8 ms·

'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

131 points by geerlingguy 10mo ago

RossBencina 10mo ago
Interesting. The post is about whether a license prohibiting SaaS competitors is "open source" and whether it might work out as a good way to ensure project sustainability. In this context "source available" means that you have the source code but you can't use it to compete with the project owner. [Kinda puts Omarchy in a different light don't you think?] There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.
- lmm 10mo ago
  > There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor. No, that's very much open source - in fact, it was the way most big name open source projects were developed back in the early days. See the famous "the cathedral and the bazaar" essay. Public bug trackers and widely soliciting contributions to mainline are relatively new phenomena, but you always had the right to fork and maintain and share your own fork, and that's the part that's essential.
  - RossBencina 10mo ago
    I agree that it started that way, but that does not mean norms and expectations don't shift. To me, acting like it's 1980 is weird. The majority of maintained open source projects today are single-source-of-truth projects, not source code drops from unreachable invisible teams. There is a reason for that -- it's part of what makes the projects usable and dependable.
    - lmm 10mo ago
      I think allowing the definition of open source to be muddled would be a big mistake, especially now that some entities are trying to whittle away users' rights while continuing to benefit from the positive vibes of open source. The OSDI/DFSG/FSF definition is a clear, simple line in the sand that has served the movement very well; there's no reason to change it. Yes some entities actively participate in their community and others do the bare minimum, but it's always going to be possible to be more or less communitarian.
- quadrifoliate 10mo ago
  > To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor. I feel like this is a completely different conversation, but this is just as much a misunderstanding of what open source is as DHH's. As long as the code is under BSD or GPL, you are free to take it as-is and do what you want with it. You could run your commercial service using it. You can certainly write patches and apply them to your own servers. You could even email the maintainers with them -- worst case is that they will ignore the emails! Open Source does not guarantee that your contributions will be accepted or merged back to the project -- indeed, if you think about it, that would be absurd. I might want some random thing in the Linux kernel, but the maintainers will always have the final word on whether they want my patches or not. The O'SaaSy license says that (essentially) 37Signals will sue you if you try to host this on your own servers, and try to sell it as a service. That's totally different, and a legal rather than a technical hurdle.
- cortesoft 10mo ago
  How easy do you have to make it to contribute to be considered “open source”. Obviously, no project accepts every single pull request. Where is the line between “open source” and “no open source” in your definition?
  - ModernMech 10mo ago
    Intent. Do you intent to be a genuinely open community and is it set up around fostering that dynamic as a central aspect of development? It's hard to measure intent, but we can do so indirectly by looking at the project structure: - Are there contributor guidelines? - Do contributors have to sign a waiver before they can contribute any code? - Is there a RFC process? - Does the project actually respond meaningfully to that feedback, or does it simply get filed in the special complaints folder for corporate. - Does the project encourage outside contributions in more than a cursory way? - Does the CLA grant the company unilateral relicensing rights? - Are governance documents public? - Can the community vote on decisions? - Does the community have a say in how it's moderated? - Are community members invited to actually join the organization? - Are architectural decisions made in open meetings? - Is there a public ROADMAP and is the community invited to contribute to it or influence it? - Can others build competing distributions without fear of retaliation? - Can the project be forked if there is community disagreement about direction? Those are just some signals off the top of my head. There's no bright line; the presence or absence of a few won't say anything one way or another. But if many of the answers to those questions are leaning toward the negative, then I don't think it can be open source.
    - nevon 10mo ago
      Completely disagree. To me, and the OSI, none of those things other than redistribution and forking have anything to do with being open source or not. In fact, you could have a closed source project tick nearly all of those boxes, although that would indeed be very unusual. I'm not sure if there is a term for what you are describing. Perhaps "community driven project".
      - ModernMech 10mo ago
- School-Cotton 10mo ago
  > To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor. It’s massively different from source-available in that anyone can fork it for free and start developing it themselves however they want. Just because one fork of the project (the original one) follows a closed development model doesn’t change anything about the code, what you can do with it, and how others can develop it.
xyzzy_plugh 10mo ago
O'Sassy or whatever is certainly Source available, and not Open Source. DHH can pound sand. I used to think the pedantry was foolish, but I've grown to understand the distinction. It's one thing to criticize the OSI's claim to the term, and I do think they could do a better job at getting out ahead of new licenses and whatnot, but even if you ignore OSI entirely then the distinction is of substantial value. I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years. At the same time it is not worth it if the spirit of Open Source is watered down.
- JoshTriplett 10mo ago
  > I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years. Yeah. Releasing a project under a source-available proprietary license and calling it Open Source, or doing a rugpull and changing an established Open Source license to a source-available proprietary license, is the kind of thing that causes the most grief. If you release something under a source-available proprietary license and make no pretenses about it being something else, and the alternative was not releasing it at all, it's a (slight) improvement.
- sofixa 10mo ago
  > I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years. I think we need more differentiation and different terms. Because O'Sassy / FSL / whatever that just forbids other companies from selling the same software as a Service is quite different than just the source being available with no rights at all, or with restrictions on who can use it and when (size of company, for profit or not, production, etc).
phendrenad2 10mo ago
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- createaccount99 10mo ago
  I agree with this. The new definition of "open source" has been crafted out of malice. _Anyone_ new to programming runs into this confusion, and that's evidence in itself.
  - deleted 10mo ago
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- koolala 10mo ago
  Control language and you control people's expectations. Like the shift from 'Private Message' to 'Direct message'. 'Open Source' to 'Source Available' would be just as massive of a shift in control and power.
