Even still, open source licenses may be used to sell software for which the source code is not available before purchase. For example, the Apache 2.0 license can be used for this; it protects users of altered versions of the source code from patent infringement lawsuits and forces the Apache license to be passed on to the end users of the modified work. It doesn't forbid throwing the source onto a repository somewhere, of course, so the source doesn't remain closed for long, but I can imagine many businesses wouldn't want to sell their technical support to a company that published their source code, and businesses are generally wary of using software without any form of support.
There's various ways people use the term "open source" and I think in general people mean "software that's available publicly for free" when they use it, but some of the open source licenses allow for some propietary-like behaviour while using them.
The copyright itself couldn't be used to take the code down, because the open license allows the customer to do exactly that.
Theoretically, a customer can buy the software, fork it, and turn it into an open source fork. Without the support contract to receive updates, though, I doubt that'll be very useful in the end.
At worst, a competitor buys your software and uses your own software against you by analysing, publishing and extending it, and selling support contracts in your market. However, I strongly doubt there's much money to be made that way.
I'm no businessman either so I wouldn't know what brings companies to make software like that. I think these licenses were born in an era of offline, compiled blobs that received updates every month at the most, whereas modern software development is much more focused on freemium and SaaS.
Technically, you could provide binaries and a GPL license, then provide source code when verified customers (eg they send their receipt/license number with their request) ask for it.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing in GPL that says you can't sell the software and operate this way. If your customers hand out the binaries to third parties, that's on them to provide the GPL and source code, not you. And of course, they could sell, re-release, etc, but anyone else could come and do the same to them.
It's risky, to be sure, and it feels "wrong" only because we've become conditioned to the status quo of so-called "intellectual property". Frankly, I would love if I could write open source software for a living, but there's a big fear of letting go of a steady paycheck (and benefits!), but that has more to do with entrepreneurship fears than software licenses.
"Sure you can redistribute the software. We'll just cut you off if you do."
But suing Bruce Perens for saying that this is a legal risk is a pretty bad look for grsecurity...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/27/grsecurity_bruce_pere...
From "The Open Source Definition"[1]:
> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
[1]: <https://opensource.org/osd>
UPDATE: it seems it is licensed under AGPLv3. So it is open source. Interesting.
Turns out it is open source.
"Interesting"
Like... why did you expect it to not be open source
This is curious behavior. There’s lots of incorrect and misleading articles. But I try to bring up questions only when exhausting reasonable investigations.
2. Searching for open3A in duckduckgo brings me to a page that spits out PHP errors and doesn't give me anything.
3. The only way that I now know where the zip file is, is because another commenter linked to it.
4. We've seen companies disguise something as open-source, when it wasn't.
5. Open source is commonly hard-to-sell.
So no, it wasn't 10 seconds to verify and the author didn't make it particularly easy to do so. My doubts are completely natural, given past news in "open-source". Are you commenting in bad faith?
I searched for “open3A” via Google (not ddg, but if I got errors on ddg, I would try “!open3a”) and the first hit is a German site. I don’t speak German, but I saw the download link [0] and downloaded the first zip and viewed the license.
I spent more time downloading the 4mb zip than clicking on stuff.
It’s not the author’s job to make answering my questions easy. It is my job to not make easily verifiable claims without trying.
I’ve dealt with lots of projects that are crappy about licenses and frequently have to download the tarball to look for licenses, just to check if I can actually use.
The author could make this easier, but she didn’t. That doesn’t mean I should go into attack mode because other people make bad claims. (And I suppose I give up after 10 seconds and don’t want to stick around for 20 seconds)
I also noticed that author doesn’t even link to her project. Maybe it’s because her project is in German and the blog is English. But I’d rather have more posts like this with whatever time the author can spend, than wait for it to sit in draft while unimportant details are finally added.
Here's a re-enactment of how I detected the license: https://i.imgur.com/Gr4xMT5.mp4
It's near trivially easy.
Here's another one I like when I want my face and audio in: Screenity https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity (very easy code to work with too).
While I agree with companies misrepresenting their products as open source as being a problem and believe the AGPL should have been mentioned, I do not see how the point about open source being hard to sell as being relevant. Not only are there are success stories in the world of open source, but the author made their success sound modest.
BTW typing only "open3A" in DDG gaves me the right answers all on the first page.
So you've made the assumption that it's distributed under a source access only license, but instead of verifying that assumption, you're asking others to correct the conclusions you draw from it.
"What do you do?" "Software development." "What kind of software?" [back and forth, question-and-short-answer at a time]
"What do you do?" "Software development." "Oh, so you like write websites and stuff?" "No, actually, [long enthusiastic explanation of their job]"
I've been accused of it often, when I meet someone new (who's a geek) and we do what in my head is the "geek subject matter negotiation", where each side narrows down domain expertise and experience by doing a breadth first tree search across all shared geek-domains, followed by a depth first search down the tree paths with significant crossover.
One recovering-geek friend says we're going "Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch" at each other before deciding on a conversation topic and speed...
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Like-Switch-Influencing-Attracting-Wi...
I'm not saying which term is better, just explaining why "open source" might not be objectively wrong in this case.
Where do they define this? In the OSI definition it doesn't mention having the source available for everyone, only that whoever has the program should be able to get the source[0]. I do believe it doesn't follow "open source" the development model where development is in the open and anyone can contribute.
Being on Github doesn't make a project open source. Having a way for other people to easily contribute doesn't make a project open source. But being licensed under AGPL 100% does make a project open source.
They define what they think it clearly means to them... but they don't own the term.
It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses )
P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.