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Hey britzl, I appreciate the attempt to compromise on the terminology here. But, this falls flat pretty badly. "Free and open" is still trying to capitalize on

Hey britzl, I appreciate the attempt to compromise on the terminology here. But, this falls flat pretty badly. "Free and open" is still trying to capitalize on the "free and open source" brand, and is going to mislead people into thinking it uses a FOSS license - seemingly deliberately. Can't you just call it "source available", which is the term we use for this kind of licensing model? It's really not okay to be capitalizing on the FOSS brand without being FOSS. It's a kick in the groin to the FOSS community when companies do this.

fluffything 6y ago
You seem to be confusing whether something is "open source" with "what kind of license does the code have". Something being "open source" does not imply anything about its license. Suggesting that only GPL-like software is allowed to use the term "open source" is crazy. It doesn't reflect the world we live in at all: there are thousands of projects on github without a license, or with some "free for non-military use"-type of license, or MIT/BSD-like licenses... EDIT: "the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” (Richard Stallman, GNU Philosophy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... ). Not that Stallman did much better with "free software", which as the article argues, has the obvious meaning that 'the software is "for free"'. Having to avoid expressions like "free software" or "open source" because two organizations decided to appropriate common english expressions to give them a complicated meaning is nuts.
- ddevault 6y ago
  No, I'm not. The term open source is defined here: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd Copyleft, free software, and open source all have different meanings, and GitHub has no restrictions on the license of software using its platform, and you're deliberately confoudning these things here to sow confusion. There are millions of different software licenses, yes, but that doesn't make them all open source. Give me a break. Is Windows "open source" by your reckoning? I has a license, after all, and I can decompile it, after all.
  - divs1210 6y ago
    Decompiling Windows is punishable by law.
    - fluffything 6y ago
      EULAs are not laws
      - redblacktree 6y ago
        Aren't EULAs are enforced by the CFAA? Isn't that why Aaron Schwartz is no longer with us?
      - freehunter 6y ago
        That’s not entirely clear, actually. Like the other comment says, the CFAA has been used to criminalize violations of EULAs in the past and the courts have been split on that idea: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/violating-terms-use-isnt-crime-eff-tells-court-again https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/violating-terms-use-is... Violating a EULA shouldn’t be a crime but it’s not always that clear cut.
        vonmoltke 6y ago
        We're talking about EULAs, but your article and the Swartz case concern Terms of Use, which are related but different. Terms of Use concern access to someone else's computer system, hence why overzealous lawyers and prosecutors have tried to expand the CFAA to cover them. EULAs concern what an end user can do with a piece of software on their own system or systems they control. I don't see how this intersects the CFAA at all.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      Which law?
- mindcrime 6y ago
  This project does not have a GPLv3 license, And? There are a lot of Open Source licenses, and even Free Sofware licenses besides GPLv3. but neither does LLVM (and many people do not consider LLVM to be free software Note that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are different - albeit related - things. nor the dozens projects on Github that don't have a license at all, or that have a license of the form "Free for non-commercial purposes" or the millions of flavors of that ("Free for non-military use", etc.). And those things are not Open Source. They may be "Source Available", or "Shared Source" or "Something Else", but "Open Source" has a de facto definition of "uses a license which is OSD compliant."
  - sszz 6y ago
    That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto (and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...). The distinction really doesn’t seem that important for most use cases so it’s not that surprising a weaker, possibly more useful interpretation has become common...
    - mindcrime 6y ago
