| A better way of stating that would be, "we're Source Available with permissive licenses." Aesprite handles this particularly well; it's very up-front with what its license allows. I don't inherently have a problem with people saying, "we're almost X, but not quite." However, I disagree that licenses like SSPL are "almost" Open Source, and I disagree that paid hosting is a particularly minor restriction. To again quote Sentry's post: > The moment we restrict what you can do with it — like not compete — it becomes something else. Blocking companies from offering paid hosting has implications, not just on an ideological level but also on a purely practical level. Part of the reason I trust technologies like Matrix or Postgresql is because I'm hopeful that their hosting will be somewhat commoditized. I know that when hosts compete there, they're competing purely on hosting quality, not on software licenses. If the official hosting services go sour for a truly Open Source project I have the option of self hosting -- but I also know that other companies will likely step up and provide alternative hosting solutions as well. When you restrict the ability to compete with your service, you make that less likely. So Open Source isn't just about the code I can run on my computer, it's also about my ability to delegate to other people. If you restrict my right to delegate hosting to an open market, that's not an insignificant restriction. And again, not everything has to be Open Source. I use proprietary SaaS services, I even use open-core services like Gitlab. But I recognize that products like Gitlab's enterprise offering comes with substantial limitations. |
Again, my definition of "almost" is what 99.9% of developers are actually likely to use it for. Most aren't interested in starting a competitor.
> Blocking companies from offering paid hosting has implications, not just on an ideological level but also on a purely practical level. Part of the reason I trust technologies like Matrix or Postgresql is because I'm hopeful that their hosting will be somewhat commoditized. I know that when hosts compete there, they're competing purely on hosting quality, not on software licenses.
There's nothing stopping companies from competing; they just can't use your code/binaries directly. They're free to implement your protocols themselves, which is very commonly done when people implement OSS implementations of Google or AWS APIs. Matrix isn't code; it's a protocol. If they had released their reference server as commons clause, you would be at exactly the same level of vendor lock-in you are now, because there are already multiple independent OSS server implementations.
> I also know that other companies will likely step up and provide alternative hosting solutions as well. When you restrict the ability to compete with your service, you make that less likely
Can you name a single example of this happening? From what I've seen, even moderately successful services (like Parse) simply die (aka self-hosting only). On the flipside, we have examples like AWS offering best-in-class hosted MongoDB that the mongo guys could never compete with, no matter how hard they try.
Sorry if my response seems combative. I'm mostly trying to improve my own understanding of what I see as a tricky problem. I've released a couple services lately that I would love to open source in some fashion, but there don't seem to be any great solutions.