Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch

No relation. This is free, open source, where you can fully use, modify, and continue it as far into the future as you want. A paid model, you lose access if you don't adhere. With this, you're losing nothing except future development time, which you were previously getting for free. These are completely different things.

My naive interoperation of this comment section says there were quite a few people making money on this work, without helping them pay their bills.

> doesn't mean its viable or reasonable for everyone

Related, it's often not viable to give away something for free.

I'm pretty sure they mean https://atlasgo.io/ and not https://atlas.apache.org/.

And AWS has agreements with services with similar services, eg MongoDB. Maybe elasticsearch asked for too much money, or AWS didn't want to pay out of principle.

Writing idempotent DDL is not that hard and then you don’t have the problem the migration tools solve (tracking state).

Regarding Redis, you mean that AGPL was not a good choice for them?

It's a dev tool that isn't taking untrusted input, right? Then no, I don't think security patches are a big deal.

Also I feel like "obsolete" is the wrong word for that.

Other than puritanism, what exactly stops you from using the FSL version? It's not like you're a hyperscaler hosting their product as a SaaS.

Companies are legal entities with similar properties to people according to some parts of the law, but they're not people. Companies cannot be arrested, companies do not need to eat food, and companies do not retire. They have a small set of human rights and obligations without any human properties. Companies share an abstraction with people when it comes to some part of the legal system.

Company personhood and its implications and restrictions differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and in countries like the USA the exact definition is still a matter up for debate.

That was already incorporated into what I said. I phrased it the way I did on purpose.

When I said businesses are not people, I was pluralizing the claim that a business is not a person.

Yes a business is made out of people, but that's a very different thing from what I was talking about.

(And please don't mention sole proprietorships, what I meant should be plenty clear now.)

It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses.

If you base your opinions on pure black and white tests without considering the actual tradeoffs of the license then that's blindness.

> FSL uses this "eventual open source" mechanism too.

I stand corrected. I hate license proliferation, but the naming and marketing is better. I hope the other former open-source companies consolidate on something.

> undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP). [1]

and that "DOSP" (Delayed Open Source Publication) is an OSI concept! [2]

But I cannot (yet) find what the timeframe for the DOSP is... because we don't want to wait 90 years for Mickey to be public domain.

[1] https://fair.io/about/

[2] https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication

If you're talking about free-as-in-freedom software, promoted by Richard Stallman and the FSF, then they have always been clear that Free software must not forbid commercial usage or require payment. Vendors are perfectly free to sell copies of Free software if they wish, but the license cannot forbid making copies and derivatives, even for commercial usage. See:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling

> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

The developer and the user are one and the same. Freedom for one is freedom for the other. Users should have the freedom to pay someone else to act as developer for them, as well.

These tenets are core to Free Software. Without freedom for users _and_ developers, there is no true freedom.

You are mistaken.

In context of GNU and FSF, when we say free software, we always mean free software with the basic freedoms

    Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
    Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
    Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
    Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

I would not call all of them "extremely reasonable" - "forbidding reselling" also significantly discourages forking. If the original company is bought by Oracle/Broadcom, and raises the prices to unreasonable amount, all their users are likely screwed.

As a user, it's pretty important for me that someone can continue to provide software under reasonable conditions even if original authors can't.

(FSL and other licenses which convert to open source are much better in that regard, but there is no excuse for BSL / SSPL)

> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.

— https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Why is that the problem? Trademarks are one of the three branches of intellectual property. The two words "open" and "source" look like generic terms, but "Open Source" has come to mean a relatively specific thing. So have Disney and Google and Coca-cola.

I mean I wanted to release a project under a modified license like "if your corporation laid off engineers in 2022-2025 you may never use this project commercially" language, but I think MIT might still be best. Software is trickier than licenses for things like images where licenses like creative commons BY-SA are really good because it guarantees the photo stays in the public domain but you can also include the photo on your website (considered a collection and you can still retain rights to your blog post). The problem with software licenses is that software is so much more composable. Like sure you can host a restrictively licensed project and call into it from your company's commercial app, but if you want to modify a module into your app that's tricky legally. Maybe I'm missing something here but I think the real risk is fake open licenses like elastic v2 (some YC company launched with it today) rather than the push for licenses like MIT.

> but the biggest tech companies don’t care when it comes to repackaging and reselling it as a service.

If I'm not mistaken, Apple would rather avoid touching anything GPLv3 with a ten foot pole. They are among the biggest tech companies in my mind.

Anybody seems fine with GPLv2 though. But GPL is less convenient than permissive licenses.

Of course, you can still indeed build services with GPL software without redistributing the modifications, which is the point of the AGPL.

