[samatman]

A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea.

I will never compromise on the definition of open source. I'm not particularly hard-nosed about proprietary software, or source available software either, they're fine, with some caveats I'll leave out.

But it's important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source. Lumping other licenses in with it should be resisted. It's like (I've never seen this, to be clear) pescatarians rebranding as "seafood vegans". What is supposed to be gained there, or by trying to bolt on various source-available licenses to the definition of open source?

So this guy picks an important topic, and right up front, he's telling me he knows that it's going to piss me off, but he's going to call not-open-source software open source anyway, and if I object, I don't care about developers getting paid.

Y'know what? You succeeded. Fuck you, tab closed.

[sanderjd]

> A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea.

I really dislike this kind of "geez, read the room!" thinking. Not everybody needs to have the same opinion about everything. Not everybody should. The opinion of "the room" or in your terminology, the "intended audience", is ever-evolving and the way that happens is via people talking and writing about their own opinions that aren't identical to the prevailing views of the time.

But it's fine that you disagree with the author about this and are unswayed by the author's arguments. Others will agree with the author and be unswayed by your counter-arguments, and that's fine too. Still others will change their views after reading the article or responses to it, and that's also fine. Maybe the prevailing view will shift as a result of all this discussion, maybe it won't. This is how discourse works!

[samatman]

I think you missed a fine point in my comment. Seeking to avoid offending absolutely everyone who reads your article is fruitless. Sometimes the point is to offend, and that, too, has its time and place.

It's when you start adding a paragraph defending your decision to offend your audience that you should give some thought to whether that is, in fact, why you're writing. If it isn't, don't. The author wasn't writing to piss off the FOSS community, that wasn't the topic, just the outcome. Why would I give credence to someone's opinions about open source if they flagrantly refer to things which aren't open source using that term? If you can't get the basics right, you have nothing to say which I want to hear.

[sanderjd]

Ah! I do see your more subtle point now, and I think it's a reasonable one.

It reminds me of the common writing advice to not hedge statements with a lot of "I think" and "I believe", because that's redundant, if it wasn't what you think, then you wouldn't be writing it, and it weakens statements, making it sound like the writer lacks conviction in the statement, and if you lack conviction in what you're writing then you definitely shouldn't write it.

That has always sounded right to me, but in the final accounting, I'm skeptical of it. Certainty just isn't all that natural, ambivalence is common, and I think hedging captures that reality more accurately in the tone of the writing.

And I think this case is the same. That paragraph is acknowledging a reality that many or most people reading the article will know, to the point that omitting any mention of it at all will seem notable. I think it is relatable and tactful to say "I know this isn't a popular view, but I care about it so here goes anyway". It doesn't imply that they are writing in order to offend. It only implies that they are aware of the situation.

I don't really get the thing about whether or not it impacts the credence with which you should take the opinions of the author... And frankly, I don't think it is the important thing; the important thing is the argument they are making. But FWIW, if it were the important thing, this particular author has an enormous amount of credibility in the space of working on a successful open source project...

[acdha]

You’re talking about someone who’s been working in open source for decades, on pretty successful projects. He knew with absolute certainty that mentioning licensing will lead to pedantic rancor, and that’s unavoidable: there is literally no way to raise this topic in a way someone will not passionately disagree with, and that’s going to distract from the more important topic he wanted to discuss.

For example:

> But it's important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source.

This phrasing means the GPL and MIT licenses are not open source. I doubt that’s what you meant, but simply raising the topic means that we’ll be debating exactly which use restrictions can dance on the head of a pin rather than the real substance of this essay: we all use open source software, we should be talking about how to make it pay a decent living!

[skybrian]

I think you misunderstood “use restrictions.” I interpret it as “anyone can use the software built with this source code themselves.” The GPL and MIT license don’t have any use restrictions. (In the case of the GPL, there are restrictions on distribution, but that’s different.)

[acdha]

My freedom to use a GPL-licensed library does not include the ability to link it into a proprietary application:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic

Now, I suspect that what you had in mind was the kind of restrictions like “you can’t use this if you work for the military”, but that’s exactly the point he was trying to make: there are a lot of opinions and interpretations swirling around, and his intention was to talk about something else rather than diving into the license debate which has been running since the Reagan era.

[skybrian]

You can do that, actually, for your own use. You can’t distribute the result. (Freedom 0 in the FSF four freedoms.)

Yes, there are always new people who get this wrong and the only thing for it is education.

Telling people that they don’t have to learn anything about how the software licenses they use work, that it’s just a matter of opinion, is not helping.

[acdha]

I don’t think anyone is saying that you shouldn’t learn about the licenses you use, only that he’s taking a big-tent view of open source focused on getting more people paid to contribute to the commons so we don’t have so many projects depending on a handful of people choosing to contribute unpaid labor.

[skybrian]

I think we should have a big-tent view of software and software licenses. There are good reasons to use a non-open source license. If you want to block Amazon from running your code on their servers, an open source license is not for you, and you should choose something else. There are other licenses that make source code available under more restrictive terms.

The fact that there's a clear definition for what an open source license is, and some licenses meet it and others don't, means I can make a statement like that, talking about a bunch of licenses as a group.

If it just means "licenses that make source available with whatever terms" then it's a less useful way of classifying and discussing licenses.

Most terms in the English language are fuzzy that way, but this one has a clear definition and I would like to stick with it.

[barnabee]

Agree and I don’t understand the downvotes.

The goal isn’t for every dev or project to make money or be sustainable in open source, just as it isn’t for every business idea to succeed.

I donate to numerous open source projects and make a point of donating more than I believe they’d charge me to buy/subscribe if the software wasn’t open source. I encourage others to do so too, I sincerely hope and believe we can see that happen. I’d love to see more truly open source software become sustainable, of course.

But I don’t kid myself that it all will be. And I don’t care to relax the definition to include open core, VC exploitative, bait and switch, or whatever (have we learnt nothing in the last two decades?!). If the project dies it dies, if it stays a hobby project that’s ok too.