Comment by jasode
1 year ago
>This is going to sound pedantic, but SQLite is not Open Source. It's Public Domain.
Well, there are 2 different modes of communication:
(1) official language-lawyer pedantic communication: "open source" != "public domain"
(2) conversational casual chitchat : "open source" includes "public domain"
Yes, the SQLite home page does say "public domain". However, when people interview SQLite create, Richard Hipp, he himself calls it "open source". He also doesn't correct others when they also call it "open source". Excerpt of R Hipp:
So, I thought, well, why can't I have a database that just
reads directly off the disc? And I looked around and
there were none available. I thought, “oh, I'll just write
my own, how hard can that be?” Well, it turns out to be
harder than you might think at first, but I didn't know
that at the time. But we got it out there and I just put it
out as open source. And before long, I started getting
these phone calls from the big tech companies of the
day, like Motorola and AOL, and, “Hey, can you
support this?”, and “Sure!” And it's like, wow, you can
make money by supporting open source software?
https://sigmodrecord.org/publications/sigmodRecord/1906/pdfs...
> (2) conversational casual chitchat : "open source" includes "public domain"
it's wrong though. like, can't be more wrong than that. you can't do whatever you want with open source software, the license tells what you can and cannot do.
with public domain software you can do most things.
Open source means just that: that the source is open. The OSI and co. re-defining the term to suit their ideological preferences doesn’t really change that. SQLite is open source, even if it’s not Open Source.
Edit: FSF should have been OSI, I think. Fixed.
> The OSI and co. re-defining the term
I don't know where you got this idea but it's not true. The OSI is simply defending the definition as it has been generally understood since the start of its usage in the 1980s by Stallman and others.
The only group of people "re-defining" -- quite successfully I suppose, which you are an example of -- what open source software means are those that have a profit motive to use the term to gain traction during the initial phase where a proprietary model would not have benefited them.
I don't think I need to provide concrete examples of companies that begin with an open source licensing model, only to rug-pull their users as soon as they feel it might benefit them financially, these re-licensing discussions show up on HN quite often.
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I don't understand why OSI didn't pick an actually trademarkable term and license its use to projects that meet its ideals of open-sourceness. OSI knows it has no right to redefine common language and police its usage, any more than a grammar pedant has the right to levy fines against those of us who split infinitives.
(To be fair to OSI, I've never seen any of their representatives do this. But the internet vigilante squad they've spawned feels quite empowered to let us know we've broken the rules.)
> conversational casual chitchat : "open source" includes "public domain"
No. What are you talking about? They are not related... other than for people virtually completely new to, well, open source.
You are also completely confused, here, too:
> Yes, the SQLite home page does say "public domain". However, when people interview SQLite create, Richard Hipp, he himself calls it "open source". He also doesn't correct others when they also call it "open source".
They are different things. A project can be both; a person can talk about these two aspects of one project.
This quickly gets into the details of definitions, but I think by most people's definitions of 'open source', something that is 'public domain' qualifies as such (see also 'source available' or 'copyleft/free software', one of which is not quite open source and the other is a more restrictive kind of open source. 'permissive' licenses like MIT and similar are closer to public domain but are different to varying degrees of technicality: one of the main problems with 'public domain' is that it's not universally accepted that there's any means to deliberately place a copyrightable work into it, so something like sqlite where the authors are not long dead is not actually public domain according to many jusrisdictions)
^ is a confused demonstration of my point:
> They are different things. A project can be both; a person can talk about these two aspects of one project.
BTW, your pouring on of qualifiers (elsewhere "weasel words") shows your (correct) lack of conviction:
> the details of definitions, but I think by most people's definitions of 'open source', something that is 'public domain' qualifies as such