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by josephcsible·6y ago·view on hn ↗
That sounds like it's not open source. Also, license proliferation is a bad thing and you really shouldn't encourage it.
3 comments
Please, do tell, how long have you been writing "open source" and how much of your source is really open, and how much of that open source has anybody read?

You know what replaces open source? Trusted source. Not the source code, but the source of the code. I will gladly use code by somebody I trust, without looking, because ultimately I can't read every line, and nobody who preaches open source actually does read every line.

If you preach open source, or FOSS, but don't read and understand every line of code you use, you are a hypocrite.

Can I ask why it is that the "foss community" is so hell bent on restricting the freedom of creators to call their software open source if the source is open, or choose licenses that might help them actually support themselves financially? As far as I can tell the "freedom" pushed by Foss evangelists only goes one way - to benefit often corporate consumers. I genuinely don't think I've ever seen a "community" that is so intent on policing language and action than that which exists around Foss.
I think the FOSS community cares a lot about the freedom of the end-user, not so much about the freedom of original creators. That is, the freedom of everyone to become a creator, not the freedom of one particular creator to control their creation or profit from it in some way. This applies both to the GPL camp, which cares about the end-user of the binary; as well as the BSD/MIT camp, which cares about the end-user of the source.

Hence, their dislike of any kind of licenses which impose restrictions on consumers of the code/binary.

I'm not saying I agree, just presenting what I believe is the thinking behind this kind of policing.

I think my issue is that a nobleish idea that supported the freedom of everyone to be a creator has morphed into something (an ideology, a secular religion) that demands that creators not be able to make a living off their creation even if (or especially if) they are providing tooling for corporations that give nothing, or at least very little proportionally, back.
Sure, that is a valid position, and I mostly believe the same that you do.

To me, the OSS movement seems to be split between a minority of extreme idealism (Richard Stallman's position on the importance of software Freedom), and a majority of mostly big corporate pragmatists, which have realized that is far more lucrative to share the burden of developing common infrastructure between themselves than the previous status quo; and who greatly dislike anyone who tries to co-opt the OSS movement into something which does not serve this purpose. There is also a 3rd camp of companies that want to sell proprietary software, but who have noticed that open source variants of their software are a better marketing strategy than the shareware and freeware of old.

I believe that this third group is the biggest annoyance to both of the traditional OSS communities, but also the only ones who can actually make money by selling software whe also showing users exactly what code they are actually running.

If you dual-license your work under the AGPL and a paid non-copyleft license, then your product will be 100% FOSS, and you'll still be able to make a living from it instead of the Amazons of the world selling your product and giving nothing back.
That's what Mongo thought as well, and it turned out not to be true in their case (well, s/make a living/turn the profit your investors expect/g).
Open source has a specific common meaning. Other ideas have other common names like source available.
It means you can read the source. It doesn't mean it has to be free. That would be FOSS. And nothing has more convoluted multi-meanings than FREE, so your argument about "common meaning" is dead wrong. Also, trying to enforce universal meaning, like enforcing universal ideals, is patently retarding. FOH!
Free software has 2 common meanings. That says nothing about open source.

FOSS is also written F/OSS. It reflects that the common meaning of open source and the less common meaning of free software are almost identical. GNU says "...we know of only a few cases of source code that is open source but not free. In principle it could happen that some free programs are rejected as open source, but we don't know if that has ever happened."[1]

Source available is an unambiguous and more descriptive name for the kind of software that matters to you. Nobody can force you to call it that. But don't expect other people to change their definition of open source.

That says nothing about their ideals. Microsoft coined shared source the same year Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer.[2][3]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html.en

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20011108013601/http://www.suntim...

Open Source really became a religion, and every acolyte believes in their heart that non-FOSS is evil. Total newb flavored koolaid. It's not like I am advocating against FOSS, or open source, I am simply drawing a line where it matters and where it doesn't, for me.
Open source means you can read the source.

The idea that all my work must be FOSS is somebody else's ideal, and one that has kept a lot of people I know from getting paid. Meanwhile, plenty of code, probably most running your world, is purely in the dark and definitely not open source.

Whatever you think about "license proliferation", that's like, your opinion. What world are you from that I can't have my own license for my own work? What kind of lemmings notion is it that I should only use a well known, open source license, especially a license that explicitly gives my work away uncompensated to random people on the internet?

You are so brainwashed with slogan terminology that you think Open Source has exactly one meaning, and that meaning is not even that the source code is open? Jesus, this forum is retarding sometimes. FOH with yr downvotes.

Edit, furthermore, I have dozens of totally FOSS code projects out there, downloaded millions of time per month. Is your business 100% open source, down to how to track your users? Stop telling people what they should do out here.

> Open source means you can read the source.

No, that's "visible source" or "source available". Read the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd

It even addresses your misconception right up front: "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code."

> The idea that all my work must be FOSS is somebody else's ideal, and one that has kept a lot of people I know from getting paid.

You can get paid even if everything you build is FOSS. Look at Red Hat.

> Whatever you think about "license proliferation", that's like, your opinion. What world are you from that I can't have my own license for my own work? What kind of lemmings notion is it that I should only use a well known, open source license, especially a license that explicitly gives my work away uncompensated to random people on the internet?

Even if your bespoke license were open source, there's a very good chance that it would be incompatible with other licenses like the GPL, thus creating more ZFS-on-Linux sort of problems.

This needs more downvotes.