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

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

#101

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

bloppe wrote: post #80
bsder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Source Available" means that it can become "Source Unavailable" overnight. See the "Our Machinery" fiasco. Yes, Open Source isn't a complete defense against this (especially when there are copyright assignments). However, it sure makes it both a lot harder to pull off and a lot less useful to even try.

"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. There must be some legal laws protecting it.

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

#102

Post by RobotToaster »

kemitchell wrote: post #65
theanonymousone wrote: post #54

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?

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.

Iirc the issue with SSPL was that releasing the entire stack under SSPL would basically be impossible, since you wouldn't have the rights to release, for example, the Linux kernel, under it.

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

#103

Post by eudoxus »

koolala wrote: post #100
eudoxus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All code is shared "under someones own copyright and terms". Whether you use pre-existing words or not doesn't define if its open-source or source-available. I can write a license right now that I maintain the copyright, and written with my own terms that complies with the OSD. We happen to have a collection of existing licenses that have been vetted, but it isn't a exclusionary whitelist. I'll reiterate, "source ava…

Why not both? Why can't something be source available and open source? Or fair source and source available? It isn't this complicated.

Thats a fair (no pun) question! The reason "source available" exists is to starkly seperate it from "open source", yet to your point, they certainly can be both. However it is reductive/pointless to say my code is "open source and source available" since of course the source is available if its open source.

This highlights my knee-jerk reaction to your initial post. My original definition I provided for Source Available was "[viewable but not OSD]". This is overly restrictive since can be both, but to assign any meaning at all Source Available it needs to be defined in relation to "Open Source", otherwise its meaningless.

I agree, it really isn't complicated :).

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

#104

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

sofixa wrote: post #35
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).

> Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good Maybe, but I think that "source available" isn't detailed enough and can mean many many different things. > 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). Point in case. For me there is one group, unde…

People run with OSI initiative as it is and consider it the golden rule when I agree with your 99.9999% of potential users line.

I think that *one blunder?) is that OSI cant really consider SSPL or similar open source because it restricts access to one party so it breaches an freedom 0 or some freedom of open source which is fair but at the same time literally only impacting people competing against (in my opinion the funding of the project and its growth itself) if someone like amazon had created a redis service competing against redis itself lets say

I think its all kinda nuanced and we kinda need more discussion with source available.

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

#105

Post by KingMob »

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 competing. They switch to source-available licenses because a FOSS license allows flush FAANGs to exploit them.

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

#106

Post by zokier »

I think the proper litmus test for these newfangled source available licenses is if the company is willing to operate under the terms of the license, or are they carving out special position for themselves as the copyright holder. In almost all cases I've seen it is more of the latter, and I find that pretty telling.

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

#107

Post by ahartmetz »

bullfightonmars wrote: post #86
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…

In the case of Fizzy, the app that 37signals has made “source available”, the real motivation for publishing is form of advertising for Ruby on Rails. DHH is on a mission to show that you can write great software with way less bullshit than is in vogue. This code base is sparkling in its design. No build frontend, server side rendered templates, minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity, extremely simple model…

>minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity

Damn weirdos. Next you're going to tell me that you can deploy it without k8s or even a container?! /s

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

#108

Post by theanonymousone »

vanviegen wrote: post #72
theanonymousone wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But SSPL was not approved by OSI. BY "investing" I mean getting it to the same status as AGPL :)

Are you suggesting that they should've bribed OSI, or.. ?

/s would be nice. But just in case, I was suggesting to work closely with OSI and do enough back and forth until a license is agreed upon.

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

#109

Post by theanonymousone »

RobotToaster wrote: post #102
kemitchell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Iirc the issue with SSPL was that releasing the entire stack under SSPL would basically be impossible, since you wouldn't have the rights to release, for example, the Linux kernel, under it.

Yes. I also read it somewhere that, for example, if you hosted your service on Microsoft IIS, SSPL required you to publish IIS source, regardless of the fact that you don't have it.

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

#110

Post by bloppe »

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…

If a project switches from an open-source to a closed-source license, then from the outside, it just looks like the project was abandoned. The final commit that was published under the open-source license will always be open source. It's the future commits that are now closed source.

So no, I don't have any specific examples of that happening.

In the case of both Redis and Terraform, the forks were announced after the license change, not before. Indeed, the forks were motivated by the license change. The community didn't get a warning "hey, we're about to change the license, fork it while you still can!". It just changed.

That's what I mean when I say the license change does not apply retroactively. The commit of Terraform that existed before the license change is still open-source. I could create a fork branching off that commit today if I wanted to.

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