Open-Source Is Just That
vale.rocks
vale.rocks
Hmmm, if the license doesn't allow modification and redistribution, then it's not open source — it's "source-available." Open source, by definition, includes those rights. Just having access to the code isn't enough.
The rest of your comment didn't. How did you want to consider it?
> I think if we can make a distinction between modification and redistribution then open source can be less proscriptive.
I think new definitions should have new terms.
> If the source is open to view, and you are able to change that code in any way, just not redistribute your modifications, what would you call that?
Source available.
Free as in beer, as in the software is free if you are giving it away.
> I think new definitions should have new terms.
The point of the article is that we already have terms that sound like they fit. You're saying you don't agree with that as new definition and the article is saying they don't agree with your more strict definition.
Isn't that the way with everything when there's a difference of opinion on the internet. The ones that have the most funding/largest platform end up winning the argument.
You may want to ignore what words have come to mean and try to derive a literal meaning from their constituent words, but then you need to fight established common use.
It feels like OSI and Open Source advocates spend a lot of time and effort trying to fight people from using "open source" and "free software" in their literal meanings rather than the other way round. The established common use is only really within the communities that use them.
The history is much discussed. This ignorance would be fixed by a Wikipedia article. And I doubt an open source developer with forceful unconventional opinions about the definitions of open source and FOSS never saw FSF or OSI mentioned.
> The established common use is only really within the communities that use them.
This is tautological. Terms are used in the communities which use them.
The article was directed to the community which uses terms like open source and FOSS. I am confident my comments took less time to write than the article.
> Isn't that the way with everything when there's a difference of opinion on the internet. The ones that have the most funding/largest platform end up winning the argument.
No. Most attempts to change the definition of open source come from come from companies attempting to profit from the change. Most resistance comes from individuals protecting a gift economy.
I think that’s probably illegal, but I have definitely heard of companies doing it.
For example, with RedHat your subscription for security updates/etc can be terminated.
I strongly dislike this obviously controversial bit being snuck into an otherwise reasonable argument. The term FOSS is meant to unify "free software" and "open source software" and there is absolutely no reason to accept GNU's definition of "free software" and not OSI's arguably more successful definition of "open source" software. After all, "free" software, to this day, just sounds like freeware to the layperson, and meanwhile, there is other industry jargon you can use for when the source code is available but the copyright license doesn't meet these criteria.
The reason was to not dilute the politcal agenda of the original movement, and this dilution is exactly why "open-source" was created.
I have always assumed it to mean the intersection of the two contexts. As in, necessarily copyleft.
A layperson doesn't know what copyleft is anyway; they hardly seem worth tailoring communicating for if you're not also going to explain the difference the terms encapsulate and why people might care. Just use "open source" at that point.
As far as I'm concerned the OSI doesn't have any weight and there's little reason to think we share values sufficiently for me to start caring. Do I look like a corporation trying to slap some sense of community on a product?
The definitions are very, very similar. Neither imply copyleft; almost all open source licenses are free software licenses and vice versa.
> As far as I'm concerned the OSI doesn't have any weight and there's little reason to think we share values sufficiently for me to start caring. Do I look like a corporation trying to slap some sense of community on a product?
All I'm saying is that if we accept "free" as implying the GNU free software definition, then we should accept "open source" as implying the OSI definition. There is no logical reason for why GNU's jargon is somehow better than OSI's.
The "free software" part necessarily implies copyleft.
> There is no logical reason for why GNU's jargon is somehow better than OSI's.
There's no logical reason to conflate them, either. I'm free to mock the term as I see fit.
It's the union.
Actually it's harder than that: it's the union, but I challenge you to find a license that is open source and not free, or that is free and not open source :-).
I think there is a difference in philosophy between two parts of the movement, but in practice, what we call "open source software" is the same as "free software" (in terms of licences).
There are a few twits out there who believe (or at least troll) that proprietary software whose source code is available is "open source". So FOSS provides the minor and largely unnecessary benefit of making it clear that it's not that.
The notion of "Open Source" has an agreed-upon definition, understood widely within the community of software development practice: https://opensource.org/osd
By the same token, "Free Software" has a specific, narrow meaning: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
What would you tell a person who would peddle you deep-frozen apple juice as "hard cider", because it's technically cider, and is undeniably hard?
(While at it: I must praise the choice of the font on the page, super clean and legible. It's Lexend, freely available from Google Fonts.)
