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by koolala 188 days ago
I edited it to be more specific while you were typing that.

The entire point of copyright is a legal mechanism to sue people. "Source-available" at a minimum is someone sharing their code under their own copyright and terms of use.

Yes the term is designed to trick outsiders. Most people don't even know that code is copyrighted by default when it is posted publicly and freely on the internet without a © symbol.
1 comments
eudoxus 188 days ago
All code is shared "under someones own copyright and terms". Whether you use pre-existing words or not doesn't define if its open-source or source-available. I can write a license right now that I maintain the copyright, and written with my own terms that complies with the OSD. We happen to have a collection of existing licenses that have been vetted, but it isn't a exclusionary whitelist.

I'll reiterate, "source available" can only be defined as not OSD code that is viewable. Everything else is entirely open to implementation and interpretation.

This is the largest problem with the term. This is in stark contract to examples like "Fair Source" which has a legal definition like the OSD, and a entity behind it stewarding that definition [0], while being a subset of Source Available. All fair source is source available, not all source available is fair source.

Yet, fair source doesn't fall into your definition of source available.

[0] - https://fair.io/

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koolala 188 days ago
Why not both? Why can't something be source available and open source? Or fair source and source available? It isn't this complicated.
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eudoxus 188 days ago
Thats a fair (no pun) question! The reason "source available" exists is to starkly seperate it from "open source", yet to your point, they certainly can be both. However it is reductive/pointless to say my code is "open source and source available" since of course the source is available if its open source.

This highlights my knee-jerk reaction to your initial post. My original definition I provided for Source Available was "[viewable but not OSD]". This is overly restrictive since can be both, but to assign any meaning at all Source Available it needs to be defined in relation to "Open Source", otherwise its meaningless.

I agree, it really isn't complicated :).

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