[brianm]

Sadly, it is a precious snowflake license (MIT + Custom term) with a very ambiguous custom term:

"The Software and/or source code cannot be copied in whole and sold without meaningful modification for a profit."

Great to see it semi-open source, and well within the rights of the author, though :-)

[vog]

So by definition, this is not Open Source. Unfortunately, the author claims to have done so nevertheless:

http://groups.google.com/group/kod-app/browse_thread/thread/...

It is a very questionable practice to claim to have produced Free Software / Open Source, when in fact this isn't the case. That's misleading marketing, if not unfair competition. Such practices are especially unfair on the huge number of authors and companies who really produce Open Source software.

The terms "Open Source" as well as "Free Software" have a well-defined meaning that includes giving others the right to distribute the software and to make a buck with it. If you don't like that, it's okay. You may still claim to have switched to "more liberal license" or something like that. But you may never claim to have switched to Open Source. That's not okay, because it is a plain lie.

I find it especially strange that the reason for this unfair behavior against competitors is to receive more fairness from competitors. That's a clear case of double standards.

[alextgordon]

How is this not open source? This is basically an open source licence with an added restriction on commercial use. To my mind, commercial use is completely orthogonal to whether a licence is open source or not.

Note that "open source" != "under a OSI or FSF approved licence" and that at no time that I've seen does the developer claim it's "Free Software" (which it certainly isn't, although it does dynamically link a GPL'd library...).

[vog]

> This is basically an open source licence with an added restriction on commercial use.

Adding that kind of restriction will make any license a non-OpenSource license. This is not orthogonal but an important aspect.

Maybe a failing analogy helps here. From a linguistic point of view, the above is like saying: "Belarus is a democracy, with an added restriction regarding elections."

> Note that "open source" != "under a OSI or FSF approved licence"

This statement is plain wrong. OSI defined the term Open Source very precisely, so using it to describe non-compliant licenses is a clear misuse of that term. Even Microsoft doesn't do that, despite their power! Instead, they coined an own term to describe their less-restrictive activities: "Shared Source". (And yes, a small minority of Microsoft's Shared Source projects are also Open Source.)

So although there are different opinions about which term to prefer, "Open Source" has technically the same meaning as "Free Software". This has been clearly stated by the Open Source movement from the very beginning. In other words, the term Open Source has been designed to be a byword for Free Software. You can find that in the early articles of ESR:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html

Finally, note that this license won't ever be approved by neither OSI nor FSF, because it violates an essential freedom. Of course you can always say: "I don't care about that certain kind of freedom". That's okay. But then you should neither claim to do "Open Source" nor to do "Free Software". That's unfair on all real Open Source developers who grant that freedom.

[alextgordon]

This statement is plain wrong. OSI defined the term Open Source very precisely, so using it to describe non-compliant licenses is a clear misuse of that term.

They may have given a definition but that does not give them a monopoly over usage of the term. Language does not have a One Definition Rule! For example, my dictionary states:

    open-source: Computing denoting software for which the
    original source code is made freely available and may be
    redistributed with or without modification.

Under that definition the licence is most certainly open source. Indeed, this definition is more in line with what many people think when they hear "open source".

I understand there are political reasons to have open source exactly equivalent with the OSI definition. However, this does not seem to have happened.

[vog]

Language does not have a One Definition Rule!

This is only true for day-to-day words. However, legal words and technical terms need strict, stable definitions that are equally understood at least by all experts in that field. Otherwise, serious communication would become next to impossible, let alone serious discussions.

> For example, my dictionary states:

Dictionaries don't provide exact definitions. However, your quoted description seems to be the best you can get out of three lines. If you care to read 4-6 lines, you'll get the quite accurate FSF definition. If you care to read even 10+ lines, you'll get the detailed OSI definition.

> Indeed, this definition is more in line with what many people think when they hear "open source".

That's an important issue. Neither the term Free Software nor the term Open Source are completely self-explanatory. So people will inevitably have misconceptions about those if they've neither read a proper definition, nor had someone explaining it well enough to them.

The concrete issue with the term "Free Software" is that people might think: Oh, this software is free (no cost), so it must be Free Software. Eric S. Raymond and others tried to solve that problem by inventing a new synonym, "Open Source".

However, the term "Open Source" has issues as well, because people might think: Oh, the source code lies open in front of me, so it must be Open Source.

Note that this is a general problem. Hardly any technical term is totally self-evident to ordinary people. Just because a technical term is not self-explanatory doesn't mean you can simply ignore its exact definition.

[veidr]

I think the point he was trying to make is that he rejects your definition of the term. As do I; notwithstanding what some foundation or some famous hacker thinks, you need a fairly broad consensus to really define a term.

I don't think that your definition of "open source" (or even "Open Source") meets that test. I think most people probably still think of it meaning that all of the source code is available to you to read/modify/compile.

What set of legal restrictions govern that is another can of worms. The software might be illegal, patented, or otherwise restricted, but those issues are independent of whether the source code is available or not.

[tel]

Unless you're of the belief that language is defined by usage in which case "open source" tends to less rigorously mean "a large codebase that can at least be viewed and likely copied".

It's not as liberating as Open Souce, but without gradations in the standard you force people to choose between two radicalized tendencies.

[callahad]

As per Kod 0.0.2's changelog, the special snowflake license was inspired by this blog post: http://blog.robrhyne.com/post/1043407467/selling-open-source

[vog]

From that blog post:

> You might ask, what essential liberty am I excluding by adding the modification clause? Ironically, nothing.

A few sentences later he contradicts that statement by defining what he means by "nothing":

> If I charged $15, someone could ask $8 and undercut me with little effort on their part.

So he denies to others the freedom to distribute the software, which is an essential part of the Open Source term (as well as the Free Software term, which has essentially the same meaning).

Until now, this could have been a plain misunderstanding of the term Open Source. However, a few sentences later the author explains that he deliberately wants to misuse the term Open Source:

> Then I’d have to make the choice to either sell [the app on App store] or open-source the app. I wanted to do both.

So he wants to claim to do Open Source without actually doing Open Source. This is really unfair on all developers who are really doing Open Source.

Note that there is nothing wrong with that business model, but claiming the name "Open Source" for that kind of business is a clear misuse of the term. Open Source has another, well-defined meaning.

The author is perfectly right that with any Open Source license, even as restrictive as GPL or AGPL, you can't make a lot of money by selling copies. This is not an accident, but by design! That's why real Open Source developers sell services around their products, such as support, implementation of customer wishes, etc.

If he doesn't want to do business that way, it's fine! But then he shouldn't claim to do Open Source.

[Zev]

The intent seems clear to me; "You can't build + sell the app on its own. But, if you want to use a part of the code in your own app, go for it."

[itsnotvalid]

Build and use is enough for most people.

But of course things would be very ambiguous in terms of how much means "meaningful modification".

[gaustin]

Right. What if I make a bunch of publicly released changes* that are then pulled back into the Kod codebase?

* Changes that fulfill this "meaningful modification" provision.

[Zev]

My thought[1] is that your changes are your own, do as you please with them. Thats how I would treat it if I intended to do anything with Kod's source code, at least.

1. Please note: I'm very far from being anything that resembles a lawyer.

[riffraff]

woudlnd it be easier to just use CC BY-NC-SA ?

[omouse]

It's for a non-open-source operating system anyway, who cares ;p