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It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

drewdevault.com

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Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#131

Post by freehunter »

BonesJustice wrote: post #129
freehunter wrote: post #31

I agree that if you've labeled your software incorrectly as open source and you've been corrected, it should be re-labeled and the problem shouldn't be ignored. I will say, though, that personally I feel "free" software has a labelling problem. I'm not heavily engaged in the open-source movement, and a lot of the terms and wording and licensing confuses me to the point where I don't want to use it because I'm not sur…

Labeling is a problem, and I think the accepted defintion of "open source" is not a very good one. We have "free" software, "open source" software, and "free and open source" software, but I feel these terms are too amorphous and overlap needlessly. It would be easier to describe some of these "kind of open source" licenses if "free" and "open source" had more disjoint definitions. Free software gives you the freedom…

>I will also note that I misunderstood "free as in beer" for a very long time.

Yup. When I first heard about it in high school forever ago, I thought it sarcastically meant for-pay software, because beer costs money. A free ($0) beer is very rare.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#132

Post by boomboomsubban »

TimJYoung wrote: post #107
boomboomsubban wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This version of events is so incredibly wrong. Free software started in the eighties over concerns about how proprietary software was being used. Embrace-extend-exstinquish was Microsoft's attack on a growing free software market, it had nothing to do with the web. The "free" in "free software" never referred to the price, and is not business strategy. It's used like in "free speech," and it refers to the free modifi…

Actually, he's 100% correct. The way that open source is used by very large tech companies today is way, way worse than anything MS ever did. MS never got a stranglehold on the network in the way that companies like Google have been able to do. Back in the 90s, if you wanted to run Novell, UNIX, or Linux instead of WinNT Server, there was nobody stopping you and there were a lot of options. The same with Office suite…

>Actually, he's 100% correct.

No. You agree with their end point. How they got there is not factual.

I don't understand your second paragraph. Why should I care about proprietary software competition? And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people?

>Also, public roads are a bad metaphor for software: there isn't a market for public roads, and software can always be innovated upon

My use was very narrow, the ability for bad actors to use infrastructure doesn't put the infrastructure at fault. That said, roads have a market and allow innovation.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#133

Post by boomboomsubban »

icebraining wrote: post #98
boomboomsubban wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This version of events is so incredibly wrong. Free software started in the eighties over concerns about how proprietary software was being used. Embrace-extend-exstinquish was Microsoft's attack on a growing free software market, it had nothing to do with the web. The "free" in "free software" never referred to the price, and is not business strategy. It's used like in "free speech," and it refers to the free modifi…

I don't think you're really in disagreement. api didn't actually say FOSS started in the 90s, but that the "FOSS revolution" (which I read as the widespread use of FOSS licenses) did. And that statement still works if you read Free as "in speech".

I could be wrong, buy they seem to talk about how the "free" part was important to combat Microsoft's costly licence, and how that isn't an issue anymore.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#134

Post by yellowapple »

BeetleB wrote: post #69
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term most people use for this is "source available". Calling it "open source" is misleading, and continuing to call it that after it's been pointed out to you is flatly dishonest.

>The term most people use for this is "source available". Calling it "open source" is misleading, and continuing to call it that after it's been pointed out to you is flatly dishonest. Given how every Reddit/HN thread I come across has an argument on whether it is appropriate to use open source in this context, I strongly disagree with the phrase "most people". In my experience, most people call it open source, and i…

The reddit/HN arguments about the definition of "open source" pop up specifically because there are people stubbornly insisting upon subverting the definition of "open source" to mean something other than its official and formal and well-established definition per the OSI.

If the license does not meet the OSI's definition of "open source", then it is not open source. If the license does not meet the FSF's definition of "free software", then is it not free software. Case closed. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. These organizations have existed for decades, and the definitions they have formalized for their respective terminologies have in turn existed for decades. The meanings of "open source" and "free software" are perfectly clear, and the sorts of licenses being discussed - like those using the Commons Clause - are very clearly neither open source nor free software by those very same well-established-for-decades definitions.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#135

Post by TimJYoung »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #132
TimJYoung wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, he's 100% correct. The way that open source is used by very large tech companies today is way, way worse than anything MS ever did. MS never got a stranglehold on the network in the way that companies like Google have been able to do. Back in the 90s, if you wanted to run Novell, UNIX, or Linux instead of WinNT Server, there was nobody stopping you and there were a lot of options. The same with Office suite…

>Actually, he's 100% correct. No. You agree with their end point. How they got there is not factual. I don't understand your second paragraph. Why should I care about proprietary software competition? And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people? >Also, public roads are a bad metaphor for software: there isn't a market for public roads, and software can always be innovated upon My use wa…

"Why should I care about proprietary software competition?"

