| > I dislike when companies mimic the prestige of open source by saying "source available" It can be a practical need, rather than a prestige grab. Some people can only sink time into developing their software if sales of that software pay their bills. The redistribution rights granted by an open-source license somewhat conflict with this, by allowing another party to appropriate their original work and use it to undercut them. (This is part of why a revenue model based on services, rather than sales, is often encouraged in open-source.) Meanwhile, the author might very much want to offer customers other rights granted by open-source licenses, like the ability to inspect the code, or to have it audited, or to modify it, or to build it from source as an assurance of what instructions are being executed. This is a situation where "source available" makes sense. Looking at it from the other direction, some potential customers will only accept software that grants the latter rights, but don't care about redistribution rights. "Source available" is a viable option for them as well. I wonder if it would be helpful to have a new, clearly defined term for a class of licenses granting inspection & modification rights without redistribution rights, and explicitly protecting users from additional restrictions like fees for source access. That could help make licensing of this kind easy to identify and understand, and if that meant wider acceptance, perhaps more developers would be willing to release their source code to users. (I do see "Fair Source" mentioned in another comment, but I haven't investigated to see if it aligns with what I'm describing.) |