'source Available' Is Not Open Source, and That's Okay

No, that's very much open source - in fact, it was the way most big name open source projects were developed back in the early days. See the famous "the cathedral and the bazaar" essay. Public bug trackers and widely soliciting contributions to mainline are relatively new phenomena, but you always had the right to fork and maintain and share your own fork, and that's the part that's essential.

I feel like this is a completely different conversation, but this is just as much a misunderstanding of what open source is as DHH's.

As long as the code is under BSD or GPL, you are free to take it as-is and do what you want with it. You could run your commercial service using it. You can certainly write patches and apply them to your own servers. You could even email the maintainers with them -- worst case is that they will ignore the emails!

Open Source does not guarantee that your contributions will be accepted or merged back to the project -- indeed, if you think about it, that would be absurd. I might want some random thing in the Linux kernel, but the maintainers will always have the final word on whether they want my patches or not.

The O'SaaSy license says that (essentially) 37Signals will sue you if you try to host this on your own servers, and try to sell it as a service. That's totally different, and a legal rather than a technical hurdle.

Yeah. Releasing a project under a source-available proprietary license and calling it Open Source, or doing a rugpull and changing an established Open Source license to a source-available proprietary license, is the kind of thing that causes the most grief. If you release something under a source-available proprietary license and make no pretenses about it being something else, and the alternative was not releasing it at all, it's a (slight) improvement.

I think we need more differentiation and different terms. Because O'Sassy / FSL / whatever that just forbids other companies from selling the same software as a Service is quite different than just the source being available with no rights at all, or with restrictions on who can use it and when (size of company, for profit or not, production, etc).

The part where the license says "Don't run this on your server and charge people money for it, or we will sue you"?

I know that everyone thinks of Big Tech absorbing your project into their SaaS when they do this, but there are other ways (say AGPL) to combat that. OSaaSy seems to me to be essentially a "give us your code for free, and you can self host it, but don't dare to charge $$ for it or else!" license.

Now you're bringing lawyers into the picture for anyone who's hosting your software on their servers. It's very reasonable for a SaaS company that wants to defend its moat, but it's not Open Source.

The moment you change a single line of that license I now have to pay extremely close attention to those details again.

This isn't a naive idealism thing - there are very solid, boring, selfish reasons for caring about this.

As user as well. Difference between I can use this for free and I have to pay to use this. Even if I can see parts inside is significant.

It might not be real principle, but at least it is real difference.

"Source available" want the benefits of being associated with that egalitarian philosophy because it's popular amongst technologists, who are their customers. But they don't want to actually practice the philosophy because their core interest is protecting their IP to turn a profit, not open collaboration and development.

It's the same problem with the idea of OpenAI as a nonprofit. It's fine that they are for profit, and they definitely aren't making a profit, but we can't pretend their mission is the same a non profit.

Its literally against the first of the four essential freedoms of Free and Open Source Software

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

It's often what it devolves into. There's merit in it at it's core, but passionate people with philosophical differences taking differences of perspectives on the matter at hand as personal attacks tends to devolve such discussions into performative zealotry.

I've found it's most useful as a tool to farm engagement, much in the same vein as "if you want to know the right answer to a question, confidently post the wrong one on the internet". For example, Just call it open source on platform of choice, mute notifications for the thread/post in question while you let the zealots do their pedantic semantic gymnastics as they all inadvertently put their thumbs on the algorithmic scale in the process, check back the following day/week, and if they can manage to come to a consensus on whatever they disagree about, great! Thanks for sorting that out. And if not, great! Thanks for the free advertising.

And it's not that I don't care, I do, or at least I did. But I've been around long enough to see the definition of "open source" change more than once, and I've stopped trying to keep up. The older I get, the lower down the list of "shit I have time to fret over" it goes, so I'll let the diaspora of the time sort it out, get back to me with the appropriate label, and use that going forward until a disagreement pops up again. Rinse and Repeat.

Uh.. are they?

I'm somewhat sympathetic to licenses that will be open source in X years, but the open source ethos is that, with proper attribution, we can do whatever with the code, the only restriction being that for some projects a derivative work needs to also be open source (while others don't care even about that)

If we were to welcome non-open source projects into a larger community, we should probably begin with licenses that forbid the usage of the software in military and things like that. Which fails to be open source for the same reason: it puts limits in how you can use the code

What if you do and have done so, yet you're competing with e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, who can do it for cheaper than you due to scale, and also have a much easier time to sell an extra line item to their existing customers vs you having to go through commercial negotiations and purchase agreements? Cf. Elastic, Redis, etc.

Maybe, but I think that "source available" isn't detailed enough and can mean many many different things.

> Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).

Point in case. For me there is one group, under something like BSL or FSL or SSPL which mostly restricts you from competing with the project's creators (e.g. making your own SaaS out of it), but everything else is fair use, you can use it in prod to make money at any size, etc. And a separate, more restrictive one, which has size, or production restrictions (you can't run the software if you're a commercial entity).

Source available sounds like a good description for the second one, because it's just available, little more. But for the first one where you can do whatever you want with one single exception that doesn't impact 99.9999% of potential users, it's not a good and clear enough description.

See the "Our Machinery" fiasco.