If you want a different definition, all you have to do is invent a new term. The term "open source" was invented by the people who made the definition at the URL above. (It had existing uses, but the people who made the definition above were the first to apply the term to software or software licenses.)
As for being the first to apply the term to software licenses, yes you're correct there. But that's the inherent source of this endless confusion: they took an existing term which didn't relate to licenses, and redefined it to be entirely about licenses.
It's quite ironic to say "If you want a different definition, all you have to do is invent a new term" since that's literally what the OSI failed to do!
Edit to add: I would appreciate it if downvoters would cite what specific part of the linked article you disagree with, considering that it has numerous instances of irrefutable proof of "open source" being used to describe software prior to 1998, including by famous folks like Bill Joy.
A bunch of for-profit companies proped OSI up to exclude "open source" projects that are not free to use for businesses so they can profit more from OSS community and you eat it up.
As does the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
(Also, I think you mean trademark case, not copyright case.)
> It does not mean it is free and open-source (FOSS).
When the campaign to describe software as "open source" kicked off in 1998, it consciously choose the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) as the basis for the Open Source Definition (OSD), so that "open source" would refer to the same thing as "free software".
Clearly the connotations of the two terms have diverged quite a lot, but their denotations weren't meant to.
Companies that want to publish their source code but not give you the right to use it however you want, e.g. Cockroach or (my former employer) Materialize, are described as “source-available” instead.
The problem is that "Free" means two things in English, which is why some like to use the French/Spanish "Libre" instead, to separate the "free-as-in-speech" from "free-as-in-beer".
This includes the point the person you are responding to is trying to make, in which case they are noting that open source and source available are not the same things. Their point seems to be that open source, by the very definition to most who matter/care about the concept, implies the "free/libre/disentangled" portion. Whether that means derivative continuation (GPL and its kin) or not (MIT, BSD, etc).
This is why the phrase "source available" exists.
One part I think is unnecessarily controversial:
> It does not mean it is free and open-source (FOSS).
This is another old argument that it's pointless to re-litigate, but one should at least note that this way of using the term ‘Open Source’ contradicts the OSI definition and risks causing avoidable misunderstandings.
[1]: https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
The entire dictionary is nothing but consensus on terms with no trademarks (and from which government?) anywhere.
OSI merely presents a definition as a service, for others to have something already thought-out to refer to rather than have to write a 10 page definition every time someone wants to refer to the concept.
It is well established by now, and the only people trying to argue about it are simply uneducated or have some deliberate agenda where they somehow benefit from artificially clouding an issue that has already gone through a process of being hashed out and recorded long ago. There is no reason to give them any air.
Nobody was even talking about law until you chimed in.
Believe it or not words can mean things in English independent of whether there is a court case establishing that meaning.
True, in the sense that some (not Open Source) things are distributed as source code. (I do so myself.)
But the title of the article references Open Source. Capital O, capital S. If something ships under an Open Source (OSS not necessarily FOSS) then you fo have those rights.
The bulk of the article is around support though, and I completely agree with the sentiments there.
If you put it, openly available, on the internet, that’s tantamount to giving it away for free, regardless of what bizarre license you release it under.
Relying on restrictions in law is fundamentally a nasty proposition.
This said, the author doesn't seem to have a good understanding of the definition of "open source" in the context of software. It is about the licence, not about the fact that one can read the source. It's a common mistake, but it's a mistake nonetheless.
To people who would say "well, if I want to understand "open source" as "source that is open", sure: you could also consider that a "hot dog" is a kind of dog. But don't be surprised when people tell you that they eat dogs ;-).
In fact I have a similar post https://boyter.org/posts/the-three-f-s-of-open-source/ which I redirect people towards if they become aggressive towards me when I am trying to help them. Thankfully I have only had to use it a handful of times.
- Does open source mean that the maintainers are free to ignore single line security fixes PR and refuse to handover it to well trusted and willing contributors.
- Does open source mean that maintainers could plant crypto miner or malware in the project or sell to someone who might do that?
- Does open source mean that companies could change the license and keep the product name same or remove a core functionality and migrate it to paid version?
I have seen multiple instances of all of these.
Yes.
>> Does open source mean that maintainers could plant crypto miner or malware in the project or sell to someone who might do that?
Yes
>> Does open source mean that companies could change the license and keep the product name same or remove a core functionality and migrate it to paid version?
