I'd emphasize that both an "Open Source" offering and a more complete "Permissive Source Available" offering were available. The goal would be to contrast the source-available offering favorably with closed-source proprietary offerings, rather than to invite, needlessly, a possibly unflattering comparison with Open Source.
But how about just not picking a fight with the Open Source community?
The argument over field-of-use restrictions is anything but new, so going in with the notion you're going to either win everybody over or that people are going to quietly roll over is foolish.
The other possibility is that you deliberately pick a fight with the Open Source community for the sake of publicity. Some marketers are cynical enough to do that, but I'm not — and Timescale are not taking a combative approach and don't seem to be either.
But people really ought to know by now that attempting to coopt the term "Open Source" is certain to provoke an infuriated and vocal response. This latest wave has been going on for what, a year or two by now?
That's not meaningful; there's a reason why the FSF and OSI have very similar criteria that end up being essentially identical in practical application; the value associated with F/OSS isn't on a smooth continuum that varies with proximity to those definitions, there's a very sharp cliff near the edge and this is outside of it.
That other actors are free to commercially exploit, including offering SaaS versions without restriction, the software is a major benefit against vendor lock-in for users, even if they have no desire to exercise that freedom directly, and has important effects on building a diverse, invested community around a piece of software. Restricting this to allow rent extraction, while not unethical (outside of, e.g., the ideological framework of the idealistic Free Software community, as opposed to the F/OSS for pragmatic reasons communiry) in the same way other proprietary-licensed commercial software is not unethical, does not even approximate the value of F/OSS.
Vendors can keep having proprietary rent-protection licenses, they just need to stop trying to convince the Open Source community that they are somehow pragmatically equivalent to Open Source. They aren't, even approximately, and critically that is the entire reason that vendors choose them, so they need to stop the dishonest sales pitches.
But it is nearly functionally identical, that's the fact of the matter. It's open source with one tiny restriction that matters to nearly nobody. That sounds pragmatically equivalent to me, from the definitions of those words. I find your claim more dishonest than theirs on that basis. You're trying to say it's a far cry from open source, and that's just not the case.
No, its not. Its superficially similar (in much the same way that, say, the Constitution of the USSR was superficially similar to a liberal democratic constitution), but not having key commercial uses reserved for a rent-seeking copyright owner is central to the function of F/OSS.
> It's open source with one tiny restriction that matters to nearly nobody.
It matters to lots of people; sure, very few people are likely to directly exercise it, but that others are free to exercise it is central to the value proposition of open source for other users.
That's like trying to describe a nectarine without talking about peaches or plums. You could do it, but you could communicate more effectively if you could make comparisons to the most similar well known concept.
They are somewhat careful to make the distinction and refer to it as source available, open source in spirit, etc. I think that's fine and legitimate communication.
Source available is a less controversial term, but it's also less descriptive. It can be a wide variety of software licenses. Whereas open source is much closer to this license. I don't see the problem here, how would you communicate it if you worked in their marketing department, if you're being honest?