The problem with your perspective from my point of view, is how convoluted the licenses can be.
Licenses are legal text by nature, and some of them are pretty convoluted. I can write an open-source license with a sneaky retroactive licensing loophole, and create problems for anyone forking/using my code with that theoretical license. Similar landmines can be implemented in bad faith or loopholes can be found in good-faith licenses (TiVoization, anyone?).
So, just because a license satisfies four freedoms doesn't make a piece of software "Open Source". So a body examining licenses and saying that it's acceptable or not is a good thing to have.
We have been reinventing things and damaging tons of stuff just because we feel like having established things is bad to start with.
> So, just because a license satisfies four freedoms doesn't make a piece of software "Open Source".
It wasn't clear what your intent was when you presented your example, since it does not actually illustrate your point. A piece of software consisting of a proprietary blob coupled with a minimal open source launcher is closed source as a whole because the majority of the software is closed source. That software does not satisfy the four freedoms, and is therefore not open source.
> So a body examining licenses and saying that it's acceptable or not is a good thing to have.
Yes, the OSI and FSF are important for establishing clear standards, and for helping developers and users identify exactly which licenses meet those standards.
It was exaggerated example on purpose, but it's not very far from the truth. Many "Open Source" projects are licensed under a permissive or weak-copyleft license, everything incl. the source is put out there, hence you have the four freedoms, theoretically.
A nice example: Try to "run" GitBook in a self hosted manner. You're free to do that. The code is out there. The license allows it, but there's no docs, and code is a landmine, probably.
As I said before, try to use VSCodium in a useful manner. You won't be able to do that. You can incorporate parts of it to your tools, but it won't work as well as the "closed source, official" VSCode, because it's designed to be like that [0].
So, saying that every license allowing four freedoms is an open source license, or even saying that "every application which has a valid, vetted Open Source license" is Open Source software is a stretch nowadays.
Lastly, we seen that not many companies thought about the ramifications of open sourcing their code properly. Elastic & HashiCorp are just two examples we made some noise about.
GitBook hasn't been open source since October 2018 (https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook) and software is judged by its most recent version. GitBook in its current form is a proprietary web service. The October 2018 version is open source, but it's also abandonware.
VSCodium does exclude the proprietary features of Visual Studio Code, but I don't see how that should disqualify VSCodium from being open source. (I use VSCodium frequently and I am satisfied with its feature set, so I strongly disagree with your claim that it is not usable in a useful manner.) VSCodium is also maintained by a community that is not sponsored by Microsoft, so I don't think it's fair to say that it is intentionally designed to be inferior to Visual Studio Code. We both agree that Visual Studio Code is not open source.
Elasticsearch (Elastic License, Server Side Public License) and HashiCorp (Business Source License) have adopted licenses that do not provide the four freedoms, and the software licensed in that way is not open source.
I tried to deploy GitBook in 2017 IIRC, and left it alone after seeing how it's shared to prevent re-deployment. I didn't know they abandoned the idea of "Looking Like Open Source" in 2018.
VSCodium may be open source in theory, but it's designed to be deployed in a less functional fashion than VSCode, more like a "Freemium", hence the "Codium", ringing me like "-ish", or "looks like". It's designed as a funnel. Yes, it's there, and it works, but it funnels users to Microsoft's closed version. Or you can embed it as an editor to your project, but not much more. I'd rather use KATE, Eclipse, Vim, Emacs, etc. Instead of it. Heck even Atom or its current incarnation is better.
Zed is also like VSCodium. The tool is "Open Source", with a proprietary backend and egregious data siphoning capabilities. It backstabs you, and being open source changes nothing.
I have given Elastic and HashiCorp as examples of companies using open source as a way to get support and traction in the early days, and back-pedaling when things didn't go as their plan. Whether this is calculated or not is another matter, but they look like they didn't fully think it through.
I agree that if open source client software requires a proprietary web service to be used, that software as a whole is not open source. That doesn't mean the test of the four freedoms is insufficient, it simply means that the test needs to be applied to both the client and the server.
> VSCodium may be open source in theory, but it's designed to be deployed in a less functional fashion than VSCode, more like a "Freemium", hence the "Codium", ringing me like "-ish", or "looks like".
VSCodium is not "designed" to be less functional, since it is a project maintained by developers who are unaffiliated with Microsoft. VSCodium is an application that is "deployed" in the exact same way as Visual Studio Code on the desktop. The name VSCodium is a nod to Chromium, not "freemium".[1]
Using the Chrome analogy, Visual Studio Code is like Chrome, proprietary and closed source. Microsoft's "Code - OSS" repo[2] is like Chromium, and serves as a functional open source base for the closed source software with the proprietary client-side features omitted. VSCodium[3] is like Ungoogled Chromium,[4] with both being community projects unaffiliated with Microsoft/Google. VSCodium takes "Code - OSS", strips out the telemetry, and uses the Open VSX Registry[5] for extensions by default instead of Microsoft's proprietary Visual Studio Marketplace.
