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Comment by wallmountedtv | Hacker News Reader

When will VC companies stop conflating source available with open source? It's even worse than just being closed source as it's trying to pander to a group for money, and without any respect to the actual values of what they are saying.

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Our philosophy surrounding open-source is uncomplicated and clear. All essential protocols and data formats are subject to the MIT license. However, considering our clients' needs and with the MongoDB situation as a reference, we must maintain some degree of defensibility.

Our objective is to foster a collaborative atmosphere, co-creating with the community. The size of the community matters to us; when it reaches a significant scale, we want to make collective decisions regarding licensing, reflecting a democratic approach.

Antype, a creation of our non-profit organization, is aimed at sustainability rather than becoming another digital ghost. Our mission isn't simply to exist, but to thrive and make meaningful contributions to the open-source landscape. By intertwining our growth with that of our community, we're setting the stage for a sustainable future.

These are all noble goals, and I don't think many commenters here are arguing that they're not justified. Just that the specific use of the term "open source" is incorrectly applied (to your own benefit).

If a subset of things you do are open source, that's great. Say that.

Yep, you right, we'll correct it.

Thank you! Terminology matters. I really appreciate that you’re willing to make that change.

Your goals sound laudable, but they do not alter the fact that your use of the term “open source” is, deliberately or otherwise, misleading.

> Our philosophy surrounding open-source is uncomplicated and clear.

It does not appear to be the case that your philosophy surrounding open-source is clear. You state very clearly, without caveats, that the product is open-source, which strongly implies that the product is, well, open-source without caveats – and this is not the case. That feels rather disingenuous, if not deliberately dishonest.

It is not unlike printer manufactures loudly proclaiming a page-per-minute value without any note about that rate is only attainable feeding entirely blank A6 sheets out of the device.

Most of our repositories are MIT licensed, which holds significant value. Some of our repositories are source-available. We believe we are building an open-source product, and we reserve the right to define what 'open-source' means for us. Our only prohibition is against competitors making minor modifications and then selling our product. Our position on this is clear. We recognize that our definition may not align with others' perspectives here, and we are open to understanding that. However, labeling our approach as dishonest isn't something we consider accurate. To avoid any confusion for those who uphold the traditional notion of 'open source', we will change the term 'open source' to 'open code' on our website.

It's unfortunate it's not actually going to be Free Software, but being able to at least audit and do non-commercial is... better than Notion, I guess. But I do retract a fair portion of my excitement over the project.

Your "reserved right" to define what a word means to you... puts the work to somehow figure out what you mean onto the reader. This isn't quite nice. The speakers are the ones that should strive to make themselves understood in the first place.

I don't have any love for "open source" since it is just "the part of Free Software that appeases people in suits", but please, use the thing as it is.

While language is by nature subjective and ever changing, be careful defending the right to redefine commonly understood terms so significantly. By the same measure people could choose to interpret anything you say, including your other license agreements, however they like!

Source available, of client and server, is definitely better than no source

I do think open source business model, especially consumer, is difficult to tackle, while protecting the creator

So congratulations and good luck

Are you seriously trying to suggest that source code being publicly accessible is worse than nobody being able to access it? What a ridiculous statement.

You are intentionally misrepresenting OP.

> When will VC companies stop *conflating source available with open source*?

*Misrepresenting* "open source" is the problem. "source available" is the correct phrase

It was worse in the case of early BIOS, which IBM made public in an instruction manual while keeping all relevant rights on distribution. I wonder why they did not publish it with a GPL or AGPL license, where they would keep commercial use to themselves.

IBM PC was released in 1981, GPL 2.0 (which was the first version in wide use) in 1991.

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