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geez, what's up with all these armchair open source experts on HN? Looks like too many people on this thread thinks this is evil. A company gave away their app

geez, what's up with all these armchair open source experts on HN? Looks like too many people on this thread thinks this is evil. A company gave away their app making tool for free, and these people are sitting in front of their keyboard talking shit about how "this is subverting the definition of 'open source'", seriously? Also what's so evil about the clause: > "You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine" does not meet (6). What's so wrong about businesses trying to give back to the community while protecting themselves against the likes of Microsoft and Amazon who will naturally take the code and monetize if there's no clause that restricts anti competition? Lastly, who the hell cares what some website called opensource.org says what open source is? This is all subjective, and from my point of view, if the source code is open, it is "open" source. There are many reasons people open source their projects, for transparency, for giving assurance to the ecosystem, etc. By trying to box the definition down to a single very narrow minded idea, you're actually hurting the growth of open source instead of helping.

koonsolo 6y ago
> you're actually hurting the growth of open source instead of helping. Which definition of "open source" are you talking about in this case? I'm confused now. Do you mean "Open Source" or source-available?
- billme 6y ago
  Both Wikipedia & Oxford appear for some reason to adopted what is at best a subjective understanding of the term “open source” — since no one in plain English would ever think some person, place, or thing being “open” would mean free to take and use as desired. Plain English is important. People are lazy. People do not like non-obvious meanings. Regardless of intent, any one prompting idea that “open source” means anything other than “viewable source code” needs to reflect on the clarity of their communication and the reality they may be seen as an chest pounding elitist; which to me is not in the spirit of the idles the claim to believe.
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    Anybody interested in "open source" is a programmer, so I hope they have a more in depth knowledge of the terminology than "plain English". Especially on the license part to include & distribute libraries they are using in their own project.
    - billme 6y ago
      No, understanding “open source” is not just for programmers, and yet another example of elitism.
ScottFree 6y ago
Couldn't agree more. Some of the reactions here are why most sane people avoid the open source community. Ultimately, these sort of reactions hurt open source in the long run by discouraging companies and individuals from releasing their source.
- thecureforzits 6y ago
  The idea that open source is being "hurt" by asking for companies not to misrepresent their products says a lot more about you than it does anyone else.
Operyl 6y ago
Seriously, this +100000000%. King giving this much to the community with such a tiny clause that most people won't mind (you can't take their engine, make a change, and resell it) is so pedantic that I feel like there will be really nobody who is seriously going to use the project who will care. I'm super excited as a developer, I can work to get some features I want in here now!
- SXX 6y ago
  Epic Games also giving a lot to the community and now only charge projects after $1,000,000 in profits. Yet they don't try to sell their EULA as "almost OSS license".
  - Operyl 6y ago
    And I appreciate them for the work they've done too! But that's not an exact one-to-one here. There's no point in attacking a project that has an honest desire to give to the community like this post has been doing.
    - SXX 6y ago
      So how exactly this is not one-to-one if we don't care about terms here? 95% of game developers will never gonna make $1M from their pet project so it's no different whatever engine code is licensed under EULA or proprietary license with different name.
      - Operyl 6y ago
        Because the engine is proprietary in Epic land, and it's not here. Here I can make any changes I want and still release the engine as a fork. I can't sell that fork. In the case of the Epic engine, you're not allowed to fork it at all.
dwheeler 6y ago
I'm not just an armchair expert. I am a literal expert. Involved in it for decades. Wrote published papers. It's part of my job title. Excluding commercial use is not helping the growth of OSS, it is falsely claiming to be OSS. If you want to say that it is being released as "source available" no one would complain. It is the falsehoods that bring out the complaints.
- Operyl 6y ago
  It's not excluding commercial use entirely, though. It's free to use, free to modify. But not free to steal, make a change, and resell.
- hartator 6y ago
  > Excluding commercial use is not helping the growth of OSS, it is falsely claiming to be OSS. Is anything less than BSD or MIT license not open source then? I am all for it, but you are publishing some of your work under GNU which mean I can't use in one of my projects without publishing the source code under GNU. Why these restrictions are acceptable but not non-commercialisation?
  - dwheeler 6y ago
    GPL is well-known to be an open source software license. Many commercial organizations depend on it.
    - hartator 6y ago
      > If you use components that are licensed under GPLv3, then you are required to license the complete application the contains the GPL components under the GPL as well. It seems to be more restrictive to me than the OP's license.
- Kiro 6y ago
  It's people like you that makes me afraid of releasing stuff open source. So aggressive for no reason at all.
- 6y ago
SXX 6y ago
> geez, what's up with all these armchair open source experts on HN? Looks like too many people on this thread thinks this is evil. This is evil because it's intentional false advertisement. That's fine when some company which is totally new to the field doing it, but these guys have their code published on GitHub for years and they know the difference. This is no different from situation when surveillance sold under names like Patriot Act. > Lastly, who the hell cares what some website called opensource.org says what open source is? This is all subjective, and from my point of view, if the source code is open, it is "open" source. Yeah and if I decide that my restaurant make amazing pork dishes I am totally allowed to call them Vegan, Halal or Kosher. Right? Then we'll have amazing products like zoom call their software end2end encrypted. Oh actually it's already happen. And we also have this amazing software called Telegram which is totally encrypted except it isn't (by default). And Apple is absolutely cannot get access to your encryption key, unless you enable this shiny cloud backup option.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  Are they charging you for something? They are literally giving something away for free, and you are free to use it or not. What an entitlement. You basically want people to be punished for giving away something for no charge, and has caused you no harm.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    If I gave away free pork sandwiches, would I be allowed to call them “vegan”, merely because I didn’t charge for them? This is not about the money.
    - cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
      Bad analogy doesn't help with your argument. The source code is open, different people have different opinion about the definition of "open source". if someone calls a pork sandwich "vegan", that's objectively false. Not the case for the concept of open source because the definition is murky and I refuse to follow some authority's definition of what open source is.
sszz 6y ago
Quite a remarkable lack of IANAL flags for a lot of people talking about false advertising/trademark law...IANAL but the minimal data I have suggests the phrase “open source” has very little protection (not strictly claimed on OSI website, no major track record of being defended in court, broadly accepted vague definition, unlikely to damage the trademarked brand’s image/rep). Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is...
- nybble41 6y ago
  > Quite a remarkable lack of IANAL… I think people have just figured out that "IANAL" goes without saying in any online public discussion, unless for whatever reason it happens to be in a forum where arbitrary participants are especially likely to be lawyers. This is not a commercial context where fraud would be a concern, and even if the speaker was a lawyer there is no reasonable expectation of any attorney-client relationship between random participants in a public discussion. "IANAL" flags are superfluous. > Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is... The de facto accepted way to say that a license is OSI compliant is to refer to it as "open source".
pjmlp 6y ago
HN is not the ideal place to discuss game development news, you will find that feeling a lot around here, sites like Gamedev or the now gone Flipcode are more into it.
abdulmuhaimin 6y ago
Its number one reason I try to avoid any open source project. I actually respect those brave souls thats involved in open source project. Thousands good and one tiny bad thing, you get scrutinized to hell. You literally have to satisfy everybody otherwise theres gonna be a vocal minority(or majority) pointing out how wrong you are(usually due to difference in priorities). honestly, its mentally and emotionally draining to deal with these. And its also applicable to HN community. Any time theres a tiny bit of good thing done by somebody/some company, theres always gonna be someone pointing out the bad things that someone/company did. You either have to be full good, or just dont bother being a good guy. I mean, why bother trying
- matz1 6y ago
  > You literally have to satisfy everybody You literally don't have to. You can just ignore some of them.