jrowen 10mo ago
What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source? To an outsider it looks like counterproductive bickering between people on the same team.
- quadrifoliate 10mo ago
  > What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source? The part where the license says "Don't run this on your server and charge people money for it, or we will sue you"? I know that everyone thinks of Big Tech absorbing your project into their SaaS when they do this, but there are other ways (say AGPL) to combat that. O'SaaSy seems to me to be essentially a "give us your code for free, and you can self host it, but don't dare to charge $$ for it or else!" license. Now you're bringing lawyers into the picture for anyone who's hosting your software on their servers. It's very reasonable for a SaaS company that wants to defend its moat, but it's not Open Source. (Talking of, I'm actually curious if anyone has seen actual self-hosted Fizzy instances in the wild.)
  - jrowen 10mo ago
    I didn't ask which part of the license violates OSS values, I asked what those principles and values are. I will infer that "anybody can do whatever they want with the code" is the principle you are referring to. I kind of thought that it was more about stuff like sharing and personal development and edification and the ability to see inside and understand things. But let's get really divisive over the money stuff.
    - simonw 10mo ago
      It's about unambiguously understanding exactly what my rights are and how I can use that code. In the case of the janky new 37signals license: what exactly counts as "... where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself"? Who gets to define the "primary value" of the thing I built?
wvenable 10mo ago
> DHH's choice of license reacts to a real pressure in open source: many companies make real money from open source software while leaving the hard work of building and maintaining it to others. If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software. That being said; I have no issue with a developer choosing any license they want -- it's their software and therefore it's their right. But calling it "open source" when it specifically forbids certain use-cases is just wrong. DHH wants his cake (pretend it's real OSS) and eat it too (deny usages).
- sofixa 10mo ago
  > If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software. What if you do and have done so, yet you're competing with e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, who can do it for cheaper than you due to scale, and also have a much easier time to sell an extra line item to their existing customers vs you having to go through commercial negotiations and purchase agreements? Cf. Elastic, Redis, etc.
  - wvenable 10mo ago
    If you have a problem with that then don't make it open source. And if you don't make it open source, don't call it open source. My own personal position is that my commercial software is commercial for me and my open source software is free for everyone to use for any purpose including making money that I will never see. If I cared, I wouldn't make that software open source.
    - jraph 10mo ago
      It should be pointed out that commercial and free software / open source are not opposed though.
darig 10mo ago
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modzu 10mo ago
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cess11 10mo ago
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Incipient 10mo ago
Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good. Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support. Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).
- sofixa 10mo ago
  > Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good Maybe, but I think that "source available" isn't detailed enough and can mean many many different things. > Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc). Point in case. For me there is one group, under something like BSL or FSL or SSPL which mostly restricts you from competing with the project's creators (e.g. making your own SaaS out of it), but everything else is fair use, you can use it in prod to make money at any size, etc. And a separate, more restrictive one, which has size, or production restrictions (you can't run the software if you're a commercial entity). Source available sounds like a good description for the second one, because it's just available, little more. But for the first one where you can do whatever you want with one single exception that doesn't impact 99.9999% of potential users, it's not a good and clear enough description.
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    People run with OSI initiative as it is and consider it the golden rule when I agree with your 99.9999% of potential users line. I think that *one blunder?) is that OSI cant really consider SSPL or similar open source because it restricts access to one party so it breaches an freedom 0 or some freedom of open source which is fair but at the same time literally only impacting people competing against (in my opinion the funding of the project and its growth itself) if someone like amazon had created a redis service competing against redis itself lets say I think its all kinda nuanced and we kinda need more discussion with source available.
  - 10mo ago
tzahifadida 10mo ago
I think that people looks at n8n success and say why not use source available?... However, I believe they are wrong to believe that this would work for any project...
deleted 10mo ago
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benrutter 10mo ago
I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects. I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes. The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but more meaningful "open source" out there.
- safety1st 10mo ago
  I certainly don't have all the answers here but the entire $300B+ SaaS industry (and a bunch of other stuff that behaves like SaaS) was built in great part on a loophole in the GPL. More precisely, many of the people who licensed their code under GPL were eventually dismayed when they realized you could sell access to whatever you like built on top of that code, over a network, and you wouldn't have to distribute the source. The AGPL was devised to close this loophole. There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected! The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys. I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing... It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.
kemitchell 10mo ago
