And yet people are fighting tooth and nail to redefine open source to mean OSI approved licence instead of using OSI approved license to mean OSI approved license.
>To see why just change the thread title: What’s up with these new non-OSI approved licenses?
It's an article that you can have a reasonable debate about without stacking the deck against the people you're arguing against. Which is why the people who make money by stacking the deck are so dead set to redefine the word to mean exactly what makes them the most money.
If OSI wanted to provide the official definition for what is "open source" and what is not, they could have perhaps trade-marked their term "Open Source".
But "OSI approved license" has its own vagueness about it. What does it mean that OSI "approves" a license? Approves it for what? To be called "Open Source"? But then unless they have the trademark for the term Open Source, they shouldn't be the one to give approvals for people to call their software that.
This reminds me of the debates about whether something is true Agile, or merely wannabe-Agile. Words are just words. It is good to have precise definitions but those can be specific to a given context. It is a bit like let x = y + z. Is that the correct definition of x? No, but it is a VALID definition of it, assuming y and z are well-defined as well.
The people trying to redefine anything are those ignorant of the history here.
Free software was coined in the 80s. I wasn't there for that.
Open source was coined in the 90s because we didn't want people to think that software which let you see the code was free of charge.
Then when they sold out a bunch of tech bros from SV decided that they knew best and redefined open source to mean whatever made their valuations go to the moon. The plan did work as expected because dot com crash.
The people around the OSI have always been share croppers that have been trying to get paid for other peoples work.
Was it redefined? My impression is that it has always effectively been a synonym for free software, just not carrying the political leanings.
Also, while I'm sure it's unintentional, your backwards of "sharecropper" smells racist.(It actually means paying someone for the right to do you your own work, and was an attempted to recreate slavery after slavery was banned in USA).
I would argue that they prohibit far less use cases than they are open for.
In any case, how would you describe these licenses? I don't feel like "source available" is an accurate descriptor in this case.
Sure the SaaS server licenses are more or less open use with caveat, but why won't a process paralleling tivoization occur?
I wouldn't find it odd for a hardware vendor to release source code, "for review" without the rights to use it on any other hardware as some do for binaries.
In a way that could be worse than closed source as that is similar to the problem of suspicion of reading leaked source code, maybe you are tainted and can't actually write software licensable for competing hardware. Maybe you never read the code yet it will appear that way, but you shouldn't check.
Given the oddities of IP and copyright infringement, it is often the case that only the owner benefits from a process of publishing. I.e. what good is the disclosure of a modern patent?
It’s kind of like that thing where software vendors give cheap or free licenses to educational users in order to get them hooked and then charge whatever company they might work for an arm and a leg to keep using it.
> My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition"
Large companies are free to use Sentry. There are Fortune 50 companies running Sentry at scale internally without paying us a cent. That's totally cool.
You're also free to compete with Sentry. You're not free to repackage Sentry for the purposes of competing with us. There are lots of competing error and performance monitoring products out there that do perfectly fine without it.
I should also note that many components of Sentry are distributed with OSI-approved licenses that you are free to use to compete with us. For example, our Symbolication service (https://github.com/getsentry/symbolicator) ships with an MIT license, and it's an important part of our business.
That seems like an obvious growth opportunity when investors need to see numbers go up
Aside, there seems to be confusion about what “relicensing” means. Even in this hypothetical scenario you’ve outlined, we can’t “relicense” already released software. Many users hosting Sentry internally are using years-old versions happily; they would continue to be able to do so. They could also choose to fork the last permissible version and maintain it themselves.
Personally, I think this scenario (relicensing such that self-hosted users could no longer do so) is incredibly unlikely. I don’t believe it would really do anything to grow the company.
I do agree that licenses like this will become more common in the future, and that's why I think it's useful to have an identifying term for them rather than making "open-source" less precise to include them. Different words for different things is good, in my opinion.