From the slew of negative nitpicky comments here, it seems that Hacker News has been taken over by MBA and not technical types. Yes the nerds you looked down on in high school are doing way better than you, no hard feelings. :)
I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.
> People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products.
I disagree. Any major in any field may or may not pursue making personal money, build wold-changing products or have nothing planned for their future. I think you are projecting your own anecdotal experience to the general case.
Not all MBAs are pursuing personal money, but when there's high visibility debacle (Intel, Boeing) there are always MBAs and accountant involved, not engineers. It's against engineer's logic to do moves/products like that.
I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of:
- if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it.
Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this.
Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.
Ofc, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too.
Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid, so this license would make the situation strictly better for them.
Laws and definitions have to change with the changing times - the technological economy is different today than it was 20 years ago when tech companies weren't so big or able to throw their weight around. Staying true to the original spirit of FOSS and sharing, means that we have to find ways to support independent FOSS business.
The loudest arguments I hear at forcing the FOSS definition to remain static and blind to revenue, is from big tech companies or wealthy people being paid by big tech companies, because it benefits them. People working for a small FOSS companies understand the realities of competing in today's tech environment, and understand that revenue-sharing far from stifling FOSS, will allow it to flourish properly.
Whatever scenario you imagine where some $bigtech benefits from using the software, there is some identifiable chain of events from where the software was produced, which can, with some effort, be defined and specified in a general way in the license, in terms of a contract that allows each party in the chain to supply to the next party in the chain.
From that perspective they will never be an independent third party, and therefore you can specify that in a contract. So I don't see a theoretical problem to this, just a practical one of specifying this both precisely enough to be enforceable, and general enough to cover all real cases.
Is there a way to structure a license so that this kind of accounting is much harder?
In Hollywood’s case, it’s pretty clear when movies are making money (same with games to a large degree), but I don’t know if there’s a way for “tool” companies to leverage that.
Yes, game projects absolutely use Hollywood accounting. Dev studios pop up for one project, and often close at launch, and some other legal entity gets all the subs after that. And so on. Game dev financing is infamously horrid.
Unreal, though, is in a different negotiating position with the game publishers than, say, an open-source software with a new pay-us-if-you-make-money clause. Its the distinction between source-available (like Unreal Engine) and open-source which the article tries to make?
Timescale's new license is an interesting move in this direction.
That license is specifically targeted in favour of small businesses for some reason, omitting individuals etc. This potential FOSS license I am talking about would only target against big tech companies.
Is this going to be fixed/known price? then you are describing "source available" model. I don't think we need another word for it -- it exists, and it works pretty well (even Microsoft uses it sometimes)
Or are you describing some sort of system where the authors get the fixed share (%) of user's company revenue? I think this is not going to work very well... just imagine a big company which is not focused on computers. Or a computer startup which wants to be bought by FAANG for billions of dollars.
I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of:
- if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it.
Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this.
Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.
Ofc, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too.
Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid, so this license would make the situation strictly better for them.
Seems problematic. You've excluded subsidiaries, but what about companies which aren't controlled by the larger corp? They can buy hosting from whomever from companies they don't control in the slightest, and if there's a market for your software it seems likely those would spring up on their own. What do you do?
(1) Ignore the problem -- your license has no teeth.
(2) Hold the larger corp responsible for payment anyway -- pretty sure this can't be accomplished purely within copyright law, and if it can then it's still not great because implementation details of the hosting company now matter in terms of the larger company's liabilities.
(3) Hold the hosting company responsible -- fine enough, that can probably be a valid term in your license. Suppose another company inserts themselves in the middle though; does your license exclude them because they're transitively connected to megacorp, or do we again find that your license has no teeth? The first case is an issue because now you're exposed to risk from your customers' customers, over whom you have no control.
Not every piece of software can be meaningfully hosted and resold by a chain of corporate entities, but it's not exactly an uncommon behavior in the wild either.
> what about companies which aren't controlled by the larger corp?
Include these companies in the definition?
> What do you do?
