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by icebraining
2785 days ago
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If the concept of the term "open source" changes, I feel nobody will be really impacted for the worse. Of course it does. It dilutes the concept, making it less relevant and useful. Currently I know that I can sell something I make using open source libraries; tomorrow, I won't. At each dilution, the concept is rendered less useful and more irrelevant. But what will happen is we will see more experimentation with monetization methods that don't rely on loopholes or technicalities in existing licenses to achieve the same thing in practice. More experimentation is great, but that doesn't justify reusing the terminology to mean other things. It's not even a good PR move, considering the (completely predictable) pushback. It's just silly. |
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I'm not trying to twist your words, but that point has already been crossed in my opinion. You can sell some code, but it comes with a lot of extra work that you'll have to do in many cases (if it's copyleft), and all licenses have additional restrictions or aspects that must be followed.
Just because you can categorize many of those licenses into some umbrellas doesn't mean you can wholesale ignore the details of each since it's under some category of "open source".
"Open Source" already means many different things. Copyleft, permissive, are patents or trademarks included? Can you give a warranty? What form of distribution counts? How do you need to make the source available? All of these things vary wildly among OSI licenses, and in the end it's not causing any massive issues because the overarching term isn't used as a technical term, it's used as a colloquialism.