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You mean making the software proprietary. The definition of open source itself is neutral on whether it's a commercial effort or not, or whether it's a communit
by kiba 3y ago
You mean making the software proprietary. The definition of open source itself is neutral on whether it's a commercial effort or not, or whether it's a community effort or not, or whether it's both community and a commercial effort.
- joveian 3y agoThere is a difference between a commercial effort and calling something commercial software, which often (usually?) refers to licensed per use (often per installed system) software. Open source must be freely redistributable, which means it can't have a per use license. I think the main issue is the name. If a project is made more commercial or proprietary than it was before, please change the name (or additionally use a different name for the commercial/proprietary part, which seems to be common practice even when starting a project as partly open source). A clean break between different maintainers (particularly when a mostly single person effort) is a good reason to change the name too. Naming things is hard and it doesn't necessarily need to be all that different a name just something to reflect the change.
- kiba 3y agoIt is not a requirement that open source software must be freely redistributable, just that you have the freedom to exercise free redistribution.
- neuromanser 3y agoI understand these two formulations to be equivalent. Would you spell out the difference? For me? Thx!