Comment by jrowen
5 hours 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.
> 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.)
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.
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?
3 replies →
I 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".
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> 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.
We 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".
If 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.
This 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.
There 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
FOSS was founded on 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.
I 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.
These 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.
I'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.
I 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.
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Yes, it's a spirit vs. letter argument isn't it? Or _Open Source_ and _open source_.
> 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
Some 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.
People 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.
They’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.
Indeed. 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.
"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.
Not 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/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.
> 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.
Not really. A project under an open source license which doesn't accept contributions is still open source.
It is totally about the license and the source code availability.
There are interesting things to say about the various development models, and those common in the open source world, but the open source aspect and the development model aspect should not be mixed.
Haven't open source projects done the rug pull too? Can't they relicense new code going forward?
I guess I would have thought of source available as existing under the open source umbrella. I get that there is an important distinction but from an adoption and evangelism standpoint it seems like an unnecessary crusade to push them away.
Do those projects have a strong track record of behaving badly? Do you think DHH has those types of intentions? (I don't know much about him really)
> Haven't open source projects done the rug pull too? Can't they relicense new code going forward?
They can, if the original license is permissive, or if there was a CLA. They can't for significant contributions under a copyleft license that was not done under a CLA. Something to consider when contributing to a project that uses a CLA or a permissive license.
> I get that there is an important distinction but from an adoption and evangelism standpoint it seems like an unnecessary crusade to push them away.
Depends on your goals. If source available misses the point anyway, adoption doesn't help, the message risks being blurred, and therefore you should push back.