Comment by echelon
17 hours ago
I'm fine with that.
Open source purity is problematic. The OSI was established by the hyperscalers, who are decidedly not open source either.
Purely "OSI-approved open source" mandates having no non-commercial or non-compete clause, which means anyone can come in and bleed off profits and energy from the core contributors of open source projects. It prevents most forms of healthy companies from existing on top.
We shouldn't be allergic to making money with the software we write - life is finite and it's more sustainable over the long term to maintain software as a job.
The new "ethical source" / "fair source" licenses that have been popping up recently [1, 2] give customers 100% use of the code, but prevent competitors from coming in and stealing away the profits from running managed offerings, etc. (I wish Obsidian were this, but it's fully closed. Still, I do not admire them any less for this choice. We venerate plenty of closed creators - it's silly to hold software to a different standard.)
AWS profits hundreds of millions a quarter off of open source developed by companies thinking they were doing the right thing. AWS turned these into a proprietary managed solutions and gave nothing back to the authors. The original wind up withering and dying. AWS isn't giving back, they're just hoovering up.
Obsidian being closed means the core authors are hyper focused and can be compensated (even if it's not much). It's not like they can rug pull us - the files are text files, we can use old versions, and if they did piss us off I'm sure someone would write an open source version.
[1] https://fair.io/
Fully agree that pushing OSI is just posturing. After all, Amazon/Google/Facebook have made literal billions by commercializing open source software. I release stuff on MIT all the time (for things I'm okay with people poaching) but I'd argue the only "pure" OSS license is GPL, which comes with its own problems (and, as we all know, it infects everything it touches).
The problem with FSL is that it hasn't been tested in the courts yet (afaik), so it's a bit of a gamble to think it'll just "work" if some asshole does try to clone your repo and sell your work. Maybe it's a decent gamble for a funded startup with in-house counsel, but if you're just one guy, imo keep stuff you want to sell closed-source, it's not that big of a deal. We've been doing just that since the 70s.
I fully agree with you.
I love the idea of open source, but we shouldn't say that something is bad just because it's closed source.