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'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

dri.es

51–60 of 172 posts

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#51

Watching what we charitably call this debate flare up yet again gives me an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, seeing people I've read and listened to for years heave time, attention, and more typing onto this tire fire evokes deep tragedy. On the other hand, I've been there, casting my own vanities to the bonfire, more than a few times. There's comfort in the familiar heat and glow. I couldn't escape the waste un…

> After all, who reads blogs?

I used to read yours, anyway!

If the literal lawyer who specializes in licenses doesn't have a clear point of view on this, what hope do the rest of us have?

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#52
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software. What if you do and have done so, yet you're competing with e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, who can do it for cheaper than you due to scale, and also have a much easier time to sell an extra line item to their existing customers vs you having to go through comme…

If you have a problem with that then don't make it open source. And if you don't make it open source, don't call it open source. My own personal position is that my commercial software is commercial for me and my open source software is free for everyone to use for any purpose including making money that I will never see. If I cared, I wouldn't make that software open source.

It should be pointed out that commercial and free software / open source are not opposed though.

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#53
post #44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it calls itself "open source" and I go to https://opensource.org/licenses and can't find an approved copy of the license - or I can't ask my favourite open source expert lawyer for their advice on it - then I don't want it to call itself open source.

Understood, thanks.

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#55

Watching what we charitably call this debate flare up yet again gives me an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, seeing people I've read and listened to for years heave time, attention, and more typing onto this tire fire evokes deep tragedy. On the other hand, I've been there, casting my own vanities to the bonfire, more than a few times. There's comfort in the familiar heat and glow. I couldn't escape the waste un…

Now it all makes sense, thank you.

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#56

As a lay person, I still don't get what is AGPL missing that makes vendors "invent" so many new licenses and spawn so much debate? Why not just use AGPL, and if it's insufficient, invest in an AGPLv2 initiative?

Source available isn't a license, it is the lack of a license. It's the legal default state for all art. It can include whatever made-up rules the author wants you to follow but your just as well off if you don't read them and just treat it as copyrighted.

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#57

I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects. I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes. The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but…

I certainly don't have all the answers here but the entire $300B+ SaaS industry (and a bunch of other stuff that behaves like SaaS) was built in great part on a loophole in the GPL. More precisely, many of the people who licensed their code under GPL were eventually dismayed when they realized you could sell access to whatever you like built on top of that code, over a network, and you wouldn't have to distribute the source. The AGPL was devised to close this loophole.

There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected!

The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys.

I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#58
post #6

What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source? To an outsider it looks like counterproductive bickering between people on the same team.

Not the same team. Open source isn't really about the license, and it's also not even really about the source; open source is a philosophy centering open development and collaboration . Sharing the source is necessary, but not sufficient. Too often, "source available" means you get to see the source, but you are not invited to participate in development, and certainly you're not going to be participating in collabora…

> Open source isn't really about the license, and it's also not even really about the source; open source is a philosophy centering open development and collaboration.

Not really. A project under an open source license which doesn't accept contributions is still open source.

It is totally about the license and the source code availability.

There are interesting things to say about the various development models, and those common in the open source world, but the open source aspect and the development model aspect should not be mixed.

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#59

As a lay person, I still don't get what is AGPL missing that makes vendors "invent" so many new licenses and spawn so much debate? Why not just use AGPL, and if it's insufficient, invest in an AGPLv2 initiative?

It is not possible to create a license that would satisfy the Free Software Foundation's "four freedoms" while also solving the issues many of those vendors have with the AGPL. At the same time, the "source available" mindset doesn't have a steward organization like the FSF or OSI.

Re: 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

#60
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'Saa…

> 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 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".
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