Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064817

Points: 3

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I may be mistaken here, but I think we will see pure functionality become less important to enterprise customers, which might (maybe not, but one can hope) proper open source business models more viable again.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34341773

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970149

Points: 3

# Comments: 6

With the AGPL that would require dual licensing, and that draws flak as well.

I think the notion that OSS means there cannot be any money involved simply cannot hold true anymore these days. Software has become extremely complex and requires dedicated developers working on it - and they need to eat.

We are currently seeing a lot of companies changing their licensing model for a reason - because there is not currently a middle ground between OSS and a working business modell that the OSS crowd doesn't hate.

That being said, I'd love to be proven wrong here!

As I said, I'm explicitly not mentioning any alternative here because they all have issues, but the AGPL's wording is much more complicated than most and that (perceived) insecurity around it is my main criticism.

I'm not sure I agree. Yes, standardization is a good thing and AGPL is the "known evil", but having read it I do think that it is a very very complex piece of text - personally I'd go so far as to say that it is close to incomprehensible and would prefer pretty much anything else.

But even aside from that the sheer number of companies that point blank ban AGPL licensed software from being used in their stack could be used as an indicator as well. Though this may be due to the common misunderstanding that it is a viral license, which just goes back to my prior point on it not being clearly worded.

I won't even mention alternatives, I'm sure they all have issues, it is a complex topic, but if it were up to me the AGPL would not be my first license choice.

Looking at what "as a service" providers of open source software do though, that is taking it a step further, since they wrap the software in a layer that _smoothes_ out changes for the user. Going back to the rental company that would equate to the car manufacturer deciding the indicator needs to be on the right side of the steering wheel now and the rental company installing an adaptor so that it remains on the left for you, to keep the look and feel for the user the same.

Not a perfect comparison, but they never are :)

That issue is not endemic to Kubernetes, but rather to any larger system past a certain age, you learn stuff as you go along and would do stuff differently if you did it again today - but you can't easily, because you cannot break compatibility for everybody using your stuff.

As a concrete example from the Kubernetes world, there is a talk by Tim Hockin [1] about how today, they would fundamentally design the api-server differently and base pretty much everything on CRDs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji0FWzFwNhA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26015915

Points: 2

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