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Comment by tommoor | Hacker News Reader

The BSL is meant to be open source "in spirit", with the sole restriction being that you can't run a competitive hosted service because that's the only way the project sustains itself.

Internally hosting a copy for your own company is purposefully within the bounds of the license.

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There's no such thing as "open source in spirit". Either something is open source, and I can use and redistribute the software per the requirements of the Open Source Initiative, or I cannot. "Open source in spirit" means, in practice, "closed source, but we probably won't sue you if we like you". While that's certainly fine for a personal wiki, I would have strong qualms about using this for a business.

Open source isn't a term exclusively owned and defined by the OSI.

You can define it however you like, but that term has long been used to describe projects that don't quite fit in OSI's box.

To be clear- I think OSI has the best definition that I would like to see- but 'somewhat open source' is certainly better than nothing.

I very strongly disagree. Historically, the whole point of open source is that you get a license that specifies your rights. You want software that you know you can use and modify even if the original author later doesn't approve. "Somewhat open source" is simply not open source in the way that term is used. (Naturally, you're free to redefine the term for your own usage, but that doesn't change anything.)

Edit: Past terms used for this type of license are freeware and source available, but that doesn't make them open source.

I think those of us who like the OSI definition of "Open Source" should actively push back on use of the term to mean something other than the OSI definition. I'd rather see licenses like the BSL called "source available" or some such.

Yea, at this point we're careful to only use the language of open source where it applies, for example our editor _is_ OSI compatible

> There's no such thing as "open source in spirit"

I guess that's down to personal opinion. I and others say there is, take a look at this article regarding the license: https://itsfoss.com/making-the-business-source-license-open-...

In the end I'm not interested in having an argument with Open Source zealots – it seems that once you make the source code of a project public there is a category of person on the internet that isn't happy until it's completely free.

By that logic, Microsoft Windows is open-source, because I can view its source under the MS Reference Source License.

This is the key distinction between "Source Available" and "Open Source". Open Source is open. That means I can modify the source and redistribute my changes. If I can't do that, the software is closed source, no matter how much marketing you apply to it.

I guess we'll agree to disagree! In the meantime I'll keep building the project and the business.

That's not open source in spirit... that's the opposite of everything open source stands for.

It garnered Bruce Peren's endorsement ;)

https://itsfoss.com/making-the-business-source-license-open-...

Not a lawyer, but that sounds a bit wishy-washy, which corporate lawyers are really not fond of. It's part of the reason why the JSON standard was problematic for a while, because it had a clause stating that it "should be used for Good, not Evil", which is a legal nightmare.

Ditto on the not a lawyer aspect, but this seems pretty straightforward:

   You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that
                      you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document
                      Service.

                      A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that
                      allows third parties (other than your employees and
                      contractors) to access the functionality of the
                      Licensed Work by creating teams and documents
                      controlled by such third parties.

It isn't really all that straightforward. The key distinction is in that phrase, "your employees and contractors". What happens if I go through a recruiting agency to hire a contractor, and the contractor is actually an employee of the recruiting agency? Does that contractor get access to my wiki? What happens if I contract with an external design firm? Do their employees get access to my wiki? What happens if I try to cheat this language by providing a wiki service as a B2B enterprise, where I get hired as a contractor (a wiki-provider contractor) to all of these corporation to set up wikis for them?

That language is the sort of seemingly straightforward sounding language that can and does get litigated to death, and I wouldn't blame a corporate lawyer for advising his or her client to steer clear.

Every single example you give either falls under contractor or employee. Simply because you don‘t know legal language, doesn‘t mean lawyers don’t have simple, binary ways to deal with this that fully captures all of your examples. Law is not at all wishy washy in this case. If both employees and contractors are captured, then you‘re literally covered.

What I do agree with, is that any careful corporate lawyer would have a good look at this license and check whether there are any courts that have ever looked at this license to see how battle tested it is. Speaking as a lawyer, what I would see as an edge case that might be problematic is if a competitor of Outline that uses its completely self-built tech stack to provide a competing service as outlined in that clause would use Outline internally as a knowledge base. But I mean that‘d be absurd.

// addendum Personally, I think it would be cool if Outline at some point removed that clause, once it has built sufficient moat around its commodity services.

OTOH:

I can't tell you how many telemedicine (aka, video conferencing) services use Zoom, Google, or GTM as their teleconferencing solution when speaking with prospective clients.

I've literally only had one that was actually using the televideo software they were pitching me as the televideo platform for our demo call. One out of many.

What happens if the company starts selling on-premises products in the future?

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