Yes, Open Source isn't a complete defense against this (especially when there are copyright assignments). However, it sure makes it both a lot harder to pull off and a lot less useful to even try.

"open source" can have restrictions too. GPL is highly restrictive because it requires any code linked with the GPL code to be GPL too.

AND it also means with copyleft-licenses that you are required to make the source code for those tweaks public too.

There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected!

The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys.

I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.

I used to read yours, anyway!

If the literal lawyer who specializes in licenses doesn't have a clear point of view on this, what hope do the rest of us have?

MongoDB invested sufficient resources in drafting an update to the AGPL. That license is called the Server Side Public License. Controversy ensued.

A major concern with the license is about modified code.

If someone builds a cloud service from your project without any code change, and that service happens to be more competitive than the one you provided, there's not much you can do about it with AGPL.

At least that's my understanding. They closed source completely, but a source-available license wouldn't have run into this issue.

DHH is on a mission to show that you can write great software with way less bullshit than is in vogue.

This code base is sparkling in its design. No build frontend, server side rendered templates, minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity, extremely simple models, jobs, and controllers.

It has < 3000 lines of js with incredibly rich interaction design, when was the last time you saw that?

I treat it as "business plus", not "FOSS minus". And of course, some source-available licenses convert to FOSS over time.

> Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing.

Funny, that's the same complaint FOSS companies have about AWS free-riding off their hard work and then competing. They switch to source-available licenses because a FOSS license allows flush FAANGs to exploit them.

The idea of doing free work for a company does feel weird. But when some bug is really getting on my nerves, being able to fix it and not have to deal with it anymore is a huge benefit!

These are distributed as enterprise binaries. It's common to face _at least_ one or two weird errors in production. Then you have to raise a ticket to support.

Would you like to know how it is discussing a binary-obfuscated error with Customer support? And then after few weeks being assigned to a newly joined fresher? And so on and on, where every person or layer every week says "you're doing it wrong" and you have to restart your proofing and explanation process from scratch?

Hint: After few weeks/months of this (or after 4 times of restarting your proofing process), you start questioning your sanity and life choices.

In those days, all I wished for is just "source-available", so that I can just debug myself what is going on and provide a concise bug report, instead of talking to support.

The weird part is, I'm pretty sure, on the other side, Oracle/IBM also LOST money in that same process. They had to hire an army of people. It was lose-lose on both sides.

Source-available means customers of that software can perform debugging themselves and file pretty good support tickets.

If you are an enterprise today, you would absolutely consider make it source-available to save on your own costs.

I personally choose Free Software first and Open Source Software second. However, if I have to choose between two proprietary options, I'd choose the source available one. I might not be able to patch/touch it, but at least I can see and verify.

Don't need to make PRs to benefit from the source being available. Running software whose source code has been under public eyeballs, and that I have compiled myself (or that a trusted third-party has compiled) is far more secure than running a binary blob that may or may not do what the developer's marketing page promises.

> If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license.

Closed-source apps have had source-code escrow clauses for a long time, exactly to avoid that problem. "If my company shuts down, you get all the source code and can do whatever you want with it."

Such clauses can, and should, be brought over to source-available licenses, where they would also be trivial since you don't even need a physical escrow.

As a sysadmin I have sometimes wished I had source available for certain things as it would help in debugging what is going on with a certain error/behaviour. strings(1) only gets you so far.

People seem to complain that they are burnt out by open source quite often so not sure that there are that many contributions apart from a couple projects.

It may also protect a project against business vultures. If you are trying to monetize your project but someone richer than you forks it and offer it for free, what can you do?

Yet, by being source available, the code is still auditable. It is easier for people to understand how the software works. And nowadays you can fine tune an LLM over it I guess...

Seems that is might also be a valid perspective? You can probably have a kind of bus clause so that source code does not become abandoned?

It does however make it unlikely for me to pick and use the project in the first place.

And definitely not a fan of living through the "era" of open source term washing, post truth, tech influencers and their echo chambers.

DHH says Y, now dozens of impressionable Xs will start parroting the same thing.

The point of sharing the code is to benefit the user. Or to benefit yourself because of the marketing that comes from users wanting this. Not to get free labour.

To me source available is: we are open source but if you are an cloud provider with billions of dollars, ask us for a license/fund us.

Technically linux gets funded enough and rightfully so but I remember how netbsd's fundings were so meagre and low which really saddened me.

To be honest, I thought about it and lets assume Linux uses a busl like license which open sources after 4 years

Most likely what would've happened is that someone will take that 4 year old code and then fork it to create the linux we all kinda love.

But overall I think linux is the bedrock of any vps/cloud provider which can be small enough too to be unable to buy their source available license so its kind of an mixed bag I guess and for linux, not worth it because it already gets a lot of funding.

It would be interesting if the same funding that linux kernel gets was shared at a similar level to the distros because I saw cachyos and talked to its creator on discord and I am not kidding but the fundings are very small for a project so big.

Also I think most people use source available license to make money or funding, basically the question which I want to ask you is: how to make enough money in open source?

In my view, "open source" but doesn't give you permission to host a commercial service that directly competes with it, is still a degree of open source, and reasonable.