All the arguments are attempts to veil "we're not making enough money."
When companies dangle "open source" projects to get attention, or start off as open source projects then someone decides "I can make money off this", then rug pull them, that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
You clearly never actually looked at Sourcegraph OSS. The OSS version died a very long time ago, the vastly majority of Sourcegraph most valuable features were never OSS, and Sourcegraph has always been very transparent about this.
All that’s changed here is that a non-OSS, but public codebase, is now private. From a customers perspective, nothing material has changed. Only those who want something for nothing are seriously impacted by this.
Even according to Stallman, free software never required any kind of support, open development, or commit history. You can publish a tarball on a web server, and that counts as free software.
i.e. publishing source code doesn’t sign you up for a lifelong obligation. People can fork it, or not fork it.
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Practically speaking, I might think of SourceGraph as something like Android.
Is Android open source? Yes. [2]
Does it have huge proprietary parts? Yes.
It is designed for collaborative development? Not really unless you work for a big company, and are paid to work on Android. (That said, I'm sure there are hobbyists / "people in their basement" that do meaningful things with Android source code -- and actually I think that is how some open phone companies started)
Is it better than it's open rather than closed? Yes. Multiple competitors to Google use Android source code, e.g. Amazon has built phones off of it. That is good thing IMO.
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[1] On my own open source projects, there is a community and best-effort support, and I really encourage that! But the point is that there are MULTIPLE valid project models under the name "open source".
Throwing code over the wall is actually valid open source, and it actually benefits society IMO. It's still valuable, even if you STOP doing it, as SourceGraph has done.
It's distinct from "I get free stuff that I like using"
There could be a different name for "unfunded or independently funded open source", but the funny thing is that the term "open source" originated as a corporate-friendly alternative to "free software"
[2] As a tangent, I also think Android has a really suboptimal and cloud-slanted architecture, but for this discussion, let's just use it as a an example of corporate open source
>I don't see any attempt to veil it -- there was specific mention of revenue and competitors
Here you go:
>Although very very few companies used our open-source version to avoid paying us, we did see it cause a lot of annoyance for devs who were asked by their management to try cloning our product or to research our codebase to give their procurement team ammunition to negotiate down our price. This honestly was just a waste of everyone's time.
you have misused the Stallman quote .. the idea is that the code is always available to rebuild and recompile.. the commerce between vendors or users is not specified. In the case you apparently defend, the source code is no longer available to build the complete product.
When someone speaks about business risk for a company which might not be breakeven profitable, the risk is not "we don't make enough money to chuckle sensibly into our wine goblets", the risk is "we have to lay off our engineering team and stop making software altogether".
There's nothing mealy-mouthed about trying to provide insight into their decision-making process. They don't owe anyone other than their employees, customers, and investors (in that order) a justification for their decision making on something like this, and certainly after spilling a few paragraphs of text off the cuff can't be called disingenuous.
This chorus of screeching that accompanies any reduction in commitment for a company involved in open-source is extremely off-putting to anyone who wants to try to build in the open and make a business out of it.
It's free. Gratis. Provided without warranty. Do with it what you will, but it was never yours. They didn't take anything from you by closing the repo. It's really cool that it was available, and it sucks that it's not available going forward - but expecting any business-backed OSS projects to adhere to the same behaviors as a volunteer effort is just wishful thinking.
these are good points but there are fundamentals at odds, really.. no amount of "explaining" will make a choice.. there are partisan issues and as said, company survival is related to profitability is related to survival.
also not mentioned so far is - this product has big implications for security by surveillance, with phone-home and instant-audit hooks, non-disclosed search for zero-day vulnerabilities, and more.. by closing the dev process, it appears that this product gets one step closer to a one-way mirror model that some customers will pay really large amounts of money for..
>There's nothing mealy-mouthed about trying to provide insight into their decision-making process. They don't owe anyone other than their employees, customers, and investors (in that order) a justification for their decision making on something like this, and certainly after spilling a few paragraphs of text off the cuff can't be called disingenuous.
When you say things like "we did it for the devs" thats mealy-mouthed and disingenuous. They don't owe anyone but their employees, customers, and investors an explanation, but then they start making public statements-- even if they are a few paragraphs and text off the cuff-- acting like they're doing it for _alutristic_ reasons.
Rug pull your open source once you've gotten what business ends you desire out of it and when it conflicts with your open source goals; like you said its your you own it.
“Of… liability? Or… uh, what?”
“Oh—risk that we couldn’t sell the apples we gave away, obviously.”