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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

I personally see "OSI approved license is only open source license" argument as childish. Free software and free license OTOH, is much wider and is beyond the triviality of the fact whether OSI has approved a license or not.

That said, "free software" movement what that is, is elastic sspl a free software ideology compatible or not?

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What OSI mostly does in that space is giving a definition for "open source" https://opensource.org/osd

Having a definitions for a term is good, as it makes sure thee is a common reference in usage. If everybody uses a different definition it hinders discussion.

If that definition doesn't serve your needs better use a different term (there are more or less related other terms like free software, shared source, libre software etc)

Licenses more or less automatically fall under that definition or not (yeah, yeah, there is a process by OSI for certification, but that is relatively close to the definition)

I've always read the term open source as the source is available for me to read so I know what I'm running. Beyond that if I'm an adventurous sort then I could try and compile it to run for my personal usage. Windows 95 was closed source because we couldn't read the source code, not because we couldn't contribute or fork it.

The OSI's open source definition agrees with the FSF's free software definition and Debian's DFSG. The SSPL is none of those. "OSI approved" is a useful line in the sand that, in practice, tells you whether a license is free software or not, and avoids endless bickering. Which is in fact a far more adult approach than trying to do everything from first principles every time.

Is it? It's about knowing what you're getting into and what (and specifically what not) the provider of the source expects you to do. If you take a well-known license, people know what they get and, imho, maybe some larger provider will pick up your software and let your business grow. If you do a custom license, legal may say no and people avoid your software.

I also think one shouldn't mix free software/free license and open source. Elastic is IMHO compatible to a free software, but it's not really open source (just source available).

why is sspl source available? curious to know.

By SSPL you mean the Server-Side Public License?

Well, first of all, it's specified as this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License (and somewhere hidden in the references mentioned there).

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