Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
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Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#2I think the salient point of the article is this:
> However, the court held that it was improper for the defendants to remove the Commons Clause, and therefore the defendants’ claims in advertising that its ONgDB software was open source was false advertising.
> Even though the AGPL has a clause specifically allowing downstream recipients to remove "further restrictions" like the Commons Clause, the court stopped the defendant from doing just that.
The decision of the trial court reads:
> Section 7 of the Sweden Software License only permits a downstream licensee to remove "further restrictions" added by an upstream licensee to the original work.
"Sweden Software License" here refers to the AGPL+Commons Clause.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220317154012/https://opensourc...
Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#3Does anyone recommend some documentations to know all the licences vs open source?
I'm thinking of launching one of our project in open source but don't want to end up in this kind or articles ^^
Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#4This is really interesting. Specifically this quote "it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when it’s not licensed under an open source license". Also, is opensource.org and the OSI the only organization that can define it and if so should they be? To me this is more about false advertising and changing a license. Another reason to look at a tool like debricked for license management.
Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#5I don't like that OSI seems to somehow come away with this (at least as framed here) with control of the term. I agree just calling whatever nonsense open-source is problematic, but I don't agree it has to be one of their licenses to be open source at all.
Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#6Does anyone recommend some documentations to know all the licences vs open source? I'm thinking of launching one of our project in open source but don't want to end up in this kind or articles ^^
Take a look at the popular licenses from the OSI: https://opensource.org/licenses
Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#7IANAL, but it seems to me that the court has only decided that if you fork software, and break it's license by removing clauses that aren't permitted to be removed (think removing one of the 3 clauses in a 3-clause BSD license), then you're distributing the software under a license that is a lie, and thus invalid, and thus not "open-source".
Could this be used as precedent if you release software and claim that it's open-source, but don't provide full source or even any source at all? Probably not IMHO.
Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#8It seems like they’re going to cover the question I have in a “next post”:
Had they not claimed they were “100% free and open source”, surely they’d have been able to change the license as they saw fit? Yes?
Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#9Does anyone recommend some documentations to know all the licences vs open source? I'm thinking of launching one of our project in open source but don't want to end up in this kind or articles ^^
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Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
#10I don't like that OSI seems to somehow come away with this (at least as framed here) with control of the term. I agree just calling whatever nonsense open-source is problematic, but I don't agree it has to be one of their licenses to be open source at all .
That part seemed like their own spin on the decision, to me. I agree with you: they shouldn’t control the term.