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

dri.es

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

#171
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will give you shit on, hardline, and selfish - my apologies. I need to slow down. By status quo I meant the closed source / proprietary world, which also supports a lot of open source projects with contributions and funding. Source available would seem, to me, to be creating an avenue to move closed things in a more open direction, and bring more people "into the fold", per sé. > And do you understand the question…

> I will give you shit on, hardline, and selfish - my apologies. I need to slow down. This was a good step. But you will not admit calling it was loaded to call people who prefer legal clarity ornery? > That question was motivated by the several comments expressing fears of being sued. I'm curious if there is a pattern of behavior among source available projects driving that, or if it's more just in principle. A lice…

> This was a good step. But you will not admit calling it was loaded to call people who prefer legal clarity ornery?

I did not intend to call the person ornery, I was asking if it was that ornery to them to have to care about getting sued, and pay attention to license terms, basically. This is one area where I think there is a meaningful distinction between libraries and end-user products.

> Treating legal documents seriously is not just principle.

Treating them seriously is one thing, automatically dismissing anything that doesn't provide unfettered rights is another. I understand the high value of that in certain contexts, but should those have claim to all of "open source"?

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

#172
post #114

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!

Or understand what it's doing internally. I used to dislike Oracle User Group presentations because it seemed as if most people were just guessing what the database was doing under the covers. MySQL presentations on the other hand (a) showed code and (b) were often given by the authors.
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