By now, this kind of open source rug pull is becoming routine. I'm really not sure how I feel about it. I'm thankful for all the free stuff, and I can't fault anyone for trying to make a buck or two.
I'm a huge advocate of free software, but mostly for personal use and individual freedom. So I don't feel like the loss of Scylla is a great loss in that respect. I can't imagine a lot of individuals are harmed by this move.
But still, it makes me distrust corporate "open source" more and more.
Definitely also understand everyone needs to make a living.
Buuuttt... projects like these would probably never haven gotten the traction they have now if they wouldn't have started out as opensource but being closed source. For example Hashicorp and Redis definitely wouldn't be where they are today if they had start out as opensource. So in that sense these license changes are a bait and switch.
> For example Hashicorp and Redis definitely wouldn't be where they are today if they had start out as opensource
What makes you think there are genuine open source projects that don't get traction? Ansible is still GPLv3 even while owned by RedHat^W IBM and works fine. Any one of the bazillions of front-end toolkits, build tools, bundlers, whatever, many initiated by some company and practically all under open source licenses.
My experience has been that if something is useful, and its open source license means one can fix bugs they encounter or at least have a small chance it'll remain around indefinitely (not go out of business) in order to bake it into your workflow, then it'll be adopted and blogged about and show up in HN and Reddit
I think GP agrees with you. They were saying that Scylladb (or redis, or hashicorp, etc.) never would have gotten as much traction if it had been proprietary from the begining. Being open source helped them get where they are, but now they are abandoning open source.
In fact I strongly suspect that this license change will do more than upset existing users of their open source version, it will scare off potential new users and customers. Not only are they no longer open source, but they gave people a reason not to trust them.
I think it's great that we're cleaning up the nomenclature.
In the 90s, we had shareware/freeware/beerware. No one expected source availability. At universities, the Unix world had open source, in the real sense. Then something happened that caused these two tracks to merge.
Maybe the university students grew up and carried on their belief in open source, but also had to create the business. After 20 years, they realized (1) it doesn't have to be open source to _feel right_ and (2) maintaining in the open is more expensive. They're now in management positions, not coding. Selling B2B doesn't require code to be open to the public, since you can have source available licenses. And as you said, perhaps ScyllaDB isn't really targeting the hobbyist. We'll continue this trend.
Or perhaps open source has stopped being a buzzword. We're now much more of a SaaS world, where being open source isn't as important as costing $10 per month or having 200 "data partners" that need to track you.
That said, I think there's a really good reason for core libraries and security-sensitive libraries to be open. I want to be able to inspect them, before using them. And I'm in the HN crowd of actually using open source code because I can fix bugs as I encounter them, but I realize this is a small crowd.
I'd love for open source to be a useful word again, and not something that goes on the Silicon Valley PR budget.
See this is tricky in my mind, because it doesn't seem like this was just a move to stop AWS/GCP cloud hosting Scylla. That was already solved with the AGPL license. This seems like they are just trying to stop any usage of ScyllaDB that isn't paid (outside of a relatively small free tier). I suppose its not a big deal, since you can always migrate to cassandra for open source forever, but definitely unfortunate for any individuals/organizations that can't afford this upgrade.
In reality open source is very difficult to build a business around, which means that software can’t exist long term. It’s not about not wanting to be open source, it’s about realising that you and your employees livelihoods are being abused by people who see open source and take it to mean they shouldn’t pay. Especially egregious when your competitors take your work and build a closed sourced business around it.
Abused doesn't make sense, open source means I made this thing and I'm giving it away because I think other people might find it useful. Take this and build something proprietary around is one of the stated goals of OSS, no one is upset AWS is offering hosted Linux.
Nobody will touch your product if it's not OSS doesn't mean you should call it OSS and then rug pull. Build it proprietary from the beginning you cowards. The people who do this are the same as the corporate shills who infiltrate subcultures to monetize them and ultimately destroy the community in the process. If you don't actually share the values of the community you're trying to join, then don't join it.
This little SV "growth hack" where the success of your OSS project is the proving ground to get funding has to die. It's turning a high-trust community into a low-trust one.
It makes sense to anyone who has tried to build open source software as a sustainable business.
It doesn’t make sense to people who contribute small hobby projects or work as researchers / are government funded, which means ultimately paid for by businesses and consumers thereof.
Then don't? This isn't that hard. Microsoft has been saying you can't build a business around OSS since its inception. And they're right. As evidenced by every OSS software business having to drop the OSS.
OSS in business works well when you make your money on something other than the software. Because you're giving it way in it's entirety. Facebook with React, Google with k8s, Twitter with Redis. Once you need the software itself to generate revenue it all falls apart.
How many businesses whose core competency is writing software realizing that there's no 1st party advantage to hosting and AWS is better than you at it will it take for those businesses to not literally give away the only asset the company has with any value?
Where it exists in a small community of other developers, most of whom have a similar mindset, it works fine.
And for very popular projects, there’s enough users for whom it makes economic sense to have some devs on staff to support their usage, tailor stuff, and keep it moving forward to maintain the project.
But in the middle, where most things are, it kinda doesn’t work.
All these mentions of the "ScyllaDB Source Available License" but not even a link towards the actual text.
I understand it will have limitations on the data that you can use (up to a certain size) and the CPU power (up to these many cores). Will it also limit the activity type (commercial, SaaS offering, ...)?
Yep. This becomes expected path - Corporate Open Source, eventually changes license to improve monetization. The way to avoid this is pick foundation based Open Source software which is not controlled by single Corporation like PostgreSQL, Linux or Kubernetes.
The other interesting example is Copyleft software, where "Corporation" does not have complete copyright holder. For example Percona or MariaDB can't "close source" their MySQL forks of the core software, though it does not prevent them from doing it with other parts of the complete platform, think MariaDB MaxScale.
Seems that ScyllaDB takes advantage of https://seastar.io that shards across cores. It seems to still be open source (for the moment, at least). Wonder if other projects could benefit from its ideas.
I doubt anyone criticizing is doing so because of "How dare they want money?"
Which just begs the question, why did you think that? That take just exposes a complete missing of the point of open source software and why (honest) people invest their time in it.
There are others who just want the caché and benefits that come with producing open source, but without the annoying actually being open source parts.
If you want to get paid for renting out copies of software, just do that honestly. If you want to make the world a better place and pay it forward for all the free stuff you were given, then do that honestly.
But wanting the benefits of sainthood without having to volunteer at the soup kitchen, no, audacity is not the word for that.
And merely wanting a comfortable living is not audacious, and no one who's not an idiot thinks it is, and is actuall othogonal to whether you have any integrity wrt open source licenses.
You can want, and have, that comfortable living either way.
I'm a huge advocate of free software, but mostly for personal use and individual freedom. So I don't feel like the loss of Scylla is a great loss in that respect. I can't imagine a lot of individuals are harmed by this move.
But still, it makes me distrust corporate "open source" more and more.