Generally, there will be situations that are hard to define in a license, as is the revenue sharing part of it - and that's probably why no such license exists yet. The easiest way around this is for a blanket catch-all clause such as "you have 1 year to start negotiations with us, after which this license automatically expires".
If you choose >X correctly, there are only a small number of companies with >X revenue in the world, so you only have to negotiate with that many companies. The idea is not supposed to extract money from small companies or individuals.
> pretty sure this can't be accomplished purely within copyright law,
AGPLv3 is enforceable by contract law, same as other EULAs that big tech companies frequently employ.
Surely not by name if they don't exist yet? And the rest of the bullets were pointing at why it's difficult to pinpoint them with additional terms.
> The easiest way around this is for a blanket catch-all clause such as "you have 1 year to start negotiations with us, after which this license automatically expires".
Which is great if you have some kind of legal foothold on megacorp, but if they're sufficiently legally isolated from you via intermediaries then additional clauses won't help.
> AGPLv3 is enforceable by contract law
In some jurisdictions (and copyright law in most others), but it doesn't magically hold third-parties responsible. It holds first-party users of your license responsible in a way which transitively affects third parties (copyleft being the mechanism). You might then claim that you could just do that for this contract too, but that's precisely my 3rd point above; doing so is unnecessarily restrictive to <X randocorps.
Elaborating on those restrictions, if randocorp is directly responsible for transitive users then they take on a huge risk whenever they have any customer because that customer might acquire megacorp as a customer at any point in time unbeknownst to them. If randocorp is not responsible for transitive users, then the mechanism for generating a connection between you and megacorp needs to be something like copyleft, but critically it has to somehow apply to contracts and interactions beyond copyright. At least it does if I'm understanding you correctly -- hypothetically, if you build a search tool, randocorp hosts the search tool, and megacorp buys searches from randocorp, would you like them to be targeted by the revenue sharing portion of your >X licenses? Anyway, assuming that's what you meant, copyleft by itself doesn't suffice, and you'd need something significantly more invasive than AGPLv3 to accomplish your goals.
> it doesn't magically hold third-parties responsible
Whatever scenario you imagine where some $bigtech benefits from using the software, there is some identifiable chain of events from where the software was produced, which can, with some effort, be defined and specified in a general way in the license, in terms of a contract that allows each party in the chain to supply to the next party in the chain.
From that perspective they will never be an independent third party, and therefore you can specify that in a contract. So I don't see a theoretical problem to this, just a practical one of specifying this both precisely enough to be enforceable, and general enough to cover all real cases.
You can write such a license if you want (or hire a lawyer to write it), but it's not FOSS and it never will be. Why is it important to you that such a license is recognized as FOSS?
Like laws, definitions change with changing times and circumstances. I am a Debian Developer and very happy to discuss this with other members of the community. Why is it important to you that such a license is not recognised as FOSS?
I can't imagine it would go down well at all with Debian users if random packages (in the free or the nonfree repo) came with clauses saying you now owe royalties to random parties. If you installed 10 packages on your company's server that each ask for 20% royalty, your company now would owe 200% royalties. It would just make the distro unusable by companies.
That's simply not true. ">X revenue a year" would affect nobody except the largest tech companies. Apart from this, it would strictly benefit existing users, because it means the projects that are properly contributing to the FOSS ecosystem, including importantly its diversity, are getting a fair share of income.
I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of:
- if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it.
Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this.
Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.
> "if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it."
That would just be a proprietary license with source availability. It would also dry up any community contributions since contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.
Sure, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too.
> contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.
Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid. This license would make the situation strictly better for them.
It's extremely ironic that the Trump administration (& their supporters) justify their control over US people and companies, preventing them engaging in normal everyday activities with Chinese partners, by saying "[X] is controllable by the CCP". Even whilst there is no evidence of the latter actually happening.
This is not even "pot meet kettle", this is the pot calling a fridge a kettle.
Further the CCP has already done the same to Western companies across the board. Let's not forget not only the atrocities committed against Uigher people, but the censorship of those atrocities.
