Comment by simonw
4 hours ago
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