Watching what we charitably call this debate flare up yet again gives me an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, seeing people I've read and listened to for years heave time, attention, and more typing onto this tire fire evokes deep tragedy. On the other hand, I've been there, casting my own vanities to the bonfire, more than a few times. There's comfort in the familiar heat and glow. I couldn't escape the waste until I was willing to give up the idea of myself as experienced, as an expert. Until I accepted that time served taught me lessons, but didn't bestow authority. Most people coming into this are new. They relearn what's useful and leave the rest behind. That's part of adaptation. I try to see their point of view. If you ask a newer coder what "open source" means, they might say "like MIT?" or even just "like GitHub?" If you look "open" up in a good thesaurus, "available" is there. The Initiative---really, whoever's on the board now or later---will never own or effectively police the term "open source", much less "open source AI". And nobody claiming "open source" for good or ill will ever summon on themself the kind of attention or cachet that marketing bauble once commanded, no matter what their license says. As for fellow oldheads, there's no resolving contradictions between ways we learned to frame these issues, decades ago. Can changes to a license be a solution to the funding problem? Can using freedom terms to buttress a business count as truly open? That bizarre conflict of ontologies won't decide where programming goes in the future, if it ever did. I doubt it will even be won or lost. It will just fade away, like the circumstances that started it. DHH can kick the anthill. The activists can raise their old hue and cry. It's purely elective, demoded dramatics. The real problems of software politics today aren't expressible in either schema. They can even seem tautologically unsolvable. Meanwhile, we've got new aspirational generalities that aren't expressible in the old ways of speaking. "Sustainability", because many doing good aren't doing so well. "Decentralization", because we're all sharecropping on some platform now. Sometimes I think the best I can do for the younger generations facing today is just to never impose petty trivia about "the movement" ever again. Never deign imply I know what they should consider important. If "free" and "open" meant something to me, let their inheritors tell me what they mean now, in practice. Tell me about the world they built and left for them. Maybe I don't have to choose. After all, who reads blogs?
- quadrifoliate 10mo ago
  > After all, who reads blogs? I used to read yours, anyway! If the literal lawyer who specializes in licenses doesn't have a clear point of view on this, what hope do the rest of us have?
theanonymousone 10mo ago
As a lay person, I still don't get what is AGPL missing that makes vendors "invent" so many new licenses and spawn so much debate? Why not just use AGPL, and if it's insufficient, invest in an AGPLv2 initiative?
- koolala 10mo ago
  Source available isn't a license, it is the lack of a license. It's the legal default state for all art. It can include whatever made-up rules the author wants you to follow but your just as well off if you don't read them and just treat it as copyrighted.
- asiekierka 10mo ago
  It is not possible to create a license that would satisfy the Free Software Foundation's "four freedoms" while also solving the issues many of those vendors have with the AGPL. At the same time, the "source available" mindset doesn't have a steward organization like the FSF or OSI.
- maxloh 10mo ago
  The major concern regarding the AGPL is that it only fosters code share when a code change is involved. The license has nothing to do with someone building a competitive service around your project. If a Big Tech company happened to build a cloud service (SaaS) around your project without any code change, and that service is more competitive than the one you provide, there is not much you can do about it with the AGPL. The AGPL is published by the FSF, with mainly community-led projects in mind. The profit and sustainability of a corporation is not their primary concern. (A minor correction: The most recent version is v3; any newer version would be v4, not v2.)
- createaccount99 10mo ago
  MinIO made their source AGPL, but then cloud providers hosted the service "as is" and make money off it, with MinIO team getting zip. That still complies with AGPL but is not monetarily beneficial to the MinIO team. At least that's my understanding. They closed source completely, but a source-available license wouldn't have run into this issue.
jillesvangurp 10mo ago
I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. It makes outside contributions a lot less likely. Your active community of people working on the code base effectively becomes your employees. There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing. Including free usage and distribution of the work they did. It's not likely to be helpful. My attitude to source available products is the same as to proprietary products. I tend to limit my dependency on those. Companies have short life spans. Many OSS projects I use have a history of surviving the implosion of companies that once actively contributed to them. Developer communities are much more resilient than companies. Source unavailable effectively becomes source unavailable when companies fail. Especially VC funded companies are kind of engineered (by VCs) to fail fast. So, it's just not a great basis for making a long term commitment. If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license. Somebody could take over the project or fork it or even create a new company around it. Some of the original developers would probably show up. A project like that is resilient against that. And projects like that have active contributors outside of the corporate context that provide lots of contributions. Because of the license. You don't get that without a good OSS license. I judge software projects by the quality of their development communities. It needs to have diversity, a good mix of people that know what they are doing, and a broad enough user community that the project is likely to be supported in perpetuity. Shared source provides only the illusion of that. Depending on them is risky. And that risk is rarely offset by quality. Of course people use proprietary software for some things. And that's fine. I'm no different. But most of the stuff I care about is OSS.
- bloppe 10mo ago
  The BUSL license requires shifting to an open-source license no later than 4 years after publication. I'd be happy to contribute to a BUSL-licensed project knowing my contributions will shift to an MIT license within 4 years. And the original authors don't have to worry as much about Amazon eating their lunch.
  - jillesvangurp 10mo ago
anon-3988 10mo ago
Why haven't anyone randomly generate a bunch of code of various kinds, use LLM to create some summary of it and dump them to github with a restrictive license? The patent office isn't here to enforce anything.
- bloppe 10mo ago
  I'm curious as to where this is going. What happens next?
- narcraft 10mo ago
  It'd be like copyright trolling the Library of Babel. The set of useful programs would be totally eclipsed by incoherent gibberish (even if there were a means to ensure that the randomly generated code were syntactically correct). In other words, the signal to noise ratio would be microscopic and running this scheme in finite time would effectively result in zero valuable code being successfully squatted.
koolala 10mo ago
