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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

#121

Post by teilo »

pie_flavor wrote: post #93
teilo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not what the decision says. OSI is guilty of making claims that the court did not make, and they are adding needless confusion to the legal definitions of the terms "Open Source" and "Free". No court has ever ruled on a definitive meaning of "open source" that matches OSI's definition of the term. OSI is claiming that the term "open source" is what is false advertising. But both the trial and appellate cou…

Sure they're free. I can get them for $0. If that statement is wrong, then 'open source just means source-available' is also wrong, for the same reasons. People who release OSI 'open source' software call it open source, people like GitHub who talk about licenses use OSI's definition, and people who release closed-source-available software clarify that it's not 'open source', using those words. The only people who tr…

The "Free" in "FOSS" has never meant $0. That's a possible and common consequence of "free," but not its definition. In fact, "free" does not necessarily imply $0. I can take an MIT licensed codebase, compile it, and sell it, and break no license. I am "free" to sell this code and products derived therefrom. I am also "free" to give it away.

But what I cannot do is take a piece of software that is not "free" and advertise that it is free.

That's what's going on here.

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

#122

Post by stonemetal12 »

So on the Neo4j website they have a community edition that is GPLv3 license with a link to gnu.org, not their own gpl + some stuff version. However on their pricing page they list a number of size and performance limitations to the community edition.

How does that work? It would seem like false advertising to claim I have to upgrade to remove their arbitrary limitations. I don't see how they legally enforce those limitations since they are licensing under a vanilla GPL v3.

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

#123

Post by pessimizer »

warp wrote: post #17
joebob42 wrote: post #5

I 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 .

In practice I don't think it's just OSI which gets to decide this. Debian and Red Hat have their own teams determining whether something is Open Source enough to allow into their distributions, and obviously the Free Software Foundation keeps their own list of licenses which they consider Free Software. If these groups of people disagree on whether a particular license is Free/Open Source software, it's not going to…

The only relationship between Free and Open Source Software is that the bulk of Open Source Software can be relicensed into Free Software (as long as the OSS license stipulations on e.g. including a copy of the license or acknowledging authorship are followed.) The FSF will never claim any interest in deciding what Open Source Software is.

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

#124

Post by pessimizer »

busterarm wrote: post #26
warp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice I don't think it's just OSI which gets to decide this. Debian and Red Hat have their own teams determining whether something is Open Source enough to allow into their distributions, and obviously the Free Software Foundation keeps their own list of licenses which they consider Free Software. If these groups of people disagree on whether a particular license is Free/Open Source software, it's not going to…

They have every right to dictate the meaning of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software Read the first section.

They should have one, but they don't, so it allows parasitic companies to trade on the goodwill that the OSI built up. If you don't think that people who sell carbon-based foods should always be able to sell them as organic, or that any coffee buyer who thinks that they do business fairly should be able to label their product as Fair Trade, you shouldn't think companies that are open about their source code should be able to label themselves Open Source.

I'm going to label my company Open Source because we're open about how we source the laptops we programmed the software on. They're MacBook Pros, and you're welcome.

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

#125

Post by bawolff »

ttybird2 wrote: post #117
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

That's not really convincing. Sure the term "open" and "source" have appeared in conjunction together previously, but it was rare for it to be used as a proper noun, instead of an adjective describing a noun, and even if it was, it was OSI that populized the term.

Regardless of any historical context, in contemporary usage, "open source" has a commonly understand meaning and its what the OSI says it is. Other meanings make as much sense as pointing out that computers aren't machines, but a job title.

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

#126

Post by glind72 »

pie_flavor wrote: post #59
glind72 wrote: post #4

This 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.

The OSI founders are (some of) the inventors of the term Open Source. It'd be like telling Ken Thompson he's wrong about what constitutes Unix Philosophy. Or, for that matter, the Free Software Foundation that they're wrong about what constitutes Free Software.

Maybe the original founders yes, but the board and the decisions they make on how it's governed now is not the same group. That's like saying the original authors of the constitution never meant for it to be a living and evolving document. I don't think they ever intended it to be the one and only definition of the term and licenses.

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

#127

Post by Beltalowda »

bawolff wrote: post #125
ttybird2 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not really convincing. Sure the term "open" and "source" have appeared in conjunction together previously, but it was rare for it to be used as a proper noun, instead of an adjective describing a noun, and even if it was, it was OSI that populized the term. Regardless of any historical context, in contemporary usage, "open source" has a commonly understand meaning and its what the OSI says it is. Other meaning…

> "open source" has a commonly understand meaning and its what the OSI says it is

I would contest this, based on the many discussions there have been on HN about this, as well as many people (including many "normal" software developers who are not deeply invested in open source) I've met and talked to over the years having only a vague notion of what "open source" is exactly (often being something along the lines of "you have access to the source code").

I'd be willing to bet a substantial amount of money that if you were to ask 1,000 random software developers about Open Source, the OSI, and the OSD over half of them won't be able to give you a coherent answer on what these things are exactly.

This is the crux of the issue, really. Who did or did not invent the term isn't necessarily all that important: the thing is that in common understanding it doesn't really have the clear specific meaning in the minds of most, whereas for others – I would argue a minority – it has a very clear and very specific meaning, which inevitably leads to friction.

I guess the point of "Open Source was used before the OSI came along" is to demonstrate that it's a term that has a kind-of "obvious" meaning, and has been coined independently of the OSI's coining more than once. People don't hear "Open Source" and then consult a precise definition, they hear "Open Source" and assume it means what it says on the tin. The same applies to "Free Software", a term with 15 years more effort to explain what it means exactly, with even more limited success.

It seems to me that attempting to educate a landmass about a term with an "obvious meaning" is a futile effort; there have been many language pedantics over the years, and I don't know of a single attempt that has worked out. You're welcome to try as far as I'm concerned, but it seems to me that there are many more fruitful ways to spend time and effort.

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

teilo wrote: post #121
pie_flavor wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they're free. I can get them for $0. If that statement is wrong, then 'open source just means source-available' is also wrong, for the same reasons. People who release OSI 'open source' software call it open source, people like GitHub who talk about licenses use OSI's definition, and people who release closed-source-available software clarify that it's not 'open source', using those words. The only people who tr…

The "Free" in "FOSS" has never meant $0. That's a possible and common consequence of "free," but not its definition. In fact, "free" does not necessarily imply $0. I can take an MIT licensed codebase, compile it, and sell it, and break no license. I am "free" to sell this code and products derived therefrom. I am also "free" to give it away. But what I cannot do is take a piece of software that is not "free" and adve…

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by josefx »

mintplant wrote: post #108
josefx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand it was never legally AGPL licensed, it was licensed on a custom license that just happened to merge AGPL and commons clause. The commons clause in this case is not an addition to existing AGPL licensed code.

I don't think this argument holds, because Section 7 refers to "this License", which the AGPL text defines specifically as: > "This License" refers to version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License. Thus I don't think that references to "this License" within the portion of their custom license that is the verbatim AGPL text would automatically expand to also encompass the tacked-on Commons Clause text.

Okay, if I read the court document correctly Section 7 explicitly refers to Section 10 to limit its scope and section 10 is explicitly about things a licensee (You) isn't allowed to do. So it cannot be applied to terms added by the licensor.

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

#130

Post by Gigachad »

ttybird2 wrote: post #117
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

The OSI definition of open source matches what almost everyone thinks of open source. It's the most useful definition. The Stallman gang have wasted over a decade trying to redefine open source to weaker terms making it useless and insisting that everyone use "Free software" instead which is insane since the world does and always will think of free as in money.
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