Intel Takes Open-Source Hyperscan Development To Proprietary Licensed Software

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Takes Open-Source Hyperscan Development To Proprietary Licensed Software

While Intel can be praised for their dozens (or likely by now, hundreds) of open-source projects they maintain and countless other existing open-source software projects they actively contribute to and are covered by Phoronix on a near-daily basis, not everything there is open-source. Intel is a wonderful and leading open-source promoter but occasionally there are closed-source blobs or questionable moves such as today: Intel is taking their Hyperscan library development from BSD-licensed open-source software to now the Intel Proprietary License moving forward...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Hyperscan-Now-Proprietary

[Kjell]

Rug pulling at its finest

Don't support greedy companies.

[geerge]

And now vectorscan exists. What a move.

edit: Or is it 4D chess. Hyperscan dies, vectorscan flourishes, intel no longer spends devs. Why bother finding maintainers to offload the project to when people will hate-maintain forever.

[Volta]

Well, that's an open-source disappointment... And it's a freaking regular expression matching library that Intel is now making closed-source.

No, it's expected from BSD trash license. I've got the feeling Intel wanted to show how crappy license is this.

Now that's even worse than being just proprietary software but if it were at least freely available to download... So now Hyperscan is just for Intel customers.

Keep dreaming. It's BSD!

[sandain]

No, it's expected from BSD trash license. I've got the feeling Intel wanted to show how crappy license is this.



Keep dreaming. It's BSD!

Lol. Tell us you have no idea how software licenses work without actually telling us. It is their software. It could have been written using any license under the sun, including GPL, and they would still be allowed to relicense it to _whatever_ they want. Any BSD licensed version is still BSD licensed and available for forking as has already been done.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

This thing must be hella performant if they are switching it to a closed source paid library. I can't imagine there's a shortage of regex libraries out there, so it must have a niche it fills.

[User42]

And now vectorscan exists. What a move.

edit: Or is it 4D chess. Hyperscan dies, vectorscan flourishes, intel no longer spends devs. Why bother finding maintainers to offload the project to when people will hate-maintain forever.

It's usually not that one game but a very close one: management says they can't afford providing the resources for it; the Team relicenses; a fork is born, with an equally permissive license; the Team is reduced to a couple employees.

And now what? You say...

Now Intel's game is both to

1. sell licences to Enterprise, who find it easier to deal with big companies than using Open Source tools anyway;
2. allocate juste enough resources for the proprietary product to stay atop.

That second point requires 2 good devs only... The more you add, the wider the gap will be. Because it's BSD, they can integrate all the open source changes in their codebase for free while working on killer features the community doesn't have the committed resources to invest in the platform (and if they do, it can be merged back in Intel's product anyway so they can work on something else that'll give them an edge).

[yakushabb]

I hate the "Open Source" philosophy. It's open until it makes money.

[qlum]

End of the day Intel works for Intel, I can imagine keeping such a library open source when code could just be merged in a fork that works on all competitors just makes it pointless for intel to continue it's development in the open, a shame but understandable.

[archkde]

Lol. Tell us you have no idea how software licenses work without actually telling us. It is their software. It could have been written using any license under the sun, including GPL, and they would still be allowed to relicense it to _whatever_ they want. Any BSD licensed version is still BSD licensed and available for forking as has already been done.

While the general idea is true, I'm not sure if the code is really fully Intel's, given that there are quite a bunch of contributors listed.