> Or you can embed it as an editor to your project, but not much more.
Have you ever used VSCodium? It's a full editor that includes almost all of the features of Visual Studio Code. It does not need to be embedded to be used.
> Heck even Atom or its current incarnation is better.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but Atom was developed by GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft. After the acquisition, Microsoft diverted development efforts to Visual Studio Code, and both VSCodium and "Code - OSS" currently run circles around Atom in both performance and features. It doesn't help that Atom was discontinued last year, with the final version having been released in March 2022.[7]
> VSCodium is not "designed" to be less functional, since it is a project maintained by developers who are unaffiliated with Microsoft.
In today's (OSS) world, employment or affiliation doesn't matter much. Microsoft can propose what they want and get what they want from the project, at the end of the day. I don't think these independent maintainers have power to say "No" (if a VSCodium developer can chime in here, I'd love to be stand corrected), or they risk VSCodium to be forked to VSCodiumX, by developers who are friendlier to the megacorp which loves Linux.
Yes, VSCodium is a node to Chromium. "-ium" has a ring akin to "-ish" in today's conjecture. Freemium - Free-ish but not. Chromium - Chrome-ish but not. VSCodium - VSCode-ish, but not. This might be curse in the naming, but it feels, looks and works like that, in practice.
The blog post I linked (for further reference, it's [0]) quotes a tweet which supports what I'm saying, heck even the blog post does a much better job of detailing what I was trying to say here in my previous comments.
To circle back, the problem with -ium projects are, they are effectively banned from participating in the main ecosystem which drives these projects forward, and to be in "The Ecosystem", you need to use the closed source versions with pervasive data collection and whatnot. Heck, even Google abuses Chromium with "Experiments and Proposals", which they use to politely yet forcefully push the web to the places they want. VSCodium is the same getaway drug and test vessel for Microsoft.
Lure with Open Source version, trap with closed source version for "Full Benefits" (for the company, because user is the product).
> You're entitled to your own opinion, but Atom was developed by GitHub...
Yes & yes.
> which was acquired by Microsoft.
Yes.
> It doesn't help that Atom was discontinued last year, with the final version having been released in March 2022
However, it's forked as Pulsar [1], which I meant by "current form" in my previous comment. Again, it's MIT licensed, and that's not my favorite, but at least it's not a company editor now.
Atom's original developers started to build Zed, which is worst of both worlds currently (Open source with a closed backend, plus "All your data belong to us" clause).
At the end of the day, from my perspective "-ium" projects and their sanitized versions are just open-core versions of the "main tools" developed from them.
Just because these versions somehow work, and have a permissive license doesn't make them open source in the meta sense. Pedantically they are open source software, yes, but they are just the "Open Core" or Demo/Shareware versions of the tools which companies use to strange to ecosystems.
This is just enshittification of open source in my eyes.
More power to you if you're happy with the -ium tools, but I'd rather use truly free software (Like Eclipse), or use completely honest closed source software (like BBEdit), instead of using tools designed to look like open source but not.
We are in agreement, mostly, the only point of contention is that I never want to see a single organization being held, alone, as the sole arbiter of which license is open source and which is not. The world is a big place. There's room for multiple organizations with different priorities and interests to define things like this and anyone who claims "there must be only one" is suspect in my view as that's such an authoritarian point of view that I can't reconcile that kind of position with also being a supporter of the freedoms that are central to the open source movement.
I agree with you on that. Ideally, I'd love to have multiple institutions working on these issues, but while the idea is nice, it involves humans.
Corporations (ab)using permissive licenses to lure people to give away their code for internet points, and many of the same companies do not give away the code they improved upon. Even GPL is violated by some firms and they deny to obey it when they caught red handed or even flat out accept that they violate it and don't change their behavior.
Same corporations scare people away from strong copyleft licenses solely because it doesn't help their bottom lines, but they tell other things instead of admitting that they want free labor. Sometimes they even "sherlock" an application by inviting the developer to headquarters, luring them to talk about the design, re-implement it, and be very reluctant to even thank the dev whose dearest project is killed with a one swift lightsaber swing (read "The day AppGet died").
After seeing all this brouhaha and sinister motivations, muddying Open Source software and redefining it to "Software which is developed by enthusiasts which are lured by GitHub stars, permissively licensed, used by corporations and never supported back", and a couple of very successful projects with wise BDFLs, I'd prefer to have a trustworthy BDFL instead of institutions with varying motivations and agendas.
While we talked about GitHub, then there's whole CoPilot saga which crawls open source repositories, and conveniently forgets to understand what licenses mean, but I digress.
At the end of the day, Free Software (and even Open Source Software) is an idealistic endeavor first, and companies don't care about anything which is not money.
