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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 outsid
by 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 agoI 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 agoIt'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?
- jrowen 10mo agoSo would you say that (in your opinion) a source available license could in theory call itself open source, if it used language you found to be unambiguous about your rights? Or is that not possible?
- simonw 10mo agoIf it calls itself "open source" and I go to https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses and can't find an approved copy of the license - or I can't ask my favourite open source expert lawyer for their advice on it - then I don't want it to call itself open source.
- jrowen 10mo agoUnderstood, thanks.
- quadrifoliate 10mo agoI apologize for having missed the mark with your question. > I will infer that "anybody can do whatever they want with this code, OR ELSE YOU'RE NOT WORTHY" is the principle you are referring to. I feel like there's cynicism in your phrasing, but a perhaps more neutral phrasing would be "Don't pick and choose what specific circumstances your users can use this for".
- jrowen 10mo agoThere was of course and I edited it out. Why is it important to give "everything" to the users? They have the source code. Why is it so important that they can use it for whatever they want?
- scheeseman486 10mo agoBeing able to fork a project when management turns hostile is one of the most effective ways GPL software protects itself from enshittification and corporate sabotage. Source available does nothing to prevent this.
- quadrifoliate 10mo ago> They have the source code. This can also be true, say, of a dump of leaked Windows source code. Would you say that that's Open Source? Why not? What's different between that and Fizzy? Fizzy's creators will also sue you in certain cases. > Why is it so important that they can use it for whatever they want? It's important only in terms of the ethics of calling yourself open. The OSI (and many other commenters here, and me) are saying that open source should be defined by lack of restrictions on the usage; DHH etc. are saying that it should be defined by lack of restrictions on the access. The reasons why I think usage-based definition rather than access-based definitions are more reasonable are: - Providing access to code is relatively cheap/easy today. This wasn't always true in the past. - Usage has a lot more variables than access. If you start putting restrictions on it, anyone using it has to stop and think about their usage to ensure it's not falling afoul of the restrictions. For example, if I put Fizzy on my server and provide free access to it for anyone on the internet without the 1000-item limit, does that qualify as "directly compet[ing] with the original Licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted Cloud Service"? I would hope not, but if I want to make sure I have to pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars.
- zx8080 10mo ago> The part where the license says "Don't run this on your server and charge people money for it, or we will sue you"? A bit offtopic but could re-generation of the project with LLM (with for example prompt "rewrite the <repo> changing every line of code") help protecting from being sued? If yes, then the OS licensing is doomed to fail.
- mariusor 10mo agoWe had a trial about this if I'm not mistaken. For a piece of software to be declared as not infringing on another, its developers need to use a "clean room" approach when developing it. Giving an LLM a repo to copy is definitely not "clean room".
- Supermancho 10mo agoSome people have internalized the words "open" "source" to mean more than the words, even going so far as to eschew the benefit (which was at the heart of the Stallman problem) because it doesn't fit the desired ethos and license. It's counterproductive, indeed.
- NiloCK 10mo agoPeople use the term to refer to a proprietary definition from the OSI, which is an OK convention. I just wish they would capitalize it, and leave the normal interpretation of the words also available.
- Supermancho 10mo ago> People use the term to refer to a proprietary definition from the OSI some people do. A vast minority of the superset. Most people (person on the street) take the words "open source" at face value and dispense with the whole idea when faced with a needless ideological argument. This specific process of thought is casually observed in most entry compsci highschool/college classrooms. The whole point of open source was to achieve a goal, which has ironically been subject to feature creep.
- simonw 10mo agoIf something is open source and follows an OSI approved license I don't have to ask a lawyer to review the license before I integrate with that code. The moment you change a single line of that license I now have to pay extremely close attention to those details again. This isn't a naive idealism thing - there are very solid, boring, selfish reasons for caring about this.
- jrowen 10mo agoThis is a good technical point. But this seems to kind of argue that one of the principles of open source is that businesses should be able to pull it into their proprietary projects to make money without hesitation. Is that accurate? I thought that was kind of more of a bonus. I feel like it's participating in the spirit of open source and should be welcomed, if someone wants to make their code available but just wants to try and restrict anything-goes usage. But I can see the purity argument.
- simonw 10mo agoThere are open source licenses that don't allow businesses to use them to make money without hesitation like the AGPL. What matters is clarity. If code is licensed under a known open source license businesses know exactly what they can do with that code. Other users of the code also know that it supports the core criteria outlined in https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoFOSS was founded on The Four Essential Freedoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... that GPL/LGPL were devised to embody. Shared source licenses don't adhere to freedom 0.
- Ekaros 10mo agoI think it comes to analogies, with open source you have a public park you are free to use. With source available it is public park you are free to look at behind a fence... So not actually public park. Still a fine thing to exist. As user as well. Difference between I can use this for free and I have to pay to use this. Even if I can see parts inside is significant. It might not be real principle, but at least it is real difference.
- birjolaxew 10mo agoWouldn't it be more along the lines of "source available" being a public park that you're free to access but can't monetize by e.g. selling tickets to - while "open source" would let you do whatever you want with the park. Ironically I think the analogy explains why many people find "source available" to align with their moral compass more than "open source" necessarily does.
- yencabulator 10mo agoSource available is a park where there is some set of activities you are forbidden from doing in the park, but you're never sure exactly which. One day you realize your driveway goes directly into the park, and if you transit to your office through the park you get sued. The park vendor is also trying to get you to buy a home inside the park.
