The primary distinction in those licenses is that they're not generally open for use — they allow a carefully chosen, closed set of use cases. As an analogy, when a bar has a TV showing some preselected channel at a preselected volume, I don't consider that TV open to my use, even though I can use it for the use case the bar specifically chose to enable.
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.
>Different words for different things is good, in my opinion.
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.
I think you are right "OSI approved license" is a much more precise term than "Open Source".
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.
>"Open source" and "free software" have always been mostly interchangeable and have since their inception not simply meant "source available".
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.
Writing "tech bro" and "sharecropper" makes it easy for people to stop trying to look for meaning in your writing.
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 describe it as "Restricted use" software which has existed for decades, generally as closed source.
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?
Yup, this is a huge thing. Get students to use the code, get comfortable with it, then when they write something for their local city or whatever, now that local city is potentially in violation.
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.
I agree. My personal term for this sort of "We're OK with little people using the software but we don't want any competition" arrangement is "private-use source license," but I wouldn't be so bold as to argue that's The Best Name. My point is just that I don't think broadening "open-source" is a good answer, because all that does is make it harder to talk about the differences in licenses.
> 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.
The incentive is that running the infrastructure required to host Sentry is challenging and requires engineering resources. You can choose to use our hosted services for a fraction of the cost (engineers are expensive).
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.