Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dri.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 172 posts

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

#91

Post by koolala »

jasonkester wrote: post #33
School-Cotton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not at all on the same team. “Open source” is given away for free, to do what you want with it. Source available is not. Fundamentally they have nothing in common other than the fact that you are allowed to read the source code.

Indeed. One is given away for free to do whatever you want with it. The other is given away for free to do whatever you want except to be a dick. If you’re not planning to be a dick, they’re functionally identical. It’s an improvement.

"Source Available" is "follow whatever my rules are or I will sue you". That could include something as crazy as a license that says "be a dick and I will sue you". For normal people that can't afford legal fees or lawyers that gives "source available" a big range of abusive possibilities.

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

#92

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

safety1st wrote: post #57
benrutter wrote: post #46

I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects. I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes. The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but…

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 gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing...

It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.

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

#94

Post by eudoxus »

koolala wrote: post #85
eudoxus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to respond here assuming you are being genuine and not facetious or sarcastic (even though I am hoping you were). "Source available" doesn't in any way mean "you can sue anyone that uses your code for any reason...". The irony of highlighting the trickery of these terms then you yourself perpetuating wrong definitions is... amusing. "Source available" is by definition ill-defined, in the sense that "open so…

I edited it to be more specific while you were typing that. The entire point of copyright is a legal mechanism to sue people. "Source-available" at a minimum is someone sharing their code under their own copyright and terms of use. Yes the term is designed to trick outsiders. Most people don't even know that code is copyrighted by default when it is posted publicly and freely on the internet without a © symbol.

All code is shared "under someones own copyright and terms". Whether you use pre-existing words or not doesn't define if its open-source or source-available. I can write a license right now that I maintain the copyright, and written with my own terms that complies with the OSD. We happen to have a collection of existing licenses that have been vetted, but it isn't a exclusionary whitelist.

I'll reiterate, "source available" can only be defined as not OSD code that is viewable. Everything else is entirely open to implementation and interpretation.

This is the largest problem with the term. This is in stark contract to examples like "Fair Source" which has a legal definition like the OSD, and a entity behind it stewarding that definition [0], while being a subset of Source Available. All fair source is source available, not all source available is fair source.

Yet, fair source doesn't fall into your definition of source available.

[0] - https://fair.io/

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

#95

Post by bloppe »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #87
bloppe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good for you; you seem like a trusting person. I'd recommend against spending your time on that. Or at least try to get paid for it. I tend walk away from anything with a shared source license. I don't invest my time in it. I don't finish reading the README. It's an instant red flag.

The whole point of having a license is that you don't have to rely on trust. It's right there in the license. There's no way to weasel out of it.

https://mariadb.com/bsl11/

"Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License" ... "To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or any later version, or a license that is compatible with GPL Version 2.0 or a later version, where “compatible” means that software provided under the Change License can be included in a program with software provided under GPL Version 2.0 or a later version"

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

#96

Post by debugnik »

jbstack wrote: post #93

Misleading article. From the second paragraph: > David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH) released a new kanban tool, Fizzy, this week and called it open source. From the linked article by DHH: > That means it's not technically Open Source™

He calls it open source in the title and the following paragraph to that. That sentence only means he thinks of himself as cheeky.

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

#97

Post by techterrier »

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…

It's a way for SaaSy companies to do business in Europe.

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

#98

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

koolala wrote: post #75

I'm amazed how many people don't like open-source... Imagine the hellscape computers / the internet would be today if Linux was 'Source available'.

Some source available licenses are literally just modified open source with the addition of some clauses (mostly cloud related)

To me source available is: we are open source but if you are an cloud provider with billions of dollars, ask us for a license/fund us.

Technically linux gets funded enough and rightfully so but I remember how netbsd's fundings were so meagre and low which really saddened me.

To be honest, I thought about it and lets assume Linux uses a busl like license which open sources after 4 years

Most likely what would've happened is that someone will take that 4 year old code and then fork it to create the linux we all kinda love.

But overall I think linux is the bedrock of any vps/cloud provider which can be small enough too to be unable to buy their source available license so its kind of an mixed bag I guess and for linux, not worth it because it already gets a lot of funding.

It would be interesting if the same funding that linux kernel gets was shared at a similar level to the distros because I saw cachyos and talked to its creator on discord and I am not kidding but the fundings are very small for a project so big.

Also I think most people use source available license to make money or funding, basically the question which I want to ask you is: how to make enough money in open source?

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

#99

Post by RossBencina »

lmm wrote: post #4
RossBencina wrote: post #2

Interesting. The post is about whether a license prohibiting SaaS competitors is "open source" and whether it might work out as a good way to ensure project sustainability. In this context "source available" means that you have the source code but you can't use it to compete with the project owner. [Kinda puts Omarchy in a different light don't you think?] There is another, I think different, form of "source availabl…

> There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public fac…

I agree that it started that way, but that does not mean norms and expectations don't shift. To me, acting like it's 1980 is weird. The majority of maintained open source projects today are single-source-of-truth projects, not source code drops from unreachable invisible teams. There is a reason for that -- it's part of what makes the projects usable and dependable.

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

#100

Post by koolala »

eudoxus wrote: post #94
koolala wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I edited it to be more specific while you were typing that. The entire point of copyright is a legal mechanism to sue people. "Source-available" at a minimum is someone sharing their code under their own copyright and terms of use. Yes the term is designed to trick outsiders. Most people don't even know that code is copyrighted by default when it is posted publicly and freely on the internet without a © symbol.

All code is shared "under someones own copyright and terms". Whether you use pre-existing words or not doesn't define if its open-source or source-available. I can write a license right now that I maintain the copyright, and written with my own terms that complies with the OSD. We happen to have a collection of existing licenses that have been vetted, but it isn't a exclusionary whitelist. I'll reiterate, "source ava…

Why not both? Why can't something be source available and open source? Or fair source and source available? It isn't this complicated.
Post reply on HN