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Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

src.sourcegraph.com

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Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#71

Post by davexunit »

achou wrote: post #61

The Fair Source license is an interesting innovation. Will individuals within large companies try out Fair Source software like they do open source software? Will teams adopt it without knowing whether there are other users at the company, opening themselves to violating the license terms? Will anyone look at the source in depth and contribute back? I’m all for (ethical) innovations that enable companies to be built…

>it’s often practical matters that attract users and developers to open source software.

But the (un)Fair Source License is not an Open Source license.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#72

Post by nickpsecurity »

davexunit wrote: post #66
nickpsecurity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is about the source being open plus certain benefits. Free and open source software, a la Richard Stallman, is a totally different thing with a philosophy akin to how a virus operates. A glance at fair.io shows an interesting attempt to provide OSS under a proprietary model. Many businesses are fine with whatever gets the job done with main benefits of OSS being reviewing, extending, or just fixing things…

>Free and open source software, a la Richard Stallman, is a totally different thing with a philosophy akin to how a virus operates. Copyleft is not a virus. I'm pretty damn tired of this meme.

It replicates once it attaches to things. This is true even of distributing a large amount of non-free code while someone in organization unknowingly included a tiny amount of copyleft code. Now, FSF etc are usually more reasonable about enforcement and I doubt most would do more than ask it be removed if whole isn't GPL'd.

The image fits the behavior of the code, though. Hence the meme. More accurate description is like an agreement many parties participate in with copyright used to seal the deal for current and future distributions. So, control-freaks enforcing ideology on improvements to what they create rather than virus. ;)

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#73

Post by vitno »

sqs wrote: post #62
CCoffie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay explain to how forking would work with this license. Forking a project is a huge part of creating a OSS community. Would licensing have to go to both parties? I don't see any explanation of how it would work for this license.

Sourcegraph CEO here. Fair Source is not an open-source license. It is intended to be an improvement over closed source (GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.) and open core (where many important bits are closed source). Fair Source is not intended to support forking and independent redistribution.

This doesn't sound like an improvement to me. It actually takes (just another) SaaS product, and makes it feel like it intentionally does a disservice to it's users.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#74

Post by dragonwriter »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #16
vitno wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fair.io/ It's made by them as well. It most certainly is not libre/free software. I'm guessing it has minimal legal ability to stand up in court. It is a bastardization of what open source is about... really it's more of a disclosed source setup.

Open source is about the source being open plus certain benefits. Free and open source software, a la Richard Stallman, is a totally different thing with a philosophy akin to how a virus operates. A glance at fair.io shows an interesting attempt to provide OSS under a proprietary model. Many businesses are fine with whatever gets the job done with main benefits of OSS being reviewing, extending, or just fixing things…

> Open source is about the source being open plus certain benefits. Free and open source software, a la Richard Stallman, is a totally different thing with a philosophy akin to how a virus operates.

This is all wrong. One: Stallman only advocates Free Software, not Open Source, and not "Free and open source". Open Source Software and Free Software are defined very similar in substance (by the OSI and FSF, respectively), what differs most substantially between the respective organization is the philosophy of why they think those definitions are desirable, not the substance of the definition. Virtually all licenses that have been considered by both the FSF and OSI have either been recognized as meeting both definitions, or have been found to be outside of both; there's almost no inconsistency.

"Free and open source software" is a collective term for the common category of software described by the FSF and OSI definitions, typically used by people who are not interested in (when using it) diverting things into a philosophical debate over preferred terminology between "Free Software" and "Open Source".

The license type sometimes described as "viral" espoused by the Stallman and the FSF is copyleft license, which is a kind of Free Software (and/or Open Source) license which has clauses to assure derivative works are licensed under a similar license; the GPL and AGPL are well-known copyleft licenses.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#75

Post by Titanous »

This looks neat, but the license is fatal. It is not "just like an open-source license."

First, what is a "user"? It is not defined anywhere in the license.

I did not look at the source code, because of the potential IP issues. What would happen if you looked at the source code and then later worked on another open source project and implemented a bit of code that looks similar? The worst case scenario if you did this and the "upstream" was open source is that you'd have to do a bit of re-licensing, the worst case scenario here is that every user of the "downstream" project gets sued by SourceGraph.

