'Source available' is not open source (and that's okay)

I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects.

I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes.

The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but more meaningful "open source" out there.

As a lay person, I still don't get what is AGPL missing that makes vendors "invent" so many new licenses and spawn so much debate? Why not just use AGPL, and if it's insufficient, invest in an AGPLv2 initiative?

I think that people looks at n8n success and say why not use source available?... However, I believe they are wrong to believe that this would work for any project...

Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good.

Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support.

Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).

What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source?

To an outsider it looks like counterproductive bickering between people on the same team.

O'Sassy or whatever is certainly Source available, and not Open Source. DHH can pound sand.

I used to think the pedantry was foolish, but I've grown to understand the distinction. It's one thing to criticize the OSI's claim to the term, and I do think they could do a better job at getting out ahead of new licenses and whatnot, but even if you ignore OSI entirely then the distinction is of substantial value.

I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years.

At the same time it is not worth it if the spirit of Open Source is watered down.

I don't know, I kind of have trouble being enthusiastic about a caustic far right activist falling out with some other person over nuances in non-free software licensing.

> DHH's choice of license reacts to a real pressure in open source: many companies make real money from open source software while leaving the hard work of building and maintaining it to others.

If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software.

That being said; I have no issue with a developer choosing any license they want -- it's their software and therefore it's their right. But calling it "open source" when it specifically forbids certain use-cases is just wrong. DHH wants his cake (pretend it's real OSS) and eat it too (deny usages).

Watching what we charitably call this debate flare up yet again gives me an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, seeing people I've read and listened to for years heave time, attention, and more typing onto this tire fire evokes deep tragedy. On the other hand, I've been there, casting my own vanities to the bonfire, more than a few times. There's comfort in the familiar heat and glow.

I couldn't escape the waste until I was willing to give up the idea of myself as experienced, as an expert. Until I accepted that time served taught me lessons, but didn't bestow authority. Most people coming into this are new. They relearn what's useful and leave the rest behind. That's part of adaptation. I try to see their point of view.

If you ask a newer coder what "open source" means, they might say "like MIT?" or even just "like GitHub?" If you look "open" up in a good thesaurus, "available" is there. The Initiative---really, whoever's on the board now or later---will never own or effectively police the term "open source", much less "open source AI". And nobody claiming "open source" for good or ill will ever summon on themself the kind of attention or cachet that marketing bauble once commanded, no matter what their license says.

As for fellow oldheads, there's no resolving contradictions between ways we learned to frame these issues, decades ago. Can changes to a license be a solution to the funding problem? Can using freedom terms to buttress a business count as truly open? That bizarre conflict of ontologies won't decide where programming goes in the future, if it ever did. I doubt it will even be won or lost. It will just fade away, like the circumstances that started it.

DHH can kick the anthill. The activists can raise their old hue and cry. It's purely elective, demoded dramatics. The real problems of software politics today aren't expressible in either schema. They can even seem tautologically unsolvable. Meanwhile, we've got new aspirational generalities that aren't expressible in the old ways of speaking. "Sustainability", because many doing good aren't doing so well. "Decentralization", because we're all sharecropping on some platform now.

Sometimes I think the best I can do for the younger generations facing today is just to never impose petty trivia about "the movement" ever again. Never deign imply I know what they should consider important. If "free" and "open" meant something to me, let their inheritors tell me what they mean now, in practice. Tell me about the world they built and left for them.

Maybe I don't have to choose. After all, who reads blogs?

we need more source available, not less. im not the only one sick of the osi thought police. im fine with still calling it open. ya know what else, free as in speech is great. but so is free as in beer.

[dead]

Interesting. The post is about whether a license prohibiting SaaS competitors is "open source" and whether it might work out as a good way to ensure project sustainability. In this context "source available" means that you have the source code but you can't use it to compete with the project owner. [Kinda puts Omarchy in a different light don't you think?]

There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.

> Look, the term "open source" has a specific, shared meaning

No, YOU look. The term "open source", being made from two common words with actual specific, shared meanings, unfortunately together create a common-sense meaning that is NOT the "specific, shared" meaning that the Open Source Initiative defines it as. So, we'll spin and spin, stuck in this endless debate. And no amount of beating people over the head (except, maybe if you can find a way to reach through the computer and do it physically) will change that.