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Comment by mmPzf | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused by the "open source but not free" statement in the readme. How common is it to refer to software with public source code as "open source"? I always thought the "open source" label applied only to those licenses officially certified as open source.

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Yes, it's a misuse of the term "open source". It should be described as "source-available" [0], not "open source".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

Many popular "open source" projects are also not free...

Can you name some examples? According to the internet for most practical purposes the terms "open source" and "free software" refer to the same set of licenses [0]

[0]: https://opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-sof...

Asperite is open source and not free.

Aseprite is not Free and Open Source software. It is source available though.

Elasticsearch

https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch is Apache2, and free as in beer, no?

not quite that repo is a mix of https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/license... and apache 2.0 .. the elastic license stuff is in a particular sub directory, but there's so many intermingled commits, a contributor can't look at git history without becoming tainted. Which then leads to elastic suing folks building on their opensource.. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users

https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...

I think they mean free as in free beer. So there can be Free and Open Source Software that you must pay for.

It's hard to sell air, until you compress it and put it in a tank. And it's hard to sell sand, until you put it in a bag. So the air and sand is free, but then it varies: Open core, dual licenses, packed with proprietary software, license clause's, etc. Why not just ask for a license fee? And why can't something be open source when it's not free as in free beer? So yes, what I mean is there are open source software that is not free as in libre, and there are open source software that are not free as in free beer. So why can't this software be called open source, when the source is... open? Open source comes with many advantages, not just that it's free as in free beer but also that you can fix issues yourself, and it makes it easier to create plugins, mods, etc.

> And why can't something be open source when it's not free as in free beer

There is nothing preventing you from charging a fee for Open Source or even for Free Software. You only need to distribute source code to users of your software. That means it does not need to be publicly available on a site like Github. You need to remember that users who receive the software and source code are still allowed to distribute your software for a fee or even free. This method of selling software is not common at all though, so I can't really name any successful projects doing it.

> So why can't this software be called open source, when the source is... open?

The reason you can't call software like that as Open Source is because Open Source has a clear definition as defined by the Open Source Initiative[1]. Free Software has a definition as well[2]. The Open Source definition is a more expanded and detailed version of the Free Software's Four Freedoms. If the license you use for your software does not allow the things as described by those definitions, you can't call it Open Source or Free Software.

[1]:https://opensource.org/osd [2]:https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The original wording was "It's open source, but it's not free". It can be understood as "It's open source software, but the copies are sold for a fee" if you stick with the standard terms, and yes, it's pretty common, but the actual meaning here was "the source is available, but not under a FOSS license", and it's also not unusual (for example, license with commercial restrictions).

Even your comment is ambiguous. I'm not really sure whether you've understood the context (and I'm not sure I've understood you, either) due to the ambiguity. This is exactly why I said the phase "open source" is a misuse and it's important to stick with the standard terms.

Thank you for this, my mistake! Will update that now.

I think "source available" is a more common term. AFAIK even ms windows is "source available" for certain customers.

I think it's a bit odd choice, but quite clear: it's a kind of shareware with source code available, I guess.

It's becoming more and more common, because giving casual words a specific meaning was a failure from the beginning. Now the newer generation of devs are growing up and are not indoctrinated enough yet to know this or care about it, and such things happen more and more.

Thats why we used to use to term Free Software... Now what open source really means depends on whoever uses it.

Even better - so things like Macromedia Flash, Opera browser and shareware games were early versions of free software. /s

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