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"I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available" I agree. The label 'source only' is considered a dirty wor

"I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available" I agree. The label 'source only' is considered a dirty word among some open source advocates. But if you are building a B2B (Business-to-Business) software product, 'source only' is a perfectly viable option to succesfully make a living from your product - one that isn't completely closed source (but one that clearly isn't open source). The source code of the product cannot be shared, but it can be modified by the customer to suit their needs. The idea of 'source only' is not new at all. Back in the late 90s when Delphi was popular, many developers created and sold components to other developers (e.g. UI widgets). These components came with full source code of the components but they were not open source. Fast forward to today, what are examples of 'source only' products doing well? Two examples: 'Kirby CMS' and 'Craft CMS' (Content Management Systems). Both are popular and profitable. Their source code is even published publicly on GitHub. The product creators trust customers will pay for the product (presumably some do not, but enough customers do pay so it doesn't matter). Other developers are happy to contribute to the eco-system of plugins. So, yes, it's perfectly possible to build a community of enthusiastic followers for a 'source only' product that isn't open source. WordPress is another example. Although WordPress is open source, the plugin market is full of 'source only' plugins for sale that are successful and profitable.

liuliu 5y ago
Source-only / source-available is great way to make a living. It also makes whoever purchases your software life easier. But pretending to be open-source and accepting contributions from people who mistaken your project as open-source is problematic. Or, in another word, changing your license from open-source to something else because open-source made it popular in the first place is problematic too.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Sure, bait and switch is bad. I wasn't defending that.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  In most cases - source available is _de facto_ open-source. You have two limitations on a product: - "actual physical limitations": the fact that you have the source, and that it's not a brutally-difficult life/career-consuming endeavor to edit it. - "artificial legal limitations": what the license says you can do Typically the capabilities afforded by the latter are a strict subset of the former (legal freedom to modify is useless without the practical freedom afforded by the actual source — I could release something with the full rights afforded by an open-source license, but if I fail to actually upload my code, even if you're legally free to edit the binary, it's a mostly useless freedom). At the same time, it's very common for the legal limitations to be utterly irrelevant, whether it's a case of you simply breaking a law that's not relevant to you (perhaps from another economic sphere of the world, or maybe you're just poor — or something is abandonware and there's nobody to even pay, not even a publisher). In all of these cases only the physical limitation dictates what you're able to do. -- If someone makes a freeware game, and it's abandonware — but it's source available, people can patch it so it keeps running on modern computers. They can translate it to other languages People can even fix egregious bugs. They can analyze it, and tease out internal mechanics and secrets, and document them on a wiki. If it's source-unavailable, then they're basically screwed. Far from being hypothetical, what I'm describing is more or less how the entire rom-hacking community works — thousands of games have undergone this, where they've received unofficial translations, balance and bug fixes, etc. (I have at least a couple of personal favorites, where I had an RPG with certain abilities that infamously did nothing in the release copy, even though they supposedly applied buffs to your heroes. In a modded version, that bug was fixed and they fully worked as intended.) All of this is possible in the modding scene because this stuff existed in a state where something "awfully close to" the platform's source code was available in a non-obfuscated, direct form. It's all illegal. All of it. That entire scene can't exist, legally, and survives on this wonderful, cockroach-like survivorship mentality of simply not caring that it's illegal, dodging lawsuits, and trading copies of things in defiance of takedown requests — which in turn happen so incredibly rarely that it may as well, practically, be legal. -- Unix, for another great example, basically exists because "actual physical limitations" didn't restrict it — the devs made the source available, tons of people copied it in what was probably a rather illegal/gray-area way, and sure, some people kicked up all sorts of legal fuss about it (c.f. some famous lawsuits involving SCO group), but in practice the only thing that matters was the fact that it had illegally achieved ubiquity. At that point the genie could no longer be put back in the bottle.
jrochkind1 5y ago
I'm not sure I'm following. As a user of software, what are the benefits of something that is "source available" but not open source? Why would this be important to you? I guess I can think of a few reasons. To help you learn how to use the software better than just from vendor-provided documentation? To help you find bugs, instead of relying on the vendor to do that? (when you're paying for software, these are kind of things one hopes one is paying for the vendor to do for you so you don't have to do it yourself, but we all know that hope is not always bourne out...) What are the actual reasons people are interested in this, over ordinary "source not available" software distribution/licensing? These above, other?
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Source available doesn't mean that you can't do anything with the code, it usually means that there are limitations (e.g. sharing it) with what you can do with it. There are a lot of cases where "source available" expects you to modify the code and even share patches with others. A popular example nowadays would be Unreal Engine 4, but it isn't anything new - Borland's OWL was distributed as source code and you need a license to use it (it is part of C++ compilers so any of their compilers would provide a license), but over the decades there have been improvements made by its users in the form of OWLNext that is meant to be installed "on top" of OWL (ie. wont work by itself).
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    OK, so the reason you are interested in this is for the ability to write, share and use patches that can be used by those who pay for a license to the code, to be able to add features without having to rely/wait for the vendor to do so?
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      Yes, while it is certainly worse than full Free Software from a community perspective, it is still much better than closed source commercial software since you are at least in control - even if the developer shuts down or abandons the project, you are still able to fix bugs and improve the program (you or anyone else who decides to distribute patches - assuming the license doesn't explicitly forbid that, but it'd be pointless to do that IMO, not that some didn't try it). And if you ever decide to move somewhere else, you can still get your data out of the program (modify it to dump to another format or just use the code to make your own converter) so you're not locked in either.
badsectoracula 5y ago
"Source available" was also common in earlier Unix systems, e.g. an once popular image viewer called "xv" was basically a shareware program distributed as source code. People even wrote patches for it.