> It’s not beyond someone like Amazon to setup a new company just firewall off AGPL software.

I suppose so. However, this would work as intended: the Amazon firewall company would need to redistribute the improvements.

Also, do you have examples of this happening? (not arguing, actually genuinely curious)

> The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction.

I'm not convinced. Compromise is the root of all evil. It allows self-contradictory and mutually exclusive ideas to exist.

I make a conscious effort to develop my morality by eliminating contradictory ideas and forming self-consistent world views. If the conclusions are extreme, then so be it. I accept the consequences.

That sounds lovely, actually.

Before Microsoft added TCP/IP to Windows, there were third party ports of the BSD TCP/IP stack to Windows. The winner ended up being Trumpet Winsock, until Microsoft wisely used the same winsock API for their own implementation and embraced and extinguished.

Those ports would still have occurred even if the BSD TCP/IP stack was GPL'd.

I use to feel the same way, but I’ve relented. The end-end-users — the people actually interacting with the software — retain the right to keep accessing its source so they can modify it. That fills an important gap, where vendors can modify other-licensed software, let me use it, but prevent me from accessing the changes they made to it.

Developers and corporations don't really matter. Trading their freedoms for ours is completely fine. We, the users, are the ones who matter. It's all about us. No, the developer cannot tivoize the software, because that harms us. No, the developer can't isolate it in a server, because that harms us. They should probably be glad Stallman is in charge... My definition of "harms us" is far more expansive and extreme than his.

And if the corporations don't like it, why don't they just... buy the developers out like the good capitalists they are? They want the software so badly? Contact the guys who wrote it and and get down to business. Make them millionaires and I'm sure they'll have no issues giving them special permission to violate the AGPLv3. They are the copyright holders, they can do whatever they want. I even emailed Stallman to confirm that he thinks it's an ethical practice, and he does. The emails are literally recorded in the commit messages, just get in contact and talk business.

If they won't do that, then let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own full time developers to write their own version. I'm sure their lawyers will also advise them not to even read our free software source code since it can taint the final product. Works for me. If they won't contribute back on our terms, if they won't pay us, then they should get literally nothing. That's leverage.

The article you linked is not convincing at all. Who said we're "gifting away" our free software? We're not. We're publishing it so that fellow hackers can enjoy it freely. People who are like us. I for one don't really want corporations taking advantage of this generosity at our expense. Either they become one of us, or they pay for it, or they leave empty handed.

People really need to stop feeling sorry for trillion dollar corporations. Won't you think of the poor billionaires with nothing to their names? Give me a break. I care a lot about individual hackers who code for a higher purpose. These are the people I want to help. You'd have to pay me big bucks to spare even one second of thought towards some billionaire technofeudalist organization.

But not any money.

> AGPL isn’t battle tested enough for me to be confident it will protect against big tech doing big tech things like spinning off a separate company in Ireland to firewall AGPL software.

What does it matter if they do? The point of the AGPL is that if you make a version available to users over the network, either you release the source to your version or you can't use it. That subsidiary could still be made to release the source or stop using it. Wouldn't that be "mission accomplished?"

Why do you need it to be battle tested when you already know that that is allowed?

You're also forgetting that even if it was illegal, setting up a shell company in a foreign country means the shell company will be able to get away with a lot of outright illegal stuff.

Chinese tech companies can just take your code with no recourse.

I don't know, they were focused on freedom for users not for vendors/programmers.

I think it's very intentional that a restriction on what you can do with software -- including reselling it -- is a violation of the "four freedoms" -- freedoms for what someone can do with software, including redistribute it or use it for any purpose they want (including reselling it).

These licenses meant to prohibit users from using the software in ways that harm the business interests of the programmers -- I am confident the original creators of free software four freedoms would agree they are not free software. It is very intentional that they were saying the freedom of users to do what they want with software should not be limited for the convenience of the business interests of those who wrote the software.

The conglomerates can also host it on their extensive cloud infra at a price small competitors will never be able to match because they own the cloud infrastructure too.

Somehow the service+infra is the same cost or cheaper then buying the infra alone and trying to deploy the open source version to it.

"First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you" I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose. So, even under this definition it is not free or open source.

The GNU Project and Richard Stallman, who made this statement, would agree that it's not free under even this earliest definition. They in-fact made it even clearer when they defined freedom of "use" as the distinct 0th freedom eventually to make it even clearer that being able to use the software freely is fundamental to their idea of freedom. Again, freedom isn't about price, it's about usage, availability, redistribution and lack of restrictions on this. I cannot freely redistribute FSL licensed code under the original definition of free software.

"Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then."

