I’m not much of a fan of AWS, but when Amazon takes a “free as in speech AND beer” product and turns it into SaaS, that’s pretty much the expected outcome since (a) the license allows it and (b) companies exist to make money. Why would Amazon spend more than necessary to create this service? It’s not that they’re intrinsically evil for doing this; it’s literally how the rules are written. If you want to change that world, you need to change the rules.
So I think this direction for complex, expensive to create “open” backend software is inevitable, and that dogmatic appeals to some formal and restrictive definition of openness are philosophically naive.
Arguments that Timescale is not open remind me again of the paradox of tolerance [0]. This basically says that a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerance. This is because a tolerant society is vulnerable to intolerance; a tolerant society, by definition, fails when it allows intolerance.
Similarly, I am quite comfortable to consider software “open” if I can download it, build it, and use it in my products; even if it is closed in some specific dimension that is required for it to exist. It’s a shame in theory that I can’t create a little TSaaS without Timescale’s approval, but it’s not a right that most people care about, and I prefer that to a world in which the Timescale product itself doesn’t exist.
Ultimately, it’s an argument between dogmatic openness and pragmatic openness. I’m decidedly in the pragmatic camp on this one. And FWIW, my recollection is that OSI itself was created in order to extend and formalise the definition of “open” to include pragmatically open licenses beyond the GPL. (I could be wrong here, it was a long time ago and I was not involved, but I seem to remember discussions on slashdot and technocrat)
In any case, I think that any academic discussion of the definition of “open” needs to take into account the paradox that perhaps, by requiring dogmatic adherence to the definition of “open”, we cause the world to be more closed. Which is, I think, not what we want.
> In any case, I think that any academic discussion of the definition of “open” needs to take into account the paradox that perhaps, by requiring dogmatic adherence to the definition of “open”, we cause the world to be more closed. Which is, I think, not what we want.
So I think this direction for complex, expensive to create “open” backend software is inevitable, and that dogmatic appeals to some formal and restrictive definition of openness are philosophically naive.
Arguments that Timescale is not open remind me again of the paradox of tolerance [0]. This basically says that a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerance. This is because a tolerant society is vulnerable to intolerance; a tolerant society, by definition, fails when it allows intolerance.
Similarly, I am quite comfortable to consider software “open” if I can download it, build it, and use it in my products; even if it is closed in some specific dimension that is required for it to exist. It’s a shame in theory that I can’t create a little TSaaS without Timescale’s approval, but it’s not a right that most people care about, and I prefer that to a world in which the Timescale product itself doesn’t exist.
Ultimately, it’s an argument between dogmatic openness and pragmatic openness. I’m decidedly in the pragmatic camp on this one. And FWIW, my recollection is that OSI itself was created in order to extend and formalise the definition of “open” to include pragmatically open licenses beyond the GPL. (I could be wrong here, it was a long time ago and I was not involved, but I seem to remember discussions on slashdot and technocrat)
In any case, I think that any academic discussion of the definition of “open” needs to take into account the paradox that perhaps, by requiring dogmatic adherence to the definition of “open”, we cause the world to be more closed. Which is, I think, not what we want.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
edited to clarify.