It would be more accurate to describe it as proprietary than it would be to describe it as free software or open source. Proprietary software is software which restricts your freedoms when it comes to the usage, modification, or distribution of said software. If you prefer, you can also use the term source-available to distinguish the degree of restrictions -- but the point is the same. There are restrictions on your freedom in the software and thus it is proprietary.
Not everything has a middle ground. Software is either proprietary (restricts your freedom) or it isn't -- and discussions about how proprietary it is (how many restrictions it imposes on users) are secondary.
I could argue a completely different case. The only "restriction" it is placing on you is that you may not restrict anyone else from exercising the same rights that you yourself were granted by the license, which I believe is the original spirit of the 4 freedoms and the GPL family of licenses.
The software is "effectively free," because for every user who simply uses it for personal use, research, or even many forms of commercial use, they have all of the same abilities that they would have with any other free software license.
The restriction only comes in when you make a derived work of the software and do not pay forward that derived work under equivalent licensing terms as the work on which it was based.
And this is where the real disagreement is. What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand?
If I'm essentially selling access to somebody else's software, I have little doubt that access software constitutes as a derived work. I think it's fair that a license like the SSPL asks me to release the code which provides access to the free software as free software itself.
Suggesting that "My freedoms are being restricted" because a licensing term prevents you from restricting the freedom of others is the same argument that "permissive" license proponents argue against strong copyleft licenses.
If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it.
The license being discussed here is not the SSPL. It's the Confluent Community License, which does not have any of the GPL-like aspects you refer to. Instead it simply denies the use of the software (freedom #0) for an "Excluded Purpose" (creating a competing product to Confluent). I'm sure you'll agree this is not in any way in the original spirit of the four freedoms.
> What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand?
This is mostly determined by copyright law, since "derived work" is a legal term of art.
> If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it.
This is the justification, but due to the design of the license it is de-facto impossible to actually comply with its requirements. Therefore it acts as a de-facto proprietary license. Many copyleft lawyers have stated that the license would likely require you to re-license Linux under the SSPL if you run SSPL code on a Linux server. This is not possible to do, and thus you are forced to pay MongoDB to get a business license.
Maybe there is a place for a license like the SSPL, but given how there would be effectively no company that could comply with it (even if it didn't require relicensing to SSPL, many companies have contracted code that they cannot relicense to a free software license) I fear it would have the same effect.
> Many copyleft lawyers have stated that the license would likely require you to re-license Linux under the SSPL if you run SSPL code on a Linux server.
There's no such thing as a "copyleft lawyer". Even if there were, there wouldn't be many of us, even if you counted every one, worldwide.
I personally don't agree with the reading you referred to. But if Mongo's SSPLv2, which they've submitted to OSI, is any indication, it won't be tenable much longer.
A licence is proprietary if it restricts any if your four freedoms. The Confluent licence restricts freedom 0, the freedom to use it for any purpose. It is therefore proprietary. JSON's license (with the "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." clause) is proprietary too.
Now, we can have a discussion over the degree of proprietary-ness, but I disagree with the statement that it isn't proprietary. Of course it is different to some other proprietary licenses, but I believe that discussion is secondary to the discussion over whether it is proprietary.
You can say the license isn't "open source." The term has a well-defined meaning provided by the OSI, and they arguably have the right to define what it means and which licenses meet the definition, being the ones who pretty much invented the term.
You DO NOT, however, get to also define the meaning of the word "proprietary." The English language is not your plaything, and you have not been given dictatorial rights to re-define words as you wish. "Proprietary" does not suddenly mean "restricts any of the four freedoms" just because you said so. When antt calls this instance a misuse of the word, [s]he is relying on the common English meaning of the term, which very much supports their point. Your rebuttal is pretty much "nuh-uh because we're now using a different definition."
> The term has a well-defined meaning provided by the OSI, and they arguably have the right to define what it means and which licenses meet the definition, being the ones who pretty much invented the term.
Funnily enough, many people would argue the exact opposite -- that "open source" has a common meaning that is separate from the "Open Source" which the OSI defines. I don't really have a strong opinion either way.
> "Proprietary" does not suddenly mean "restricts any of the four freedoms" just because you said so.
I am using the term in the same manner as the FSF. Maybe you disagree with their definition, but it's hardly something I've just come up with in this argument -- this definition in the context of software licenses has been in use since the 80s. If you disagree with that definition, complain to the FSF about their subversion of language instead of me.
> If you disagree with that definition, complain to the FSF about their subversion of language instead of me.
Whether you follow the FSF's lead is up to you!
The FSF itself changed the way it talks about these issues. Its "philosophical" writing used to distinguish "semi-free" or "source-available" and "proprietary". They even had a nice diagram showing semi-free as a middle ground.
At some point, they made a rhetorical decision to lump everything east of "free software" together in one "proprietary" pile. I wish I knew why. But the reason couldn't have been precision.
You can't run your code on a users computer without respecting the other three freedoms, and the AGPL goes even further and says you can't even run it on your own computers.
This was an argument I used to hear being made loudly and unironically by the MIT/BSD crowd in the 90s/00s.
To quote Stalman, free software isn't about having the source available any more than a library is about making books with movable type. It is about giving people the power to be programmers without selling their souls to Big Evil.
That essentially all the code that makes Amazon Amazon is DevOps code on how production code and hardware is managed is something no one could have seen in 2007.
Pretending that orchestration is not the most important part of the stack today is as ignorant as saying that source code doesn't matter because you have the binary version was in 1995, again something I've heard said unironically.
The AGPL, the most radical of the free software licenses, does not deal with the supporting code on how to deploy the software. The prosperity license does, because it's written by people who are in the trenches today. And it's completely free when you open source your full stack.
> You can't run your code on a users computer without respecting the other three freedoms, and the AGPL goes even further and says you can't even run it on your own computers
Absolutely wrong for the gpl, which is a distribution license, not a usage license. This is a well established fact.
I've cancelled the mongodb standardization in the big company I work for specifically to avoid them.
The only sane way for a cautious company to use those vaguely licensed software is the proprietary one. That's the intent of this artificial grey area.
And as a consumer I try to avoid proprietary software whenever possible. License management is a huge pain.
Middle ground exists because it is ultimately for a court to decide whether or not something is a copyright violation. These things aren't black and white. A license is a piece of legal advice which suggests the decision a court might make if it were to be taken to one, based on past judicial decisions. When it comes to new technologies and new distribution methods (or distribution loopholes), there's not much precedent to go off. The uncertainty here is the middle ground.
You are focused on enforcement which (might be interesting in an internet lawyering way) is irrelevant if noone uses the codebases in the first place because of the license makes it unuseful for users and coders.
Almost all of these "middle ground" license cannot be combined with the normal licenses that have huge functioning communities.
even transistors, the basic underpinning of our digital worlds, have middle ground - it's the norm, not the exception, and dichotomies are almost entirely a human fiction to make things more computationally tractable
So we can go down rabbit holes like this I guess? I mean whats the middle ground between believing the earth is flat and the center of the universe vs a modern scientific view?
Metaphors aren't really a good thinking tool here.
Instead maybe asking (as I suggested you do) if EVEN ONE of these LICENSE schemes is actually working for the community its supposed to serve vs the pr blahblah we see in their announcements?
Not everything has a middle ground. Software is either proprietary (restricts your freedom) or it isn't -- and discussions about how proprietary it is (how many restrictions it imposes on users) are secondary.