I'm amazed how many people don't like open-source... Imagine the hellscape computers / the internet would be today if Linux was 'Source available'.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  Some source available licenses are literally just modified open source with the addition of some clauses (mostly cloud related) To me source available is: we are open source but if you are an cloud provider with billions of dollars, ask us for a license/fund us. Technically linux gets funded enough and rightfully so but I remember how netbsd's fundings were so meagre and low which really saddened me. To be honest, I thought about it and lets assume Linux uses a busl like license which open sources after 4 years Most likely what would've happened is that someone will take that 4 year old code and then fork it to create the linux we all kinda love. But overall I think linux is the bedrock of any vps/cloud provider which can be small enough too to be unable to buy their source available license so its kind of an mixed bag I guess and for linux, not worth it because it already gets a lot of funding. It would be interesting if the same funding that linux kernel gets was shared at a similar level to the distros because I saw cachyos and talked to its creator on discord and I am not kidding but the fundings are very small for a project so big. Also I think most people use source available license to make money or funding, basically the question which I want to ask you is: how to make enough money in open source?
- noirscape 10mo ago
  For a lot of developers, the current biggest failure of open source is the AWS/Azure/GCP problem. BigCloud has a tendency to just take well liked open source products, provide a hosted version of them and as a result they absolutely annihilate the market share of the entity that originally made the product (which usually made money by offering supported and hosted versions of the software). Effectively, for networked software (which is the overwhelming majority of software products these days) you might as well use something like BSD/MIT rather than any of the GPLs[0] because they practically have the same guarantees; it's just that the BSD/MIT licenses don't contain language that makes you think it does stuff it actually doesn't do. Non-networked software like kernels, drivers and most desktop software don't have this issue, so it doesn't apply. Open source for that sort of product (which most of the big switches away from open source have been about) only further entrenches BigCloud's dominance over the ecosystem. It absolutely breaks the notion that you can run a profitable business on open source. BigCloud basically always wins that race even if they aren't cheaper because the company is using BigCloud already, so using their hosted version means cutting less yellow tape internally since the difficulty of getting people to agree on BigCloud is much lower compared to adding a new third party you have to work with. The general response to this issue from the open source side tends to just be to accuse the original developers of being greedy/only wanting to use the ecosystem to springboard their own popularity. --- I should also note that this generally doesn't apply to the fight between DHH and Mullenweg that's described in the OP. DHH just wants to kick a hornets nest and get attention now that Omarchy isn't the topic du jour anymore - no BigCloud (or for this case, shared hosting provider is probably more likely) is going to copy a random kanban tool written in Ruby on Rails. They're copying the actual high profile stuff like Redis, Terraform and whatever other examples you can recently think of that got screwed by BigClouds offering their services in that way (shared providers pretty much universally still use the classic AMP stack, which doesn't support a Ruby project, immunizing DHHs tool from that particular issue as well). Mullenweg by contrast does have to deal with Automattic not having a stranglehold on being a WordPress provider since the terms of his license weren't his to make to begin with; b3/cafelog was also under GPL and WordPress inherited that. He's been burned by FOSS, but it's also hard to say he was surprised by it, since WP is modified from another software product. [0]: Including the AGPL, it doesn't actually do what you think it does.
NiloCK 10mo ago
Again and forever: These fights stem from usage of a proprietary definition of Open Source (the OSI's). Obviously the definition doesn't resonate with DHH, and he uses the words 'open' and 'source' colloquially. Open, as in a book or a window, source, as in the thing that gets compiled into bits and bobs that run on computers. You wouldn't jump on someone's "open letter" to city hall because of a lack of freedom to fork it. This could stop if people capitalized their reference to Open Source, which is standard English treatment of proper nouns. Unlikely to happen though, because insisting that "my definitions are your definitions" seems to be a primal tribal instinct for humans.
- douglascamata 10mo ago
  Pretty much the most sound comment in this section. It's like some organization "stole" the meaning of the words "open source" and called it "Open Source" (with the capitalization). Now you can't say your source is open for anyone to read anymore because it's not "Open Source"™ as "That Entity"™ defines it.
- insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  I for one disagree that software can't be "open source" if the OSI says it's not open source. There are varying degrees of open source. Since when do they get the right to define what is "open source"? In my view, "open source" but doesn't give you permission to host a commercial service that directly competes with it, is still a degree of open source, and reasonable.
jbstack 10mo ago
Misleading article. From the second paragraph: > David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH) released a new kanban tool, Fizzy, this week and called it open source. From the linked article by DHH: > That means it's not technically Open Source™
- debugnik 10mo ago
  He calls it open source in the title and the following paragraph to that. That sentence only means he thinks of himself as cheeky.
zokier 10mo ago
I think the proper litmus test for these newfangled source available licenses is if the company is willing to operate under the terms of the license, or are they carving out special position for themselves as the copyright holder. In almost all cases I've seen it is more of the latter, and I find that pretty telling.
immibis 10mo ago
Also, "open source" is not free software.
henryball 10mo ago
Side note: Anyone looking for an open source (not source available) Kanban tool: - Kan (AGPL): https://github.com/kanbn/kan https://github.com/kanbn/kan (my own project) - WeKan (MIT): https://github.com/wekan/wekan https://github.com/wekan/wekan - Taiga (AGPL): https://github.com/taigaio/ https://github.com/taigaio/
jamietanna 10mo ago
I will say I didn't disagree with DHH's use of "open source" as I will generally let it slide as its not "Open Source", the version that I attribute to following the Open Source Definition as set out by the Open Source Initiative I agree that there are many who don't understand the distinction and assume that "Open Source" == "open source", and so I do agree that avoiding the use of "open source" where it instead means "non-OSD" makes sense
norgaardrow17 10mo ago
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steviedotboston 10mo ago
Dries remains one of the most level headed people in the open source community (and it is a community)
phendrenad2 10mo ago
> Look, the term "open source" has a specific, shared meaning Maybe with the HN crowd. The fact is, the term "open source", being made from two common words with actual specific, shared meanings, unfortunately together create a common-sense meaning that is NOT the "specific, shared" meaning that the Open Source Initiative defines it as. Furthermore, a lot of people like the common-sense definition better than the OSI definition.
pabs3 10mo ago
I'm reminded of Drew's 2021 post: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your-monopoly.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...

