[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.