Why Open Source Needs New Licenses
medium.com
medium.com
Yes, it has. And the accepted definition of "Open Source" is the OSI Open Source Definition.
I will now prepare for the negative feedback by those who have a vested commercial interest in me being wrong :)
Nice rhetorical trick... set up a strawman of sorts by pre-assuming that anybody who disagrees with you must have "a vested commercial interest in ... being wrong". That really makes it seem like the author of TFA isn't interested in any kind of reasonable / rational discussion on this topic.
Oh well, I'll just add this:
1. Open Source is not a business model. And if you make code Open Source, nothing guarantees that you will be able to make money from it. There are lots of reasons to think that you might, but you're not entitled to any particular profit from your work (this would also be true if it were proprietary / closed source).
2. If somebody else makes money off your project, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't also make money off of it, and it's not necessarily even the case that your competing with the other player. There are many different bases for competition and different market segments and you may well find that the customers you're selling to are a different segment with different buying criteria. So it's not even guaranteed that this is a zero-sum game.
3. If you don't want to release your code under an Open Source license (as defined by the OSD) then don't. That's fine. Stallman and the FSF hard-liners aside, most of us are OK with the existence of proprietary software (even if we prefer to use/develop F/OSS). But don't call your project Open Source if it isn't. Is that so much to ask?
4. There are plenty of licenses out there that are "source available", "shared source", "shareware", "proprietary", or "almost-but-not-quite-OSS". If one of those licenses matches your goals better than an OSI certified OSS license, then USE IT. Or, make your own new license, with whatever terms you prefer. But, again, if those terms don't conform to the OSD, don't try to pretend you're doing something you're not, by referring to the thing as "Open Source". Just be honest, for crying out loud.