Open Source Computing

Week 4

Week of February 5

It is time to divide unattached students into teams by lot:

echo "hello and welcome to Open Source" | shasum -a 512

import numpy as np
from randomgen import ChaCha
rg=np.random.Generator(ChaCha(seed=0x1234567, rounds=20))    # might use different seed
# now rg.integers(N) chooses a good random value between 0 and N-1

Continue with licenses.html at the AGPL

Wednesday

CockroachDB is a high-performance SQL database designed for transactions distributed among multiple servers. In 2019 they relicensed to address the Amazon problem, moving from Apache 2.0 to a form of the Business Source License (below):

Today, we’re adopting an extremely permissive version of the Business Source License (BSL). CockroachDB users can scale CockroachDB to any number of nodes. They can use CockroachDB or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license.

Take that, Amazon! But under their old Apache license, Amazon could have taken their code, renamed the product, and sold it. Nonetheless, they write

But our past outlook on the right business model relied on a crucial norm in the OSS world: that companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service. That norm no longer holds.

Under the Apache license, another company could outright sell an updated version of the same product.

Anti-Amazon alternatives to AGPL (start at Server-Side Public License)