I think we've seen time and time again large enterprises abusing the spirit of open source for their own monetary gain, contributing nothing back, and just acting in bad faith.
One should always read software licenses before installing a dependency, regardless of how a particular project is marketed. This would still be necessary even if companies weren’t using the term “open source” to refer to this type of license.
People make it sound like companies are out to confuse you by calling it “open source”. If you’re the kind of developer that blindly uses a piece of software because someone claimed it was open source without doing due diligence on how it can be legally used, then you deserve whatever consequences may arise.
That is exactly what people who call non-OSI-approved licenses “Open Source” are doing.
However, I agree, one should also read the license and those of the entire dependency tree.
License technicalities don't matter. If people use permissive licenses as an excuse to justify an ecosystem that is parasitic any such system will die out, it cannot sustain itself.
If that's what you think open source is, it'll vanish. No commercial system can exist like that and it should not because it effectively means distributing resources from people who do everything to people who do nothing.
If they strip all attribution, then you can just take them to court for violating the license; other than public domain and WTFPL, even the most permissive licenses (BSD/MIT/Apache) still require attribution.
Free software has been fine without any businessmen or companies involved, we don't need your or any company's approval. It seems like the only thing that will vanish from the open source sphere are companies with flawed business plans.
Building a business off the open source model and community good-will before realising it doesn't work is either incompetence or dishonesty.
> If that's what you think open source is, it'll vanish. No commercial system can exist like that and it should not because it effectively means distributing resources from people who do everything to people who do nothing.
This is a weirdly hyper-capitalist take. You're saying that the successful businesses built off open source "should not" exist?
Back in the real world, with people in it, the GPL and (by extension) Open Source were created for underlying reasons.
They were the Bazaar people. They sold open source as something that makes software quality better. It was the counterpoint to Free Software, who said they made programs morally better, and that it was largely irrelevant whether copyleft made software quality better.
I mentioned the cases I have seen the word abuse used as a counter point to 'If somebody doesn't want any competitors' which is not something I have seen brought up when taking about abusing the spirit of open source.
I was not taking about what the licenses legally bind you to do.
For many, the spirit of open source is to allow it to be used in any way, commercially or otherwise. I don't consider it acting in bad faith at all to use what's out there and made available, and I am happy to give things away as in beer. Otherwise it's not open source (which is also fine, not all software has to be open source).
To abuse the spirit of open source, make arbitrary rules about its use.
The main way I think about this and how I often see people act are that actions which undermine the long term success and sustainability open source community is abusive. So you take a behavior and say if a non-trivial number of people emulated/copied this behavior will the open source community survive long term, if the answer is no, then the behavior is abusive.
Of course people disagree with what will lead to long term sustainability of open source projects and communities, though it does seems like a reasonable heuristic to the first degree of approximation.
It's a spectrum IMHO from closed-source to "do whatever you want" source.
Well, by definition they wouldn't be open source projects then. But yes, better to make that clear from the start.