Comment by Incipient
5 hours ago
Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good.
Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support.
Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).
Most source-available licenses that I've encountered have no paid license requirements for users. They only require a paid license if you want to sell the product commercially. Normally, you're still allowed to use the software as a piece of a larger commercial product, as long as it does not compete with the original author, or "substantially reproduce the functionality" of the source-available bits, depending on the exact language.
> Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support.
AND it also means with copyleft-licenses that you are required to make the source code for those tweaks public too.
"Source Available" means that it can become "Source Unavailable" overnight.
See the "Our Machinery" fiasco.
Yes, Open Source isn't a complete defense against this (especially when there are copyright assignments). However, it sure makes it both a lot harder to pull off and a lot less useful to even try.
"Open Source" can also become "Source Available" overnight. See Redis, Terraform, etc. In the same vein, "Open Source" can also become "Closed Source" overnight.
In neither case does the change apply retroactively. It only applies to new contributions after the license change.
Well technically Redis had a fork before it became source available known as valkey which is still in bsd license
Terraform was forked to create opentofu if I remember correctly
I think the most recent example is kind of minio for this type of thing no?
Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source since it seems that you haven't named any and I am curious how they can do that. There must be some legal laws protecting it.
1 reply →
> Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good
Maybe, but I think that "source available" isn't detailed enough and can mean many many different things.
> Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).
Point in case. For me there is one group, under something like BSL or FSL or SSPL which mostly restricts you from competing with the project's creators (e.g. making your own SaaS out of it), but everything else is fair use, you can use it in prod to make money at any size, etc. And a separate, more restrictive one, which has size, or production restrictions (you can't run the software if you're a commercial entity).
Source available sounds like a good description for the second one, because it's just available, little more. But for the first one where you can do whatever you want with one single exception that doesn't impact 99.9999% of potential users, it's not a good and clear enough description.
People run with OSI initiative as it is and consider it the golden rule when I agree with your 99.9999% of potential users line.
I think that *one blunder?) is that OSI cant really consider SSPL or similar open source because it restricts access to one party so it breaches an freedom 0 or some freedom of open source which is fair but at the same time literally only impacting people competing against (in my opinion the funding of the project and its growth itself) if someone like amazon had created a redis service competing against redis itself lets say
I think its all kinda nuanced and we kinda need more discussion with source available.
I agree with you the "source available" is overstretched. It's hard to come up with a good new label for the first group. Maybe "Open Use" or "Fair Source".