Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Open source has meaning, and you're polluting that meaning. It would be one thing if you were honest about it, but by continuing to call closed source software open you're proving that this isn't just a mistake but is actually maliciousness on your part.

Just say "We're making our source public, and after three years our legacy code will automatically become open source". Don't claim you're making something open source, but then have all these nasty hidden caveats. It's dishonest.

View on HN

Feels like a spirit vs. letter conflict. When we say "Codecov is now Open Source" we sincerely mean it at face value. We think we're embodying the spirit of open source. If the letter doesn't jibe then let's change it together.

Also feels like we'd have to take this conversation to a video call or something to make any further progress.

[disclosure: I'm Head of Open Source at Sentry, which owns Codecov.]

I don't understand how the "head of open source" software can claim that a license which literally begins by saying it is not open source, is in fact open source. You're right gaslighting the community or you're engaging in self delusion.

I think just changing the title from 'CodeCov is now Open Source' to 'Source code of CodeCov is now available', it conveys the same spirit and meaning, without any misleading parts

The letter reflects the spirit valued by the community, OSI, and FSF. You are free to choose a different term to reflect a different spirit.

IMHO it's also dishonest to claim there is "one true definition" of the term "Open Source", when in fact 1) there have been a zillion discussion like this now, which demonstrates this consensus doesn't exist, 2) "Open Source" has seen usage going back to as far as 1985 at the least.[1]

All of this is reminds me of the "if people keep misusing your design, then it sucks"[2] story from the other day. If you don't want people to "misuse" [common and obvious adjective] + [common noun] then choose a better term.

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html#pre-1998-usage

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36939648

Reply on news.ycombinator.com