Any time someone uses the word "sustainable" in regards to a FOSS project, I know they're buttering up the community as they plan to make the project not FOSS anymore.<p>In this particular case, it's not <i>as</i> bad as that, as Open WebUI is merely introducing a more onerous version of the BSD advertising clause. BSD 4-clause was considered a FOSS license but, in practice, demanding specific forms of attribution was incredibly problematic, especially in projects with multiple contributors. The attribution clauses in Creative Commons licenses are similarly if not more problematic; to the point where there is a cottage industry of <i>copyleft trolls</i> abusing pre-4.0 licenses as a way to rugpull people and coerce them into massive settlements.<p>Furthermore, the way this specific attribution requirement is written sounds like a possible future trademark landmine. Like, imagine if <i>Firefox</i> shipped with an attribution requirement that prohibited removing the trademarked Mozilla branding. That would effectively make the project non-FOSS because anyone who wants to use their FOSS rights is in a catch-22. Either you violate copyright and remove the trademarks, or you violate trademark by using your rights under the license in a way that violates trademark policy.<p>I'm also particularly not fond of the plan to demand CLAs and sell white-label licenses; my personal opinion is that you should almost never sign a CLA for a FOSS contribution. At the very least CLA signers should be getting paid a revenue share of the white-label licensing revenue.
I am skeptical that this change meets the Open Source definition. I can understand that they want to experiment with something new, but the OSD includes a non discrimination clause, you cannot restrict or grant different rights in an open source license to different groups. What they should do instead is dual license, with a license that a acheives their goals for the general populace, plus special licenses for specifc groups that allow them to do things the open source license doesnt. I'm not a fan of CLAs like that, but they are requiring a CLA anyway.
Why does this keep happening? Do people not understand the implications choosing an open source license.in the first place? There are a million licenses, in fact you can just make your own one up! But when you choose a class of license the specifically allows commercial exploitation... you don't get to act wronged when it happens.
> we started seeing a pattern we couldn’t ignore: bad actors taking our work, stripping the branding, selling it as their own, and giving nothing back. That’s not open source—that’s exploitation.<p>That <i>is</i> Open Source, and “Open Source” has <i>always</i> been the corpo-friendly version of “Free Software”. It's very funny to see so many people pointing out “This doesn't meet the Open Source Definition!!!!” like there's any reason to care. OSI themselves will tell you that “open source” as we know it was a product of AOLTimeWarner's desire to get people to work for them for free: <a href="https://opensource.org/history" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/history</a><p>“The [February 3rd, 1998] conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”<p>I <i>want</i> philosophically-focused software that puts the rights of human-persons above the desires of corporate-persons. Fuck “Open Source” lol
Yep. This "little addition" to the license will likely make it non Open Source according to standard definition. It reminds me "Commons Clause" which Redis tried to add to its license years ago... and later pulled back.<p>I understand OpenWebUI team pain and perhaps not everything they do, they should do as Open Source<p>In my opinion you should think about Open Source as fundamental science - if you discover Gravity, people are going to use it and often not giving you any credit.
> But with Open WebUI’s rapid growth and success, we started seeing a pattern we couldn’t ignore: bad actors taking our work, stripping the branding, selling it as their own, and giving nothing back.<p>I recently wrote a blog post on software licensing and this more or less feels like the reasoning behind some of the source available licenses like SSPL or the Elastic License.<p>What sometimes ends up happening is that forks are created (see Redis and Elasticsearch for examples) due to the community being quite upset and that can make it worse for the original project that was trying to protect itself from typically hyperscalers but sometimes just actors that aren’t aligned with the project's goals (that give nothing back and profit themselves).<p>If you never intend to make money from a project, license it permissively, like MIT or BSD or Apache 2.0 or similar licenses.<p>If you'd like to make money from the project at some point, consider dual licensing: AGPL or even something like SSPL, alongside commercial licenses for people with different requirements (commercial, proprietary software etc.), maybe with waivers for stuff like companies smaller than X employees or Y global revenue per year.
They swapped out MIT [0] for BSD-3 just five months ago, which doesn’t seem to have been announced at all. Nixpkgs still has the 0.6.5 release as MIT, and 0.6.6 is in the AUR as MIT as well.<p>I wanted to be on the dev’s side here. CLA’s can be reasonable and I’ve happily let others convert my GPL code to them before. But reading the Open WebUI developer’s blog [1] makes it evident this isn’t really about the community — as he says, “It’s just me” and what he wants that matters for Open WebUI.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/8468/files">https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/8468/files</a>
[1]: <a href="https://jryng.com/thoughts/my-purpose" rel="nofollow">https://jryng.com/thoughts/my-purpose</a>
Do you have any recommendations for self-hosted, truly open-source, "ChatGPT"-style interfaces (e.g., a UI for chat, RAG, image generation, etc.)?<p>I use Open WebUI a lot, but it's lacking in a few aspects (UI, huge Docker images), and its focus on commercialization does not motivate me to contribute.
They cannot just relicense the work of all of their public contributors without them agreeing in writing. This is completely illegitimate. (They don't seem to require signing any contributor agreement.)
Asked and answered but for the sake of discourse, what is the best model/structure for open source projects? Every OSS project that reaches critical mass seems to believe changing the license to something source-available is the only option. Is it or isn’t it? Why or why not? Does it make sense to go with a different OSS license? If it does, which license would you recommend, and in what case(s)?
So did they find out they made a mistake going with the BSD license, and correct it to be more in line with their original intentions?<p>Many here are responding as if they are making some moral u-turn, or calling them out for not being FOSS license cognisati from the very start.<p>And I get it. Most are not just 'rebranding and shipping'. You incorporated this into your own system as a frontend to your own specialized AI solution, and now you feel rugpulled.<p>I guess the true FOSS solution would be fork and backport changes. But that would mean someone steps up as the maintainer if this community of users wants to keep sharing the costs.<p>While not an easy option for all usecases, some could also bite the bullet and switch to LibreChat wich is MIT licensed.
here's a hard fork, who is with me? <a href="https://github.com/AI3clauseBSD/claused-webai">https://github.com/AI3clauseBSD/claused-webai</a>
As we've seen this countless times, it still has the same problems:<p>> taking our work, [...] and giving nothing back<p>That's the BSD license for you. Following is a lot of FUD about what you can or cannot do, and what is open-source at all.<p>> the new branding clause [...] incentivizes individuals and organizations to actively contribute back<p>Not anymore with a CLA. I understand that they want money, but it never works by semi-closing open-source projects. It doesn't seem to be a famous project but I still expect the usual small forks while the real projects contributions slowing down because of the CLA.