> In other words, free as in freedom, but not free as in beer.
That's the Free Software slogan, not open source. The only relationship between the two is that open source can easily be relicensed into Free Software (or proprietary, or whatever.)
There's nothing in open source about friendliness or collaborative development. I'm not forced to take your advice or contributions just because I'm open source, so how could that have anything to do with it?
> That's the Free Software slogan, not open source. The only relationship between the two is that open source can easily be relicensed into Free Software (or proprietary, or whatever.)
> There's nothing in open source about friendliness or collaborative development.
Your view of the meanings of "free" and "open source" software is very literal and narrow. I'm not trying to debate the technical definitions of those terms, because frankly, I don't care and I don't think they matter in this discussion.
The crux of what I am saying is this:
A company may choose to share their source code for others to benefit from, under the hope that large players will contribute back in some way rather than use the situation to the disadvantage of the upstream company.
In other words, they might hope to:
* Let hobbyists learn from and use their code for free.
* Let competing companies use their code, as long as they contribute something back (money, bugfixes, festures, community support, QA).
* Make their employees happy.
and they may not hope to:
* Empower other large companies to freeload--ie, profit without contributing back at all.
Yes, I understand that permissive open source licenses allow freeloading in a legal sense. That does not mean the upstream companies have to be happy about it, much in the same way that you're allowed to use your office's shared kitchen to microwave fish, but your colleagues do not have to be happy about it.
> That's the Free Software slogan, not open source. The only relationship between the two is that open source can easily be relicensed into Free Software (or proprietary, or whatever.)
While you are correct that the Free Software Movement has slogans like "free as in freedom" and has a definition based on "the four freedoms," the Open Source Movement also recognizes and advocates for "Software Freedom" as well.
"We build a world where the freedoms and opportunities of Open Source software can be enjoyed by all." [1]
Software that is licensed under Apache 2.0, MIT, BSD, or any of the other so-called "permissive" licenses is labeled "Free Software" by the Free Software Movement as-is. It does not require a "relicense" to become Free Software.
Said another way: you don't have to use a copyleft license like the GPL to qualify for the "Free Software" label.
It is just a different name for the same thing, because there was a group that developed a vocabulary before another group existed.
Originally it's "free as in speech" not "free as in freedom"
But BSL is definitely not free as in speech. So if it's neither free as beer, so what part of it is "free"?
Yeah, it always confuses me when people release something under e.g. the BSD or MIT license and then complain about "freeloaders."
It's totally understandable to not want companies to profit off of proprietary, closed-source forks of your software. I get it! But there are licenses that you can use to stop that from ever happening (namely [A]GPL). Why not use one of those?
It's because a lot of them were culturally anti-copyleft, but had never read the licenses or the reasons behind them.
Copyleft is politically scary to some people, so they refuse to acknowledge it other than to call people zealots. Explicit licenses protect you. Open source spirits don't. Everyone should be honest: the only reason a lot of people prefer open source is because they want to preserve a rug-pull option. Then they get surprised with it's Amazon pulling the rug on them.
Disclosure: I work for Amazon, but I've been a copyleft advocate for a quarter century.
Indeed, copyleft can be politically scary. Especially when for-profit companies co-opt copyleft to drive licensing revenue by selling alternative license arrangements [1]. If all those who adopt copyleft licenses pledged to commitment to community-oriented GPL enforcement principles [2] I think that it would be a lot less scary. Unfortunately we've seen "copyleft trolls" that try to wield copyleft as a weapon, either for profit or to make other demands that are not helpful to the community.
Copyleft licenses are, indeed, protective licenses from my perspective. Or, they should be.
An aside, when it comes to "Amazon pulling the rug" -- what exact incident are you referring to?
I've been into free software since I was a kid, so all of this is very familiar to me. You've done a great job of breaking it down! Thanks for this and similar comments on this post. I hope they clear things up for some people. I feel that GPL (and AGPL, even more so) often does not get a fair shot, and that's a shame.
GPLs are a bit complicated for companies because (personal opinion alert) I THINK it is ok if you’re a company, member of a particular community, to be able to embed that on some product and not be mandated to open-source the whole thing.
IMHO not everything needs to be open-source, but in many case it just makes so much sense that is a dumb idea to reinvent the wheel.
Many projects are succesfull this way. One I can think of is LLVM.
Projects are free to choose permissive licenses like BSD.
Companies are then free to use the code however they like and not contribute back in any way.
Projects are then free to be annoyed by this because they hoped that companies would contribute time and/or resouces out their own good will.
Finally, projects are free to move to "business source" licenses because good will didn't work, so they need to utilize the legal system to ensure that large companies help sustain the project.
Describing changing to a source-available licenses as "now utilizing the legal system" is strange.
Projects choosing a permissive license like BSD is utilizing the legal system. BSD is a contract, a copyright license. It imposes restrictions/limitations/obligations, which can/would be enforced by a court.
Come on, you're unfairly quoting bits of my sentences in order to fuss over something unrelated to my point.
I said:
> so they need to utilize the legal system to ensure that large companies help sustain the project.
No shit they were using the legal system before with the BSD license. I am saying that they are now using the legal system to ensure companies contribute, which is not something the BSD license did.
Have you ever set lenient guidelines, people took advantage of them in a way you didn't like, so you were forced to tighten your guidelines in a way you didn't originally want to?
eg: a professor establishes a generous late homework policy, which most students use reasonably, except a few who decide to turn in everthing on the last day of the term and make the TA's lives hell. Prof is allowed to be disappointed and then adjust their future terms' policies to be more specific (eg "submit assignments max 5 days late").
For this analogy to work, it also needs to include the professor advertising their course and attracting good-will primarily on the basis of their generous policy, and then bait-and-switching involved participants when they later decided they didn't like it.
The professor could advertise their course this way for Term 1, realize their policy isn't working as intended, and then change their policy (and advertising) as of Term 2. That's not a bait and switch. There was no promise that their course would have the generous original policy in for all terms in perpetuity.
As far as I can tell, you are allowed to fork HashiCorp's code up until the point of license change, and continue to use it as you like, rebrand it as a new project, whatever. I could be wrong, but I don't think HashiCorp ever said "we will never ever change our license."
Ehh.. with terraform it's more like putting out a bootstrapped "need a penny, take a penny. have a penny, leave a penny" jar in front of the register, occasionally putting your own pennies into it (while other people leave theirs as well), then, after the jar starts to overflow, and you realized no one was giving your business extra money, you decide to take the jar (now a significant chunk of change, thanks in large part to the good will of others)
In other words, free as in freedom, but not free as in beer.