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Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

The BSL is not an OSI-approved license, so it’s certainly not “open source” by the commonly used definition.

I agree it’s a reasonable license. But it’s not an open source license.

The OSI is a consortium of cloud platform vendors (really - check for yourself). Of course they'll define open source in a way that excludes licenses that restrict them from turning your work into closed-source cloud platforms. The good news is that we're not beholden to their definition as they have no official status whatsoever. We don't have to believe them just because they put the words Open Source in their company name.

The BSL is clearly not open source since it requires approval from the licensor in certain applications, but the OSI also rejected the SSPL, which is just an extended AGPL that requires source code publication in even more cases, and is clearly open source because of that.

I hadn’t considered this angle, stupidly. Now I have to rethink a minor belief system.

OSI, and the open source definition they produced, predate the very notion of public cloud by close to a decade. While you don’t have to accept the definition, you are out of step with the industry at large, who broadly use “open source” to refer to things which meet the OSI definition. There’s no need for a competing definition: it’s fine for software to not be open source.

As to the specifics of SSPL, I personally don’t see the rationale for accepting AGPL but not SSPL.

At large? As you can see, there is room for a community with a different view on that. My personal definition of an "open source license" is that, as the name implies, I can access the code, preferably without much gatekeeping (e.g., creating a free account in a private GitLab instance). And, to be honest, I prefer the BSL with an Additional Use Grant over any other license, because this is the most reliable option to ensure that the project has a future and won’t be abandoned because no one wants to invest their time for free.

You are welcome to choose that, but in my opinion, it isn't open source. I think open source should means anyone can contribute or take, and contributions are shared, without undue discrimination. Nobody is forced to work on the project, but if they are then they have to give the results of their work back to the common pool they took from. You have just as much power to keep the project going as anyone else does, including the current "maintainer".

> but if they are then they *have to* give the results of their work back to the common pool they took from

Well, here we go. Your "open" isn't so open in the end.

"open is when you have the right to make it closed"

You cannot redefine words because they don't fit with your personal definition. Open source has meant in accordance with the OSI, for quite a while.

> but the OSI also rejected the SSPL

So did Debian and Red Hat. Do you think AWS leads them both?

It even says it is not an open source license right in the license

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