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

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 sure what legal or press hell I might be unleashing in the future. The fact that "free" needs to be clarified with "free as in beer" or "free as in speech" is the most notable. Any thesaurus can give a dozen or more great words to use other than the ambiguous "free".

Some of the OSI/FSF licenses can be (in my opinion) just as restrictive and encumbered (albeit in different ways) as non-free/non-open licenses. The biggest ambiguity to me is having multiple pieces of software with different licenses. I've seen some Ruby gems where they're GPL'd, and I'm not sure what the definition of "modified" means as it pertains to when I need to redistribute the code. If I used MIT licensed code inside of a GPL application, do I need to release the MIT code too? What if I need to use non-free code in an otherwise GPL codebase? I'm just SOL? Do I need to guarantee my released GPL code works, or can I release completely broken code and still satisfy the license?

And this post highlights that pretty well those franken-licensing problems. What the hell is Commons Clause? I've never even heard of it... or maybe I did hear of it and like the post says I just thought it was Apache Commons or Creative Commons. Again, ambiguous terms that have tons of better words in a thesaurus.

FSF/OSI have changed the world for the better for sure, but like with the million and a half Linux distros, the tyranny of choice ends up making the process harder. I've never released any of my code as open-source because to be honest, I have no idea what "open source" actually means.

The article states two different issues at play. I agree with you on the first one: everyone can license their project however they want. It is your code after all.

The second issue is a bit more complicated, and I can't agree with you on this. If adding the Commons Clause to a license changes the license, using the parent's license name to take advantage of brand recognition is misleading for the end users. It is false advertising, and it hurts the brand of the parent license.

If "Apache 2.0 + Commons Clause" is so common and so appreciated, surely it wouldn't be problematic to rename the whole thing and avoid this issue.

> Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product

Is that an actual license? Because that's not what I've seen most often recently, at all.

An honest FOSS license + dual licensed for commercial would say "it's fine if you make money, and we don't need a cut... unless you've integrated our software AND you don't want your final product to be similarly open-source."

The recent example that's coming to mind is the new CKEditor real-time collaborative version that came out recently. You can integrate this in a commercial product, as long as the users of the product are free to stand up their own instance (instead of paying you to host it, using their editor product as an integrated part of your commercial product.) If your product is closed and you want it to integrate their CKeditor, the other license that is available costs $25/mo per 25 Monthly Active Users.

Even if your product is open-source and users are free to go off and host their own instance, it seems likely that many will opt to pay you to host it instead. Doing this supports your development effort and keeps you in business, meanwhile entitling your paid users to whatever degree of support you're offering subject to availability.

If it's not worth $X/mo per user to you, to keep the users locked-in to the product that you borrowed part of, and such that the users don't have this other option in case your company goes belly-up, then maybe you should really be open-source? Or maybe you should just build your own whatever-it-is that you wanted for free, to make a part of your product.

This post seemed aggressive and vague to me. I'm not even sure what problem the author has with these licenses. I _think_ the issue is confusing naming - which seems pretty solvable - and not a fundamental problem with "dual licensing" / "source available" / "commons clause" software?

People can develop software out in the open and say "use it as it is, for free!", "use it as part of a new product, for free!", but also say "please do not sell this software as it is" and "please do not make and sell an almost-identical product using this software". That seems good to me, if the other option is closed-source.

E.g. I could make a product, you can use it for free, I will try to make money selling consulting services around the product (you can compete with me on that!) just don't sell the software.

I am happy to be corrected if there is a problem with these licenses being misused (or misrepresented as free and open source), but the post didn't give any examples.