131 points by geerlingguy 10mo ago

Interesting. The post is about whether a license prohibiting SaaS competitors is "open source" and whether it might work out as a good way to ensure project sustainability. In this context "source available" means that you have the source code but you can't use it to compete with the project owner. [Kinda puts Omarchy in a different light don't you think?] There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.

lmm 10mo ago
> There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor. No, that's very much open source - in fact, it was the way most big name open source projects were developed back in the early days. See the famous "the cathedral and the bazaar" essay. Public bug trackers and widely soliciting contributions to mainline are relatively new phenomena, but you always had the right to fork and maintain and share your own fork, and that's the part that's essential.
- RossBencina 10mo ago
  I agree that it started that way, but that does not mean norms and expectations don't shift. To me, acting like it's 1980 is weird. The majority of maintained open source projects today are single-source-of-truth projects, not source code drops from unreachable invisible teams. There is a reason for that -- it's part of what makes the projects usable and dependable.
  - lmm 10mo ago
    I think allowing the definition of open source to be muddled would be a big mistake, especially now that some entities are trying to whittle away users' rights while continuing to benefit from the positive vibes of open source. The OSDI/DFSG/FSF definition is a clear, simple line in the sand that has served the movement very well; there's no reason to change it. Yes some entities actively participate in their community and others do the bare minimum, but it's always going to be possible to be more or less communitarian.
quadrifoliate 10mo ago
> To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor. I feel like this is a completely different conversation, but this is just as much a misunderstanding of what open source is as DHH's. As long as the code is under BSD or GPL, you are free to take it as-is and do what you want with it. You could run your commercial service using it. You can certainly write patches and apply them to your own servers. You could even email the maintainers with them -- worst case is that they will ignore the emails! Open Source does not guarantee that your contributions will be accepted or merged back to the project -- indeed, if you think about it, that would be absurd. I might want some random thing in the Linux kernel, but the maintainers will always have the final word on whether they want my patches or not. The O'SaaSy license says that (essentially) 37Signals will sue you if you try to host this on your own servers, and try to sell it as a service. That's totally different, and a legal rather than a technical hurdle.
cortesoft 10mo ago
How easy do you have to make it to contribute to be considered “open source”. Obviously, no project accepts every single pull request. Where is the line between “open source” and “no open source” in your definition?
- ModernMech 10mo ago
  Intent. Do you intent to be a genuinely open community and is it set up around fostering that dynamic as a central aspect of development? It's hard to measure intent, but we can do so indirectly by looking at the project structure: - Are there contributor guidelines? - Do contributors have to sign a waiver before they can contribute any code? - Is there a RFC process? - Does the project actually respond meaningfully to that feedback, or does it simply get filed in the special complaints folder for corporate. - Does the project encourage outside contributions in more than a cursory way? - Does the CLA grant the company unilateral relicensing rights? - Are governance documents public? - Can the community vote on decisions? - Does the community have a say in how it's moderated? - Are community members invited to actually join the organization? - Are architectural decisions made in open meetings? - Is there a public ROADMAP and is the community invited to contribute to it or influence it? - Can others build competing distributions without fear of retaliation? - Can the project be forked if there is community disagreement about direction? Those are just some signals off the top of my head. There's no bright line; the presence or absence of a few won't say anything one way or another. But if many of the answers to those questions are leaning toward the negative, then I don't think it can be open source.
  - nevon 10mo ago
    Completely disagree. To me, and the OSI, none of those things other than redistribution and forking have anything to do with being open source or not. In fact, you could have a closed source project tick nearly all of those boxes, although that would indeed be very unusual. I'm not sure if there is a term for what you are describing. Perhaps "community driven project".
    - ModernMech 10mo ago
School-Cotton 10mo ago
> To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor. It’s massively different from source-available in that anyone can fork it for free and start developing it themselves however they want. Just because one fork of the project (the original one) follows a closed development model doesn’t change anything about the code, what you can do with it, and how others can develop it.

xyzzy_plugh 10mo ago

O'Sassy or whatever is certainly Source available, and not Open Source. DHH can pound sand. I used to think the pedantry was foolish, but I've grown to understand the distinction. It's one thing to criticize the OSI's claim to the term, and I do think they could do a better job at getting out ahead of new licenses and whatnot, but even if you ignore OSI entirely then the distinction is of substantial value. I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years. At the same time it is not worth it if the spirit of Open Source is watered down.

JoshTriplett 10mo ago
> I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years. Yeah. Releasing a project under a source-available proprietary license and calling it Open Source, or doing a rugpull and changing an established Open Source license to a source-available proprietary license, is the kind of thing that causes the most grief. If you release something under a source-available proprietary license and make no pretenses about it being something else, and the alternative was not releasing it at all, it's a (slight) improvement.
sofixa 10mo ago
> I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years. I think we need more differentiation and different terms. Because O'Sassy / FSL / whatever that just forbids other companies from selling the same software as a Service is quite different than just the source being available with no rights at all, or with restrictions on who can use it and when (size of company, for profit or not, production, etc).

phendrenad2 10mo ago

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createaccount99 10mo ago
I agree with this. The new definition of "open source" has been crafted out of malice. _Anyone_ new to programming runs into this confusion, and that's evidence in itself.
- deleted 10mo ago
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koolala 10mo ago
Control language and you control people's expectations. Like the shift from 'Private Message' to 'Direct message'. 'Open Source' to 'Source Available' would be just as massive of a shift in control and power.

