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Comment by novemp | Hacker News Reader

Nooo I can't make money off of other people's work! This is an affront to FOSS!

It is a 100% not open-source. It won't be maintained besides pull-requests AND if another company or individual develops this further, it can not be used commercially by anybody else but the company who released this. It this fair? Open source goes both ways.

They have given us a gift with the code being availabile as it is.

It would be fair for them to have released nothing.

I do think its a shame that it can't legally be combined with GPL'd free software

It's a nice sentiment, but irrelevant. The code is not open source, they should not say that it is. Open source code can be used commercially.

That part is fair but they should have said something like "shared source", or "source available".

"Open source" means something specific to a lot of people. You may have issues with how OSI operates (I do too!) but let's not muddy things further.

You misunderstood me. I am grateful they are sharing the source code for review. My problem is with the wording. Open source means something different by definition. If they leave this project in the dust and someone else continues to maintain it, because he depends on it, this would be illegal and they could sue if they want years later. With open source this can not happen to you. It is a huge difference.

Would an EPEL package constitute a violation?

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