[openstack-dev] [all] [tc] "No Open Core" in 2016

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Fri Feb 5 22:18:06 UTC 2016


On 2016-02-05 13:17:40 -0500 (-0500), Doug Hellmann wrote:
[...]
> My understanding of the "no open core" requirement is about the
> intent of the contributor.  We don't want separate community and
> "enterprise" editions of components (services or drivers).  The
> Poppy situation doesn't seem to be a case of open washing anything,
> or holding back features in order to sell a more advanced version.
> It happens that for Poppy to be useful, you have to buy another
> service for it to talk to (and to serve your data), but all of the
> Poppy code is actually open and there are several services to choose
> from.  There is no "better" version of Poppy available for sale,
> if you buy a PoppyCDN subscription.
[...]

Considering the openness of software based on the openness of its
prerequisites is complex and fraught with snakepits. There is
unfortunately almost always some level of non-freeness:

To run it, do you need to purchase a computer or similar
infrastructure? Electricity? Cooling?

Will it run on a system which is not littered with non-free
microcode, either uploaded as blobs by the operating system or
perpetually resident as system firmware in (((e)e)p)rom?

Are there systems with board schematics and full parts manifests
published under an open license on which you can run it?

This discussion comes up a lot in other free software communities,
and if we push back on completely freely-licensed and
openly-developed client software which people can use with a
proprietary service and for which there is no alternative open
equivalent service on the market (yet), we need to be prepared to
answer these other questions about where we draw the line on "open
enough."
-- 
Jeremy Stanley



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