Software seem to come when the software is a byproduct rather than the sole product.
@@jorymil "wanting to make a living" and capitalism aren't the same thing. I'm begging programmers to read a book other than one on programming.
If a company builds their product on top of an open source project, meaning they've taken help from the community to test and fix it, then the community should own it, not the company. If said company then decides to screw over the community by claiming 'this is mine now' like some spoilt toddler, then the community needs to have the legal right to sue that company. If that's not how open source licencing works, then it bloody well needs to be.
I don't mind if they charge for support or even for proprietary bolt-on extras or whatever - just as long as the core product they took from open source or developed as open source remains truly open and not any of this BS 'kinda sorta open but not really' nonsense.
What community? Do you mean corporate backed community?
As someone said in another comment, that IS how open source works, they have no legal right to change the license while it is open source.
The problem is that no one is able to win a legal battle against a big company like IBM because no one has enough money to survive it.
In court it does not matter what is legal or what is right, it matters who has more money to either bribe or extend the case until the opponent runs out of money.
Nevermind HashiCoro. I merged multiple patches into their products. They would 't so much as interview me. Let em rot.
I'm really curious to know what Automattic will do in the near future regarding WordPress and all those software titles they have that are (still) open source...
The capitalist profit motive goes directly against open source.
Always picking the wrong boogey man, tsk tsk tsk
@@SkylearJ It's only a boogey man for illiterate people.
@@SkylearJHow so?
How dare a for profit company make money to continue to produce quality products I want to use for free!
Who pays the developers that YOU expect to continue developing the product YOU don't want pay for?
Where is your soap boxing over Billion dollar companies that repackage FOSS and then charge for them without contributing back to the developers?
You ask @4:46 about what happened to startups like Ansible and Hashicorp like these companies are expected to develop amazing products for free forever. Do these people not expect some return on their hard work and the demand the community places on them when their hard work blows up?
Why do farmers charge for their food? Why can't they just bear the expenses themselves and give away the food for free?
Because no one wants to be exploited and that's what F/OSS has led to, the exploitation of maintainers and contributors by people who abuse the F/OSS community and all you do is enable them. You are a corporate shill for Oracle, Rocky, and others who rebrand and don't contribute. So keep wearing your shirt, it makes it easier to identify who is sponsoring you.
“Who pays the developers”
Crowed Sourcing via stuff like Paypal, Patreon, and SubscribeStar has worked before. Some FOSS projects have made a lot of money that way.
Just because capitalism is popular does not mean that it is the best model or even the only viable one.
I love what you do Jeff!❤
Hey Jeff. It's always enlightening to hear your perspective. I remember meeting you at my first AnsibleFest in Atlanta, and how passionate you were about the community. One thing we both agree strongly about is the importance of trust in OpenSource communities. I used to think that there were CLA's that could help communities, but now believe that a DCO, or something like the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement are better. I am proud of the Red Fedora I currently wear, and I believe Red Hat holds closer to the ethics of Open Source than it appears from the outside. I also know this hat biases me, and I appreciate folks like you, who challenge us to do better. I don't believe that "Corporate Open Source is Dead". I think that the Open Source movement, like anything, is learning, and evolving. It's a tough balance, and nobody's perfect, that's for sure.
The 'is Dead' is for TH-cam, otherwise I'd get about 1/10th the eyeballs on this video (TH-cam is TH-cam... that I kinda hate).
But it's definitely not at a high point. I think it correlates to the wider economy a bit, and I hope companies can learn from the missteps and course correct.
Red Hat is better than most, though it feels like the sands have slowly shifted in the wrong direction, especially after the IBM buyout (and yes, I know IBM had nothing to do with the CentOS decisions). Ansible's still been hanging on, which I appreciate :)
@@JeffGeerling From my experiences working for tech companies, I would say that the "investors" in your business have expectations that need to be met, regardless if they are venture, private, or public. If I had to choose which one would give a company like Red Hat the best chance of staying true to Open Source principles, I'd take IBM over Wall Street or Venture capital any day. I'm not so naive as to believe that things could never turn sour, but I am pragmatically at peace with the current balance.
WOW! Thank you! This was concise, eloquent, and strikingly clear. @Jeff, you present a frame of mind that is objective and realistic. It also weights the significance of this properly. Again, Thank you for continuing to champion this mindset of concern and community alignment.
I love OSS, but when your boss is worried about "support" so he can CYA when something goes wrong by saying "we paid for support" - it doesn't even matter if that support on average is trash, as long as it's on paper "supported" that makes the managerial class sleep at night.
And while there's always at least a few grand in excess budget every year which could be donated to OSS projects we use, it just doesn't happen.
I love how freeloader is a prejorative often hurled at home users or small businesses, and not as often at giant corpses making bank off of others work.
Glad this is getting more attention. I’m not sure what these companies will do when they can’t hire experts at any price for their stack that has been pruned of users