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Comment by tjomk | Hacker News Reader

Why does everyone assume that if something is open source it must also be free and licensed under permissive license allowing you whatever? Briefly looking at their website I got the impression that it was meant for transparency reasons rather than in the spirit of free and open-source.

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I didn't assume it must be free of charge. I only mentioned it isn't, to point that this is not a possible reason they chose AGPL.

I did, however, assume the Open Source <=> OSI approved license. How else to define Open Source?

Transparency alone could be achieved with their own Source Available license, so it doesn't seem like a reason for double licensing.

Yesterday I was listening to The Changelog podcast with Steve O'Grady called "Open Source is at a Crossroads". In it he says something along the lines of: We have companies come to us saying they want to release their source under an encumbered license and we tell them that they can definitely do that but they can't call it open source, because open source means something fairly specific to developers. We work with them on getting their specific license terms set up but they come back saying "We really want to call it open source, because developers find open source cool, and we want to attract developers." Developers like it because of what open source means.

https://changelog.com/podcast/558

Thank you, I found the answer to my question posted above in this podcast and the article linked there [1]

So, the argument is simply that Open Source is a branding that attracts developers as a target group.

I wonder when will we start seeing commercial, source available projects posted to GitHub with a single file like stringutils.[ts|go|java|etc] MIT-licensed for a single purpose of calling the entire project "Open Source"

[1]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2023/08/03/why-opensource-matter...

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