Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

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For once, someone got it right and didn't claim with bold, uppercase letters that it's an Open Source project, like it usually happens with a lot of HN entries of that topic. Lately, the relicense of some Sentry product to a non-OSS license that was wrongly called "Open Source" just because the source was shared. As deserved, these kinds of usages tend to receive a good amount of backlash due to wrongly using the term.

But here, all is right, I don't see where anyone could base any complaint. Except for being entitled to instruct others about the license they should use for their own work, that is. I'd say they are walking the line with insisting on how "open" this solution is, but it doesn't really cross any line.

They are missing a very strong 4th line in "How is this different than OpenStack?" [1], though: OpenStack is Apache 2.0, aka. proper OSS, thus you can use or host it in whatever way you want, even use it to create an IaaS if you wanted. With UbiCloud, I didn't read the license, but probably not.

[1]: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud#how-is-this-different-t...

EDIT: turns out they say "open source" not in the linked github repo, but in the project's homepage. Back to square one then: they are lying.

They have an "open source" image right there on their front page

Oh. Just saw it. I had only opened the Github project page linked in this entry. I've added a mention in my comment.

Indeed, just back to being another case of falsely claiming to provide the freedoms of usage that Open Source would actually grant but they don't.

Should be a very quick fix, though. It isn't called open source all across, but only mistakenly in a couple of places.

Thanks for pointing this out. We updated our website.

For clarification, we weren't planning to launch until we had a proper looking website. Yesterday, I shared our GitHub repo on LinkedIn to get feedback from friends. Then, we saw this on HN - and realized that we haven't looked at our website in quite a while.

We're also trying to formulate a better point of view on the license and its implications. We Ask HN'ed several days ago, but there wasn't much input: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998888

In the end, we picked a more restrictive license. An important reason for that is, we feel that we can move from a restrictive to a more liberal license easily. Doing the inverse would feel like not doing the right thing by our users.

For the record, I believe you did the right thing. It's your work so you should use whichever license you like, and have users use your product on your own terms. It's just that passing non-OSI approved licenses as "Open Source" does tend to trigger strong responses.

OSS flies faster because people love the ability to use and reuse source code. But not everything must be OSS especially if the source code itself must be the source of income (thinking here of a mantra that's been repeated in HN several times, and which is very correct IMO: "Open Source is not a business model")

And yes you're right that it's better to go from restricted to open. The opposite direction has always been received with harsh criticism. Also you open yourself to the risk of a community forming around forking the project from the last commit that was OSS, and departing with their own thing form there. Unlikely, but technically possible.

Yeah, these are terminological bugs. I have reported them. I work there.

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