Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

> No licensee or downstream recipient may use the Software (including any modified or derivative versions) to directly compete with the original Licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted, managed, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product or cloud service where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself.

No thanks. These “almost-but-not-quite-FOSS” licenses are a blight.

View on HN

Some will argue that it is Open Source. But Open Source came from commercial interests against Free Software.

It's clearly not free software, since the user freedom is restricted.

It's not libre, since that also refers to freedoms.

It's not really Open Source.

Source-Available has been used to describe this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

I don't see the issue - the creator is reserving the right to create their own paid hosted version?

That's absolutely fine for them, but they shouldn't call it "Open-source" and "Fully open source" (like they do on the linked page).

This software is source-available. Open Source licenses don't discriminate on the basis use of the software.

Using the term Open Source for license like this is dishonest. It seeks to profit from the goodwill from actual Open Source software.

I appreciate your view but consensus reality does not agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

I can link to community-edited articles, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Definition

We make the consensus reality. I'm part of the faction that wants this particular reality, so I advocate for it.

OSD !== Open Source. All OSD is Open Source, not all Open Source is OSD. You are free to disagree, but the OSI has chosen (more accurately forced to choose) very explicitly to only define and trademark OSD. There's really not much more to the conversation then that.

Maybe you're right, but FSL/BSL is arguably "more open source" than GPL. We all know GPL is a poison pill that kills commercial use, while FSL/BSL just blocks competitors from stealing your app.

That's not even remotely true. GPL does not prevent any commercial use, when others (like BSL or the O'Sassy license here) explicitly prevent commercial use...

Are you kidding me? If you link against a GPL library in a proprietary commercial app, the GPL's copyleft infects that code and you'd have to release it under GPL.

Explain to me how that doesn't prevent commercial use? Are you going to say "well technically it doesn't prevent it"? No one cares. Commercial projects avoid GPL like the plague.

Fair point, I've actually just switched to MIT as of today. This is a personal project I've been building for myself and I want to share it with anyone who finds it useful.

Nice, thanks!

The confusing thing for me related to that was Try Free which leads me to look for pricing. But with only Try free I get suspicious of even private or small team.

If it’s free for use. Try is a confusing term.

Off topic, I’d really wish any service or product with tiers would have pricing in a discoverable way.

Don’t worry. The license is unenforceable, since the code is written by AI. It’s in the public domain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com