koonsolo 6y ago

> you're actually hurting the growth of open source instead of helping. Which definition of "open source" are you talking about in this case? I'm confused now. Do you mean "Open Source" or source-available?

billme 6y ago
Both Wikipedia & Oxford appear for some reason to adopted what is at best a subjective understanding of the term “open source” — since no one in plain English would ever think some person, place, or thing being “open” would mean free to take and use as desired. Plain English is important. People are lazy. People do not like non-obvious meanings. Regardless of intent, any one prompting idea that “open source” means anything other than “viewable source code” needs to reflect on the clarity of their communication and the reality they may be seen as an chest pounding elitist; which to me is not in the spirit of the idles the claim to believe.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  Anybody interested in "open source" is a programmer, so I hope they have a more in depth knowledge of the terminology than "plain English". Especially on the license part to include & distribute libraries they are using in their own project.
  - billme 6y ago
    No, understanding “open source” is not just for programmers, and yet another example of elitism.

ScottFree 6y ago

Couldn't agree more. Some of the reactions here are why most sane people avoid the open source community. Ultimately, these sort of reactions hurt open source in the long run by discouraging companies and individuals from releasing their source.

thecureforzits 6y ago
The idea that open source is being "hurt" by asking for companies not to misrepresent their products says a lot more about you than it does anyone else.

Operyl 6y ago

Seriously, this +100000000%. King giving this much to the community with such a tiny clause that most people won't mind (you can't take their engine, make a change, and resell it) is so pedantic that I feel like there will be really nobody who is seriously going to use the project who will care. I'm super excited as a developer, I can work to get some features I want in here now!

