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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

#111

Post by aatd86 »

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…

Maybe that's the whole point. Entities which rely on the product enough to propose contributions are more likely to be paying customers who really need to have a given feature available?

People seem to complain that they are burnt out by open source quite often so not sure that there are that many contributions apart from a couple projects.

It may also protect a project against business vultures. If you are trying to monetize your project but someone richer than you forks it and offer it for free, what can you do?

Yet, by being source available, the code is still auditable. It is easier for people to understand how the software works. And nowadays you can fine tune an LLM over it I guess...

Seems that is might also be a valid perspective? You can probably have a kind of bus clause so that source code does not become abandoned?

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

#112

Post by narcraft »

anon-3988 wrote: post #69

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.

It'd be like copyright trolling the Library of Babel. The set of useful programs would be totally eclipsed by incoherent gibberish (even if there were a means to ensure that the randomly generated code were syntactically correct). In other words, the signal to noise ratio would be microscopic and running this scheme in finite time would effectively result in zero valuable code being successfully squatted.

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

#113

Post by bloppe »

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…

I agree with you the "source available" is overstretched. It's hard to come up with a good new label for the first group. Maybe "Open Use" or "Fair Source".

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

#114

Post by comex »

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…

Counterpoint: I’ve often wished the proprietary software I use was source-available so that I could fix bugs for myself.

The idea of doing free work for a company does feel weird. But when some bug is really getting on my nerves, being able to fix it and not have to deal with it anymore is a huge benefit!

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

#116

Post by immibis »

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…

That's why SSPL was created. People working in tech companies have expressed extreme vitriol for SSPL - I wonder why.

The SSPL isn't the best designed license, but it is "more AGPL than AGPL"

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

#117

Post by douglascamata »

NiloCK wrote: post #84

Again and forever: These fights stem from usage of a proprietary definition of Open Source (the OSI's). Obviously the definition doesn't resonate with DHH, and he uses the words 'open' and 'source' colloquially. Open, as in a book or a window, source, as in the thing that gets compiled into bits and bobs that run on computers. You wouldn't jump on someone's "open letter" to city hall because of a lack of freedom to f…

Pretty much the most sound comment in this section. It's like some organization "stole" the meaning of the words "open source" and called it "Open Source" (with the capitalization). Now you can't say your source is open for anyone to read anymore because it's not "Open Source"™ as "That Entity"™ defines it.

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

#118

Post by rdsubhas »

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 to a newly joined fresher? And so on and on, where every person or layer every week says "you're doing it wrong" and you have to restart your proofing and explanation process from scratch?

Hint: After few weeks/months of this (or after 4 times of restarting your proofing process), you start questioning your sanity and life choices.

In those days, all I wished for is just "source-available", so that I can just debug myself what is going on and provide a concise bug report, instead of talking to support.

The weird part is, I'm pretty sure, on the other side, Oracle/IBM also LOST money in that same process. They had to hire an army of people. It was lose-lose on both sides.

Source-available means customers of that software can perform debugging themselves and file pretty good support tickets.

If you are an enterprise today, you would absolutely consider make it source-available to save on your own costs.

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

#119

Post by preisschild »

bloppe wrote: post #78
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…

The BUSL license requires shifting to an open-source license no later than 4 years after publication. I'd be happy to contribute to a BUSL-licensed project knowing my contributions will shift to an MIT license within 4 years. And the original authors don't have to worry as much about Amazon eating their lunch.

While that is certainly better, the original point still stands. If the company goes bust the latest source code will only be open source after 4 years. By that time other software has likely taken over the need in the first place, because not having that need fulfilled for 4 years is mostly not reasonable. And older versions often don't have compatibility with new versions either.

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

#120

Post by piaste »

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. [..] 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.

Don't need to make PRs to benefit from the source being available. Running software whose source code has been under public eyeballs, and that I have compiled myself (or that a trusted third-party has compiled) is far more secure than running a binary blob that may or may not do what the developer's marketing page promises.

> If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license.

Closed-source apps have had source-code escrow clauses for a long time, exactly to avoid that problem. "If my company shuts down, you get all the source code and can do whatever you want with it."

Such clauses can, and should, be brought over to source-available licenses, where they would also be trivial since you don't even need a physical escrow.

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