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Seeing the source code isn’t that terribly important and loses the main benefits of FOSS.

I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. Even if contributors do the main work, this long tail of user contribution is so important.

With source available, I’m not contributing any of my work toward a proprietary project. I’m happy to spend hours researching and writing up a bug if my work goes toward a common good. Not so much if it just funds some corporation with free labor.

I think it’s a distraction to try to force this into a good/bad dichotomy. I don’t hear anyone saying that “source available” is bad. Just that it’s different than FOSS. There’s nothing wrong with selling software. I just think it’s inferior to FOSS for producing high quality software.

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Important to note that community involvement is not core to FOSS. Many FOSS projects do not accept outside contributions.

Good point, but it’s common. And it’s possible. And the community has the freedom to fork, even if they don’t.

And pretty much every successful FOSS project accepts bug reports from users. So that’s still a contribution even though it’s not source code.

> And the community has the freedom to fork, even if they don’t.

So does a SAMS community. They just can't turn it commercial (for a noncommercial license), or they have to wait for full FOSS (for a delayed FOSS license), etc.

> And pretty much every successful FOSS project accepts bug reports from users. So that’s still a contribution even though it’s not source code.

That is still possible with SAMS.

It’s not the possibility that’s important, it’s the practicality.

I can “fork” windows. I just can’t do anything with it without paying Microsoft.

And I can also spend effort to write up a detailed report to Microsoft or to a SAMS project. But I won’t, because I don’t like doing free labor for corporations.

But you can fork SAMS and do something wuth it without paying the authors.

You just have to keep the fork free of money.

The only way you would care about that is because you do want money in the fork. Then you become a dealer.

As an end user? No difference.

> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project.

I disagree entirely. You're describing various communities around various OSS projects, and what you're describing is fantastic. However, none of it is inherent to OSS. There are more OSS projects out there that have no community around than those that do, but they are no less OSS.

> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project.

Imho the main benefit of FOSS is that it becomes a shared good forever. Which includes those community aspects.

No vendor can close it back up. If vendor goes under or stops supporting the community, the community can go on regardless. That keeps the FOSS available to all until the last copy bitrotted away.

> I think the main benefit is community involvement in submitting bugs, contributing changes, writing docs, and being part of the project. Even if contributors do the main work, this long tail of user contribution is so important.

I wholly disagree. It depends on the project.

For the projects that want contributions, yes, FOSS is what you want.

For projects that don't want contributions, there's no loss in switching to SAMS.

I said as much in the post.

> I think it’s a distraction to try to force this into a good/bad dichotomy. I don’t hear anyone saying that “source available” is bad.

And yet there are comments on this very page saying that SAMS gives less freedom, therefore it's bad.

Let me know when a "source available" project achieves the same widespread acceptance and success as the thousands of open source projects like the Linux kernel, gcc and everything else that have given the industry the ability to be more productive by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Edit: if you want an example of where GPL vs BSD license made a huge difference, just look at Juniper's behaviour around their changes to FreeBSD that were used to build JunOS. Juniper was a poor contributor of changes they made to the FreeBSD kernel back to the community. In comparison, the fact that the GPL forces vendors to publish their changes to Linux means that the community has ended up with support for many embedded platforms being merged into mainline. The FreeBSD developer community struggles in part because vendors can take without giving back because of the license, so there is less incentive to participate in the community.

That's a disingenuous argument when proprietary code such as Windows, AWS, and Google have just as much widespread acceptance, and they often did it by cannibalizing FOSS.

Last I checked, all those organizations were contributing many changes every release to the Linux kernel to improve performance, fix bugs and add features.

Because they have to for their own purposes.

Even Google still "contributes" to Android. But they made it unusable without Play Services, which is entirely proprietary.

There are ways to use FOSS to further monopoly and still look like the good guys by contributing. Doesn't make them any less the bad guys.

Software licensing has almost nothing to do with monopolies you mentioned. Google's monopoly comes from the position of power it has entrenched itself in by controlling search and using that control to make its advertising platform ubiquitous while buying up competitors in the online advertising space.

In fact, I would argue that open source licenses makes it easier to compete against the cloud platforms you listed. Smaller companies like Hetzner can build their own private cloud platforms using virtualization software like QEMU (another very healthy project licensed under the GPL) and open source orchestration software. They can obtain and build on this software because it is open source and freely available (free as in both beer and money). "Source available" licenses aren't an improvement on this.

Sure, they're not an "improvement" on this, but Hetzner becomes just another cannibal in that case.

