To an outsider it looks like counterproductive bickering between people on the same team.
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. O'SaaSy 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.
(Talking of, I'm actually curious if anyone has seen actual self-hosted Fizzy instances in the wild.)
A bit offtopic but could re-generation of the project with LLM (with for example prompt "rewrite the <repo> changing every line of code") help protecting from being sued? If yes, then the OS licensing is doomed to fail.
I kind of thought that it was more about stuff like sharing and personal development and edification and the ability to see inside and understand things. But let's get really divisive over the money stuff.
> I will infer that "anybody can do whatever they want with this code, OR ELSE YOU'RE NOT WORTHY" is the principle you are referring to.
I feel like there's cynicism in your phrasing, but a perhaps more neutral phrasing would be "Don't pick and choose what specific circumstances your users can use this for".
In the case of the janky new 37signals license: what exactly counts as "... where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself"?
Who gets to define the "primary value" of the thing I built?
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.
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.
If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software.
That being said; I have no issue with a developer choosing any license they want -- it's their software and therefore it's their right. But calling it "open source" when it specifically forbids certain use-cases is just wrong. DHH wants his cake (pretend it's real OSS) and eat it too (deny usages).
I used to think the pedantry was foolish, but I've grown to understand the distinction. It's one thing to criticize the OSI's claim to the term, and I do think they could do a better job at getting out ahead of new licenses and whatnot, but even if you ignore OSI entirely then the distinction is of substantial value.
I do think we need more Source Available licenses in the world. Certainly I would greatly appreciate being able to browse the source of the many proprietary software systems I've administered over the years.
At the same time it is not worth it if the spirit of Open Source is watered down.
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.
There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.
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.
No, YOU look. The term "open source", being made from two common words with actual specific, shared meanings, unfortunately together create a common-sense meaning that is NOT the "specific, shared" meaning that the Open Source Initiative defines it as. So, we'll spin and spin, stuck in this endless debate. And no amount of beating people over the head (except, maybe if you can find a way to reach through the computer and do it physically) will change that.