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Theme for 2024: more companies start inventing new "open source" licenses that aren't, and try to solve the freeloader problem by making "open source" mean "source available".

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in reply to Jeff Geerling

are you teasing a video about licensing models like with hashicorp? I didn't really get the point, what they changed, and what it causes.
in reply to Jeff Geerling

fascinating and relevant talk https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=1i0_kYY1g0qTdBWi
in reply to Jeff Geerling

"Open source" as in beer that you can drink yourself but you can't let anyone else taste and you can't cook with it.
in reply to Jeff Geerling

Recently advocated in Sentry's license-unveiling plan to get them to avoid conflating open source:

https://github.com/getsentry/fsl.software/issues/10

Which led me also write up why the distinction is important:

https://danb.me/blog/open-source-available-distinction/

TBF, they did actually listen to me and make changes to reduce confusion which was good to see.

in reply to Jeff Geerling

ha. might happen!

myelf I'm the author of a FOSS lib and so far using the model where the lib is just a public demo of my skills, and hopefully a source of inbound leads to further paying work, esp on systems involving that tech mix and problem domain. so it hasnt felt like a burden on me so far. but keeping an eye on its "account balance" for sure

LatLearn:
https://github.com/mkramlich/LatLearn

in reply to Jeff Geerling

omg yay? Licensing is already a dumpster fire in open source.

How about Apache, Linux Foundation and FSF start ENFORCING? There's a thought...

in reply to Jeff Geerling

then do a big spiel and a blog post titled "our commitment to open source" while the marketing department spends all day thinking about how to screw over your paying customers
in reply to Jeff Geerling

in the end everyone calls their software open source and the only closed source software vendors are those who lost their source code and survive by selling the last .exe
in reply to Jeff Geerling

The freeloader problem is the companies, as they never give as much as they take in the first place. Imho.

I’m very fine with commercial use of open source, if it’s done honestly.

And I sadly think you are right🙁 It’s the new public API. Most will make it effectively useless to stop people from using it. And a few will do something dramatic that gets headlines.

in reply to Jeff Geerling

the curious part about it all is how many people adopt/use projects without actually sitting and reading through the whole thing.
The worst sin one does in front of a license is "to assume with a sense of entitlement" rather than "know and understand" what rights come with said license.
(or why I don't use VS code).
in reply to Jeff Geerling

Which "freeloader problem" is it they are trying to solve?
in reply to kasperd

@kasperd the problem where you take VC money and promise 100x returns based on your open source software... then realize the software (bits and bytes) is not a moat for your profit so you decide open source isn't actually what you wanted, so you screw with your community of users 😀
in reply to Jeff Geerling

Yeah, a lot of commercial enterprises are doing this because it sounds trendy to the customer who generally knows nothing about open source.
in reply to Jeff Geerling

turns out, open source is not a business model, it even evolves more competitors offering „your“ product.

After thinking about it for a while, I changed my mind a bit.

A license to protect the business and releases the code as open source after a defined period may also be in the interest of those just using and contributing to the software without commercial interests

It really depends on the project, it‘s all about „cathedrals“ and „bazaars“.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)