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It's not surprising FSF sees the Commons Clause as non-F/OSS according to their definition. The question, though, is whether OSI's taxonomy is even relevant to

It's not surprising FSF sees the Commons Clause as non-F/OSS according to their definition. The question, though, is whether OSI's taxonomy is even relevant today when there are other, more imminent concerns. Namely, if you want your software project to contribute to software and information monopolization in "the cloud" and on very few content aggregation sites such as Fb, github, and others that themselves don't reciprocally allow eg. indie search crawlers and untracked linking.

saagarjha 8y ago
This is a different issue, as you yourself have mentioned. And it has an easy solution: you are free to host the code yourself if you don’t like putting it on a centralized service.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  That's exactly the kind of limited perspective I'm questioning. FSF bases their copyleft concept on ethical beliefs. But what are the ethics of publishing your project on github such that your user's clicks are tracked, and you can't even scrape github for building up a search index unless you're GoogleBot or Bing? What are the ethics of giving your labor to cloud providers working hard to lock users in to their ecosystem? What is ethical about OSI's no-purpose-limitation criterion such that your software can be easily weaponized in one form or another? What is ethical about promoting the idea that software developers need to give all their work away such that only very few cloud providers can benefit, to the detriment of financing further development and maintenance?
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I still don't understand your point. The GPL provides none of the protections you are asking for, since I am free to post my code wherever I see fit. Are you asking for protections as to where I am legally allowed to host my code?
deleted 8y ago
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kemitchell 8y ago
Here's a piece of mine outlining how incomplete the Open Source Definition remains for discussing how far open source copyleft can go: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft-Regulation.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft-Regul... Summary: > [The fact that OSD doesn't set out complete rules for copyleft] is altogether understandable, considering the way it was written, and why. The Definition wasn’t meant to answer current questions about the limits of open source copyleft design. Those questions hadn’t even been practically posed yet. But we’re asking them now. In order to establish meaningful regulation for open source copyleft, we’ll have to look beyond the Definition. That will be far easier to do without pretending that we’re still debating the Definition.

saagarjha 8y ago

This is a different issue, as you yourself have mentioned. And it has an easy solution: you are free to host the code yourself if you don’t like putting it on a centralized service.

tannhaeuser 8y ago
That's exactly the kind of limited perspective I'm questioning. FSF bases their copyleft concept on ethical beliefs. But what are the ethics of publishing your project on github such that your user's clicks are tracked, and you can't even scrape github for building up a search index unless you're GoogleBot or Bing? What are the ethics of giving your labor to cloud providers working hard to lock users in to their ecosystem? What is ethical about OSI's no-purpose-limitation criterion such that your software can be easily weaponized in one form or another? What is ethical about promoting the idea that software developers need to give all their work away such that only very few cloud providers can benefit, to the detriment of financing further development and maintenance?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I still don't understand your point. The GPL provides none of the protections you are asking for, since I am free to post my code wherever I see fit. Are you asking for protections as to where I am legally allowed to host my code?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kemitchell 8y ago

Here's a piece of mine outlining how incomplete the Open Source Definition remains for discussing how far open source copyleft can go: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft-Regulation.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft-Regul... Summary: > [The fact that OSD doesn't set out complete rules for copyleft] is altogether understandable, considering the way it was written, and why. The Definition wasn’t meant to answer current questions about the limits of open source copyleft design. Those questions hadn’t even been practically posed yet. But we’re asking them now. In order to establish meaningful regulation for open source copyleft, we’ll have to look beyond the Definition. That will be far easier to do without pretending that we’re still debating the Definition.