| I am empathetic as well but... Let me start saying that no one prevents a company from selling the software with licenses allowing to access the source code, companies even provide the code under the GPL because the BSD or the GPL nowhere state that the code has to be provided for free, big companies have provided the code under open source licenses behind fees for quite a while so far (redhat is one of the examples). The BSL certainly allows you to access the code without having a license but I would dare to say that most of the companies out there, especially for critical components like this, prefer managed and supported solutions, for which rights to access the source code can be granted. But in general it's absolutely true that it allows accessing the source code without having to buy the license and this is certainly a plus for the final user. But that's it :) I will not say that I know the legal language but I will say that the legal language really differs form what we perceive and a judge or a court perceive and the interpretation is dictated by the national law. The sentence > Effective on the Change Date, or the fifth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License, and the rights granted in the paragraph above terminate. Use the word "version" which is broad and generic, can be read as "the commit makes a new version" or "the intent for the developer to release a new version". Do, again, no certainty really ok the long term. Going open source require sacrifices, I have given for free more than 1 year of research and development I did to build the technology behind the hashtable implemented in cachegrand and I did because I believe that true technological advancement should be available to anyone and meanwhile my work is not a game changer it my small bit to try to help. That's why when I see a license like BSL pointed out as open source or "quasi" open source I do feel the need to give some context. Try to imagine if Linus at the time would have decided to give Linux under BSL... Nowadays would be very different! |