you're creating a false dichotomy
neither open source nor proprietary represents a single thing and there's a continuum between the two extremes
this license is clearly somewhere near the middle
neither open source nor proprietary represents a single thing and there's a continuum between the two extremes
this license is clearly somewhere near the middle
Not everything has a middle ground. Software is either proprietary (restricts your freedom) or it isn't -- and discussions about how proprietary it is (how many restrictions it imposes on users) are secondary.
The software is "effectively free," because for every user who simply uses it for personal use, research, or even many forms of commercial use, they have all of the same abilities that they would have with any other free software license.
The restriction only comes in when you make a derived work of the software and do not pay forward that derived work under equivalent licensing terms as the work on which it was based.
And this is where the real disagreement is. What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand?
If I'm essentially selling access to somebody else's software, I have little doubt that access software constitutes as a derived work. I think it's fair that a license like the SSPL asks me to release the code which provides access to the free software as free software itself.
Suggesting that "My freedoms are being restricted" because a licensing term prevents you from restricting the freedom of others is the same argument that "permissive" license proponents argue against strong copyleft licenses.
If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it.
> What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand?
This is mostly determined by copyright law, since "derived work" is a legal term of art.
> If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it.
This is the justification, but due to the design of the license it is de-facto impossible to actually comply with its requirements. Therefore it acts as a de-facto proprietary license. Many copyleft lawyers have stated that the license would likely require you to re-license Linux under the SSPL if you run SSPL code on a Linux server. This is not possible to do, and thus you are forced to pay MongoDB to get a business license.
Maybe there is a place for a license like the SSPL, but given how there would be effectively no company that could comply with it (even if it didn't require relicensing to SSPL, many companies have contracted code that they cannot relicense to a free software license) I fear it would have the same effect.
There's no such thing as a "copyleft lawyer". Even if there were, there wouldn't be many of us, even if you counted every one, worldwide.
I personally don't agree with the reading you referred to. But if Mongo's SSPLv2, which they've submitted to OSI, is any indication, it won't be tenable much longer.
That's a lot different to never seeing it.
Calling these licenses proprietary strains the word past its breaking point.
Now, we can have a discussion over the degree of proprietary-ness, but I disagree with the statement that it isn't proprietary. Of course it is different to some other proprietary licenses, but I believe that discussion is secondary to the discussion over whether it is proprietary.
You can say the license isn't "open source." The term has a well-defined meaning provided by the OSI, and they arguably have the right to define what it means and which licenses meet the definition, being the ones who pretty much invented the term.
You DO NOT, however, get to also define the meaning of the word "proprietary." The English language is not your plaything, and you have not been given dictatorial rights to re-define words as you wish. "Proprietary" does not suddenly mean "restricts any of the four freedoms" just because you said so. When antt calls this instance a misuse of the word, [s]he is relying on the common English meaning of the term, which very much supports their point. Your rebuttal is pretty much "nuh-uh because we're now using a different definition."
Funnily enough, many people would argue the exact opposite -- that "open source" has a common meaning that is separate from the "Open Source" which the OSI defines. I don't really have a strong opinion either way.
> "Proprietary" does not suddenly mean "restricts any of the four freedoms" just because you said so.
I am using the term in the same manner as the FSF. Maybe you disagree with their definition, but it's hardly something I've just come up with in this argument -- this definition in the context of software licenses has been in use since the 80s. If you disagree with that definition, complain to the FSF about their subversion of language instead of me.
Whether you follow the FSF's lead is up to you!
The FSF itself changed the way it talks about these issues. Its "philosophical" writing used to distinguish "semi-free" or "source-available" and "proprietary". They even had a nice diagram showing semi-free as a middle ground.
At some point, they made a rhetorical decision to lump everything east of "free software" together in one "proprietary" pile. I wish I knew why. But the reason couldn't have been precision.
Sure, but my response was to the statement:
> You DO NOT, however, get to also define the meaning of the word "proprietary."
And to clarify that I am not defining the meaning of proprietary, I'm using the definition the FSF uses (and has used for significantly longer than the span of this comment thread). Whether you think that's a reasonable definition is a different point, but I was being accused of (effectively) moving the goal-posts.
You can't run your code on a users computer without respecting the other three freedoms, and the AGPL goes even further and says you can't even run it on your own computers.
This was an argument I used to hear being made loudly and unironically by the MIT/BSD crowd in the 90s/00s.
To quote Stalman, free software isn't about having the source available any more than a library is about making books with movable type. It is about giving people the power to be programmers without selling their souls to Big Evil.
That essentially all the code that makes Amazon Amazon is DevOps code on how production code and hardware is managed is something no one could have seen in 2007.
Pretending that orchestration is not the most important part of the stack today is as ignorant as saying that source code doesn't matter because you have the binary version was in 1995, again something I've heard said unironically.
The AGPL, the most radical of the free software licenses, does not deal with the supporting code on how to deploy the software. The prosperity license does, because it's written by people who are in the trenches today. And it's completely free when you open source your full stack.
Absolutely wrong for the gpl, which is a distribution license, not a usage license. This is a well established fact.
That's what I said.
I've cancelled the mongodb standardization in the big company I work for specifically to avoid them.
The only sane way for a cautious company to use those vaguely licensed software is the proprietary one. That's the intent of this artificial grey area.
And as a consumer I try to avoid proprietary software whenever possible. License management is a huge pain.
Many things in life have no real middle ground.
These "middle ground" licenses have yet to show a useful non-toxic instance that actually served their communities.
You have the burden of proof here.
Almost all of these "middle ground" license cannot be combined with the normal licenses that have huge functioning communities.
even transistors, the basic underpinning of our digital worlds, have middle ground - it's the norm, not the exception, and dichotomies are almost entirely a human fiction to make things more computationally tractable
the burden is yours
Metaphors aren't really a good thinking tool here.
Instead maybe asking (as I suggested you do) if EVEN ONE of these LICENSE schemes is actually working for the community its supposed to serve vs the pr blahblah we see in their announcements?