Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?

[adison]

keep the topic at bay.

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn but that's the point ... "sometimes" ... "can be" .... "enterprise"
Effectively source not available unless you pay us lots of money
Contrast situation with Cloudron

Of course there are some benefits to Cloudron being open-source, but there are also some risks, and basically we as users should not be so demanding about someone else's property. Otherwise it will be 'Atlas Shrugged' scenario.

[timconsidine]

@adison read your post

@adison said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

i personally believe all products should be at least source.available.

Maybe it's not what you meant, but it's what you wrote.
Don't blame me for misunderstandings arising.

[timconsidine]

Ignoring this topic now.

[necrevistonnezr]

@ryangorley said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

So they'll often run these companies at a loss for years to try to grow the user base as much as they can to get that big cash out at the end.

Or they pull a Hashicorp.

[adison]

@necrevistonnezr said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

p

what did hashicorp do? i mean, i use hashicorp vault and that works fine.

[fbartels]

@adison https://thenewstack.io/hashicorp-abandons-open-source-for-business-source-license/

[adison]

@fbartels said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

https://thenewstack.io/hashicorp-abandons-open-source-for-business-source-license/

uh what? if that is the case, how is vault still maintained?

[necrevistonnezr]

I have posted a few warnings about this - any commercial competitive offering to Hashicorp products is endangered.
Reliability and stability in licensing is a value by the way if you’re running a business and have proper budgeting.

I know a couple of businesses really struggling now: Vague license, absurd new license fees, and total dependence makes for a toxic cocktail.

[fbartels]

Especially around Terraform a lot of business has been built. I'm too lazy to check, but I think there are now two endorsed community forks of the last version before the license change.

[msbt]

@fbartels https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-announces-fork-of-terraform/ that's one, not sure what's the second

[fbartels]

@msbt opentofu was recently still opentf. Maybe that was because i thought there were two projects.

[ryangorley]

@necrevistonnezr said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

Or they pull a Hashicorp.

Yeah. I guess this led to the OpenTofu (aka OpenTF) fork that is now under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation.

Directus made a similar move over to a BSL license a few months ago. I was really sympathetic to BSL licensing in principle, but soured when in the specific case of Directus the product went from open source to any business that makes more than $5M in revenue must now pay them $500~$700/mo. to self host Directus. They don't actually publish that information. I've got clients operating very low-margin businesses who would find themselves in serious trouble. I don't imagine most people installing Directus on Cloudron understand what licensing cliff they're eventually going to walk off of.

Still, I'll take an open source product that could go this direction any day over a proprietary commercial product that can make such arbitrary changes without accountability or recourse.

[avatar1024]

I wonder if a possible solution would be for Cloudron to use Canonical's approach to snap where it's all open source but the Snap Store, with the snapd deamon having the Snap Store somehow hardcoded has the source for apps.

Not that I often use Canonical as an example, especially not on this, but it feels that this could be a half way house for Cloudron.

I also like the idea of open sourcing all of Cloudron but without update push from Cloudron repo and support (other than the forum and docs) for not not paying customer.

[adison]

@avatar1024i mean, i guess its an idea

[fbartels]

@avatar1024 said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

but without update push

If I remember correctly, this is how it was before the two apps limit existed. You could install, but all updates where from the cli. It was no fun.

[jdaviescoates]

I'm going off topic, but re:

@timconsidine said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

Woke socialism

I find the the crazy culture wars we live in these strange times so bizarre when they lead to such terms being used in a derogatory way like this.

"Woke" just means "awake to the injustices of the world" or as Wikipedia puts it:

"alert to racial prejudice and discrimination".

and "socialism" basically just means "understands that concentrated private ownership - think about the ultra concentrated ownership of land, banks, media - isn't really good for anyone" (and e.g. The Spirit Level has shown very convincingly that inequality is bad for everyone, including the rich), or as Wikipedia puts it:

characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership....Social ownership can be public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee.

Note that it doesn't mean state ownership of everything (although, coupled with greatly modernised more participatory and deliberative democratic practices more suited to the 21st century - of which thankfully there are many good examples of all over the world - wrt to natural monopolies like water and rail etc, that would often make lots of sense)

And now in the UK we have the Conservative Government tweeting utterly bizarre things like this (which thankfully nearly everyone - including loads of actual scientists - is taking the piss out of):

https://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/1709207218027934071/quotes

[avatar1024]

@fbartels said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

It was no fun.

Agreed, but the change in license was no fun either...and in my view more harmful

[ruihildt]

@ryangorley said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

Directus made a similar move over to a BSL license a few months ago. I was really sympathetic to BSL licensing in principle

Also sympathetic on principle, but when the code is released to open source 3 years later, it's a kind of bad joke when you talk about a web platform with all dependencies, etc.

[LoudLemur]

I think Cloudron should be Free as in Freedom.

I have a few boring things to say, which I will add at the end, but this is what I think:

1. Business Model
   Creating a financially viable business model for a Free Software project has been a longstanding problem. In all the discussions I have seen, the most promising way a Free project can achieve this is by the project team being the best provider of code improvements. They can achieve this by for example staying current with the needs and requests of users and responding in a timely fashion with quality code.

A crowd-funding, goal / stretch-goal format for making improvements would hopefully sustain continual work on the project. CodeWeavers have been successful with a system where paying users gained the perk of being eligible to vote on the direction the coding focus should take. It is worth looking at how they manage it:
https://www.codeweavers.com/

Data visibility is very helpful for a system like that, where you can see a roadmap and options along the way, the flow of developer time, the use of resources etc. Apache eCharts could help, for example.

Another source of funding would be to have a "Corporation Suggested Contribution" in the download area. This could be scaled and set according to the size of the corporation, for example. If the relevant page were pitched in terms of corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and had some sort of "establishing a relationship with the developers" perks, that might be enough to enable corporate IT departments to authorize the payment, perhaps in a tax deductible way.

Another path Cloudron might follow would be to take a policy that code would be made Free later, for example, during the third year after it was initially introduced.

Open Source?
Isn't Cloudron 'Open Source' already? Does it not satisfy Freedom 1, publishing the source code in a human readable way? Does Cloudron not follow an Open Source development model, where people can contribute code to, for example, add support for an additional application?

https://www.cloudron.io/opensource.html

There are some non-Free packages which Cloudron supports, and I believe these should be flagged as such, so that people can filter them. By Free Software Foundation standards, including non-Free packages is enough to categorize Cloudron as non-Free, in the same way that Debian GNU/Linux has been categorized as non-Free, due to its support for proprietary firmware.