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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

> Most irksome of all, in a fair number of cases they sit centrally on pages covered in ads and SEO keywords. My tools are being associated with a genuinely bad user experience.

For the record, any license that does not allow users to do that would NOT be a free software license.

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Most licenses, even permissive ones, do require attribution of some sort, which in theory should move the SEO to the original.

The problem is that:

1. BSD-4-clause included an advertising clause and that was considered burdensome (similarly, GFDL-with-invariant-clauses is forbidden by e.g. Debian), so the attribution only has to remain somewhere.

2. Embedded-in-an-archive links probably don't count much for SEO. Some aspects of GPL and/or AGPL can help in some circumstances ("appropriate legal notices"), but automated AGPL requirement satisfaction in the presence of forks can actually be pretty tricky to implement even among good actors.

3. even though it's illegal, stripping of license headers remains very common

I hate that people think they can control the definitions of "free" and "open" . I don't care about these biased propaganda definitions. If you want to promote your definition use a branded trademarkable name, don't try to steal our shared use of common words.

It's useful when words mean things. That goes double when the words are used for marketing. Like, yeah in theory it's odd for the OSI to define "Open Source", but in practice it turns out the only people who seem to object to this are people who really want the social capital from calling their stuff open source while actually screwing over the users.

I think there are plenty of arguments for non-OSI approved licences and I don't think "screwing over their users" is even remotely close to why people choose them.

It's perfectly acceptable to use whatever license you want, but then don't call it "open source."

You should stop using the generic term open source if what you really mean is Open Source InitiativeⓇ OSI Certified™ license.

Likewise, you should stop using the term open source if what you really mean is source available [0], especially with usage restrictions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

I myself rarely use the term "open source" but this does not stop others from (mis)using it. The mere fact that a term is generic does not mean that it is meaningless. If someone is genuinely unaware or confused about what the rest of the world thinks "open source" means, then I am happy to educate them. But if they are deliberately exploiting mis-use of the term to hide nefarious intent, then they can go to hell.

“Free” means something. If you want to stop people distributing your software through a site that has ads, then it’s not “free.”

“Open source” means something too. The control people have is in using shared definitions.

Language is malleable, so if enough people use a word incorrectly it changes the definition. But those people get to be called wrong for years until enough people misuse it to make it right.

You're redefining big-F "Free" software as defined by the GPL, which aims to give users freedom to change their software - and is indifferent to; at best, restricts at the worst, the rights of intermediate software developers who inject themselves between Free software and users by choosing to redistribute or allow their software to be infected by the GPL bits.

IMO, MIT & BSD give downstream developers more rights and are indifferent to end-users. GPL gives users more rights, and indifferent to downstream developers.

You have one definition, of "free" but its not the only reasonable one.

Is MIT not free because it requires attribution? Is no code free because it cannot be used in ways that break the law?

Just because there are some restrictions does not make it completely unfree, and its fair for people to want to use what is the most natural word to refer to thing that are free enough for them. "OSI-approved" works if you want to be precise but one org does not have the right to dictate the use of a word as common as "open".

I don’t think I’ve said my definition of “free,” but restricting who can distribute my software seems pretty non-free to me.

I don’t think there’s a true, single definition, but I think maybe the closest to that would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

There is no valid freedom to abuse. It's like complaining that you're not free to enslave. It's not a valid argument.

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