[cyphar]

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.

[slavak]

No, I'm sorry, that's not how things work.

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."

[cyphar]

> 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.

[kemitchell]

> 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.

[cyphar]

> Whether you follow the FSF's lead is up to you!

Sure, but my response was to the statement:

> You DO NOT, however, get to also define the meaning of the word "proprietary."

And to clarify that I am not defining the meaning of proprietary, I'm using the definition the FSF uses (and has used for significantly longer than the span of this comment thread). Whether you think that's a reasonable definition is a different point, but I was being accused of (effectively) moving the goal-posts.

[slavak]

On the other hand, you _are_, possibly intentionally, mixing the concept of open-source as defined by the OSI, and proprietary software as defined by the FSF. You're acting as if proprietary software is the antonym of OSS, and citing the FSF definition to support it. Except, the FSF doesn't talk about open-source (except to say that it "misses the point"), it talks about Free Software. And the OSI doesn't provide a definition of proprietary software.

[antt]

The GPL/AGPL restricts freedom zero too.

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.

[grumpydba]

> 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.

[antt]

>which is a distribution license, not a usage license. This is a well established fact.

That's what I said.