3 ms·

What is being said here? Are we just elaborating on someone else's post? What is the point being driven home? I read that entire thing twice and I still have n

What is being said here? Are we just elaborating on someone else's post? What is the point being driven home? I read that entire thing twice and I still have no idea if the author is pro open source in the literal, binary sense (IE, the only sense that fits the spirit of the definition) or not. I think he's leaning towards being proprietary source-available but he seems to struggle with the reality that source available isn't in any sense comparable to open source. As far as I'm concerned there are like 4 or 5 licenses the satisfy the definition of open source. Period. No discussion to be had. If you make your own and it has a bunch of stipulations beyond paying the rights you have forward; you're not open source. Worse; you're diluting open source. And this author seems to think that open source should be some kind of financially viable thing. That's not right. The best code that gets used most often has no ulterior motive. Stop trying to reconcile open source with capitalism.

kemitchell 6y ago
I suspect you're reading through preconceptions I no longer share. Source available is in nearly every practical sense comparable to open source. The median number of contributors to an open source project is one. Even with exceptional projects boasting many contributors, users who don't edit, but simply use what's given them, vastly outnumber them. The source of "source available" projects is just as available, and frequently in the same places online. Its authors often develop "in the open" with the same tools and infrastructure. Their licenses frequently allow nearly all the use cases that MIT or Apache 2 do. Sometimes that license delta is really the only meaningful difference. If there weren't any discussion to be had on open source, we wouldn't have so many licenses, or so many revisions and later versions. I don't know which four of five you like, but they're highly unlikely to have been first versions or uncontroversial in their days. Alas, "paying the rights you have forward" isn't at all clear. What rights? How paid forward? Are AGPL, OSL, and SSPL "pay the rights you have forward" licenses? The idea that open source isn't reconcilable with capitalism wouldn't sit well with the early advocates for "open source" that I've read or heard from. The Cathedral and the Bazaar can be read, and fairly readily, as an extended pitch that open source sits great with capitalism, and capitalists ought to be excited about it. Capital-issuing public companies fund the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Foundation, Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla, and so on.

kemitchell 6y ago

I suspect you're reading through preconceptions I no longer share. Source available is in nearly every practical sense comparable to open source. The median number of contributors to an open source project is one. Even with exceptional projects boasting many contributors, users who don't edit, but simply use what's given them, vastly outnumber them. The source of "source available" projects is just as available, and frequently in the same places online. Its authors often develop "in the open" with the same tools and infrastructure. Their licenses frequently allow nearly all the use cases that MIT or Apache 2 do. Sometimes that license delta is really the only meaningful difference. If there weren't any discussion to be had on open source, we wouldn't have so many licenses, or so many revisions and later versions. I don't know which four of five you like, but they're highly unlikely to have been first versions or uncontroversial in their days. Alas, "paying the rights you have forward" isn't at all clear. What rights? How paid forward? Are AGPL, OSL, and SSPL "pay the rights you have forward" licenses? The idea that open source isn't reconcilable with capitalism wouldn't sit well with the early advocates for "open source" that I've read or heard from. The Cathedral and the Bazaar can be read, and fairly readily, as an extended pitch that open source sits great with capitalism, and capitalists ought to be excited about it. Capital-issuing public companies fund the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Foundation, Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla, and so on.