WTF? Hetzner has built a platform to deliver services to their customers. They have built a business that takes care of putting in physical infrastructure by constructing buildings to house servers, deliver network connectivity, cooling and power while financing that infrastructure and delivering service as a great monthly price. QEMU is but a small part of that, and I'd venture a guess that the cost of building the software to run their business is around the same order of magnitude as the physical infrastructure. That's hardly a parasitic business.

Moreover, Google is the parasite in this case. Hetzner was founded in 1997 before Google even existed, running cloud-like business before Google launched their first service. Google isn't the reason software like QEMU exists, although they have certainly helped improve it.

Not sure why you're choosing to be so ignorant of the history of how we got here today.

Hetzner is a cannibal of QEMU,not Google.

I do not dispute that Hetzner built that stuff, but in "The Economics of Programming Languages," Evan says that cannibals need to build a business too. What they don't need to build is the software they cannibalize.

So the original authors have to build the software and a business, while cannibals just build a business. Who is going to win?

And your claim that QEMU is a small part of their business discounts the other FOSS code they build on. How much FOSS? I bet it's a lot.

You appear to be viewing software licensing as a zero sum game. How has Hetzner's use of open source virtualization software harmed the original author of QEMU, Fabrice Bellard? Back in the early days of QEMU, there were bugs. Lots of bugs, as hardware emulation is complicated. By releasing QEMU under the GPL, the project gained lots of users, and some of those users started fixing bugs. Because Fabrice chose to license QEMU under the GPL, users were forced to publish those fixes back to the community. Companies that decided to use and build on QEMU made it better. Parasites only take, while FOSS makes sure that users give back to the original project.

Why is it that software developers, like Fabrice Bellard, choose to use FOSS licenses rather than a software available license? Do they receive zero benefit from choosing a FOSS license? No. They receive the benefit of other people using, and then improving the software they originally developed, which in turn feeds back into building a stronger community that supports the software.

SAMS has barriers to entry that FOSS does not, and it fails to protect certain developer interests that FOSS licences protect. Those barriers to entry and rights matter to authors of FOSS. Developers who believe in FOSS will never adopt SAMS licenses, because SAMS doesn't protect the rights those authors value in the way that licenses like the GPL do. You're free to use whatever "software available" license you want, but people like me that value what FOSS gives back to us will never come around to your viewpoint because you do not value what we value.

They matter to some authors.

The rest, like me, just have to go along because SAMS is not widely accepted.

The problem is not FOSS. The problem is that FOSS is the only socially acceptable option.

To reply to your edit, you are making my case for me.

One of my points is that FOSS can be worse for the end user because companies like Juniper can take a lot of it and make it proprietary. This is true even for the GPL in these SaaS days.

I personally think that copyleft is a necessary thing for non-FOSS SAMS because of this.

> One of my points is that FOSS can be worse for the end user because companies like Juniper can take a lot of it and make it proprietary.

I disagree with this point. They don’t make the FOSS worse. They make a new thing. The original is still available.

And if it was SAMS it wouldn’t save it from this fate as it would never be used enough to get to this point.

So SAMS isn’t a defense against “abuse.” But I argue that this isn’t abuse at all as the license is used as designed. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

If I create a project with MIT, I’m perfectly fine with Juniper taking it and bolting it onto their own proprietary software. I don’t think this makes my project worse.

> They don’t make the FOSS worse. They make a new thing. The original is still available.

But the new thing is not, and unwitting end users using the new thing probably are never told about the open alternative.

> And if it was SAMS it wouldn’t save it from this fate as it would never be used enough to get to this point.

If SAMS were as accepted as FOSS, I think SAMS would be used enough to get to that point.

> But I argue that this isn’t abuse at all as the license is used as designed. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

I'm not arguing for abolishing FOSS. Projects that want this can still use FOSS as it is.

I'm arguing for SAMS to be accepted as a valid alternative. Based on the comments on this page, it is not as accepted.

> If SAMS were as accepted as FOSS

But that’s impossible as SAMS is not FOSS.

*accepted to the same level that FOSS is accepted.

Unreal Engine has been one of the top video-game engines for years and it's "source available".

It’s as “source available” as Windows.

> SAMS gives less freedom

This is objectively true.

> therefore it’s bad

This is subjective, of course, in relation to other license types. I happen to agree with it, but so what.

> > SAMS gives less freedom

> This is objectively true.

To only a certain kind of person: non-author dealers.

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