      That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto There isn't any significant confusion. There is a token amount of confusion, which is pretty much always clarified every time one of these threads comes up. (and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...). It's de facto, not de jure, because OSI has no authority to enforce their definition, since they don't have a trademark (at least not a registered trademark) on the term "Open Source". What makes it the de facto definition is just usage. By and large, among the people who care about the legal details of Open Source licensing, the OSD is accepted. Yes, there are a handful of exceptions, but that's OK. It doesn't change the basic point.
      - sszz 6y ago
        I guess in my experience, the phrase is routinely used to refer to code availability and often the fact that a licensing fee doesn’t need to be negotiated or paid in order to run the code on our servers (either in an academic or corporate setting), which is a weaker requirement than the OSI definition. Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning. I’m not saying it’s correct usage, but it’s definitely real and frequent. It’s my impression a non-negligible number of people share the same understanding, evidence by the fact that this discussion apparently is recurring? Even those who corrected the Defold release language knew what was intended, even if they said it was incorrect usage of the phrase. Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small; I just don’t think that is true based on my day to day experiences.
- lewiscollard 6y ago
  > OSI decided to appropriate the term "Open source" to refer to something slightly weaker than "Free Software" but much stronger than "you can look at the source code". They are not in their right to do that. This is incorrect. Over 20 years ago people who would later be part of OSI _coined_, not co-opted, the term (within the scope of software). It was coined to mean _exactly the same thing_ as "Free Software"; the OSD was directly derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and there have only been two licenses, as I recall, that are OSI approved and the FSF have said are non-free. You also confuse "OSI-approved license" with "GPL", because the OSI (and FSF) have approved permissive BSD and MIT and many other non-copyleft licenses. Here you go: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
davidjgraph 6y ago
The original feedback was largely requesting to not say "open source" and they've changed this. Much as I respect the position you always take on FOSS, the current position is a reasonable compromise between the original two standpoints, so I lower my weapon.
- ddevault 6y ago
  I don't really see this as an improvement over the previous situation. It's just misleading in a different way. In fact, it's worse: as far as I could tell, the term "open source" was used sparingly, to the point where I wasn't going to make a fuss about it when I saw this. Now, the term "free and open", which is equally misleading, is used much more prominently than "open source" ever was.
  - britzl 6y ago
    Not true. I went over the entire website and searched for "open source" and changed the wording. I did not add a bunch of extra "free and open" just for fun.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      My mistake, then.
  - billfruit 6y ago
    I think many here are being way too pedantic with this matter.
britzl 6y ago
Defold is Free, meaning that it doesn't cost anything to use and you don't have to pay any royalties. Defold is Open, meaning that it is possible to modify and extend. It is actually possible to extend the engine even without source code access thanks to our native extension system.
- ddevault 6y ago
  >Defold is Open, meaning that it is possible to modify and extend. It is actually possible to extend the engine even without source code access thanks to our native extension system The word for this is "extensible". Please stop repurposing language to capitalize on a brand you aren't rightfully a part of. This is gaslighting. I really want to like and support this project, but you've got to cut this crap out, man. Publishing a source available project is admirable and worthwhile in its own right, be satisfied with that so that we can praise you for it in good faith. How much do you owe to the FOSS community? The least you could do in return is not backstab us. Do the right thing.
  - karlp 6y ago
    As someone without a bone in the fight, I find your language quite inflammatory, it's a bit excessive to use "backstab" and "gaslighting" IMO.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      That's what this is. If you don't want to be asked to stop gaslighting people, you shouldn't gaslight people.
      - teraflop 6y ago
        What, in your opinion, does the word "gaslighting" mean?
        ddevault 6y ago
        Manipulating facts to mislead people into behaviors which serve your self-interests.

