Item — HN Reader

You and Symbiote are technically correct, what I'm suggesting wouldn't match The Open Source Definition [1]. But being "correct" matters little to me, what matters is promotion of the idea & usage of free software.

> Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. [2]

I believe you'd agree that everything-as-a-service and tivoized products do not make users free, even if they technically don't violate the terms of FOSS-licensed code that they incorporate.

> The Business Source Licence

Yes, I've heard about that license, but I think it's mostly applicable when an already existing company decides to make its product more open, while I was thinking of the opposite — a group of independent contributors realizing "hey, we've made something big, let's protect our work (and potentially get rewarded for our efforts)" and creating a more formal entity around it.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd/ [2] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

1 comments

> what matters is promotion of the idea & usage of free software

It's not a mere technicality, it's an important point of principle.

The FSF used to use the term semifree for such licences, but now just call them proprietary or nonfree. [0]

Similarly the OSI page you linked shows that the OSI considers non-commercial restrictions to breach criterion 6, No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.

> you'd agree that everything-as-a-service and tivoized products do not make users free, even if they technically don't violate the terms of FOSS-licensed code

Tivoization was addressed in GPLv3. The SASS point is less clear-cut as it's not obvious how to define the relevant boundaries, but roughly speaking the AGPL addresses this.

Not all problems can be addressed by software licences though.

> a group of independent contributors realizing "hey, we've made something big, let's protect our work (and potentially get rewarded for our efforts)" and creating a more formal entity around it

The point remains that if they adopt a licence that prohibits commercial use, the project is no longer Free and Open Source software. There's certainly a place for formal organisations though, and there are many of them in the FOSS world: FSF and GNU, OSI, SFLC, Linux Foundation, Apache, Mozilla, Eclipse Foundation.

There's also TideLift which seems to be doing well raising funds for FOSS contributors while also improving software quality. [1]

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

[1] https://medium.com/general-catalyst-amplified/introducing-ti... (I would link to their official About page but it's pretty uninformative)