Saying Goodbye to GitHub – Ersei 'N Stuff

Re:Saying Goodbye to GitHub – Ersei 'N Stuff by zelphirkalt on Monday April 03, 2023 @03:53AM (#35419993)

If we go by how many people explain open source, you would be right, but if we go by how people who actually know what their licenses are supposed to do explain open source, then no. You give a license for a specific reason. One might be to allow others to copy, but there is usually a condition, and that is to leave the license information intact. If we go further towards free/libre software licenses like GPL or AGPL, then we have more conditions to it. For example that, if you distribute software using that code, you need to distribute the source of your software as well (a bit imprecise).

If you want to get a better picture of the situation, read up on the licenses and what they do, specifically the term "copyleft".

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Re:Saying Goodbye to GitHub – Ersei 'N Stuff by robertlagrant on Monday April 03, 2023 @05:58AM (#35420947)

That's why OSS is not about the contents of more restrictive licences (as you say, copyleft is a good example), but about the broadest definition that applies to all of them. More specialised sub-types can have more conditions, but then we should speak about those sub-types directly.

I make this point because it causes confusion. Saying "my OSS project is being run by others for money and I get none of it" is confusing, as it uses the supertype. Using the subtype is clearer, and even self-explanatory: "my project I licenced so others can make money from it while giving me none is being run by others to make money from it and I get none".

That may be a bad situation, but at least the reasons are now clear.

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