fluffything 6y ago

You seem to be confusing whether something is "open source" with "what kind of license does the code have". Something being "open source" does not imply anything about its license. Suggesting that only GPL-like software is allowed to use the term "open source" is crazy. It doesn't reflect the world we live in at all: there are thousands of projects on github without a license, or with some "free for non-military use"-type of license, or MIT/BSD-like licenses... EDIT: "the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” (Richard Stallman, GNU Philosophy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... ). Not that Stallman did much better with "free software", which as the article argues, has the obvious meaning that 'the software is "for free"'. Having to avoid expressions like "free software" or "open source" because two organizations decided to appropriate common english expressions to give them a complicated meaning is nuts.

ddevault 6y ago
No, I'm not. The term open source is defined here: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd Copyleft, free software, and open source all have different meanings, and GitHub has no restrictions on the license of software using its platform, and you're deliberately confoudning these things here to sow confusion. There are millions of different software licenses, yes, but that doesn't make them all open source. Give me a break. Is Windows "open source" by your reckoning? I has a license, after all, and I can decompile it, after all.
- divs1210 6y ago
  Decompiling Windows is punishable by law.
  - fluffything 6y ago
    EULAs are not laws
    - redblacktree 6y ago
      Aren't EULAs are enforced by the CFAA? Isn't that why Aaron Schwartz is no longer with us?
    - freehunter 6y ago
      That’s not entirely clear, actually. Like the other comment says, the CFAA has been used to criminalize violations of EULAs in the past and the courts have been split on that idea: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/violating-terms-use-isnt-crime-eff-tells-court-again https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/violating-terms-use-is... Violating a EULA shouldn’t be a crime but it’s not always that clear cut.
      - vonmoltke 6y ago
        We're talking about EULAs, but your article and the Swartz case concern Terms of Use, which are related but different. Terms of Use concern access to someone else's computer system, hence why overzealous lawyers and prosecutors have tried to expand the CFAA to cover them. EULAs concern what an end user can do with a piece of software on their own system or systems they control. I don't see how this intersects the CFAA at all.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Which law?
mindcrime 6y ago
This project does not have a GPLv3 license, And? There are a lot of Open Source licenses, and even Free Sofware licenses besides GPLv3. but neither does LLVM (and many people do not consider LLVM to be free software Note that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are different - albeit related - things. nor the dozens projects on Github that don't have a license at all, or that have a license of the form "Free for non-commercial purposes" or the millions of flavors of that ("Free for non-military use", etc.). And those things are not Open Source. They may be "Source Available", or "Shared Source" or "Something Else", but "Open Source" has a de facto definition of "uses a license which is OSD compliant."
- sszz 6y ago
  That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto (and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...). The distinction really doesn’t seem that important for most use cases so it’s not that surprising a weaker, possibly more useful interpretation has become common...
  - mindcrime 6y ago
    That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto There isn't any significant confusion. There is a token amount of confusion, which is pretty much always clarified every time one of these threads comes up. (and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...). It's de facto, not de jure, because OSI has no authority to enforce their definition, since they don't have a trademark (at least not a registered trademark) on the term "Open Source". What makes it the de facto definition is just usage. By and large, among the people who care about the legal details of Open Source licensing, the OSD is accepted. Yes, there are a handful of exceptions, but that's OK. It doesn't change the basic point.
    - sszz 6y ago
      I guess in my experience, the phrase is routinely used to refer to code availability and often the fact that a licensing fee doesn’t need to be negotiated or paid in order to run the code on our servers (either in an academic or corporate setting), which is a weaker requirement than the OSI definition. Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning. I’m not saying it’s correct usage, but it’s definitely real and frequent. It’s my impression a non-negligible number of people share the same understanding, evidence by the fact that this discussion apparently is recurring? Even those who corrected the Defold release language knew what was intended, even if they said it was incorrect usage of the phrase. Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small; I just don’t think that is true based on my day to day experiences.
lewiscollard 6y ago
> OSI decided to appropriate the term "Open source" to refer to something slightly weaker than "Free Software" but much stronger than "you can look at the source code". They are not in their right to do that. This is incorrect. Over 20 years ago people who would later be part of OSI _coined_, not co-opted, the term (within the scope of software). It was coined to mean _exactly the same thing_ as "Free Software"; the OSD was directly derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and there have only been two licenses, as I recall, that are OSI approved and the FSF have said are non-free. You also confuse "OSI-approved license" with "GPL", because the OSI (and FSF) have approved permissive BSD and MIT and many other non-copyleft licenses. Here you go: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

davidjgraph 6y ago

The original feedback was largely requesting to not say "open source" and they've changed this. Much as I respect the position you always take on FOSS, the current position is a reasonable compromise between the original two standpoints, so I lower my weapon.

ddevault 6y ago
I don't really see this as an improvement over the previous situation. It's just misleading in a different way. In fact, it's worse: as far as I could tell, the term "open source" was used sparingly, to the point where I wasn't going to make a fuss about it when I saw this. Now, the term "free and open", which is equally misleading, is used much more prominently than "open source" ever was.
- britzl 6y ago
  Not true. I went over the entire website and searched for "open source" and changed the wording. I did not add a bunch of extra "free and open" just for fun.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    My mistake, then.
- billfruit 6y ago
  I think many here are being way too pedantic with this matter.

britzl 6y ago

Defold is Free, meaning that it doesn't cost anything to use and you don't have to pay any royalties. Defold is Open, meaning that it is possible to modify and extend. It is actually possible to extend the engine even without source code access thanks to our native extension system.

ddevault 6y ago
>Defold is Open, meaning that it is possible to modify and extend. It is actually possible to extend the engine even without source code access thanks to our native extension system The word for this is "extensible". Please stop repurposing language to capitalize on a brand you aren't rightfully a part of. This is gaslighting. I really want to like and support this project, but you've got to cut this crap out, man. Publishing a source available project is admirable and worthwhile in its own right, be satisfied with that so that we can praise you for it in good faith. How much do you owe to the FOSS community? The least you could do in return is not backstab us. Do the right thing.
- karlp 6y ago
  As someone without a bone in the fight, I find your language quite inflammatory, it's a bit excessive to use "backstab" and "gaslighting" IMO.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    That's what this is. If you don't want to be asked to stop gaslighting people, you shouldn't gaslight people.
    - teraflop 6y ago
      What, in your opinion, does the word "gaslighting" mean?
      - ddevault 6y ago
        Manipulating facts to mislead people into behaviors which serve your self-interests.