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

dri.es

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

#121

Post by preisschild »

KingMob wrote: post #105
jillesvangurp wrote: post #67

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 o…

> I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. I treat it as "business plus", not "FOSS minus". And of course, some source-available licenses convert to FOSS over time. > Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing. Funny, that's the same complaint FOSS companies have about AWS free-riding off their hard work and then…

You can switch to a copyleft-FOSS license that requires users like AWS to effectively contribute back too. And this way you stay "open source".

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

#122

Post by preisschild »

Incipient wrote: post #25

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).

> 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.

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

#123

Post by preisschild »

jrowen wrote: 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#...

Its literally against the first of the four essential freedoms of Free and Open Source Software

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

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

#124

Post by mhitza »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #67

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 o…

I don't mind the idea of contributing back with fixes on a sources available project. Especially in the context of work.

It does however make it unlikely for me to pick and use the project in the first place.

And definitely not a fan of living through the "era" of open source term washing, post truth, tech influencers and their echo chambers.

DHH says Y, now dozens of impressionable Xs will start parroting the same thing.

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

#125

Post by benrutter »

koolala wrote: post #70
benrutter wrote: post #46

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…

Why? What is meaningful about sharing code with the threat of a lawsuit if someone copies it? Is sounds like you want the term to be erroded?

To explain where I'm coming from a bit more, my thinking is something like:

"open source" where crucial parts of making a system work, or where the project scoops up eager contributors and them schisms the community once it's finished using their work, tends to have a negative effect.

If those projects were more explicitly either "closed source"/"source accessible" etc, then the open source community could focus their efforts on projects that actually embraced genuine openness and hackability.

Of course - I'd rather there was more actual open source. But what I really want is for "open source" to be some marker saying "this is a project that's open and built by/for the community".

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

#126

Post by mhitza »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #92
safety1st wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it…

> which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party

Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)

Big companies will rather ignore your project than use an AGPL licensed product. For them it's just not worth the hassle.

Maybe 1 out a 1 billion software is so revolutionary that licenses be damned. But maybe we should temper our expectations a bit around the software we build!

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

#128

Post by jillesvangurp »

rdsubhas wrote: post #118
jillesvangurp wrote: post #67

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 o…

20 years ago, I used to consult with Fortune 500 companies that run Oracle and IBM products (web servers and Java frameworks). These are distributed as enterprise binaries. It's common to face _at least_ one or two weird errors in production. Then you have to raise a ticket to support. Would you like to know how it is discussing a binary-obfuscated error with Customer support? And then after few weeks being assigned…

That's a great reason I steer clear of products like that. Oracle is not a DB I've used since 2005. There's no need. The market for closed sourced databases imploded to basically legacy products that predate when open source databases became a sane default choice. I guess some banks/insurers still might talk themselves into believing it's a sane choice for new projects.

I guess source available is better than source unavailable + hand wavy support from a company that's out to milk you for revenue for as long as they can get away with it.

But it's a weak substitute for proper open source that you can just fork and fix if you need to without having to beg some indifferent company to pretty please fix their legacy shit and offering to do free work for them. If it's open source, chances are that there are still some others around also using the same software and sharing your pain that can support you or benefit from your fixes.

I don't see the value of most shared source projects. Usually there are very decent OSS alternatives. And the lack of those usually just means one will pop up shortly and displace whatever it is you are using. Any benefit to these projects tends to be short lived. OSS developers like to copy what is good and add it to their own projects.

E.g. most nosql databases ended up having postgresql absorb whatever it was that made these things interesting. Several shared source things (mongodb) are at this point looking a bit dated and backwards. That's also exactly what happened to MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, and all those other long forgotten databases that people used to use last century. There's very little technical reason to use any of those at this point.

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

#129

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

mhitza wrote: post #126
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it…

> which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :) Big companies will rather ignore your project than use an AGPL licensed product. For them it's just not worth the hassle. Maybe 1 out a 1 billion software is so revolutionary that licenses be damned. But maybe…

Interesting, I might write my software under AGPL but still I guess some questions arise as if sure the big companies might not use my project but some smaller companies can still create an competing product.

As an example immich is an AGPL based software which has its own instance and then https://pixelunion.eu (I think gives more free stuff like 16 gig instance etc) and then competes with immich itself

They can do this because they release any changes they make or they don't change it that much .

> Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)

What I want is if someone uses my open source product and then uses it to create an competing product, I am under no obligation to release it under a foss and much rather then release it under an source available license

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

#130

Post by bayindirh »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #101
bloppe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. Th…

> Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source...

The most prominent one is Solaris. It was open one day, and closed the next. Memo didn't say we're close-sourcing it, but moving to a cathedral (final release as open source only) model, but they never released the sources ever after.

Oracle lost all of the core developers over it.

This where Illumos took over.

> There must be some legal laws protecting it.

For permissively licensed code? Nope. Nothing. Even if you don't transfer the copyright, nothing stops someone from forking it and building on it closed source. That someone would be the company opening it or someone else.

In the olden days, when the internet was not that capable to allow collaborative software development, losing developers was a real threat. Now it's not. Developers are dime a dozen. You can close the source, hire some people and continue working on it.

However, this is Open Source model working as intended. Freedom to the developers! If a developer wants to work on a closed source fork, it's completely permitted, baked into the system.

This is why GPL (esp. v3), while viral, is superior. You can't change the license if there's a copyright holder other than you. You can't just fork and close the source. It's limiting to keep the freedom. A working (and arguably necessary) compromise.

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