Asking for contributions is also problematic, as you're asking for employers to authorize free contributions including a blanket license and patent grant to a proprietary commercial project. And even after that the contributor doesn't have the right to freely use and distribute the software they modified.

I'm all for publishing source code of proprietary projects, but dressing it up as an open source project is not great. I'd suggest adding a license clickwall to avoid accidental IP contamination.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#76

Post by nickpsecurity »

davexunit wrote: post #70
nickpsecurity wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The key intent of OSS is the right to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. The source code is just a prereq for that ability." No, the key intent of open-sourcing software is to let one see the source. That's it. Additional intents are added with licensing terms. This goes back to academic and even proprietary (eg Burrough's 1960's MCP) examples that did this. Many models of it f…

You are incorrect. "Open Source" is a well-defined term. http://opensource.org/osd

The phrase itself originally came from the free software movement. The practice pre-dated it. Former is philosophical meaning with strings attached, the latter is a literal definition with many forms. I'm using the latter.

I'd be up for considering a new term to avoid confusion. Paid, non-profit or for-profit, models allow for most benefits of OSS if structured correctly. So, the new phrase must allow for that. I've been calling it "proprietary OSS" or "paid OSS."

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#77

Post by dragonwriter »

davexunit wrote: post #71
achou wrote: post #61

The Fair Source license is an interesting innovation. Will individuals within large companies try out Fair Source software like they do open source software? Will teams adopt it without knowing whether there are other users at the company, opening themselves to violating the license terms? Will anyone look at the source in depth and contribute back? I’m all for (ethical) innovations that enable companies to be built…

>it’s often practical matters that attract users and developers to open source software. But the (un)Fair Source License is not an Open Source license.

> A glance at fair.io shows an interesting attempt to provide OSS under a proprietary model.

I'm not sure that that is the case: its clearly not Free, but it might be that rare example of a license that meets the OSI Open Source definition but not the FSF Free Software definition. (It clearly violates the spirit of Open Source, and if OSI were to review it, the Open Source definition might be explicitly amended to preclude the kind of use limitation it imposes.)

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#78

Post by davexunit »

sqs wrote: post #51
ultramancool wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do not like this license, it prevents usage with other licensing models near completely. Say I want to integrate their code intelligence into gitlab community (MIT licensed), I'm shit out of luck, even if I were to create a relicensed version of gitlab under the Sourcegraph license, it seems as though it'd be unclear who gets what fees and who counts as a "user" in this case. Would it force me as a devleoper…

Sourcegraph CEO here. Fair Source is intended to allow companies to distribute both the product and source code, and still charge for the product. Fair Source is not an open-source license. Just as with GPL, there are restrictions around your usage of the code that are intended to produce longer-term benefits (in our case, making sure we can build the best product and have a sustainable business). We have had it revi…

>Just as with GPL, there are restrictions around your usage of the code that are intended to produce longer-term benefits (in our case, making sure we can build the best product and have a sustainable business).

GPL benefits humanity, unfair source license benefits your bank account. Got it.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#79

Post by Titanous »

Dangeranger wrote: post #31

This looks really great, thanks for making it open-source and for releasing https://fair.io as a new license model. One thing that you should know is that your 'appdash' trace links are publicly available. You can see a screenshot here https://www.dropbox.com/s/vfu2sbz2ctlxwsx/Screenshot%202015-...

It's not open source in the traditional sense of the term, though they have published the source code. The license is proprietary.

Re: Sourcegraph: self-hosted Git service with semantic code navigation/search/review

#80

Post by brentjanderson »

Titanous wrote: post #75

This looks neat, but the license is fatal. It is not "just like an open-source license." First, what is a "user"? It is not defined anywhere in the license. I did not look at the source code, because of the potential IP issues. What would happen if you looked at the source code and then later worked on another open source project and implemented a bit of code that looks similar? The worst case scenario if you did thi…

The license is interesting - on their [primary website](https://sourcegraph.com/) (Scroll down to Pricing), the pricing section indicates that teams using the "Core" feature set do not have a set limit. Any number of users can use the core system. Enterprise features appear to revolve around access control and scale.
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