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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

#111

Post by giantg2 »

pie_flavor wrote: post #90
giantg2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you were to design a source-available nonfree product, and call it 'open source', this court would find you guilty of false advertising." It's not really about any of that. If you read the court opinion, it's basically copyright protection infringement on the basis that someone copied a product and changed the licensing in violation of the original license. The false advertising claim is on the basis that the dup…

The original license is AGPL with an added non-commercial clause. To say 'the original license forbade that', where 'that' is being FOSS, is to either agree with me, or to claim that the court is instead offering opinion on what constitutes 'free', which is five times as loaded as 'open source'.

This is a false dichotomy. I don't have to agree with you as the elements of your example are substantially different from the case, leaving other possible outcomes. This ruling does not create precedent on the definition of open source. The court is addressing the violations of the terms of the license and the misrepresentation of being a drop in replacement.

Can you quote the ruling where it defines open source, or Open Source? There are several definitions in the dictionary and OSI is only one of them. There is still debate in many communities about whether open source and a noncommercial clause are compatible or not. That's not something the court needs to look at in this case.

Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising

#112

Post by giantg2 »

roywiggins wrote: post #95
giantg2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the quote also says it's unlicensed.

If there's no license, then all rights are implicitly reserved by whoever owns the copyright, probably the author, unless it was explicitly placed in the public domain. "distributed unlicensed software (not in the public domain) is fully copyright protected, and therefore legally unusable... Examples of this are unauthorized software leaks or software projects which are placed on public software repositories like Git…

My bad, I took it to mean fully copyleft or dedicated.

Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising

#113

Post by thayne »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #7

IANAL, 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…

> 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.

That would be unfortunate, because there are companies that claim their products are "open source" even though they clearly aren't. For example pritunl markets their product as open source on their website, but while the source code is available on github, it is licensed with a proprietary license that doesn't let you do basically anything with that source code.

Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising

#114

Post by thayne »

righttoolforjob wrote: post #110
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is related to a long ongoing court battle between Neo4j and Graph Found (ONgDB). Basically the latter forked the former but removed some clauses from the license they weren't supposed to remove, and this tangential ruling is basically stating that they can't call it open source in their advertising because of that. Related reading: https://casetext.com/case/neo4j-inc-v-graph-found-inc

I understand it a bit differently. They could not remove the clause (as they do not dictate the license), so the clause stays. The software is thus licensed the same way as the original repo and neither can be called open source. Whoever sued these folks for false advertising should sue Neo4j as well.

But isn't Neo4j suing Graph Found? Why would Neo4j sue themselves?

Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising

#115

Post by [deleted] »

busterarm wrote: post #54
CogitoCogito wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure what your point is anymore. If you agree that they were not the first ones to use the term, then we are on the same page. If you agree that open source was used as a term before the OSI came along and decided the define the term in a specific way, then we are in agreement.

Not really in the context of software though it wasn't. Save for that one caldera announcement. General awareness of the term and its meaning starts with the OSI.

[deleted]

Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising

#116

Post by prepend »

kube-system wrote: post #109
prepend wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are organizations other than OSI which have their own opinions on what they consider a “valid” open source license. What other organizations have credible claims? I’ve only heard of companies that have created non-open licenses and are trying to redefine the term (eg, open core, etc)

The organizations that you think are credible, are credible. The term is not legally protected. Personally, when Subway calls their sandwiches "good", I think they are actually making non-good sandwiches, and they're trying to redefine the term. Both "good" and "open source" are descriptive terms that are subjective. The OSI recognizes this themselves: > "Open Source" is not and cannot become a trademark. > there is…

> The organizations that you think are credible, are credible. The term is not legally protected.

Credible to me, but I don’t get to decide what’s credible. We live in a society, etc etc. that’s why I asked.

Subway can’t call the cold cut combo sandwich a fried chicken sandwich even though I think they are a credible organization. They would be wrong. If there’s some other org that is credible and is credible using open source, I’d like to know.

Just like Subway would not be credible if they claimed their non-organic sandwich was organic.

The examples I’m familiar with are companies trying to benefit from open source as a positive marketing term and I don’t think are credible.

Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising

#117

Post by ttybird2 »

nulbyte wrote: post #30

> The court only confirmed what we already know – that "open source" is a term of art for software that has been licensed under a specific type of license, and whether a license is an OSI-approved license is a critically important factor in user adoption of the software. The court confirmed no such things. The decisions expressed in these two documents regarding the use of "open source" as a description of the produc…

OSI has been trying really hard to claim the term for themselves in a dishonest way, even though they were not the ones that invented it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26507460

Re: Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising

#119

Post by teilo »

rectang wrote: post #94
teilo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No court has as yet ruled that the OSI definition of "open source" is the legal definition of the term. The ruling here does not either. If it had limited its ruling to the term "open source," then this would indeed begin to codify what "open source" means from a legal standpoint. However, the courts ruled upon the composite term "open source and free". Under the OSI definition, open source implies free. But no court…

I said "widely understood", which is true irrespective of whether a court has ruled on it. There's a huge ecosystem which is underpinned by the OSD. There are also a handful of orgs (most prominently a few VC-funded companies) who want to freeload on the goodwill of "Open Source" to market their proprietary software. And there are some Free Software advocates who dislike the very term "Open Source". (Not that "Free S…

It may be "widely understood" but one could just as well argue that open source is "widely misunderstood." What matters is how the courts understand the term, and that, unfortunately, has not been resolved.
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