Yes
None of the things you mentioned are restricted (or required) by the license.
You may not agree with these points, or even consider them ethical, but OSS licenses allow for any of the above.
A popular open source has lot of community contributions like blog post, answers in stack overflow, issue reporting, PRs etc. And if the maintainer changes the behaviour abruptly with no way for community to fix it, even if they are ready to pay for the development cost like terraform seems like abusing the open source ethos for their advantage.
You are of course free to determine your own ethical standard and the use, or don't use, companies that apply that standard.
>> abusing the open source
You say "abusing" - they would say "using".
> A program that you can run consists of a series of numbers whose meaning is obscure. No one, not even a good programmer, can easily change the numbers to make the program do something different.
Back in the old days, we only needed a hex editor and disassembler, maybe sometimes a debugger, to "make the program do something different".
PC magazines would publish binary patches too.
IDA showed up sometime in the 90s but it was extremely expensive, and cracking it became a "rite of passage".
Now, Ghidra is free and there are tons of other tools available.
I would say it was clear you had zero experience writing for a general audience if I wished to make unfounded assumptions like you.
You overlooked he wrote easily maybe? Cracking IDA was a rite of passage because it demonstrated skill.
The answer is: because modifying software without the source code (i.e. reverse-engineering) is extremely difficult.
I've had many experiences where the source code was available, yet finding what to change and figuring out how to rebuild the whole thing --- but without changing anything else --- was far more difficult than patching a few bytes in the binary.
To quote the title of this article, "open-source is just that".
Free software is about user freedoms; the creator is unable to stop the user from redistributing or modifying the software. By using the term "open source", these freedoms end up getting ignored, until it simply gets diluted down to source availability, as seen in this article [1].
Actually, this article goes one step further and even says that free software is not free software; that is, it can have a license that restricts fundamental user freedoms. This is obviously wrong.
[1]
From the article:
> When software is open-source, it is open-source, not necessarily free and open-source (FOSS), and even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive licence. The code being available in and of itself does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.
[2]
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
The definitions in my head go something like this:
Open Source -> Open (e.g. free and unencumbered) & Source available
Source Available -> Only source is available, restricted under some odious license presumably
Free Software -> You can download this (generally in binary form) and use it for free.
First, the name sound cool, who doesn't want to be in the flow, putting its stream of consciousness into some hikigai endeavor?
It makes clear that there is something about liberty, rather than a focus on gratious in the monetary sense.
It also bring on the table that there is some work at play. So human time and attention. The polysemie helps in the sense that it also stand for the result of the work, be it software, music or some graphic design.
If you describe source-available proprietary software as “open source” you are using the term differently from practically everyone else, including the people who coined it.
This is nonsense & actively harmful posting. There are some good paragraphs about what you don't get, but up at top saying it doesn't have to be free is not correct.
Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd
Where's the vigorous criticism of CLAs? The criticism of monetization that leaves out unpaid volunteers? The acknowledgment of all the free labor provided by users, bug reporters, documenters, evangelists, etc.?
This attitude is as toxic as the users' attitudes it's railing against, just on the opposite side of the fence.
https://opensource.org/definition-annotated
I agree partly with the article about entitlement, but you need to define what "open" means, and "access to source code" doesn't cut it due to IP laws. It can't be "open" if it's a legal landmine.
And yes, Open-Source does mean "FOSS", always. The definitions of Open-Source and Free Software being very much equivalent.
Stop overloading terms for your own gain.
Other than that I 100% agree either you.
From what I understand, Free Software and Open Source are largely similar, except that the former is political and moral, while the latter is mostly concerned about practical effects.
Your misconception is very common, but you, and other people with the same misconception, are conflating a few different things. Most of the people who prefer the term “free software” also prefer copyleft licenses to permissive licenses. Which is where the misunderstanding that “free software” means copyleft licenses and “open source” means permissive licenses comes from.
Viral licenses e.g. GPL are _both_ free software and open source. Permissive licenses e.g. BSD are also _both_ free software and open source.
And again I apologize for viewing it through that lens when discussing the legal aspects, not the political aspects.
“Free software IS a viral license”
Not “free software as a political movement tends to prefer viral licenses”.
Why is it so hard to just admit you were wrong?
This does not align with reality, irregardless of what some private company says or how strongly you feel about software freedoms.
Do you have examples of any notable software describing itself as “open source” that isn’t FOSS?