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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

> This repository is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which prohibits commercial usage. MyShell reserves the ability to detect whether an audio is generated by OpenVoice, no matter whether the watermark is added or not.

So it is not 'open' then and you cannot make money out of this?

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It is open, just not by your definition. You can view, use and modify the code to your hearts content. Sounds pretty open to me!

Open for business!

No wait…

To be specific, while it is not a bad license, it does not quality for the Free Cultural Works mark as defined by the Creative Commons and Freedom Defined: https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/freeworks/

Well… “use” isn’t exactly free, this the complaint. On a scale of free to not free, “cannot use this for my work” is a pretty big jump to the latter end IMO

Careful, you’re saying the quiet part out loud; freedom is about profiting off the uncompensated work of others.

Well ultimately we all need to eat. If someone wants to be compensated in today’s society, they either need to join a gift-based sub-society (see: OSS foundations, NGOs in general) or sell something. Trust me, I totally agree that freedom of information should be a completely separate concern from resource allocation

EDIT: I guess there’s a third option, “work another job and use OSS on your off hours”. Which feels… idk, disrespectful of the whole enterprise. OSS software development is important enough to deserve a wage IMO, to say the least

To your last point, people pay what the market will bear. In this case, it's free, so don't be surprised that if you give something away for free that people, well, take it for free. Importance has nothing to do with it.

As long as your hearts content isn't commercial

And not by opensource.org's definition, which prohibits use restrictions. It's not reasonable to act like OP is being idiosyncratic when this fails to meet the protected definition of "open source".

The term "open source" is not protected, the OSI (opensource.org) attempted and failed to acquire a trademark on that term.

Fair enough. Is there any shared definition of "open source" which permits use restrictions, then?

I admit not to have read the whole paper, but in the intro nowhere do they mention “open source”, so it seems unfair to measure them by that definition

By the commonly held definition of open, in the context of "open source", it is not open.

> You can view, use and modify the code to your hearts content.

The non-commercial clause of their license specifically prohibits commercial use, so we cannot use this source, and presumably the data that the source uses, to our hearts content.

The OSI has a definition of open source that clearly states commercial use is required [0].

Wikipedias entry on Open Source Licensing also stipulates that commercial re-use is required [1].

There is a term called "source available" which is more in line with your intent.

[0] https://opensource.org/osd/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license

> commonly held definition of open, in the context of "open source", it is not open

While this is very true, the context of "open source" can't be assumed.

Where do they claim to be “open source”?

In their README in the GitHub repository as well as the paper. I opened an issue [0] and it looks like they've updated their README, at least, to reflect that it's not open source.

[0] https://github.com/myshell-ai/OpenVoice/issues/16

You can’t. Scammers who don’t care about noncommercial licenses sure can!

Yep, this is one of those "only bad actors" licenses, probably as a cash grab.

It will definitely stop those bad actors from scamming people this time, right? Right?

This is the most insightful take. Licenses like this prevent certain businesses in certain countries, but it is quite harmful as it adds a powerful tool for propaganda/scammers/etc who don’t care about the laws.

Additionally, it only really hurts small businesses & startups as the big companies all have teams that can make their own version or pay for 3rd party apis for easily. So yeah, us startup folks won’t like this license much as it basically is aimed at us the most.

Either way, congrats with the tech. It does look very impressive!

erm, it's existence provides to scammers.

unless you're proposing it's use in detecting itself is some how symmetrical, which I really don't think is anything but unproven conjecture.

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