- nextaccountic 10mo ago> bickering between people on the same team. Uh.. are they? I'm somewhat sympathetic to licenses that will be open source in X years, but the open source ethos is that, with proper attribution, we can do whatever with the code, the only restriction being that for some projects a derivative work needs to also be open source (while others don't care even about that) If we were to welcome non-open source projects into a larger community, we should probably begin with licenses that forbid the usage of the software in military and things like that. Which fails to be open source for the same reason: it puts limits in how you can use the code
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- School-Cotton 10mo agoThey’re not at all on the same team. “Open source” is given away for free, to do what you want with it. Source available is not. Fundamentally they have nothing in common other than the fact that you are allowed to read the source code.
- jasonkester 10mo agoIndeed. One is given away for free to do whatever you want with it. The other is given away for free to do whatever you want except to be a dick. If you’re not planning to be a dick, they’re functionally identical. It’s an improvement.
- koolala 10mo ago"Source Available" is "follow whatever my rules are or I will sue you". That could include something as crazy as a license that says "be a dick and I will sue you". For normal people that can't afford legal fees or lawyers that gives "source available" a big range of abusive possibilities.
- ModernMech 10mo agoNot the same team. Open source isn't really about the license, and it's also not even really about the source; open source is a philosophy centering open development and collaboration. Sharing the source is necessary, but not sufficient. Too often, "source available" means you get to see the source, but you are not invited to participate in development, and certainly you're not going to be participating in collaboration. "Source available" projects want the benefits of being associated with that egalitarian philosophy because it's popular amongst technologists, who are their initial customers. But they don't want to actually practice the philosophy because their core interest is protecting their IP to turn a profit, not open collaboration and development. Outside contributions are considered a liability in many source available projects [1]. This is important because source available projects have in the past resulted in a "rug pull", when the project gets enough airspeed, so they start putting more work into the closed source to placate their investors. Once the technologists are not the primary users, the entire source available charade is done. The available source becomes deprecated, features are moved to the closed source branch, and eventually the available source rots. One final point: if we call source available "open source", then what are we going to call open source to differentiate it from source available. Because they're actually different things. [1]: For example, many projects won't even allow outside contributions, but when they do, you'll have to sign some sort of contributor agreement: https://www.scylladb.com/open-source-nosql-database/contributor-agreement https://www.scylladb.com/open-source-nosql-database/contribu... Edit: (this is to the response below me, as I'm rate limited now and I'm going to bed so I'll forget to post this tomorrow) If anyone tried to do this then the project would be forked immediately. An open source project can go closed source, but as an OSS project, everyone should already have everything the need to keep it going despite that, and that all remains open. That's why we love open source. Also, it'd be really hard to pull off if they've accepted a lot of outside contributions -- when you submit code to an open source project, you retain the copyright. This is not a problem as long as the project is licensed under the agreement under which they submitted the commit, which only grants rights to redistribute under that license. At least that's how it works with Apache 2.0 (I believe, IANAL). So to go closed source, they'd need agreements from all of their contributors to do so. Now, it can happen. MongoDB is an example. But as far as I can tell, you'd have a hard time of it if you accepted contributions from people and they.
- koolala 10mo agoThese terms are designed to trick people exactly like you. "Source available" means you can sue anyone that shares a modification of your code for any reason you want to make up.
- eudoxus 10mo agoI'm going to respond here assuming you are being genuine and not facetious or sarcastic (even though I am hoping you were). "Source available" doesn't in any way mean "you can sue anyone that uses your code for any reason...". The irony of highlighting the trickery of these terms then you yourself perpetuating wrong definitions is... amusing. "Source available" is by definition ill-defined, in the sense that "open source" is defined. There is no trademark, stewarding body, or legal entity behind "Source available". It only exists in relation to OSI defined "open source". Which is to say, it is defined as code that does not fit the "Open Source Definition (OSD)" yet its source code is viewable. Maybe its modifiable, maybe its free to use, but maybe its neither. Thats all anyone can factually attribute to the definition of "Source available". Nothing about "suing ... for any reason". Again, hoping you were making your comment in good fun, otherwise it doesn't look too good for you.
- koolala 10mo agoI edited it to be more specific while you were typing that. The entire point of copyright is a legal mechanism to sue people. "Source-available" at a minimum is someone sharing their code under their own copyright and terms of use. Yes the term is designed to trick outsiders. Most people don't even know that code is copyrighted by default when it is posted publicly and freely on the internet without a © symbol.
- eudoxus 10mo agoAll code is shared "under someones own copyright and terms". Whether you use pre-existing words or not doesn't define if its open-source or source-available. I can write a license right now that I maintain the copyright, and written with my own terms that complies with the OSD. We happen to have a collection of existing licenses that have been vetted, but it isn't a exclusionary whitelist. I'll reiterate, "source available" can only be defined as not OSD code that is viewable. Everything else is entirely open to implementation and interpretation. This is the largest problem with the term. This is in stark contract to examples like "Fair Source" which has a legal definition like the OSD, and a entity behind it stewarding that definition [0], while being a subset of Source Available. All fair source is source available, not all source available is fair source. Yet, fair source doesn't fall into your definition of source available. [0] - https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/
- sceptic123 10mo agoYes, it's a spirit vs. letter argument isn't it? Or _Open Source_ and _open source_.
- preisschild 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#Four_essential_freedoms_of_free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#... Its literally against the first of the four essential freedoms of Free and Open Source Software > The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).