Comment by quadrifoliate
4 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?
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?
So 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?
2 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".
Or, as GNU puts it,
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
There 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?
3 replies →
> 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".