[LexiMax]

> I would love if licences with usage restrictions were more popular, and the OSI wouldn't just say "that's not open source!!!".

I agree with you, but guess who pays the OSI's bills: https://opensource.org/sponsors/ For their corporate sponsors, not supporting usage restrictions is a feature, not a bug.

There's also a ton of dogma surrounding the open source and free software definitions where you'll get dog-piled for not conforming to these definitions. These definitions are often considered as holy writ and their adherents refuse to entertain if perhaps these definitions might need to be adjusted for the realities of 2023.

Even if you try to ignore them and coin your own terminology so as to not to conflict, open source and free software advocates will continue to try and control the narrative by insisting on their own language, which is designed to have negative connotations in their circles.

[mcpackieh]

> but guess who pays the OSI's bills: https://opensource.org/sponsors/ For their corporate sponsors, not supporting usage restrictions is a feature, not a bug.

Stallman and the FSF are hardly darlings of the corporate world, but they also consider the first and most important software freedom to be: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)." This is something people in this space earnestly believe in, not something they're just being paid by corporations to espouse.

If you don't share these values, then that's your prerogative. Simply use another license and ignore people who complain about it; since they don't share your values you shouldn't care what they think.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

[LexiMax]

> Stallman and the FSF are hardly darlings of the corporate world

I imagine the corporate world is very happy with the FSF, because they represent the most popular non-permissive licenses by a significant margin, and RMS's stewardship of the FSF in the era of GPLv3+ has been an enormous help in the rise of popularity of permissive licenses.

> This is something people in this space earnestly believe in, not something they're just being paid by corporations to espouse.

I'm not implying that its adherents are influenced by corporations, but that its adherents have seemingly taken its tenants as holy writ instead of critically re-examining them in the context of today's open source landscape.

[account42]

> I'm not implying that its adherents are influenced by corporations, but that its adherents have seemingly taken its tenants as holy writ instead of critically re-examining them in the context of today's open source landscape.

You can imply that all you want but that doesn't make it true. Once you allow the terms to be muddied by usage restrictions you agree with you will quickly find them also used for software with usage restrictions that you don't agree with and soon the terms will be entirely meaningless. The point of open source licenses is that they effectively put the software into the commons (which copyright on its own fails to do) and, in with copyleft licenses, to keep derivatives in the commons as well.

Non-commercial restrictions specifically don't just afect big corporations but anyone who accepts money vaguely related to their use of the software. Accept donations? Do related work for hire? Agree to fix an issue for your friend in exchange for a beer? Accept any kind of reward or sponsorship based on your status from work using the software? Better call you lawyer first to make sure the conditions allow it. More often than not, the answer is going to be "no way to tell until you get sued".

[Pannoniae]

Yeah, you've put it way better than I could ever have, thanks. I just massively dislike how they pretend the OSI has a trademark over the word "open source" (which they don't) and that they presume everyone wants to have their work be freely combinable with others.

If you use it, great, if you don't want to because you are afraid of the legal issues, no problem. It's massive entitlement to think that just because you released the source code, anyone should be granted the four freedoms to essentially do whatever with it. (Which includes the SaaS loophole as well....)

[account42]

If you don't want to grant the four basic freedoms, simply don't call your license open source. Stop trying to mooch off of the goodwill around open source software.