SXX 6y ago
Epic Games also giving a lot to the community and now only charge projects after $1,000,000 in profits. Yet they don't try to sell their EULA as "almost OSS license".
- Operyl 6y ago
  And I appreciate them for the work they've done too! But that's not an exact one-to-one here. There's no point in attacking a project that has an honest desire to give to the community like this post has been doing.
  - SXX 6y ago
    So how exactly this is not one-to-one if we don't care about terms here? 95% of game developers will never gonna make $1M from their pet project so it's no different whatever engine code is licensed under EULA or proprietary license with different name.
    - Operyl 6y ago
      Because the engine is proprietary in Epic land, and it's not here. Here I can make any changes I want and still release the engine as a fork. I can't sell that fork. In the case of the Epic engine, you're not allowed to fork it at all.

dwheeler 6y ago

I'm not just an armchair expert. I am a literal expert. Involved in it for decades. Wrote published papers. It's part of my job title. Excluding commercial use is not helping the growth of OSS, it is falsely claiming to be OSS. If you want to say that it is being released as "source available" no one would complain. It is the falsehoods that bring out the complaints.

Operyl 6y ago
It's not excluding commercial use entirely, though. It's free to use, free to modify. But not free to steal, make a change, and resell.
hartator 6y ago
> Excluding commercial use is not helping the growth of OSS, it is falsely claiming to be OSS. Is anything less than BSD or MIT license not open source then? I am all for it, but you are publishing some of your work under GNU which mean I can't use in one of my projects without publishing the source code under GNU. Why these restrictions are acceptable but not non-commercialisation?
- dwheeler 6y ago
  GPL is well-known to be an open source software license. Many commercial organizations depend on it.
  - hartator 6y ago
    > If you use components that are licensed under GPLv3, then you are required to license the complete application the contains the GPL components under the GPL as well. It seems to be more restrictive to me than the OP's license.
Kiro 6y ago
It's people like you that makes me afraid of releasing stuff open source. So aggressive for no reason at all.
6y ago

SXX 6y ago

> geez, what's up with all these armchair open source experts on HN? Looks like too many people on this thread thinks this is evil. This is evil because it's intentional false advertisement. That's fine when some company which is totally new to the field doing it, but these guys have their code published on GitHub for years and they know the difference. This is no different from situation when surveillance sold under names like Patriot Act. > Lastly, who the hell cares what some website called opensource.org says what open source is? This is all subjective, and from my point of view, if the source code is open, it is "open" source. Yeah and if I decide that my restaurant make amazing pork dishes I am totally allowed to call them Vegan, Halal or Kosher. Right? Then we'll have amazing products like zoom call their software end2end encrypted. Oh actually it's already happen. And we also have this amazing software called Telegram which is totally encrypted except it isn't (by default). And Apple is absolutely cannot get access to your encryption key, unless you enable this shiny cloud backup option.

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
Are they charging you for something? They are literally giving something away for free, and you are free to use it or not. What an entitlement. You basically want people to be punished for giving away something for no charge, and has caused you no harm.
- teddyh 6y ago
  If I gave away free pork sandwiches, would I be allowed to call them “vegan”, merely because I didn’t charge for them? This is not about the money.
  - cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    Bad analogy doesn't help with your argument. The source code is open, different people have different opinion about the definition of "open source". if someone calls a pork sandwich "vegan", that's objectively false. Not the case for the concept of open source because the definition is murky and I refuse to follow some authority's definition of what open source is.

sszz 6y ago

Quite a remarkable lack of IANAL flags for a lot of people talking about false advertising/trademark law...IANAL but the minimal data I have suggests the phrase “open source” has very little protection (not strictly claimed on OSI website, no major track record of being defended in court, broadly accepted vague definition, unlikely to damage the trademarked brand’s image/rep). Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is...

nybble41 6y ago
> Quite a remarkable lack of IANAL… I think people have just figured out that "IANAL" goes without saying in any online public discussion, unless for whatever reason it happens to be in a forum where arbitrary participants are especially likely to be lawyers. This is not a commercial context where fraud would be a concern, and even if the speaker was a lawyer there is no reasonable expectation of any attorney-client relationship between random participants in a public discussion. "IANAL" flags are superfluous. > Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is... The de facto accepted way to say that a license is OSI compliant is to refer to it as "open source".

pjmlp 6y ago

HN is not the ideal place to discuss game development news, you will find that feeling a lot around here, sites like Gamedev or the now gone Flipcode are more into it.

abdulmuhaimin 6y ago

Its number one reason I try to avoid any open source project. I actually respect those brave souls thats involved in open source project. Thousands good and one tiny bad thing, you get scrutinized to hell. You literally have to satisfy everybody otherwise theres gonna be a vocal minority(or majority) pointing out how wrong you are(usually due to difference in priorities). honestly, its mentally and emotionally draining to deal with these. And its also applicable to HN community. Any time theres a tiny bit of good thing done by somebody/some company, theres always gonna be someone pointing out the bad things that someone/company did. You either have to be full good, or just dont bother being a good guy. I mean, why bother trying

matz1 6y ago
> You literally have to satisfy everybody You literally don't have to. You can just ignore some of them.