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

My point of view is clear, but what I see is complex. Things seemed simpler back when I believed what Slashdot told me, before I'd spent twenty years getting involved and looking closer.

If you're looking for a seer with a salvation plan---as technology, legal innovation, organizational form---I don't have hope to offer you.

Look at the figureheads of free and open, the "philosophers". The ones we remember succeeded, but not on the terms of the lofty gospels they preached. Very few practical systems are "free". Most competitive software is closed, and sharing code across orgs still sucks much of the time. Linus succeeded, but Linus just wanted to code, get respect, and make good money. Glad he did.

Thinking we'd seen the end of software history got us here. Now I see more willingness to try new things again. They mostly wither or fail, but so did most early attempts at "free". Mutation, selection, adaptation.

The major concern regarding the AGPL is that it only fosters code share when a code change is involved. The license has nothing to do with someone building a competitive service around your project.

If a Big Tech company happened to build a cloud service (SaaS) around your project without any code change, and that service is more competitive than the one you provide, there is not much you can do about it with the AGPL.

The AGPL is published by the FSF, with mainly community-led projects in mind. The profit and sustainability of a corporation is not their primary concern. (A minor correction: The most recent version is v3; any newer version would be v4, not v2.)

See https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up#b...

MongoDB invested sufficient resources in drafting an update to the AGPL. That license is called the Server Side Public License. Controversy ensued.

I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. It makes outside contributions a lot less likely. Your active community of people working on the code base effectively becomes your employees.

There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing. Including free usage and distribution of the work they did. It's not likely to be helpful.

My attitude to source available products is the same as to proprietary products. I tend to limit my dependency on those. Companies have short life spans. Many OSS projects I use have a history of surviving the implosion of companies that once actively contributed to them. Developer communities are much more resilient than companies. Source unavailable effectively becomes source unavailable when companies fail. Especially VC funded companies are kind of engineered (by VCs) to fail fast. So, it's just not a great basis for making a long term commitment.

If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license. Somebody could take over the project or fork it or even create a new company around it. Some of the original developers would probably show up. A project like that is resilient against that. And projects like that have active contributors outside of the corporate context that provide lots of contributions. Because of the license. You don't get that without a good OSS license. I judge software projects by the quality of their development communities. It needs to have diversity, a good mix of people that know what they are doing, and a broad enough user community that the project is likely to be supported in perpetuity.

Shared source provides only the illusion of that. Depending on them is risky. And that risk is rarely offset by quality. Of course people use proprietary software for some things. And that's fine. I'm no different. But most of the stuff I care about is OSS.

Why haven't anyone randomly generate a bunch of code of various kinds, use LLM to create some summary of it and dump them to github with a restrictive license? The patent office isn't here to enforce anything.