[bachmeier]

Just as I don't understand the original comment, I also don't understand yours. You don't need to push to the original repo because open source allows you to make your fork available to others. The developer of the original has a right to decide to accept your changes or not, so I fail to see why it matters that your PR isn't accepted.

[tremon]

Just as I don't understand the original comment, I also don't understand yours

The way Github e.a. use forks dilutes the larger meaning of the word, that's what this thread is about. When people used to talk about forks, they always mean a community fracture over differences of opinion: gcc vs egcs, xfree86 vs xorg, ffmpeg vs libav, openwrt vs lede, glibc vs eglibc, kde4 vs trinity, gnome3 vs cinnamon vs mate.

The common-use term of "fork" on github has nothing to do with divergence of development, it's just a band-aid for lack of contributor access control. I can understand why people don't like github's use of forks, and that has nothing to do with what the license "allows" or not: if it's not a divergent development line, it's not a fork, it's a clone at best. In most cases, I'd say it's just a feature branch hosted in a different repository.

Calling something a fork implies long-term viability (or at least the intention) as an alternative to the original repo. That doesn't sound like a realistic description of most cloned repo's on Github to me.

[cxr]

> The common-use term of "fork" on github [i]s just a band-aid for lack of contributor access control

More accurately: it's a consequence of GitHub's early decision to reject the traditional currency of open source (patches) in favor of imposing dark pattern-infested workflows on hosted projects and their contributors.

When you accept patches, anyone can easily create an account, submit their patch, and then be on their way. GitHub's opting for an unnecessarily heavyweight pull request workflow instead, though, meant that contributors were required to set up a personal on-GitHub copy of the desired repo, point their copy on their local machine at that as a remote, and push to it. At that point, they're already paying the cost of project hosting overheads just for contributing to a project that isn't theirs. When it comes time to start their own project, or evaluate whether it's worth it to continue hosting their existing projects elsewhere, pressure to choose GitHub cones into play that wouldn't otherwise if there were a level playing field. Fast forward nearly 15 years of network effects, and you have it as a nearly unavoidable multi-billion dollar behemoth.

It's such a transparent growth hack inspired by the underhanded tactics used by social networks that folks' unwillingness to even acknowledge its negative impact on productivity and privacy is really infuriating—not to mention the negative impact itself.

[theobeers]

“Feature branch hosted in a separate repository” is a very good way of putting it.

[jlokier]

> I fail to see why it matters that your PR isn't accepted.

Making their code useful to other people is a strong motivator for many altruistic open source developers.

The purpose of getting PRs accepted upstream is so that your changes are useful in concert with other people's changes, especially their later changes.

Your private change is of little use to others when it's only in your private fork, which hardly anyone knows about, and if they do know, your change is incompatible with later work and maintenance by other people anyway.

If you don't care whether anyone else uses your work, especially in future, that's fine. But if you want it to be more useful to others, getting it merged upstream makes a huge difference to that.

(Merging upstream or just submitting PRs that don't get merged also helps personal visibility and reputation, which is undoubtedly a motivator for many. That's a burden on upstream maintainers when someone is pushing low quality work and doesn't care to ensure it's useful to the project.)

[Nadya]

Maintaining a fork and maintaining a single feature of a project are two different levels of commitment and you can want to do one without doing the other although all too often people want to contribute a feature and then not provide support for it and expect the project maintainer to now maintain the contributed code. But that's a different issue (and why many maintainers sometimes don't accept random PR's even if the code itself is fine).

> You don't need to push to the original repo because open source allows you to make your fork available to others.

This is simply not true - not all open source software is copyleft. You can have restrictive licensing regarding use and/or distribution and still be open source.

[bachmeier]

> This is simply not true - not all open source software is copyleft. You can have restrictive licensing regarding use and/or distribution and still be open source.

Well, of course you can adopt any definition of "open source" you want, but I'm using the OSI definition, which states:

"The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software."

You are referring to "source available", for which they offer the clarification:

"Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code."

[Nadya]

There is a reason FLOSS exists as a term to differentiate itself from OSS and I think the ideological differences between the two are important. So does Bruce Perens, the co-founder of OSI and the author of the Debian Social Contract of which the OSI definition was based off: https://web.archive.org/web/20140716055445/https://lists.deb...

This was back in 1999 - it's been over 20 years and "OSS" has only been muddied further and further to mean "source available" since.

Pedantry aside tremon's response sums it up well: "Feature branch hosted in a separate repository."

[pabs3]

Where is this muddying happening? The only place I've noticed it is on HN, where others always correct the poster by pointing at the Open Source Definition.

Maybe it is time to ditch both "open source" and "free software" and go with something that has a clear meaning that isn't possible to muddy, like "libre software", prefixed with "always" for copyleft licenses and "currently" for permissive ones.

