[znpy]

> We are seeing dozens of database companies turn their OSS into basically proprietary shared code licenses. And we seem to still pretend its "open source"

"open source" here is working as intended. the thing is, "open source" is misunderstood by many (most?) individuals.

"open source" was explicitly created by Eric Raymond and others in the late 90ies because the Free Software movement was seen as too extremistic by companies still deeply rooted into the proprietary model.

"open source" is a nice way out, in order to be able to look cool, while not actually playing it cool.

I said it in many posts and i'll say it again: if you're require to give up copyright on your contributions and the license isn't free-software... then it's just a matter of time before a company turns your code into proprietary intellectual property.

people that do not agree are simply delusional (or okay with that).

[ptx]

Well, sort of. Open source was just a different name to describe free software, with the purpose of emphasizing the collaboration benefits this gives the business rather than the freedom it gives users. But this "business source" stuff is a different thing which is not open source at all.

[mixmastamyk]

Not just different names but different licenses.

[ptx]

No, not really. The first three criteria of the Open Source Definition [0] are essentially freedoms 1–3 of the Free Software Definition [1] and freedom 0 more or less maps to criteria 5 and 6.

The mainstream FOSS licenses (GPL, BSD, Apache2, etc.) are all included both in the official list of open source licenses [2] and the official list of free software licenses [3], so these licenses are both open source licenses and free software licenses. These lists might have some minor differences, but they share a substantial subset and the definitions broadly speaking define the same thing.

[0] https://opensource.org/osd/

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[2] https://opensource.org/licenses/

[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

[toyg]

You can't interpret things like these out of context.

OSS as a term was created at a time when free software, as defined by GNU, was effectively becoming the de-facto standard for collaborative efforts on the internet. Yes, MIT and BSD were around (barely, in the BSD case), but the rising star was Linux and Linux (and the software built on it - GTK, gimp, etc) was GPL.

The industry needed a way to get on the action without touching the "communist" GPL, and that's why ESR's definition of "Open Source" was endorsed. Obviously they coopted all the existing bits they were ok with (i.e. all the ones that did not impose any extra burden on companies), that's why the definitions overlap substantially; but they are not the same thing. If they were, there would not have been any need to create a new definition for it.

[ptx]

Out of context? I provided plenty of context if you care to follow the links I posted.

The distinction between copyleft and non-copyleft licenses, e.g. GPL and BSD, is different from the distinction between open source and free software, which is mainly ideological. The GPL is a copyleft license but also an open source license, as you can see on the OSI website.

For maximum context, here is a quote from the board meeting minutes [0] where the OSI approved the Free Software Foundation's copyleft GPL license as an open source license in accordance with the Open Source Definition: "The Open Source Initiative is pleased to announce that, based on broad review and acceptance by both the Board and the community, it has confirmed that GPLv3 and LGPLv3 both conform to the Open Source Definition."

[0] https://opensource.org/meeting-minutes/minutes20070905/

[toyg]

Yes, because OSS was meant to be a superset of projects including Free Software, so that stuff that did not fit the Free Software definition could still be considered ideologically acceptable. Do I really have to draw a diagram...?

[znpy]

> The industry needed a way to get on the action without touching the "communist" GPL, and that's why ESR's definition of "Open Source" was endorsed.

which against, doesn't really makes sense.

Stallman has repeated over and over that the Free Software movement is not about communism (despite what communist people like to say).

Most likely, the industry needed a way to get people to submit improvements and patches (essentially doing Development, QA and support) for free without having to give a way the right to sell proprietary services.

[znpy]

In this contexts license is everything, I can’t understand why people won’t get this in their head.

[znpy]

What you’re saying doesn’t make sense at all.

If that was true that would have been just some marketing campaign.

There would have been no need to divert the attention from the free software foundation.

[ptx]

Yes, basically a marketing campaign. Wikipedia [0] says (in part): "Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring free software principles and benefits to the commercial-software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of the sharing of source code."

In other words, we had a thing that would benefit everyone in many ways, but some people didn't like the marketing message of "users deserve these rights!" so a complementary marketing message of "cheaper and higher-quality software through collaboration!" was needed to reach that group.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...