8 ms·

That doesn't track my experience advising on new licenses in the last few years. Most of the folks who ask me for or about them have been in open source for qui

That doesn't track my experience advising on new licenses in the last few years. Most of the folks who ask me for or about them have been in open source for quite some time, have done their homework on licensing basics, and simply don't care whether anyone in particular tells them they're open source. Open source is at best a means to them, not an end, and not a perfectly effective one when it comes to advancing an activist cause, building a business, or advancing the technical state of the art.

verdverm 6y ago
Watch the video of FB head of legal talking at the FOSS conference about licenses. Success in advising these companies on crafting a license does not imply that the project or their choice to embrace this style of license will result in success. If they still call themselves open source, they are lying. The proper term is "source available."
- kemitchell 6y ago
  I've seen the talk. There are many talks. No license guarantees success in any dimension. Not MIT. Not BSD. Not Apache 2 or GPLv3 or WTFPL or any of the PolyForm terms. Most open source projects, as I suspect you define open source, fail. Very little uptake. Very little outside contribution. Net loss, financially speaking, for the developers. You're free to argue for or against whatever meaning of "open source" you like. But disagreeing with you, or refusing to accept the brand you'd force on them, does not make anyone a liar. I was quite doctrinaire about the issue myself, for many years. It wasn't until I got beyond reading what the OSI said about itself---parsing the OSD, reading its history, dealing with the mailing list process, seeing the shifts in FSF position, reading up on the "open" buzzwords wars before 1998---that I realized the "right answer" I was so proud of having wasn't so right and rigorous, after all. I regret how badly I treated others, for the sake of my own feeling of "correctness".
  - verdverm 6y ago
    If you think the PolyForm counts as open source, and you want to pervert the meaning of open source, go ahead. You can claim your own meaning for open source and licenses, but there is a governing body that we look to, to decide which licenses do qualify as open source. They have started denying this style license, and until they approve PolyForm as a qualifying license, you will be considered among the liars (people abusing ignorance and marketing for their own benefit) if you promote it as an open source license.
    - kemitchell 6y ago
      PolyForm hasn't held the new noncompete licenses out as "open source". Others could, but we don't. I don't know how you jumped to that conclusion. Personally, I don't care what OSI says, though I do care very much what some of the individuals involved in it say. My clients occasionally care about OSI approval, but far less than you might expect. I've also been a part of drafting licenses that I suspect nearly anyone would call "open source". The Blue Oak Model License, for example. I won't be submitting those licenses to OSI or FSF. As far as I know, none of the other folks involved in drafting them care to waste their time on that process, either.
      - verdverm 6y ago
        It's the crowd consensus around definitions and open source licenses that matter, and if the crowd puts trust in OSI (or another) org, then it gains value and becomes the guiding light so to speak. This is not so far off from how / why Bitcoin has a real world value. Essentially, it will be an uphill battle for companies using these license to claim they are part of the open source community. Just because you are on GitHub doesn't mean you are COSS. I now consider Microsoft to be the biggest COSS company.
        kemitchell 6y ago
        There is no consensus. There are myriad distinct points of view and competing interests. Several schools hold themselves out as the one true reading of the Open Source Definition. Others don't care about OSD at all. Is CC0 (not OSOI approved) software open source? How about AGPLv3 (approved)? Ethically licensed software (in process)? BSD/MIT (approved) code from standards bodies under separate patent? Adaptive Public License (approved) software that explicitly opts out of patent coverage? NASA's latest license (not approved)? RPL 1.5 (approved by OSI, not by FSF)? Apache 2 (approved) API wrappers that only talk to closed cloud services? WTFPL (not approved)? I've released noncommercial licenses, avoided calling them "open", had others do so quite despite me, then hear, basically "I know, and I don't care" when I pointed it out. On the other hand, I know people who don't think copyleft counts as open source, or shouldn't any more. There is a kind of lowest common denominator of sorts around MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0, maybe Artistic 2, assuming no patents. Some would add GPLv2, LGVPLv2.1, and maybe MPLv2 and EPLv2, for copyleft. All of those licenses have well known legal and practical limitations. Some are truly ancient, like MIT and BSD, and wouldn't be considered competently drafted now.