liuliu 5y ago

Source-only / source-available is great way to make a living. It also makes whoever purchases your software life easier. But pretending to be open-source and accepting contributions from people who mistaken your project as open-source is problematic. Or, in another word, changing your license from open-source to something else because open-source made it popular in the first place is problematic too.

mwcampbell 5y ago
Sure, bait and switch is bad. I wasn't defending that.
Jetrel 5y ago
In most cases - source available is _de facto_ open-source. You have two limitations on a product: - "actual physical limitations": the fact that you have the source, and that it's not a brutally-difficult life/career-consuming endeavor to edit it. - "artificial legal limitations": what the license says you can do Typically the capabilities afforded by the latter are a strict subset of the former (legal freedom to modify is useless without the practical freedom afforded by the actual source — I could release something with the full rights afforded by an open-source license, but if I fail to actually upload my code, even if you're legally free to edit the binary, it's a mostly useless freedom). At the same time, it's very common for the legal limitations to be utterly irrelevant, whether it's a case of you simply breaking a law that's not relevant to you (perhaps from another economic sphere of the world, or maybe you're just poor — or something is abandonware and there's nobody to even pay, not even a publisher). In all of these cases only the physical limitation dictates what you're able to do. -- If someone makes a freeware game, and it's abandonware — but it's source available, people can patch it so it keeps running on modern computers. They can translate it to other languages People can even fix egregious bugs. They can analyze it, and tease out internal mechanics and secrets, and document them on a wiki. If it's source-unavailable, then they're basically screwed. Far from being hypothetical, what I'm describing is more or less how the entire rom-hacking community works — thousands of games have undergone this, where they've received unofficial translations, balance and bug fixes, etc. (I have at least a couple of personal favorites, where I had an RPG with certain abilities that infamously did nothing in the release copy, even though they supposedly applied buffs to your heroes. In a modded version, that bug was fixed and they fully worked as intended.) All of this is possible in the modding scene because this stuff existed in a state where something "awfully close to" the platform's source code was available in a non-obfuscated, direct form. It's all illegal. All of it. That entire scene can't exist, legally, and survives on this wonderful, cockroach-like survivorship mentality of simply not caring that it's illegal, dodging lawsuits, and trading copies of things in defiance of takedown requests — which in turn happen so incredibly rarely that it may as well, practically, be legal. -- Unix, for another great example, basically exists because "actual physical limitations" didn't restrict it — the devs made the source available, tons of people copied it in what was probably a rather illegal/gray-area way, and sure, some people kicked up all sorts of legal fuss about it (c.f. some famous lawsuits involving SCO group), but in practice the only thing that matters was the fact that it had illegally achieved ubiquity. At that point the genie could no longer be put back in the bottle.

jrochkind1 5y ago

I'm not sure I'm following. As a user of software, what are the benefits of something that is "source available" but not open source? Why would this be important to you? I guess I can think of a few reasons. To help you learn how to use the software better than just from vendor-provided documentation? To help you find bugs, instead of relying on the vendor to do that? (when you're paying for software, these are kind of things one hopes one is paying for the vendor to do for you so you don't have to do it yourself, but we all know that hope is not always bourne out...) What are the actual reasons people are interested in this, over ordinary "source not available" software distribution/licensing? These above, other?

badsectoracula 5y ago
Source available doesn't mean that you can't do anything with the code, it usually means that there are limitations (e.g. sharing it) with what you can do with it. There are a lot of cases where "source available" expects you to modify the code and even share patches with others. A popular example nowadays would be Unreal Engine 4, but it isn't anything new - Borland's OWL was distributed as source code and you need a license to use it (it is part of C++ compilers so any of their compilers would provide a license), but over the decades there have been improvements made by its users in the form of OWLNext that is meant to be installed "on top" of OWL (ie. wont work by itself).
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  OK, so the reason you are interested in this is for the ability to write, share and use patches that can be used by those who pay for a license to the code, to be able to add features without having to rely/wait for the vendor to do so?
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    Yes, while it is certainly worse than full Free Software from a community perspective, it is still much better than closed source commercial software since you are at least in control - even if the developer shuts down or abandons the project, you are still able to fix bugs and improve the program (you or anyone else who decides to distribute patches - assuming the license doesn't explicitly forbid that, but it'd be pointless to do that IMO, not that some didn't try it). And if you ever decide to move somewhere else, you can still get your data out of the program (modify it to dump to another format or just use the code to make your own converter) so you're not locked in either.

badsectoracula 5y ago

"Source available" was also common in earlier Unix systems, e.g. an once popular image viewer called "xv" was basically a shareware program distributed as source code. People even wrote patches for it.