Because without it we all pay much higher prices than we normally would, and we get sub-par quality/innovation. Unless you're somehow intimating that proprietary software can be completely eliminated, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think that such views are grounded in reality.

"And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people?"

I think this has been demonstrated pretty clearly over the last 10-15 years: they use open source to direct the industry in ways that are beneficial to them, regardless of whether they are good for everyone else. And, it is often the case that there are serious issues for anyone that would want to compete against them in a specific area of software because they're now competing against "free". It forces companies to diversify into areas where they have little expertise, just to be able to compete. So, instead of a company being a developer tools company, they're now something else that also happens to give away developer tools. In the end, it favors large corporations over smaller enterprises in an industry that has traditionally been one with very low startup costs and lots of opportunity.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#136

Post by boomboomsubban »

TimJYoung wrote: post #135
boomboomsubban wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Actually, he's 100% correct. No. You agree with their end point. How they got there is not factual. I don't understand your second paragraph. Why should I care about proprietary software competition? And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people? >Also, public roads are a bad metaphor for software: there isn't a market for public roads, and software can always be innovated upon My use wa…

"Why should I care about proprietary software competition?" Because without it we all pay much higher prices than we normally would, and we get sub-par quality/innovation. Unless you're somehow intimating that proprietary software can be completely eliminated, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think that such views are grounded in reality. "And how are they building these free software moats that stop other…

>Because without it we all pay much higher prices than we normally would, and we get sub-par quality/innovation. Unless you're somehow intimating that proprietary software can be completely eliminated, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think that such views are grounded in reality.

There has been no shortage of quality and innovative free software. I see no reason that restrictions on a users rights would encourage innovation or a quality product.

Reading the rest of your post, you also seem to view free software as primarily about price. The picture you paint sounds more like what Internet Explorer did to browsers than any free software I can think of.

> So, instead of a company being a developer tools company, they're now something else that also happens to give away developer tools

Or you can take the existing developer tools and improve and extend them. Having access to a large amount of your competitors resources allows you to more easily compete on an even field.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#137

Post by ldiracdelta »

gus_massa wrote: post #94
IggleSniggle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, “brownies with a sprinkling of horseshit” is extremely descriptive yet concise. I understand what this is faster than reading the recipe for what this thing is.

Using another analogy, it's like "vegan lasagna with meat". We all understand what it mean, but once you put some juicy meat there you can't call it vegan anymore.

Non-metaphorically, I highly recommend ordering vegetarian pizza with extra meat. You get a bunch of excellent vegetables and meat to boot! Very delicious.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#139

Post by dragonwriter »

slededit wrote: post #102
yebyen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the model that AGPL was designed to combat, right? Under the AGPL, Amazon would be free to do that, as long as they released the code for their managed deployment systems. (This doesn't get you any money, but it saves you from the sense that your FOSS-work has been exploited by a commercial entity that doesn't give anything back, so long as it's actually enforceable.)

AGPL says nothing about monetization. It only says Amazon would have to open any modifications they made. Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers it does not solve the problem of paying the people actually doing the work.

> Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers

Which, if they really are the dominant beneficiary, they probably will; whoever is making the most money from the software has the most financial interest in maintaining it, and that's the reason so many big corps that benefit from FOSS invest heavily back into those projects, either via sponsorship of projects or paying their own developers to work on the codebase or both.

But that doesn't serve the interests of the investors in the company doing the initial work, who invested in the hopes of capturing the downstream revenue later development of the work would produce. Which is understandable, but they shouldn't attempt to trade on the popularity of open source licenses with their non-open alternatives.

And that, not the “people doing the work”, is what the Commons Clause is about.

Re: It's not okay to pretend your software is open source

#140

Post by dragonwriter »

esotericn wrote: post #110
icebraining wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unlicensed code is the DRMed one - you're implicitly stating that you reserve the right to impose restrictions or sue any of your users. CC0 or MIT actually releases them from those restrictions.

When you walk by me in the street, you're implicitly reserving the right to throw me in to oncoming traffic. In reality, despite being strictly possible, this barely ever occurs in practice. I don't think it's fair to use the term "implicit" in that way. No-one is suggesting that you write your startup's infrastructure based on random bits of code, that's obviously a bad idea. I'd basically consider 'no licence' as e…

> When you walk by me in the street, you're implicitly reserving the right to throw me in to oncoming traffic

No such right exists, so it is not implicitly reserved.

This is not the case, in law, with copyright.

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