verdverm 6y ago

Watch the video of FB head of legal talking at the FOSS conference about licenses. Success in advising these companies on crafting a license does not imply that the project or their choice to embrace this style of license will result in success. If they still call themselves open source, they are lying. The proper term is "source available."

kemitchell 6y ago
I've seen the talk. There are many talks. No license guarantees success in any dimension. Not MIT. Not BSD. Not Apache 2 or GPLv3 or WTFPL or any of the PolyForm terms. Most open source projects, as I suspect you define open source, fail. Very little uptake. Very little outside contribution. Net loss, financially speaking, for the developers. You're free to argue for or against whatever meaning of "open source" you like. But disagreeing with you, or refusing to accept the brand you'd force on them, does not make anyone a liar. I was quite doctrinaire about the issue myself, for many years. It wasn't until I got beyond reading what the OSI said about itself---parsing the OSD, reading its history, dealing with the mailing list process, seeing the shifts in FSF position, reading up on the "open" buzzwords wars before 1998---that I realized the "right answer" I was so proud of having wasn't so right and rigorous, after all. I regret how badly I treated others, for the sake of my own feeling of "correctness".
- verdverm 6y ago
  If you think the PolyForm counts as open source, and you want to pervert the meaning of open source, go ahead. You can claim your own meaning for open source and licenses, but there is a governing body that we look to, to decide which licenses do qualify as open source. They have started denying this style license, and until they approve PolyForm as a qualifying license, you will be considered among the liars (people abusing ignorance and marketing for their own benefit) if you promote it as an open source license.
  - kemitchell 6y ago
    PolyForm hasn't held the new noncompete licenses out as "open source". Others could, but we don't. I don't know how you jumped to that conclusion. Personally, I don't care what OSI says, though I do care very much what some of the individuals involved in it say. My clients occasionally care about OSI approval, but far less than you might expect. I've also been a part of drafting licenses that I suspect nearly anyone would call "open source". The Blue Oak Model License, for example. I won't be submitting those licenses to OSI or FSF. As far as I know, none of the other folks involved in drafting them care to waste their time on that process, either.
    - verdverm 6y ago
      It's the crowd consensus around definitions and open source licenses that matter, and if the crowd puts trust in OSI (or another) org, then it gains value and becomes the guiding light so to speak. This is not so far off from how / why Bitcoin has a real world value. Essentially, it will be an uphill battle for companies using these license to claim they are part of the open source community. Just because you are on GitHub doesn't mean you are COSS. I now consider Microsoft to be the biggest COSS company.
      - kemitchell 6y ago
        There is no consensus. There are myriad distinct points of view and competing interests. Several schools hold themselves out as the one true reading of the Open Source Definition. Others don't care about OSD at all. Is CC0 (not OSOI approved) software open source? How about AGPLv3 (approved)? Ethically licensed software (in process)? BSD/MIT (approved) code from standards bodies under separate patent? Adaptive Public License (approved) software that explicitly opts out of patent coverage? NASA's latest license (not approved)? RPL 1.5 (approved by OSI, not by FSF)? Apache 2 (approved) API wrappers that only talk to closed cloud services? WTFPL (not approved)? I've released noncommercial licenses, avoided calling them "open", had others do so quite despite me, then hear, basically "I know, and I don't care" when I pointed it out. On the other hand, I know people who don't think copyleft counts as open source, or shouldn't any more. There is a kind of lowest common denominator of sorts around MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0, maybe Artistic 2, assuming no patents. Some would add GPLv2, LGVPLv2.1, and maybe MPLv2 and EPLv2, for copyleft. All of those licenses have well known legal and practical limitations. Some are truly ancient, like MIT and BSD, and wouldn't be considered competently drafted now.