jrowen 10mo ago

What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source? To an outsider it looks like counterproductive bickering between people on the same team.

quadrifoliate 10mo ago
> What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source? The part where the license says "Don't run this on your server and charge people money for it, or we will sue you"? I know that everyone thinks of Big Tech absorbing your project into their SaaS when they do this, but there are other ways (say AGPL) to combat that. O'SaaSy seems to me to be essentially a "give us your code for free, and you can self host it, but don't dare to charge $$ for it or else!" license. Now you're bringing lawyers into the picture for anyone who's hosting your software on their servers. It's very reasonable for a SaaS company that wants to defend its moat, but it's not Open Source. (Talking of, I'm actually curious if anyone has seen actual self-hosted Fizzy instances in the wild.)
- jrowen 10mo ago
  I didn't ask which part of the license violates OSS values, I asked what those principles and values are. I will infer that "anybody can do whatever they want with the code" is the principle you are referring to. I kind of thought that it was more about stuff like sharing and personal development and edification and the ability to see inside and understand things. But let's get really divisive over the money stuff.
  - simonw 10mo ago
    It's about unambiguously understanding exactly what my rights are and how I can use that code. In the case of the janky new 37signals license: what exactly counts as "... where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself"? Who gets to define the "primary value" of the thing I built?

wvenable 10mo ago

> DHH's choice of license reacts to a real pressure in open source: many companies make real money from open source software while leaving the hard work of building and maintaining it to others. If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software. That being said; I have no issue with a developer choosing any license they want -- it's their software and therefore it's their right. But calling it "open source" when it specifically forbids certain use-cases is just wrong. DHH wants his cake (pretend it's real OSS) and eat it too (deny usages).

sofixa 10mo ago
> If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software. What if you do and have done so, yet you're competing with e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, who can do it for cheaper than you due to scale, and also have a much easier time to sell an extra line item to their existing customers vs you having to go through commercial negotiations and purchase agreements? Cf. Elastic, Redis, etc.
- wvenable 10mo ago
  If you have a problem with that then don't make it open source. And if you don't make it open source, don't call it open source. My own personal position is that my commercial software is commercial for me and my open source software is free for everyone to use for any purpose including making money that I will never see. If I cared, I wouldn't make that software open source.
  - jraph 10mo ago
    It should be pointed out that commercial and free software / open source are not opposed though.

darig 10mo ago

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modzu 10mo ago

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cess11 10mo ago

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Incipient 10mo ago

Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good. Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support. Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).

sofixa 10mo ago
> Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good Maybe, but I think that "source available" isn't detailed enough and can mean many many different things. > Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc). Point in case. For me there is one group, under something like BSL or FSL or SSPL which mostly restricts you from competing with the project's creators (e.g. making your own SaaS out of it), but everything else is fair use, you can use it in prod to make money at any size, etc. And a separate, more restrictive one, which has size, or production restrictions (you can't run the software if you're a commercial entity). Source available sounds like a good description for the second one, because it's just available, little more. But for the first one where you can do whatever you want with one single exception that doesn't impact 99.9999% of potential users, it's not a good and clear enough description.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  People run with OSI initiative as it is and consider it the golden rule when I agree with your 99.9999% of potential users line. I think that *one blunder?) is that OSI cant really consider SSPL or similar open source because it restricts access to one party so it breaches an freedom 0 or some freedom of open source which is fair but at the same time literally only impacting people competing against (in my opinion the funding of the project and its growth itself) if someone like amazon had created a redis service competing against redis itself lets say I think its all kinda nuanced and we kinda need more discussion with source available.
- 10mo ago

tzahifadida 10mo ago

I think that people looks at n8n success and say why not use source available?... However, I believe they are wrong to believe that this would work for any project...

deleted 10mo ago

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benrutter 10mo ago

I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects. I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes. The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but more meaningful "open source" out there.

safety1st 10mo ago
I certainly don't have all the answers here but the entire $300B+ SaaS industry (and a bunch of other stuff that behaves like SaaS) was built in great part on a loophole in the GPL. More precisely, many of the people who licensed their code under GPL were eventually dismayed when they realized you could sell access to whatever you like built on top of that code, over a network, and you wouldn't have to distribute the source. The AGPL was devised to close this loophole. There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected! The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys. I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing... It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.

kemitchell 10mo ago

Watching what we charitably call this debate flare up yet again gives me an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, seeing people I've read and listened to for years heave time, attention, and more typing onto this tire fire evokes deep tragedy. On the other hand, I've been there, casting my own vanities to the bonfire, more than a few times. There's comfort in the familiar heat and glow. I couldn't escape the waste until I was willing to give up the idea of myself as experienced, as an expert. Until I accepted that time served taught me lessons, but didn't bestow authority. Most people coming into this are new. They relearn what's useful and leave the rest behind. That's part of adaptation. I try to see their point of view. If you ask a newer coder what "open source" means, they might say "like MIT?" or even just "like GitHub?" If you look "open" up in a good thesaurus, "available" is there. The Initiative---really, whoever's on the board now or later---will never own or effectively police the term "open source", much less "open source AI". And nobody claiming "open source" for good or ill will ever summon on themself the kind of attention or cachet that marketing bauble once commanded, no matter what their license says. As for fellow oldheads, there's no resolving contradictions between ways we learned to frame these issues, decades ago. Can changes to a license be a solution to the funding problem? Can using freedom terms to buttress a business count as truly open? That bizarre conflict of ontologies won't decide where programming goes in the future, if it ever did. I doubt it will even be won or lost. It will just fade away, like the circumstances that started it. DHH can kick the anthill. The activists can raise their old hue and cry. It's purely elective, demoded dramatics. The real problems of software politics today aren't expressible in either schema. They can even seem tautologically unsolvable. Meanwhile, we've got new aspirational generalities that aren't expressible in the old ways of speaking. "Sustainability", because many doing good aren't doing so well. "Decentralization", because we're all sharecropping on some platform now. Sometimes I think the best I can do for the younger generations facing today is just to never impose petty trivia about "the movement" ever again. Never deign imply I know what they should consider important. If "free" and "open" meant something to me, let their inheritors tell me what they mean now, in practice. Tell me about the world they built and left for them. Maybe I don't have to choose. After all, who reads blogs?

