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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

So, essentially, this is a closed source or source available licence. Anyone trying to develop open source with this will be stuck two years behind the official release and so it won't be worth trying. I don't get how it solves that freeloader problem either.

The one benefit I can see is that it forces software to stay relatively up to date as, if they don't make enough changes in a two year period, they will likely be forked and someone else will add the fixes that the devs weren't. But this is also potentially a negative as it inventiveness regularly breaking compatibility with old versions.

I don't see any benefit to the developer using this license except that it makes them feel like they are doing open source. A better approach would just be to accept public contributions under a closed, source-available licence. Or, better still, just offer separate personal and commercial licences.

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> Anyone trying to develop open source with this will be stuck two years behind the official release and so it won't be worth trying.

Only if you're a direct SaaS competitor. In that case, you'll have to diverge based on two year old code, which seems fair to me. (And you're always free to start your own project, if you want to compete...)

> I don't get how it solves that freeloader problem either.

Because freeloading competitors are stuck with two year old code, putting them at a disadvantage, or compelling then to invest in that old code (some of which might find its way into the original branch).

> I don't see any benefit to the developer using this license except that it makes them feel like they are doing open source.

Is there really a need for this amount of negativity/scepticism?

> Because freeloading competitors are stuck with two year old code, putting them at a disadvantage, or compelling then to invest in that old code (some of which might find its way into the original branch).

This makes no sense though. If you don't want competition, why give your source away? If you do want competition, why put it at a disadvantage? That's why I am so negative about this license. It's just someone trying to have their cake and eat it too. Also, I don't see what's to stop someone free-loading off a two-year-old copy of your work.

> If you don't want competition, why give your source away?

Why not? I mean you're literally arguing against the business decision we are making. We believe in Open Source, we believe in funding Open Source, we are trying to find a balance that is possible to walk for a SaaS business. I'm surprised people generally take the binary view that "either Open Source with no protection or go proprietary completely".

> Also, I don't see what's to stop someone free-loading off a two-year-old copy of your work.

Nothing, you can do that!

> We believe in Open Source

But you don't believe in it enough to do it.

> I'm surprised people generally take the binary view that either Open Source with no protection or go proprietary completely

Because FOSS is about community contributions. People contribute to something owned by the community for the good of the community. Yet here you have claimed the near-exclusive right to profit from the code. FOSS is saying that you expect some of your users to contribute to your code, so you are effectively saying: "contribute to my code for my benefit, and I might let you use it in some circumstances" which is antithetical to the FOSS saying "contribute to public code for public benefit".

> Nothing, you can do that!

Then why not let people free-load of the current version? The answer is because you want to be the only ones who profit from this software. This license exists to keep you as the soul or primary beneficiary of the code for the duration of time you are developing it, unless you make a decision so fundamentally bad that people are willing to wait two years to fix it. I'd wager you don't think you'll make such a decision.

FOSS is explicitly about letting anyone do anything they want with your code, even if you don't like it[1].

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary

> More generally, a license that limits who can use a program, or for what, is not a free software license.

> Because FOSS is about community contributions. People contribute to something owned by the community for the good of the community.

Absolutely not. This is never what it meant.

If you go back the Four Freedoms then it talks about "freedom to do with the software what I want", and certainly not about "software developed with a specific methodology" or "community contributions". The OSD says more or less the same, in a different way.

Ask Richard Stallman: I'm 100% convinced he will tell you the same. It has ALWAYS been about giving users freedom about their own computers, never about "the greater good of the community" of anything else.

The disagreement about the DSL is that the "use the software for any purpose"-freedom is breached. You can disagree if that's a big deal or not, and if that will or won't impede community contributions, but "you must accept community contributions" never played a part of that and never should play a part in that. I will quite literally take down every single one of my many free software projects if it ever becomes to mean that, and suspect many others will too.

On a personal level YOU may think that this is important, and that's fine. But that's something different. Usually I would take this as a "I care about this" and not be too pedantic about exact meaning of "Free Software" or whatnot, but you're incredibly fastidious about the "correct usage of FOSS" all over this thread, it's a hugely painful that your understanding of what it even means is just factually incorrect.

> If you don't want competition, why give your source away?

Of course they don't want competition, but what they do want is customers like me, who will never voluntarily choose to become fully dependent on a single third party for anything remotely important.

> what they do want is customers

Exactly. So they should stop pretending they're open source when this is really just source available as a sales decision. It's also bad for customers like you since you might be mislead into thinking they actually are open source, when in reality they do a lot to prevent any competing services which makes users much more locked-in than it might seem. If you want to switch, you'll either have to self-host if the issue is with their prices, or do 2 full years of development to implement your own version if they make a decision you don't like. It would probably be easier to switch to a competing service at that point, so you are just as locked into them as you are to anyone else.

It would be much better for you if they actually were open source because then you wouldn't be locked-in, and it would be at least a little better if they stopped lying about it.

> I don't see any benefit to the developer using this license except that it makes them feel like they are doing open source.

This is not designed to attract open source developers, but offers reassurance to end-users against hostile vendor behavior (drastic price increase, disagreeable change of direction, general lack of development etc).

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