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Seeing the source code isn’t that terribly important and loses the main benefits of FOSS. I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs,

Seeing the source code isn’t that terribly important and loses the main benefits of FOSS. I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. Even if contributors do the main work, this long tail of user contribution is so important. With source available, I’m not contributing any of my work toward a proprietary project. I’m happy to spend hours researching and writing up a bug if my work goes toward a common good. Not so much if it just funds some corporation with free labor. I think it’s a distraction to try to force this into a good/bad dichotomy. I don’t hear anyone saying that “source available” is bad. Just that it’s different than FOSS. There’s nothing wrong with selling software. I just think it’s inferior to FOSS for producing high quality software.

kweingar 3y ago
Important to note that community involvement is not core to FOSS. Many FOSS projects do not accept outside contributions.
- prepend 3y ago
  Good point, but it’s common. And it’s possible. And the community has the freedom to fork, even if they don’t. And pretty much every successful FOSS project accepts bug reports from users. So that’s still a contribution even though it’s not source code.
  - gavinhoward 3y ago
    > And the community has the freedom to fork, even if they don’t. So does a SAMS community. They just can't turn it commercial (for a noncommercial license), or they have to wait for full FOSS (for a delayed FOSS license), etc. > And pretty much every successful FOSS project accepts bug reports from users. So that’s still a contribution even though it’s not source code. That is still possible with SAMS.
    - prepend 3y ago
      It’s not the possibility that’s important, it’s the practicality. I can “fork” windows. I just can’t do anything with it without paying Microsoft. And I can also spend effort to write up a detailed report to Microsoft or to a SAMS project. But I won’t, because I don’t like doing free labor for corporations.
      - gavinhoward 3y ago
        But you can fork SAMS and do something wuth it without paying the authors. You just have to keep the fork free of money. The only way you would care about that is because you do want money in the fork. Then you become a dealer. As an end user? No difference.
gavinhoward 3y ago
> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. Even if contributors do the main work, this long tail of user contribution is so important. I wholly disagree. It depends on the project. For the projects that want contributions, yes, FOSS is what you want. For projects that don't want contributions, there's no loss in switching to SAMS. I said as much in the post. > I think it’s a distraction to try to force this into a good/bad dichotomy. I don’t hear anyone saying that “source available” is bad. And yet there are comments on this very page saying that SAMS gives less freedom, therefore it's bad.
- bcrl 3y ago
  Let me know when a "source available" project achieves the same widespread acceptance and success as the thousands of open source projects like the Linux kernel, gcc and everything else that have given the industry the ability to be more productive by standing on the shoulders of giants. Edit: if you want an example of where GPL vs BSD license made a huge difference, just look at Juniper's behaviour around their changes to FreeBSD that were used to build JunOS. Juniper was a poor contributor of changes they made to the FreeBSD kernel back to the community. In comparison, the fact that the GPL forces vendors to publish their changes to Linux means that the community has ended up with support for many embedded platforms being merged into mainline. The FreeBSD developer community struggles in part because vendors can take without giving back because of the license, so there is less incentive to participate in the community.
  - gavinhoward 3y ago
    That's a disingenuous argument when proprietary code such as Windows, AWS, and Google have just as much widespread acceptance, and they often did it by cannibalizing FOSS.
    - bcrl 3y ago
      Last I checked, all those organizations were contributing many changes every release to the Linux kernel to improve performance, fix bugs and add features.
JohnFen 3y ago
> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. I disagree entirely. You're describing various communities around various OSS projects, and what you're describing is fantastic. However, none of it is inherent to OSS. There are more OSS projects out there that have no community around than those that do, but they are no less OSS.
RetroTechie 3y ago
> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. Imho the main benefit of FOSS is that it becomes a shared good forever. Which includes those community aspects. No vendor can close it back up. If vendor goes under or stops supporting the community, the community can go on regardless. That keeps the FOSS available to all until the last copy bitrotted away.

kweingar 3y ago

Important to note that community involvement is not core to FOSS. Many FOSS projects do not accept outside contributions.

prepend 3y ago
Good point, but it’s common. And it’s possible. And the community has the freedom to fork, even if they don’t. And pretty much every successful FOSS project accepts bug reports from users. So that’s still a contribution even though it’s not source code.
- gavinhoward 3y ago
  > And the community has the freedom to fork, even if they don’t. So does a SAMS community. They just can't turn it commercial (for a noncommercial license), or they have to wait for full FOSS (for a delayed FOSS license), etc. > And pretty much every successful FOSS project accepts bug reports from users. So that’s still a contribution even though it’s not source code. That is still possible with SAMS.
  - prepend 3y ago
    It’s not the possibility that’s important, it’s the practicality. I can “fork” windows. I just can’t do anything with it without paying Microsoft. And I can also spend effort to write up a detailed report to Microsoft or to a SAMS project. But I won’t, because I don’t like doing free labor for corporations.
    - gavinhoward 3y ago
      But you can fork SAMS and do something wuth it without paying the authors. You just have to keep the fork free of money. The only way you would care about that is because you do want money in the fork. Then you become a dealer. As an end user? No difference.

gavinhoward 3y ago

> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. Even if contributors do the main work, this long tail of user contribution is so important. I wholly disagree. It depends on the project. For the projects that want contributions, yes, FOSS is what you want. For projects that don't want contributions, there's no loss in switching to SAMS. I said as much in the post. > I think it’s a distraction to try to force this into a good/bad dichotomy. I don’t hear anyone saying that “source available” is bad. And yet there are comments on this very page saying that SAMS gives less freedom, therefore it's bad.

bcrl 3y ago
Let me know when a "source available" project achieves the same widespread acceptance and success as the thousands of open source projects like the Linux kernel, gcc and everything else that have given the industry the ability to be more productive by standing on the shoulders of giants. Edit: if you want an example of where GPL vs BSD license made a huge difference, just look at Juniper's behaviour around their changes to FreeBSD that were used to build JunOS. Juniper was a poor contributor of changes they made to the FreeBSD kernel back to the community. In comparison, the fact that the GPL forces vendors to publish their changes to Linux means that the community has ended up with support for many embedded platforms being merged into mainline. The FreeBSD developer community struggles in part because vendors can take without giving back because of the license, so there is less incentive to participate in the community.
- gavinhoward 3y ago
  That's a disingenuous argument when proprietary code such as Windows, AWS, and Google have just as much widespread acceptance, and they often did it by cannibalizing FOSS.
  - bcrl 3y ago
    Last I checked, all those organizations were contributing many changes every release to the Linux kernel to improve performance, fix bugs and add features.

JohnFen 3y ago

> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. I disagree entirely. You're describing various communities around various OSS projects, and what you're describing is fantastic. However, none of it is inherent to OSS. There are more OSS projects out there that have no community around than those that do, but they are no less OSS.

RetroTechie 3y ago

> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. Imho the main benefit of FOSS is that it becomes a shared good forever. Which includes those community aspects. No vendor can close it back up. If vendor goes under or stops supporting the community, the community can go on regardless. That keeps the FOSS available to all until the last copy bitrotted away.