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I'm struggling to understand the vitriol toward this. It is a thoughtfully-crafted license, eminently readable, written by a skilled legal practitioner in this

I'm struggling to understand the vitriol toward this. It is a thoughtfully-crafted license, eminently readable, written by a skilled legal practitioner in this domain. That's all well and good. It's still a proprietary license that rejects the most basic principle of open source, which is the ability of anyone to use and modify the software. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's silly to expect FOSS advocates to embrace it.

HexDecOctBin 5y ago
But why the assumption that it is aimed at FOSS advocates? The license doesn't even mention source code, it has nothing to do with FOSS. Does FOSS has a monopoly on releasing software free of cost? Should no new interesting shareware-esque licenses be shared on a website dedicated to startups, lest the FOSS advocates be offended?
ThenAsNow 5y ago
> It's still a proprietary license that rejects the most basic principle of open source, which is the ability of anyone to use and modify the software. Anyone is able to to use and modify the software, it's just that if your entity is large enough, you don't get to use it at zero compensation to the licensor. The reason I would expect more FOSS advocates to embrace it is that other than this or a limited few other models (e.g., open core, commercial licenses to relieve GPL copyleft terms), what other avenues do they propose to exploit to ensure developers/maintainers are able to fund continuing development and maintenance of the software commons? It's not like typical proprietary licenses to binaries where even if you pay, most likely you won't get the code (the exceptions are a low proportion of all proprietary licenses). "Shared source" as MS seems to define it makes you prove you're in one of their qualifying groups before you get to see the code - i.e., it's not like it's up on GitHub. And there are likely penalties if you share the code. Shareware was also rarely distributed in source form, often had nag mechanisms/crippling, and didn't tend to distinguish between personal or non-commercial users and large institutional users. So I don't think "shareware" is a great categorization of this either. My off-the-cuff label for this is a "Source Openly Available" license.

HexDecOctBin 5y ago

But why the assumption that it is aimed at FOSS advocates? The license doesn't even mention source code, it has nothing to do with FOSS. Does FOSS has a monopoly on releasing software free of cost? Should no new interesting shareware-esque licenses be shared on a website dedicated to startups, lest the FOSS advocates be offended?

ThenAsNow 5y ago

> It's still a proprietary license that rejects the most basic principle of open source, which is the ability of anyone to use and modify the software. Anyone is able to to use and modify the software, it's just that if your entity is large enough, you don't get to use it at zero compensation to the licensor. The reason I would expect more FOSS advocates to embrace it is that other than this or a limited few other models (e.g., open core, commercial licenses to relieve GPL copyleft terms), what other avenues do they propose to exploit to ensure developers/maintainers are able to fund continuing development and maintenance of the software commons? It's not like typical proprietary licenses to binaries where even if you pay, most likely you won't get the code (the exceptions are a low proportion of all proprietary licenses). "Shared source" as MS seems to define it makes you prove you're in one of their qualifying groups before you get to see the code - i.e., it's not like it's up on GitHub. And there are likely penalties if you share the code. Shareware was also rarely distributed in source form, often had nag mechanisms/crippling, and didn't tend to distinguish between personal or non-commercial users and large institutional users. So I don't think "shareware" is a great categorization of this either. My off-the-cuff label for this is a "Source Openly Available" license.