[freehunter]

I agree that if you've labeled your software incorrectly as open source and you've been corrected, it should be re-labeled and the problem shouldn't be ignored.

I will say, though, that personally I feel "free" software has a labelling problem. I'm not heavily engaged in the open-source movement, and a lot of the terms and wording and licensing confuses me to the point where I don't want to use it because I'm not sure what legal or press hell I might be unleashing in the future. The fact that "free" needs to be clarified with "free as in beer" or "free as in speech" is the most notable. Any thesaurus can give a dozen or more great words to use other than the ambiguous "free".

Some of the OSI/FSF licenses can be (in my opinion) just as restrictive and encumbered (albeit in different ways) as non-free/non-open licenses. The biggest ambiguity to me is having multiple pieces of software with different licenses. I've seen some Ruby gems where they're GPL'd, and I'm not sure what the definition of "modified" means as it pertains to when I need to redistribute the code. If I used MIT licensed code inside of a GPL application, do I need to release the MIT code too? What if I need to use non-free code in an otherwise GPL codebase? I'm just SOL? Do I need to guarantee my released GPL code works, or can I release completely broken code and still satisfy the license?

And this post highlights that pretty well those franken-licensing problems. What the hell is Commons Clause? I've never even heard of it... or maybe I did hear of it and like the post says I just thought it was Apache Commons or Creative Commons. Again, ambiguous terms that have tons of better words in a thesaurus.

FSF/OSI have changed the world for the better for sure, but like with the million and a half Linux distros, the tyranny of choice ends up making the process harder. I've never released any of my code as open-source because to be honest, I have no idea what "open source" actually means.

[esotericn]

If you want to provide the source to your software, you put the code on the Internet and you're done.

You don't need to even choose a licence. That only comes in to play if you concern yourself with downstream users that care about licensing.

It really only becomes complicated when you want to release it and _also_ monetise it or restrict its use.

Licenses exist because of how this is ultimately at odds with how software actually works - it's basically legal DRM.

(I think licensing has valid uses in the current environment, but it's worth keeping in mind how absurd it is as a concept, it's basically a massive hack).

[Flimm]

Copyright applies by default. You do need to choose a license:

> When you make a creative work (which includes code), the work is under exclusive copyright by default. Unless you include a license that specifies otherwise, nobody else can use, copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation. Once the work has other contributors (each a copyright holder), “nobody” starts including you.

See https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

[esotericn]

I addressed this in my comment.

> That only comes in to play if you concern yourself with downstream users that care about licensing.

``` println!("gosh, no LICENSE!"); ```

I just published some source code without choosing a license.

(Yes, yes, I do licence my actual projects. But letting legalistic bullshit put people off releasing their source, even by a microscopic amount, is something that I disapprove of strongly.)

[icebraining]

No, unlicensed code is the DRMed one - you're implicitly stating that you reserve the right to impose restrictions or sue any of your users.

CC0 or MIT actually releases them from those restrictions.

[esotericn]

When you walk by me in the street, you're implicitly reserving the right to throw me in to oncoming traffic.

In reality, despite being strictly possible, this barely ever occurs in practice. I don't think it's fair to use the term "implicit" in that way.

No-one is suggesting that you write your startup's infrastructure based on random bits of code, that's obviously a bad idea.

I'd basically consider 'no licence' as equivalent to WTFPL. It scares off big companies. That's probably what you want anyway. If anyone cares enough they'll ask you to relicense it.

[dragonwriter]

> When you walk by me in the street, you're implicitly reserving the right to throw me in to oncoming traffic

No such right exists, so it is not implicitly reserved.

This is not the case, in law, with copyright.

[BonesJustice]

Labeling is a problem, and I think the accepted defintion of "open source" is not a very good one. We have "free" software, "open source" software, and "free and open source" software, but I feel these terms are too amorphous and overlap needlessly. It would be easier to describe some of these "kind of open source" licenses if "free" and "open source" had more disjoint definitions.

Free software gives you the freedom to do whatever you want with the software: run it however you want, modify it, redistribute it, whatever. It should be possible to have "free" software that is not open source, i.e., software that requires more roundabout hacking to modify. You'd have the right to redistribute your modifications, even if they were made without the benefit of having the original source. I would expect most free software to also be open source, but it needn't be required

Open source software ought to simply describe software that is 'open' in the sense that you peer into it, see how it works, tinker with it, and otherwise extend it with the benefit of having the original source code. It shouldn't necessarily imply the same level of freedom as 'free' software. The right to resell, for example, need not be guaranteed.

Free and open source would combine the rights conferred by being both free and open source, just as it does today: you can use, modify, and redistribute the software and/or its source code (which is freely available) however you like, give or take some licensing nuances like reciprocity.

On a side note, I agree about the ambiguity of 'free' and the the confusion regarding "free as in speech" and "free as in beer". I will also note that I misunderstood "free as in beer" for a very long time. I'd originally assumed it related to the fact that no one 'owns' beer (in the IP sense): everyone is free to make and sell it.

[freehunter]

>I will also note that I misunderstood "free as in beer" for a very long time.

Yup. When I first heard about it in high school forever ago, I thought it sarcastically meant for-pay software, because beer costs money. A free ($0) beer is very rare.