Yes, the GNU project were acutely aware of this and designed the GPL licenses around such scenarios - they just didn't design it for SaaS businesses, where if you redistribute the built program externally after modifying it but only distributed its responses over a network, you technically weren't obligated to open source that modification. AGPL resolved this issue, and has more case law behind it than this 2 year old license, and has certainly less daunting implications than a not legally well defined 'competing purpose'.

Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with whether or not Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, and the license was made by lawyers to clearly provide protection. Did you create this legal theory yourself? Because I've not seen any writing from a lawyer on the internet that suggests that Amazon could firewall themselves off in a friendly jurisdiction under any reading of the license, and I read a lot of AGPL lawyerblogging.

Sentry, the company who created FSL, even states that this license restricts user freedom explicitly - for the sake of the business interests of the original developer.

So summing up.. Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GNU Project, the OSI, the creators of the FSL, the company now currently using FSL, all agree that this source available license does not meet the definition of "free software". So, whose definition are we using out of thin air?

I try to remember this and remind to others while chatting:

    - Open Source software is about developer freedom.
    - Free Software is about user freedom.

> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.

That's not a bug, that's a feature. Freedom 0 applies to everyone.

Giving a gift does not confer an obligation, and "contributing back" is meaningless in this context. Someone using a gift you gave them to run a business does not harm you in any way whatsoever.

> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.

this is absolutely right, and the OSI has been successfully captured by these companies

would RedHat be able survive to IPO these days? I very much doubt it (see: Oracle Linux)

a new term is needed, "Open Source" is no longer fit for purpose in a world where the hyperscalers exist

"Fair Source"?

The problem isn't that there's no free/libre Android, it's that it's not the core ethos.

15-20 years ago, someone at Google thought, "Jeeze, these little smartphones are great, but they could be better, and imagine all of the data we could get off of users if they did everything in their lives with one?", so they bought into Android, which was a completely independent startup until 2005. That is the platform's raison d'être. They wanted to compete with PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and later iPhoneOS, for the data that people were entering into smartphones, so they introduced a software product that was open source so that OEMs would buy in. And it worked.

Android would not have had a use to Google as a GNU/Linux-style project where there is no gatekeeper. If I can easily tear out Google's proprietary software, and replace it with something else without losing access to things like the Play Store, then Google just lost out on the value proposition on their purchase of Android in 2005 when it came to my use of it. They did it to make money off of my use, not to graciously support a FLOSS project.

And now we're seeing that playing out as all of the FLOSS projects you mention are under direct threat from Google's handling of the project.

Microsoft has subverted projects like CPython by hiring mediocre core developers who have built out their power over the years. Microsoft has coerced other projects to move to GitHub so they could steal and launder the copyright in their LLMs. Multiple Microsoft GitHub CEOs have mocked open source and resistance to the code laundering.

Microsoft "open" source projects like VSCode exist to lock in developers, surveil developers and steal their IP. Developers should become dependent on GitHub, Copilot and stolen code until the open source ecosystem can finally be destroyed.

The entire thing is a big EEE that is beginning to pay off because of LLMs (we can still resist by moving off GitHub and rejecting LLM code theft).

Unlike yours?

That's the definition of "source available", not "open source".

Are you deliberately being obtuse? Do you have an axe to grind?

'Open source' has a commonly agreed upon meaning, 'source available' has a meaning. You are mistaking open source for just source available.

Read the literal open source definition

https://opensource.org/osd

I guess you're right, in the way that we can either describe and prescribe language, and yes, open source is not defined in exact terms. I still do think that attaching the label to a product, and disregarding the decades long collaborative nature of the development is utter nonsense. In my opinion, the onus is on these people to get closer to what open source really is, not because I don't want to update the term, but because I want the movement to succeed, and not to be watered down.

Funnily enough, the Liquibase project agrees with this sentiment too (or wants to avoid the fallout from open source gatekeepers): https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/pull/7380

Not just some people. It's more like if the Cheese Association of France came up with a definition, and that definition then gets accepted by cheese lovers and major dairy industry companies worldwide. The OSD holds significant weight in the industry.

The OSI are the people who made it up, and the only reason why anybody cares about it. If you call yourself Open Source and you don't comply with the OSI definition, you're a parasite trying to commit fraud with the good will generated by other people.

I also don't care if somebody in 1975 said "I like to be open, and I'll let anyone look at the source." Old McDonald had a farm before McDonald's was a restaurant, but that doesn't mean that if you open a restaurant called McDonald's that is decorated like a McDonald's, you're not a scammer. I know your plastic fruit is carbon-based, but if you label it as "organic" you're a thief.

If you're not trying to scam people, be creative and make up your own catchphrase for letting people look at your source code - or don't even, because the whole idea of having a branding for allowing people access (and rights to) the source is imitation of the FSF and OSI.