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ModernMechtoday at 6:08 AM2 repliesview on HN

Not the same team. Open source isn't really about the license, and it's also not even really about the source; open source is a philosophy centering open development and collaboration. Sharing the source is necessary, but not sufficient. Too often, "source available" means you get to see the source, but you are not invited to participate in development, and certainly you're not going to be participating in collaboration.

"Source available" projects want the benefits of being associated with that egalitarian philosophy because it's popular amongst technologists, who are their initial customers. But they don't want to actually practice the philosophy because their core interest is protecting their IP to turn a profit, not open collaboration and development. Outside contributions are considered a liability in many source available projects [1].

This is important because source available projects have in the past resulted in a "rug pull", when the project gets enough airspeed, so they start putting more work into the closed source to placate their investors. Once the technologists are not the primary users, the entire source available charade is done. The available source becomes deprecated, features are moved to the closed source branch, and eventually the available source rots.

One final point: if we call source available "open source", then what are we going to call open source to differentiate it from source available. Because they're actually different things.

[1]: For example, many projects won't even allow outside contributions, but when they do, you'll have to sign some sort of contributor agreement: https://www.scylladb.com/open-source-nosql-database/contribu...

Edit: (this is to the response below me, as I'm rate limited now and I'm going to bed so I'll forget to post this tomorrow)

If anyone tried to do this then the project would be forked immediately. An open source project can go closed source, but as an OSS project, everyone should already have everything the need to keep it going despite that, and that all remains open. That's why we love open source.

Also, it'd be really hard to pull off if they've accepted a lot of outside contributions -- when you submit code to an open source project, you retain the copyright. This is not a problem as long as the project is licensed under the agreement under which they submitted the commit, which only grants rights to redistribute under that license. At least that's how it works with Apache 2.0 (I believe, IANAL). So to go closed source, they'd need agreements from all of their contributors to do so.

Now, it can happen. MongoDB is an example. But as far as I can tell, you'd have a hard time of it if you accepted contributions from people and they.


Replies

jraphtoday at 7:22 AM

> Open source isn't really about the license, and it's also not even really about the source; open source is a philosophy centering open development and collaboration.

Not really. A project under an open source license which doesn't accept contributions is still open source.

It is totally about the license and the source code availability.

There are interesting things to say about the various development models, and those common in the open source world, but the open source aspect and the development model aspect should not be mixed.

jrowentoday at 6:38 AM

Haven't open source projects done the rug pull too? Can't they relicense new code going forward?

I guess I would have thought of source available as existing under the open source umbrella. I get that there is an important distinction but from an adoption and evangelism standpoint it seems like an unnecessary crusade to push them away.

Do those projects have a strong track record of behaving badly? Do you think DHH has those types of intentions? (I don't know much about him really)

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