The very name of that website sounds like some sort of propaganda department. Notwithstanding that, the claims it makes are all of comparatively trivial offenses. The "top 3rd" one was awarded 10 million by a US court, peanuts compared to company revenue (e.g. a US judge awarded Apple 1 billion in damages from Samsung). The "top 2nd" one links to a blog by a Cisco officer whose only technically-specific example he could give was copying some code from strcmp.c - ooooo strcmp.c! That is going to really get an edge over the competition! LOL.
The PDF link describing details about the 1st one was broken, but it sounds like a standard case of employees leaving a company to work for a competitor (allowed under California law) and the old company going sour grapes.
Didn't bother reading 4 and 5, after how overblown 2 and 3 were.
The wikipedia article does not go into that much technical details. Do you have more? Given that the Cisco officer could only talk about strcmp and not something more substantial, I am inclined to believe the story was overblown.
On a separate note, I think the biggest most obvious question that any accuser has to answer is, if Huawei copied so much significant material, why are they ahead of everyone else? It takes time to digest copied technology, it is not a simple case of just copying your competitor's source code then racing ahead of them with a massive sales team and non-technical economic prowess. Given that intellectual property laws were constructed to (supposedly) encourage innovation, even if Huawei did get to where they are now by copying, doesn't that suggest that in fact it's a good thing, they have brought all this extra innovative technology to the world? Or are the monopolists simply going sour grapes because they are no longer at the the forefront?
>The wikipedia article does not go into that much technical details. Do you have more? Given that the Cisco officer could only talk about strcmp and not something more substantial, I am inclined to believe the story was overblown.
It's wikipedia man - that section alone has 8 cited sources. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, but I'm not going to spoonfeed you.
>it is not a simple case of just copying your competitor's source code then racing ahead of them with a massive sales team and non-technical economic prowess
But this is exactly what happened in Huawei's case. Huawei is known for being cheaper than Cisco and providing way better support than Cisco. It's easy to throw bodies at sales & support when you don't pay R&D. They aren't even ahead of everyone else - Cisco's hardware is still more performant and Ericsson is still more widely deployed. 5G simply provided a new ground where everyone would start from 0.
I don't know why you are being downvoted but your questions don't seem relevant. What does it matter that monopolists are going sour grapes? If I steal from you, and use that money to buy a fancy car, and get thrown in jail, will any lawyer use the defense "infinity0 was jealous of my fancy car"?
I checked the sources - they are either inaccessible or don't go into technical detail, and basically just repeat what the sentence on the wikipedia article says. So no, they are not sufficient to actually get to the details of the case. If you are "familiar" with the case as you claimed, surely you can answer one simple question of mine rather than make me tree-search through all these links? Additionally, I am coming from a background of having the media spew these accusations at me all day without actually backing them up, so I am not inclined to want to tree-search through yet another probably-unsubstantive source being thrown in my face.
When your officer mentions "strcmp" on a public blog post, as one of their key examples of "theft", that is extremely telling.
> But this is exactly what happened in Huawei's case. [..] providing way better support than Cisco [..] They aren't even ahead of everyone else
Providing better support is not helped by copying technology, but you have to train large numbers of non-technical support staff to be competent at supporting that particular technology. Sure "ahead" depends on your measure, but they are certainly ahead in some key areas such as coverage.
> If I steal from you, and use that money to buy a fancy car
Stealing money is different from copying technology. If I steal your money, you no longer have the money. But if I copy your technology, you still have the technology. By the time it takes me to understand your technology, you have had enough time to innovate further upon it. So attributing Huawei's success primarily to this, is extremely biased. Given than there have been much more substantial lawsuits with widely-covered technical evidence (Apple vs Samsung, Google vs Oracle) as well as heavier fines involved, I cannot put any strong belief in these Huawei accusations. Huawei being singled out for something less substantive than what other companies have already done, this stinks of some sort of prejudice, and anyone reasonable can see this. If it's not racism, it is ideological - that a company from a country run on an entirely different set of principles, is doing as good or better than you.
It has absolutely nothing to do with religion. Just simply right and wrong, stealing is wrong. Stop justifying it and you'll probably stop getting downvoted.
I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.