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Comment by Grimburger | Hacker News Reader

> Restricted licenses (reminiscent of the older shareware movement) are not open source

I can look at the code. Seems open enough to me [ducks from tomatoes].

People play the semantics game on this a lot but the source is viewable/available/stealable by anyone who wants it. Hackers can find bugs to either exploit or notify the maintainers of and people can modify it to better suit their needs. Legitimate businesses will buy a license if it is of worth to them, I doubt you'll find many that are overpriced for their value.

The fervent animosity towards dual free non-commercial/paid commercial licenses in the foss world has always puzzled me. In the end it is source code readable by anyone yeah? What would you actually prefer, it stays locked up forever?

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What they would prefer is that you continue to offer up your unpaid labor that they can then use to build fortunes upon. It is no accident that businesses are happy to encourage "open source" so long as that means "make us stuff we can use to make money with without paying you a dime". "Open source" has never meant you couldn't charge for your work or otherwise impose a noncommercial use restriction on it, though the OSI and its pro-corporate partisans have gone to great lengths to claim otherwise (much like they like to pretend the invented the term and/or the concept).

At the end of the day I don't work for free, and I'm pretty sure you don't either, so if you want to get paid for what you do then make them pay you. The End. Full stop. HAND. TYVFM. FOAD. Etc. Ad nauseum. Anyone who says otherwise should not be engaged but simply told to get lost... because if they want Free Shit then they know where to find it.

Open source is never about you working for free or not being able to charge money for shit.

I see OSI version of open source as forced labor, the best I can do is open source my work, meaning make the source code open source, people can use it for free but as soon as you want to commercialize my work, you gotta pay.

If you anyone is about to say that isn't open source, well, there is nothing you can do about it, sorry

The OSI thinks otherwise:

> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

-- Source: https://opensource.org/osd

They've been pushing this line for decades.

What use is accessible code if you're not (legally) allowed to do anything with it? It's a bit like having an all you can eat buffet but you're not allowed to eat the food only look.

I agree that there is one upside though, there's a chance the code can be used again after collapse of civilization when we find that someone made a backup.

> if you're not (legally) allowed to do anything with it

You mean make money from it? You're allowed to anything you can imagine for private purposes.

I was specifically talking about dual non-commercial/commercial licenses above.

> You're allowed to anything you can imagine for private purposes.

Not legally, no.

Non-commercial licenses are by definition not open source.

thats a semantic argument. "source available" is in practice the same thing as "open source", unless you are a business trying to make money off free software.

I can think of one immediate example: Auditing it.

Open source means you can read the source code, which is a very powerful tool at your disposal.

I have over 750 thousand files in my root file system. I've never audited any of them. What about the libraries I use for my personal projects? Crosses fingers..

> Open source means you can read the source code

Note: It doesn’t only mean that.

Does Unreal Engine make their source inspectable and modifiable?

> The fervent animosity towards dual free non-commercial/paid commercial licenses in the foss world has always puzzled me. In the end it is source code readable by anyone yeah?

Yes, but I cannot for example use it if I received grant to develop open source application.

Maybe above is overly cautious. Buy I have enough legal uncertainty with dealing how to tax grant income, I do not need more of it.

I would instead appreciate license even more toxic for corporations than GPLv3 - which would not block use by small players.

> What would you actually prefer, it stays locked up forever?

The problem is that it is usually alternative to free software/open source - not completely secret code.

> I would instead appreciate license even more toxic for corporations than GPLv3 - which would not block use by small players.

Something like the Reciprocal Public License? https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5

RPL still allows commercial use, so you might as well just use GPL

The animosity comes from being tricked into vendor lock-in with "free" samples.

I would much rather have a paid free license than a zero cost non-free license. I'm always surprised more corporate/enterprise software doesn't take this approach. Have it be a full open source license, but only distribute the source to companies that pay for support contracts. Of course your paying customers could turn around and redistribute it, but most companies are risk adverse and would rather buy from the vendor. If you really can't handle some people using your new code for free you could have it be proprietary for a year or three then revert to AGPL or whatever FLOSS license you prefer. (which was mentioned in tfa)

> The animosity comes from being tricked into vendor lock-in with "free" samples.

Care to name one of these lock-in licenses specifically rather than generally?

> I would much rather have a paid free license than a zero cost non-free license.

As someone who earns money from opensource software used by both companies and individuals I really have no idea what this actually means. Care to elucidate for the rest of us what a "paid free" or " zero cost non-free" license is? Literally just an example link to one of those types of licenses is all I'm asking here.

Paid free would be where you pay for an app and get the GPLed source code along with the binary.

> The animosity comes from being tricked into vendor lock-in with "free" samples.

Care to name one of these lock-in licenses specifically rather than generally?

It's not the licenses, it's the tactics they allow. Microsoft giving away Office to schools for so long is why so many companies use it today. They are afraid of teaching their employees something new, so they don't even consider it. Because everyone realizes this, there is little competition.

I thought I was pretty clear, but I guess not. When I said "zero cost non-free" I meant any software that doesn't cost money, but does not give users freedom. An example would be Microsoft Edge. When I said "paid free" I meant software that costs money, but does give users freedom. An example would be RHEL, it was still free/opensource code but they only let paying customers download it from their servers. I'm not sure if redhat still works this way after the changes they've gone through since IBM, but that was their thing for a long time.

> it is source code readable by anyone yeah? What would you actually prefer, it stays locked up forever?

False dichotomy.

It breeds animosity if a open source software project closes the doors to the original developers who intended the project to be free software. Plex is an example.

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