[eadmund]

> To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be much more restrictive in most practical ways since the majority of companies don't want to open source their code, but very few of them plan to sell hosted search.

The four freedoms of software are: the freedom to use the software for any purpose; the freedom to study and change the software; the freedom to share the software; and the freedom to share one’s changes. The AGPL permits all four; the Elastic License does not allow using the software to make a competitor; therefor the Elastic License is not a free software license.

More details: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> Who wants to put in years building a business …

Free software is not about the original author of code; it is about the users of that code and what they do with it. Copyleft ensures that those who build upon a software foundation grant the same freedoms to their users which they themselves received. Free software is about the users.

[9dev]

That is a very US-centric perspective on freedom, and one that isn’t actually very helpful in assessing actual real-life restrictions of a license. You may win the philosophical argument on the nature of freedom, but you lose the debate participants. If both the vendor can’t continue working on the software, because they’re unable to monetize it, and the user is unwilling to use it due to concerns over exposing business secrets, the outcome is a net-negative, no matter how venerable your cause might be.

[skrtskrt]

the four freedoms were not written by God, just a bunch of ideological pedants.

it's perfectly valid to have a completely different view of what freedom is for software

[riedel]

But FOSS and OSS are brands/labels of FSF and OSI and sometimes it is good to have such labels. This like arguing that same SmartTV is not smart or that there is other ways making a TV smart. I think it is good to have some innovation in licencing (like ethical licences which are by definition probably not free), but not by redefining stuff.

[skrtskrt]

sure then people should stop crying and pooping their pants when someone tries to introduce a license that's not technically OSS but tries to address ethical concerns.

"It's not OSS" is a not a value judgement unless you think that the four freedoms were written by god. But it is treated exactly as religiously.

[eadmund]

> "It's not OSS" is a not a value judgement unless you think that the four freedoms were written by god.

It’s not a value judgment unless the four freedoms reflect one’s values. They reflect mine; therefore I judge that non-free software does not align with my values.