All of these headaches stem from the OSI's refusal to address the problems posed by SaaS to the open source model. Their thinking is stuck in the 1980s and 1990s.
SaaS is effectively a loophole. You can use 100% open source software to create something that is actually far more proprietary and that offers less user freedom than old school closed source applications. Yes the user can theoretically get the code but it's painful to operate and meanwhile the SaaS application has all the user's data.
Open source is rapidly becoming free labor for closed SaaS and a tool to accelerate the lock-down of user data in the cloud rather than a tool to expand user freedom.
People are trying to roll their own licenses to deal with these problems since the OSI is providing no leadership.
> All of these headaches stem from the OSI's refusal to address the problems posed by SaaS to the open source model. Their thinking is stuck in the 1980s and 1990s
There are no such problems. The “problem“ supposedly raised by SaaS is, in fact, an issue widely recognized as inherent to FOSS licensing before the OSI existed.
> Open source is rapidly becoming free labor for closed SaaS
“Free Software commercially redounds to the benefit of whatever for has the most resources to build and sell non-licensing services around it“ is not a new thing with SaaS. It's been recognized widely since the early 1990s.
What's new is people feeling entitled to a viable business mod for VC-funded startups that can free ride on FOSS-centered goodwill, without actually being FOSS.
You realize that you're choosing a future here where nobody owns their data nor has the ability to actually run software on that data themselves... unless they have a lot of free time and the skills of a developer and IT professional, right?
People are letting the idea of open source as originally conceived eclipse the goal of providing freedom to the user.
It's a pretty common thing. When an idea doesn't turn out exactly as people wanted, it's very common for people to double down on the idea to the point of even turning against the original goals of the idea. This is what open source is doing. The license is more important than what the license was intended to achieve: freedom for the end user.
Isn't this a case of Neo4j trying to prevent a SaaS from making money selling a managed Neo4j offering?
It seems the OSI is siding against Neo4j and with the SaaS by saying Neo4j had no rights to remove the right to sell the software from the SaaS company who decided to remove the added clause preventing them from selling Neo4j.
If you're talking about projects where people are following the letter and spirit of the license, and publishing their code, but it's a pain to use... that's not really something you can control with a copyright license. The correct answer in that case is to not use that code and treat projects that rely on it as technical debt.
If you mean that the SaaS provider has a private fork of someone else's code, and won't publish that fork... well, AGPL already exists for that. But here's the thing: in order for any license to close this loophole, you need to create a licensing term that obligates the user to publish private forks. These terms will inevitably either restrict the user's freedom to run the program, or the user's freedom to modify the program. I don't see why we should be calling restrictions on either freedom[0] to be Free Software or Open Source.
My personal feeling is that companies that are adopting "SaaS-loophole" copylefts are looking for the street cred of being source-available, while still being able to wield copyright in the way one would with proprietary software. Hence the Commons Clause that bans commercial endeavors on top of the already difficult-to-comply-with Affero clause. If you want to be paid, just... demand payment.[1] That's what proprietary licensing is for, and you are never going to close the "SaaS loophole" in FOSS while still remaining in the spirit and letter of FOSS.
The thing about SaaS is that it wasn't invented this decade. Even back in the 80s and 90s when FOSS was novel, you had massive IBM mainframes that could be partitioned, virtualized, and rented out exactly in the same way Amazon does today.
[0] GPL and weaker copylefts are tolerable because said licensing provisions only trip on distribution. Ordinary users do not need to worry about GPL compliance until they want to give someone else their code. This is a feature, not a bug.
> in order for any license to close this loophole, you need to create a licensing term that obligates the user to publish private forks. These terms will inevitably either restrict the user's freedom to run the program
No. The end user is the one using the SaaS service, not the company providing the service. AGPL is there to give freedom all the way up to the end user. Also, there is no private fork in this scenario.
Uh, there is a private fork in this scenario. The whole point of AGPL is that you cannot legally modify the software and host it over a network to avoid having to publish your fork and comply with the GPL copyleft clause. Mere use does not trip the AGPL copyleft, because Freedom Zero is considered sacrosanct.
Furthermore, there are plenty of situations involving a network, other than SaaS, in which both the client and server could be considered end-users. For example, a WordPress site. The people who own the site and the people viewing it are two separate sets of end-users with their own freedoms to protect.
SaaS is effectively a loophole. You can use 100% open source software to create something that is actually far more proprietary and that offers less user freedom than old school closed source applications. Yes the user can theoretically get the code but it's painful to operate and meanwhile the SaaS application has all the user's data.
Open source is rapidly becoming free labor for closed SaaS and a tool to accelerate the lock-down of user data in the cloud rather than a tool to expand user freedom.
People are trying to roll their own licenses to deal with these problems since the OSI is providing no leadership.