Comment by immibis
7 hours ago
The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response, the OSI put out this official blog post seething with anger but not a single rational argument: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
that doesn't hold. The whole ecosystem, not just the OSI, has agreed that SSPL is not open source / free software, including the FSF, Debian, Fedora.
That doesn't hold.
FSF declined to make a statement either way - citing the fact that very little software uses this license and it all has xGPL alternatives, so there's no urgent need to make an official decision.
Debian didn't call it free or unfree, but rather decided not to include SSPL software in their distribution, which is an orthogonal issue, due to it having a higher risk of being incompatible with all the other stuff when used a certain way, which does not make it non-free.
Fedora calls it non-free, but just calls it their own belief, not something based on solid reasoning about meeting guidelines or not. Note that Fedora is a project of one of those open source reseller companies.
I found the points in your last comment to be true.
I still think you'd need to back the fact OSI rejected SSPL for commercial concerns of its members a bit more. Even if nobody else has formally rejected SSPL on convincing grounds, major parts of the free software ecosystem distrusts it and OSI is not that special in this. I found nobody making the case that SSPL is a free software license. Nobody likes it except mongodb, and formerly redis and elasticsearch. That would be an interesting revelation to me but I need more convincing evidences.
I do think that open source is the watered down corporate version of free software that attempts to get rid of the end user rights concerns (which I care about most, but the corporations around the OSI don't care about much or at all), and that the OSI is governed by big corps and is not the most trusty organization when it comes to protect free software. One only needs to see the definition they came up for open source AI models which is not quite restrictive (and thus useful) to see the least. So I'm actually somewhat inclined to believe this.