[Nadya]

Those who sit on the Open Source side of things constantly muddy the waters and claim they are one in the same. Those who sit on the Free Software side of things are adamant that they are related but different.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

The important bit is here:

> “Free” and “open” are rivals for mindshare. Free software and open source are different ideas but, in most people's way of looking at software, they compete for the same conceptual slot. When people become habituated to saying and thinking “open source,” that is an obstacle to their grasping the free software movement's philosophy and thinking about it.

[pabs3]

I meant to ask who is muddying the waters by claiming that "open source" == "source available" rather than the Open Source Definition published by OSI?

[jrochkind1]

The post you cite by Perens doesn't seem to mention the term "FLOSS" (or spelled out), right?

I have seen "FLOSS" used as an umbrella term for ALL of it, that is anything that is open source is also "FLOSS". But you are saying it exists to differentiate from "open source"? Huh. Just to muddy the waters yet further.

[Nadya]

It doesn't use the term directly, no. Because to hackers, especially back in 1999, Free and Open Source were one in the same. It was just a difference of branding. However Bruce differentiates between "Open Source" and "Free Software" in writing and he only does so because public perception of what "Open Source" actually means had already been muddied in the year since OSI's founding and the freedoms afforded by FLOSS were already being de-emphasized and put on the back burner.

To quote Bruce:

> Most hackers know that Free Software and Open Source are just two words for the same thing. Unfortunately, though, Open Source has de-emphasized the importance of the freedoms involved in Free Software.....

> ......Sadly, as I've tended toward promotion of Free Software rather than Open Source, Eric Raymond seems to be losing his free software focus. The Open Source certification mark has already been abused in ways I find unconscionable and that I will not abide. I fear that the Open Source Initiative is drifting away from the Free Sofware values with which we originally created it.

There would be no need to make any kind of distinction between Free Software and Open Source if Open Source was being perceived as Free Software.

OSI was and always will be a marketing gimmick [0] created to sell the idea of open source to commercially interested parties.

> We realized that the Netscape announcement had created a precious window of time within which we might finally be able to get the corporate world to listen to what we have to teach about the superiority of an open development process. We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with `free software' in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. Open source, contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

Not to downplay OSI at all. It was extremely important and widely influential in Netscape's journey to becoming Firefox and I'd even argue is still important today. But the issue centered around what "Free" means ("Free" as in freedom - not beer - which is why the term "libre" is often used as well) and that "Free Software" already had a poor reputation in the business world and so it needed to be rebranded. Eric Raymond made it very clear that he places importance on phrasing and branding and attributes the tactics used by OSI to its success and why the Free Software movement failed. [1]

Honestly a comment by Havoc Pennington on that very post, dated Jun 28, 1999, sums up the issue perfectly.

>I think Eric's analysis of the facts is basically right. i.e. the "open source as business" stuff has gotten us a lot of popularity. The danger is that we fall for our own marketing program. That is, new community members join, and we have to say "we didn't really mean that. Really we meant freedom. The business stuff is for the suits." An increasing number of new members just don't understand freedom, or copyright, or anything like that; they joined "Linux," not "GNU."

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/19981206185148/http://www.opensou...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170630183629/http://www.linuxt...

[jrochkind1]

Y'all are talking about possibly three different things.

"Source available" does not mean anything about a license at all. It literally just means the source is available... to someone.

Open source generally means it must have a license that allows modifications and derived works. It is more than "source available" it means that a public license to use and redistribute the software is available. "source available" does not necessarily mean you have a free license to use or distribute the software, or modify it and distribute the modifications. "open source" does. The Open Source Institute has tried to standardize a definition. https://opensource.org/osd

"copyleft" is sometimes used to mean something more than some "open source". Richard Stallman has promoted these sense of "copyleft". Like GNU license as opposed to apache. Both are open source -- nobody says apache license isn't open source right? Open source licenses that aren't "copyleft" are sometimes called "permissive". Here's one description of it that will suffice:

> 3. Is the Apache considered copyleft?

> Copyleft licenses require the derivative works or modified versions of existing software to be released under the same license. The Apache License doesn’t have any such requirements. It’s a permissive license. It permits you to release the modified parts of the code under any license of your choice. However, you are required to release all the unmodified parts of the software under the same license (the Apache License).

--https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/top-10-ap...

So, no, "source available" is definitely not the same thing as "open source" -- all open source may be "source available", but things described as just "source available" usually are not open source. The source might be available to you, but you might not be allowed to use it (at all, or in certain ways) without paying, and you might not be allowed to redistribute derived works.

And "copyleft" is usually used as a subset of "open source", for restrictive/"viral" licenses.

I have no idea what any of this has to do with where this discussion began -- but yes, anything that's open source, copyleft or not, gives you the right to make a variaton of the software, use that variation, and distribute it. I think that is part of the accepted definition of open source. "Source available" software may not give you this right.