quadrifoliate 10mo ago
> After all, who reads blogs? I used to read yours, anyway! If the literal lawyer who specializes in licenses doesn't have a clear point of view on this, what hope do the rest of us have?

theanonymousone 10mo ago

As a lay person, I still don't get what is AGPL missing that makes vendors "invent" so many new licenses and spawn so much debate? Why not just use AGPL, and if it's insufficient, invest in an AGPLv2 initiative?

koolala 10mo ago
Source available isn't a license, it is the lack of a license. It's the legal default state for all art. It can include whatever made-up rules the author wants you to follow but your just as well off if you don't read them and just treat it as copyrighted.
asiekierka 10mo ago
It is not possible to create a license that would satisfy the Free Software Foundation's "four freedoms" while also solving the issues many of those vendors have with the AGPL. At the same time, the "source available" mindset doesn't have a steward organization like the FSF or OSI.
maxloh 10mo ago
The major concern regarding the AGPL is that it only fosters code share when a code change is involved. The license has nothing to do with someone building a competitive service around your project. If a Big Tech company happened to build a cloud service (SaaS) around your project without any code change, and that service is more competitive than the one you provide, there is not much you can do about it with the AGPL. The AGPL is published by the FSF, with mainly community-led projects in mind. The profit and sustainability of a corporation is not their primary concern. (A minor correction: The most recent version is v3; any newer version would be v4, not v2.)
createaccount99 10mo ago
MinIO made their source AGPL, but then cloud providers hosted the service "as is" and make money off it, with MinIO team getting zip. That still complies with AGPL but is not monetarily beneficial to the MinIO team. At least that's my understanding. They closed source completely, but a source-available license wouldn't have run into this issue.

jillesvangurp 10mo ago

I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. It makes outside contributions a lot less likely. Your active community of people working on the code base effectively becomes your employees. There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing. Including free usage and distribution of the work they did. It's not likely to be helpful. My attitude to source available products is the same as to proprietary products. I tend to limit my dependency on those. Companies have short life spans. Many OSS projects I use have a history of surviving the implosion of companies that once actively contributed to them. Developer communities are much more resilient than companies. Source unavailable effectively becomes source unavailable when companies fail. Especially VC funded companies are kind of engineered (by VCs) to fail fast. So, it's just not a great basis for making a long term commitment. If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license. Somebody could take over the project or fork it or even create a new company around it. Some of the original developers would probably show up. A project like that is resilient against that. And projects like that have active contributors outside of the corporate context that provide lots of contributions. Because of the license. You don't get that without a good OSS license. I judge software projects by the quality of their development communities. It needs to have diversity, a good mix of people that know what they are doing, and a broad enough user community that the project is likely to be supported in perpetuity. Shared source provides only the illusion of that. Depending on them is risky. And that risk is rarely offset by quality. Of course people use proprietary software for some things. And that's fine. I'm no different. But most of the stuff I care about is OSS.

bloppe 10mo ago
The BUSL license requires shifting to an open-source license no later than 4 years after publication. I'd be happy to contribute to a BUSL-licensed project knowing my contributions will shift to an MIT license within 4 years. And the original authors don't have to worry as much about Amazon eating their lunch.
- jillesvangurp 10mo ago

anon-3988 10mo ago

Why haven't anyone randomly generate a bunch of code of various kinds, use LLM to create some summary of it and dump them to github with a restrictive license? The patent office isn't here to enforce anything.

bloppe 10mo ago
I'm curious as to where this is going. What happens next?
narcraft 10mo ago
It'd be like copyright trolling the Library of Babel. The set of useful programs would be totally eclipsed by incoherent gibberish (even if there were a means to ensure that the randomly generated code were syntactically correct). In other words, the signal to noise ratio would be microscopic and running this scheme in finite time would effectively result in zero valuable code being successfully squatted.

koolala 10mo ago

I'm amazed how many people don't like open-source... Imagine the hellscape computers / the internet would be today if Linux was 'Source available'.

Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
Some source available licenses are literally just modified open source with the addition of some clauses (mostly cloud related) To me source available is: we are open source but if you are an cloud provider with billions of dollars, ask us for a license/fund us. Technically linux gets funded enough and rightfully so but I remember how netbsd's fundings were so meagre and low which really saddened me. To be honest, I thought about it and lets assume Linux uses a busl like license which open sources after 4 years Most likely what would've happened is that someone will take that 4 year old code and then fork it to create the linux we all kinda love. But overall I think linux is the bedrock of any vps/cloud provider which can be small enough too to be unable to buy their source available license so its kind of an mixed bag I guess and for linux, not worth it because it already gets a lot of funding. It would be interesting if the same funding that linux kernel gets was shared at a similar level to the distros because I saw cachyos and talked to its creator on discord and I am not kidding but the fundings are very small for a project so big. Also I think most people use source available license to make money or funding, basically the question which I want to ask you is: how to make enough money in open source?
noirscape 10mo ago
For a lot of developers, the current biggest failure of open source is the AWS/Azure/GCP problem. BigCloud has a tendency to just take well liked open source products, provide a hosted version of them and as a result they absolutely annihilate the market share of the entity that originally made the product (which usually made money by offering supported and hosted versions of the software). Effectively, for networked software (which is the overwhelming majority of software products these days) you might as well use something like BSD/MIT rather than any of the GPLs[0] because they practically have the same guarantees; it's just that the BSD/MIT licenses don't contain language that makes you think it does stuff it actually doesn't do. Non-networked software like kernels, drivers and most desktop software don't have this issue, so it doesn't apply. Open source for that sort of product (which most of the big switches away from open source have been about) only further entrenches BigCloud's dominance over the ecosystem. It absolutely breaks the notion that you can run a profitable business on open source. BigCloud basically always wins that race even if they aren't cheaper because the company is using BigCloud already, so using their hosted version means cutting less yellow tape internally since the difficulty of getting people to agree on BigCloud is much lower compared to adding a new third party you have to work with. The general response to this issue from the open source side tends to just be to accuse the original developers of being greedy/only wanting to use the ecosystem to springboard their own popularity. --- I should also note that this generally doesn't apply to the fight between DHH and Mullenweg that's described in the OP. DHH just wants to kick a hornets nest and get attention now that Omarchy isn't the topic du jour anymore - no BigCloud (or for this case, shared hosting provider is probably more likely) is going to copy a random kanban tool written in Ruby on Rails. They're copying the actual high profile stuff like Redis, Terraform and whatever other examples you can recently think of that got screwed by BigClouds offering their services in that way (shared providers pretty much universally still use the classic AMP stack, which doesn't support a Ruby project, immunizing DHHs tool from that particular issue as well). Mullenweg by contrast does have to deal with Automattic not having a stranglehold on being a WordPress provider since the terms of his license weren't his to make to begin with; b3/cafelog was also under GPL and WordPress inherited that. He's been burned by FOSS, but it's also hard to say he was surprised by it, since WP is modified from another software product. [0]: Including the AGPL, it doesn't actually do what you think it does.

NiloCK 10mo ago

Again and forever: These fights stem from usage of a proprietary definition of Open Source (the OSI's). Obviously the definition doesn't resonate with DHH, and he uses the words 'open' and 'source' colloquially. Open, as in a book or a window, source, as in the thing that gets compiled into bits and bobs that run on computers. You wouldn't jump on someone's "open letter" to city hall because of a lack of freedom to fork it. This could stop if people capitalized their reference to Open Source, which is standard English treatment of proper nouns. Unlikely to happen though, because insisting that "my definitions are your definitions" seems to be a primal tribal instinct for humans.

douglascamata 10mo ago
Pretty much the most sound comment in this section. It's like some organization "stole" the meaning of the words "open source" and called it "Open Source" (with the capitalization). Now you can't say your source is open for anyone to read anymore because it's not "Open Source"™ as "That Entity"™ defines it.
insane_dreamer 10mo ago
I for one disagree that software can't be "open source" if the OSI says it's not open source. There are varying degrees of open source. Since when do they get the right to define what is "open source"? In my view, "open source" but doesn't give you permission to host a commercial service that directly competes with it, is still a degree of open source, and reasonable.

jbstack 10mo ago

Misleading article. From the second paragraph: > David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH) released a new kanban tool, Fizzy, this week and called it open source. From the linked article by DHH: > That means it's not technically Open Source™

debugnik 10mo ago
He calls it open source in the title and the following paragraph to that. That sentence only means he thinks of himself as cheeky.

zokier 10mo ago

I think the proper litmus test for these newfangled source available licenses is if the company is willing to operate under the terms of the license, or are they carving out special position for themselves as the copyright holder. In almost all cases I've seen it is more of the latter, and I find that pretty telling.

immibis 10mo ago

Also, "open source" is not free software.

henryball 10mo ago

Side note: Anyone looking for an open source (not source available) Kanban tool: - Kan (AGPL): https://github.com/kanbn/kan https://github.com/kanbn/kan (my own project) - WeKan (MIT): https://github.com/wekan/wekan https://github.com/wekan/wekan - Taiga (AGPL): https://github.com/taigaio/ https://github.com/taigaio/

jamietanna 10mo ago

I will say I didn't disagree with DHH's use of "open source" as I will generally let it slide as its not "Open Source", the version that I attribute to following the Open Source Definition as set out by the Open Source Initiative I agree that there are many who don't understand the distinction and assume that "Open Source" == "open source", and so I do agree that avoiding the use of "open source" where it instead means "non-OSD" makes sense

norgaardrow17 10mo ago

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steviedotboston 10mo ago

Dries remains one of the most level headed people in the open source community (and it is a community)

phendrenad2 10mo ago

> Look, the term "open source" has a specific, shared meaning Maybe with the HN crowd. The fact is, the term "open source", being made from two common words with actual specific, shared meanings, unfortunately together create a common-sense meaning that is NOT the "specific, shared" meaning that the Open Source Initiative defines it as. Furthermore, a lot of people like the common-sense definition better than the OSI definition.

pabs3 10mo ago

I'm reminded of Drew's 2021 post: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your-monopoly.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...