Comment by dspillett
2 years ago
Your goals sound laudable, but they do not alter the fact that your use of the term “open source” is, deliberately or otherwise, misleading.
> Our philosophy surrounding open-source is uncomplicated and clear.
It does not appear to be the case that your philosophy surrounding open-source is clear. You state very clearly, without caveats, that the product is open-source, which strongly implies that the product is, well, open-source without caveats – and this is not the case. That feels rather disingenuous, if not deliberately dishonest.
It is not unlike printer manufactures loudly proclaiming a page-per-minute value without any note about that rate is only attainable feeding entirely blank A6 sheets out of the device.
Most of our repositories are MIT licensed, which holds significant value. Some of our repositories are source-available. We believe we are building an open-source product, and we reserve the right to define what 'open-source' means for us. Our only prohibition is against competitors making minor modifications and then selling our product. Our position on this is clear. We recognize that our definition may not align with others' perspectives here, and we are open to understanding that. However, labeling our approach as dishonest isn't something we consider accurate. To avoid any confusion for those who uphold the traditional notion of 'open source', we will change the term 'open source' to 'open code' on our website.
It's unfortunate it's not actually going to be Free Software, but being able to at least audit and do non-commercial is... better than Notion, I guess. But I do retract a fair portion of my excitement over the project.
Your "reserved right" to define what a word means to you... puts the work to somehow figure out what you mean onto the reader. This isn't quite nice. The speakers are the ones that should strive to make themselves understood in the first place.
I don't have any love for "open source" since it is just "the part of Free Software that appeases people in suits", but please, use the thing as it is.
Source available, of client and server, is definitely better than no source
I do think open source business model, especially consumer, is difficult to tackle, while protecting the creator
So congratulations and good luck
While language is by nature subjective and ever changing, be careful defending the right to redefine commonly understood terms so significantly. By the same measure people could choose to interpret anything you say, including your other license agreements, however they like!