[bruce511]

>> There is clearly a tension here where a bunch of people want to call their software open source without actually believing in what open source actually means.

So much this. If Open Source is a marketing term then companies are free to call whatever they do "Open Source" and the term becomes meaningless. You may as well call the software "Free Range".

On the other hand if Open Source is a defined thing, built around a specific definition, and the 4 freedoms, and so on, (hint: it is) then the marketing term could lead you places you don't want to go.

So there's a generation of programmers who want to "redefine" Open Source to suit their preferences. Dilute the definition until it's meaningless. I'm strongly against this.

To be clear everyone is welcome to use any license, with any restriction they like. But if it doesn't conform to the OSI definition don't call it Open Source.

Stop trying to turn a technical specification into a generic marketing term.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

The term Open Source was coned because ESR, Bruce Perens and co. didn't like the term "Free Software" - they were afraid it will scare the software business away. At that epoch it was logical as software was mostly sold as a product, even a physical one. One of the arguments of OSI is you can build your services around OSS, just like Red Hat did.

Fast forward a few decades and it turns out you no longer can because any software you build in this way will be used by Amazon and they will earn the money, not you. From this PoV, pure OSS is almost hurting web-based software ecosystem development.

[bruce511]

>> The term Open Source was coned because ESR, Bruce Perens and co. didn't like the term "Free Software" - they were afraid it will scare the software business away.

Sure. They didn't completely align with Free Software, so they coined a new term for a new kind of license.

Current companies are free to do the same thing. If they don't like the Open Source or Free software licenses they are free to coin their own term, write their own license. Nobody has any problem with this, and every company is free to write whatever license they like.

What they don't get to do is co-opt the term "Open Source" and then change the meaning of it to something quite different. That's not ok.

I completely agree that Open Source is not necessarily a viable business strategy for most businesses. The solution to that is to not be Open Source.

For some reason, some companies though think this is not ok. They want to use the marketing term "Open Source", as if it means whatever they want it to mean. They want to build on the goodwill generated by decades of Open Source developers, and then bait-and-switch that goodwill at some point. That's no ok.

>> it turns out you no longer can because any software you build in this way will be used by Amazon and they will earn the money, not you.

You make this sound like this is something new. Whereas Open Source has always been used by big companies to make money. MacOS is based on NetBSD. That's over 25 years old now.

So yes, if you want to make a software business, and you plan to sell your product, then releasing it for free and allowing others to use it commercially is probably not a great business strategy. So if releasing it as Open Source is contrary to your business goals then, you know, don't release it as Open Source.

[jchw]

Framing it this way implies that open source is "flawed" specifically because it was trying to eschew the ideological aspects of the free software movement and make it more appealing to businesses and underscore its technical advantages rather than ethical. However this oddly common viewpoint ignores that the free software movement doesn't really define "free software" much differently than the open source software movement defines "open source software"; free software licenses still can't discriminate against different users or use cases.

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

> Free software can be commercial

> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.

What Amazon has done is of course bad for a lot of kinds of businesses like Elastic, but neither open source nor free software is about business models or how software development can be sustainable. For obvious reasons the perspective of VC-funded startups is overrepresented and overrated here of all places, but outside this space nobody cares. You license out your software to a community in hopes that it will help your business, and it might; you can get your software into package managers and Linux distributions easier if it is OSI/DFSG approved. The fact is, it's not a bug that this allows Amazon to go and use it and monetize it. Amazon uses and monetizes Linux and associated projects every single day, and it is ultimately beneficial to Linux and many open source projects. Best I can say is maybe you could argue Amazon can abuse their market position to compete unfairly with others, but that is truly irrespective of software licensing.

So what I make of this is simple: you shouldn't open source your flagship product unless your business model has a robust way to remain sustainable. In doing so, you are making a gamble that nobody else can monetize it better than you. Using an unfair CLA to trick people into contributing to a product that you already know with near certainty will be eventually closed source is just a dick move, and not knowing any better than to avoid this circumstance is negligent. Yes, as a proponent of the benefits of open source software, it is a bummer that we can't just have nice things. However, the last few years of CLA-based rugpulls have done great harm to people's trust in open source projects and startups based on open source, and I ultimately don't think we're better off for it.

[echelon]

> Stop trying to turn a technical specification into a generic marketing term.

It's already gone.

OpenAI, OpenArt, OpenWeb, OpenSea, OpenGov

The OSI is fucked too. The OSI definition of "open source AI" is horrible as you can't replicate or easily modify the systems without the data and tooling that the OSI definition doesn't require.

If AI eats software and the OSI definition of "open" AI wins, then we've already been captured by big business marketing.