Simon Willison’s Weblog

in July 2023, we [Hugging Face] wanted to experiment with a custom license for this specific project [text-generation-inference] in order to protect our commercial solutions from companies with bigger means than we do, who would just host an exact copy of our cloud services.

The experiment however wasn’t successful.

It did not lead to licensing-specific incremental business opportunities by itself, while it did hamper or at least complicate the community contributions, given the legal uncertainty that arises as soon as you deviate from the standard licenses.

— Julien Chaumond # 8th April 2024, 6:35 pm

“We believe that open source should be sustainable and open source maintainers should get paid!”

Maintainer: *introduces commercial features*
“Not like that”

Maintainer: *works for a large tech co*
“Not like that”

Maintainer: *takes investment*
“Not like that”

— Jacob Kaplan-Moss # 12th February 2024, 5:18 am

We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist. [...] Further, 96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers.

— The Value of Open Source Software, Harvard Business School Strategy Unit # 22nd January 2024, 4:35 pm

I like to make sure almost every line of code I write is under a commercially friendly OS license (usually Apache 2) for genuinely selfish reasons: I never want to have to solve that problem ever again, so OS licensing my code now ensures I can use it for the rest of my life no matter who I happen to be working for in the future

— Me # 18th August 2023, 7:33 pm

Overnight, tens of thousands of businesses, ranging from one-person shops to the Fortune 500, woke up to a new reality where the underpinnings of their infrastructure suddenly became a potential legal risk. The BUSL and the additional use grant written by the HashiCorp team are vague, and now every company, vendor, and developer using Terraform has to wonder whether what they are doing could be construed as competitive with HashiCorp’s offerings.

— The OpenTF Manifesto # 17th August 2023, 5:15 am

Many people, and even a few companies, have contributed code to SQLite over the years. I have legal documentation for all such contributions in the firesafe in my office. We are able to track every byte of the SQLite source code back to its original creator. The project has been and continues to be open to outside contributions, as long as those contributions meet high standards of provenance and maintainability.

— D. Richard Hipp # 8th February 2023, 6:07 pm

When building a tool, it’s easy to forget how much you’ve internalized: how much knowledge and context you’ve assumed. Your tool can feel familiar or even obvious to you while being utterly foreign to everyone else. If your goal is for other people to use the darn thing — meaning you’re not just building for yourself, or tinkering for its own sake (which are totally valid reasons) — you gotta help people use it! It doesn’t matter what’s possible or what you intended; all that matters is whether people actually succeed in practice.

— Mike Bostock # 23rd February 2021, 10:55 pm

for those open source companies that still harbor magical beliefs, let me put this to you as directly as possible: cloud services providers are emphatically not going to license your proprietary software. I mean, you knew that, right? The whole premise with your proprietary license is that you are finding that there is no way to compete with the operational dominance of the cloud services providers; did you really believe that those same dominant cloud services providers can’t simply reimplement your LDAP integration or whatever? The cloud services providers are currently reproprietarizing all of computing — they are making their own CPUs for crying out loud! — reimplementing the bits of your software that they need in the name of the service that their customers want (and will pay for!) won’t even move the needle in terms of their effort.

— Bryan Cantrill # 15th December 2018, 5:02 pm

Open Source gives engineers the power to collaborate across legal entities (companies) without involving bizdev. The benefits of this workaround are extraordinary and underappreciated.

— Yehuda Katz # 6th June 2018, 9:52 pm

The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn’t required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that’s all.

— Andrew S. Tanenbaum # 7th November 2017, 11:50 am

You count the “value” that is lost by people who would have made money selling rival goods, but can’t now because they can’t compete with free. But you don’t count the value that is created by people who build upon the freely given goods. [...] In other words, you only look at the first-order effects. It’s the same mistake a lot of people make when they accuse open source developers of “dumping” and ruining the market for competing software. That’s true, in a very narrow sense, but it ignores all the other people who took that software and used it to create something else of value.

— Mark Pilgrim # 21st October 2009, 9:59 am

There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It’s just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn’t help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development.

— Ian Bicking # 21st September 2009, 6:22 pm

Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!

— Auren Hoffman # 24th June 2009, 11 am

Let’s try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now—as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.

— Sridhar Vembu # 7th June 2009, 11:32 am

The simple truth is that in the age of Web 2.0/3.0, in the era of cloud and utility computing, the application server is a commodity. A commercial, proprietary app server simply cannot survive in this environment anywhere outside the lethargic, soft-padded walls of the enterprise.

— Aral Balkan # 8th January 2009, 6:10 pm

[In Mali...] The outcome of this rampant illegal software copying is that Windows is seen as “the first world standard” and any attempt to push a cheaper alternative is strongly resisted. They consider it trying to cheat local people out of getting the same quality of software that is used in the developed world, even though it’s a legal way of getting quality software for free.

— Jeremy Allison # 9th December 2008, 8:03 am

The only down side is everyone I’ve talked to at Freebase seems pretty solid on this being their proprietary secret sauce, because a good, fast scalable open source tuple store might actually jump start a real semantic (small-S) web after all these years.

— Kellan Elliott-McCrea # 29th September 2008, 3:29 pm

The thing that disrupts you is always uglier and worse in some way. Less features, less developed. But if there’s a 10X price win in there somewhere, the cheap rickety thing wins in the end.

— Rich Skrenta # 18th January 2008, 10:59 pm

Schools and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of the range of free-to-use products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to use them.

— Becta # 12th January 2008, 10:35 am

From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again. [...] The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.

— Miguel de Icaza # 4th January 2008, 12:42 pm

Don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.

— Linus Torvalds # 16th December 2007, 9:53 pm

The companies that couldn’t beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft’s strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.

— Ian Hickson # 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm

Simply put, free and open-source software is just the scientific model applied to programming: free sharing of work open collaboration; open publication; peer review; recognition of the best work, with priority given to the first to do a meaningful new piece of work; and so forth. As a programmer, it is the best arena in which to work. There are no secrets; the work must stand on its own.

— Dave Shields # 30th November 2007, 11:47 pm

Yet when you look at the projects in the UK, these projects are failing. The more they fail, the more it drives [the UK government] down this weird behaviour of only selecting the biggest people—even though they’ve failed two or three times before.

— John Powell # 16th October 2007, 5:33 pm

Open source is neither an industry fad, nor a magic bullet.

— Microsoft FAQ # 13th August 2007, 1:54 pm

Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.

— Mark Pilgrim # 12th January 2007, 9:51 am