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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

Usually the corporate needs differ too much and they end up keeping their own fork anyway.

Netflix has the resources to maintain this. It's probably more a PR move for their hiring division.

Absolutely this. It literally happened to me with a Netflix OSS we were using at work. I found a bug that was biting us, opened a ticket with a PR attached with a possible fix and got an answer after a few months "ah yeah we fixed this in our internal version time ago, thanks, will merge it now".

Indeed, this is not open-source: this is public-source. They don't really open the project to external contribution, they just publish their code and continue the project as their tool. They will not have incentive to add features that are not useful to their business even if it useful to the community (if provided by a PR for example), because all the developers of the project are employed by the same company and this company doesn't have any reason to review and fix code that is not part of their business.

> Indeed, this is not open-source: this is public-source. They don't really open the project to external contribution

It's open source, and they don't have to accept external contributions. Terms have a well-defined meaning, please refrain from calling open source code not open source, and not open source code, open source.

You are arguing the difference between the letter and spirit of the law.

you can fork it and continue dev in case they change their mind, it is open source.

any other 'source available' licenses would not (legally) let you do that.

It has the Apache license, definitely Open Source. https://github.com/Netflix/maestro/blob/main/LICENSE

I think the contention here is more about whether it's an open project— does it have an open bugtracker, an open project management structure, clear governance, etc.

It not having those things is fine, and eventually someone may still take the source and create an open project around it. But understanding that is a Netflix project helps calibrate people's understanding around whether the model when you find a bug is going to be "fork, fix, and run the fork indefinitely" or "fork, fix, contribution accepted, drop fork and return to upstream."

It's absolutely open source, under the Apache license. If a nascent community takes it and runs with it then the public version will become dominant.

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