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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

>release their software open source instead of licensing

What do you mean? Open source is not just source available.

Open Source Science Software is generally licensed under MIT or GPL to make the source available, source code inheritable, mark the artifact as a deliverable, and make code reviewable and encourage collaboration.

So the funding bodies can support you financially over the code you released, and other users can support you with improvements to make code more valuable and usable.

This is beyond source available, this how Free Software is designed and dreamed to work in practice.

I mean this in the best way, but your comment doesn't make any sense. I'm asking sfpotter what he means by releasing something OS without using licensing. I didn't ask for an overview of free software.

Licensing in this context means "closed/strict licensing which doesn't provide freedoms". The code is actually licensed:

https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/SuiteSparse/blob/mast...

> Licensing in this context means "closed/strict licensing which doesn't provide freedoms".

Maybe that's what the commenter meant but that's not what that language means. Open source licenses are, well, licenses, and if you use them then you're licensing your code. The L in GPL stands for license, for example.

The original commenting user verified that he/she used the term "License" as in "Strict copyright" [0].

There's no need to be pedantic over a word here.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33274282

"Strict copyright" doesn't make sense either. OSS licenses are just as strict as closed source ones. You can just say a "closed source license."

OSS licenses are generally called "permissive", "weak copyright", "weak copyleft" and "strong copyleft" (in case of GPL family) depending on the context and nature of the license implied.

"Strict/Strong Copyright" makes sense.

Just try Googling for "weak copyright" or "strong copyright". You can see for yourself that there's no such usage like you're explaining. All the top results are about whether copyright as a general concept is, or should be, strong or weak, applied to all circumstances (proprietary and open sourced software alike and even other types of copyrightable works).

Strong and weak copyleft is a different matter, those terms do make sense. Maybe that's the source of confusion here.

I suppose I was being pendatic (sorry) but more over your comment than theirs. If that's what they meant then your original reply could've just been "oh I think they meant not a proprietary license" rather than explaining what open source means to someone that already understands it.

In fact, I tried to explain why Open Source works in "Scientific Software" in general. Sorry if that wasn't obvious.

People generally ask "why" people give away their life research for free, and I wanted to clarify that as a person who works in an HPC Center and makes research himself.

https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/SuiteSparse/blob/mast... it's lgpl or gpl, which is the point of the complaint.

GitHub does a ton of work to formalize license management, it's odd that copilot ignored all of that.

Yes but GGP said “instead of licensing”.

I read it as "licensing in a proprietary way", or "licensing with strict copyright terms".

Which is also present in some research software. You buy the source, but can't share/distribute. Only compile, customize and use.

This is the correct interpretation. Apologies for any confusion.

"licensing" as verb is often used to mean "sell or buy (depending on context) commercial licenses". Even though releasing for free as open source also involves a software license.

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