Open WebUI changed license from BSD-3 to Open WebUI license with CLA(docs.openwebui.com) |
Open WebUI changed license from BSD-3 to Open WebUI license with CLA(docs.openwebui.com) |
In this particular case, it's not as 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 copyleft trolls abusing pre-4.0 licenses as a way to rugpull people and coerce them into massive settlements.
Furthermore, the way this specific attribution requirement is written sounds like a possible future trademark landmine. Like, imagine if Firefox 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.
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.
If the project is controlled by a commercial entity, you just have to understand it will likely change in a way you disagree with.
Icefox anyone?
Somehow it feels great to be paid, to pay others for the tools, like in every other profession, not so much.
I frankly find LGPL more useful in cases like that, but it apparently does not work for some parties. Open-source + commercial licensing also looks like a good balance between keeping the community-developed code accessible to everyone, while allowing the parties who don't want to share to pay for the privilege.
That is Open Source, and “Open Source” has always 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: https://opensource.org/history
“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.’”
I want philosophically-focused software that puts the rights of human-persons above the desires of corporate-persons. Fuck “Open Source” lol
My only gripe with the project was the (exorbitant) size of the docker containers, especially for cases where you need a tool with no local models, just a gateway to third-party APIs. Now another and more serious one has been added.
[1] https://docs.openwebui.com/features/workspace/
[2] https://docs.openwebui.com/pipelines/
Based on history, I don't think changing from a permissive OSS license will allow it to remain the most popular, most full-y featured project, especially in a world of competitors (plenty of which have venture funding).
I understand OpenWebUI team pain and perhaps not everything they do, they should do as Open Source
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.
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.
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).
If you never intend to make money from a project, license it permissively, like MIT or BSD or Apache 2.0 or similar licenses.
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.
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.
[0]: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/8468/files [1]: https://jryng.com/thoughts/my-purpose
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.
Far from, these projects are the exceptions not the norm imo. Even the ones that grow past hobbyist torch-passing. Usually the impetus for changing license involves a business who finds themselves in charge of very well-used projects that, despite their popularity, isn't all that lucrative to be the ward of.
So, I think there are better models than using permissive OSS as the license for the first few years of a project and then switching it out from underneath contributors/users.
From a purely business perspective, it seems silly to acquire a customer base who wants _free_ and agree to provide it, then rug pull them - and expect the inertia from the initial goodwill can carry the business for more than a few years. I've seen dozens of software businesses and projects die this way at this point, so I'm not surprised, even if the juice is only temporary it's seems well worth the squeeze for enough of these entities.
Downstream should be under the same conditions they are willing to support upstream.
Using the license on its own, you effectively are saying:
- Don't use our branding to endorse your fork
- Don't remove our branding from your fork
The only way to satisfy both of these is to not fork.
[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-webui/open-webui/refs...
Also, they forgot to reformat the new clauses for 80 column text, which makes the license unreadable on the normal GitHub viewer.
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.
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.
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.
While not an easy option for all usecases, some could also bite the bullet and switch to LibreChat wich is MIT licensed.
> taking our work, [...] and giving nothing back
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.
> the new branding clause [...] incentivizes individuals and organizations to actively contribute back
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.
Nothing, then get nothing as well.
Pay the work of others, than freely charge as much as they feel like.
On my repos, the only stuff I have with ROCm licenses are forks from projects where the decision was not mine to begin with.
As time has proven, shareware and trials is a much better model if one intends to make a living from software, without having it lock behind SaaS walls, or hardware.
Even street performers got their work tools from somewhere and unless they were going around the scrap yard, it wasn't at zero cost most likely.
Do you have any proof of that? Hell, are OpenWebUI even receiving VC funding?
E.g. the original GPL or Apache licenses did not consider patents, DRM or Tivoization, but the modern versions do.
I think it's legitimate for a project to say "we think we should address these issues but we didn't think of them" and update their license.
I'm not saying this is always the case, but it's the reason I think it's ok to sign a CLA for an organization you trust: it's _likely_ you'd also trust their choice to change a license.
Technically, they're allowed to do that - the BSD-3 license is itself public domain - but it's usually a pretty bad idea. Have the new clauses been written by a copyright lawyer, or at least been vetted by one?
The fact that this is Open WebUI's second license change this year should be a red flag for anyone considering contributing to or relying on their software.
https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
Hence I much rather go for dual license approach.
Your users don't know what source code is.
Your users don't bother to look at what they downloaded to find the code therein.
Your users aren't developers and they don't know any devs, so having the source isn't useful to them, so even if they see the code they won't redistribute.
Your users find the code a competitive advantage and don't want to spread that around. Its also too expensive for most organisations to obtain the code too.
You deliver binary and source, but then disincentivise redistribution by cutting off access to something else, like updates. This is what grsecurity and RedHat do. There was one leak of grsec, but that quickly became obsolete.
That said, aside from helping with writer’s block, I guess the distilled conclusions are more or less the ones in my comment above: permissive licenses for non-commercial stuff, dual licensing if you intend to make money.
MSTY is the first one that comes to mind though. And if you're willing to stretch your idea of "what competes with OpenWebUI" I know half a dozen startups that let you pass in some set of keys and "build a multi-agent system" in a GUI usually alongside some pared down chat windows.
Could you give names of those startups?
And yeah, Hugging Face is very much venture funded -- they had a modest 4.5b valuation in the last round.. (I just didn't know they had some competing product).