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Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

Devils advocate here: I can give you a binary of my open source MIT code and never phone you the code. The code is still MIT licensed, and open source. You just have no access to it.

That said, I entirely agree that MS is misrepresenting their openness here, which isn’t in the least surprising.

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? Do you know what “source” means in open source? Like, what is the source of the binary? It’s the code. That’s the source in open source.

I don't disagree, but it is perfectly acceptable per the MIT license, which is an OSI approved license. MIT doesn't require source distribution with the binary (which is why from the developer perspective, it's a more "permissive" license)

The license describes what users are allowed to do with the source code, it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) define what a creator has to do to make the source code open.

Then it sounds like you're philosophically opposed to copyleft license like GPL. That's ok, we can agree to (in my case vehemently) disagree, but your philosophy is inconsistent with the commonly accepted definition of "open source" such as OSI's OSD[1][2]

[1]: https://opensource.org/licenses [2]: https://opensource.org/osd

I think you completely misunderstand me. I don’t have any opinion on GPL, but in the links you shared, even OSI considers the license to be separate from the definition of open source “Open source licenses are licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition”. You can use a license that open source projects use (ie MIT), and still keep the source closed, or you can write one that puts obligations on you if you want. In fact, you can use or write pretty much any license you want if you own the copyright.

In their defense, most everyone else does the same thing. They still shouldn't do it, but at least they're not the trendsetter here (though they are contributing to the ongoing problem)

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