Is it just me or is passing off things that aren’t FOSS as FOSS a much bigger thing lately than it was previously.
Don’t get me wrong. I remember Microsoft’s “shared source” thing from back in the day. So I know it’s not a new thing per se. But it still seems like it’s suddenly a bigger problem than it was previously.
LLaMa, the large language model, is billed by Meta as “Open Source”, but isn’t.
I just learned today about “Grayjay,” a video streaming service client app created by Louis Rossmann. Various aticles out there are billing it as “Open Source” or “FOSS”. It’s not. Grayjay’s license doesn’t allow commercial redistribution or derivative works. Its source code is available to the general public, but that’s far from sufficient to qualify as “Open Source.” (That article even claims “GrayJay is an open-source app, which means that users are free to alter it to meet their specific needs,” but Grayjay’s license grants no license to create modified versions at all.) FUTO, the parent project of Grayjay pledges on its site that “All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so.” I hope that means that they’ll be making Grayjay properly Open Source at some point. (Maybe once it’s sufficiently mature/tested?) But I worry that they’re just conflating “source available” and “Open Source.”
I’ve also seen some sentiment around that “whatever, doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match the OSI’s definition of Open Source. Source available is just as good and OSI doesn’t get a monopoly on the term ‘Open Source’ anyway and you’re being pedantic for refusing to use the term ‘Open Source’ for this program that won’t let you use it commercially or make modifications.”
It just makes me nervous. I don’t want to see these terms muddied. If that ultimately happens and these terms end up not really being meaningful/helpful, maybe the next best thing is to only speak in terms of concrete license names. We all know the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, Mozilla, etc kind of licenses are unambiguously FOSS licenses in the strictest sense of the term. If a piece of software is under something that doesn’t have a specific name, then the best we’d be able to do is just read it and see if it matches the OSI definition or Free Software definition.
Until then, I guess I’ll keep doing my best to tell folks when something’s called FOSS that isn’t FOSS. I’m not sure what else to do about this issue, really.
I think we’re seeing a natural evolution, and it’s in no small part due to corpos using FOSS to their own will. FOSS works if everyone is playing nicely, but corpos aren’t.
For example. You build a small piece of code that helps out a huge chunk of developers. You release it for free, and let them use it however they want. A ton of small projects and apps are made easier thanks to you and your work, and you get called out from them. However, a giant corpo then takes this, uses it in all of their brand-name solutions, and then sells those solutions for millions of dollars becoming one of the most profitable companies in existence. You don’t get a dime for your work, even though without your work their work would have been much more difficult.
This is the story of core.js, who’s developer is currently in search of work to feed his family in Eastern Europe, while Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and pretty much 90% of the web use his code. He used the MIT license which allows this.
I think a lot of developers have seen this and are wise to it. GPL licensing is on the rise. I know when I read his story I immediately changed my tone from “FOSS/MIT Licensing is the best most moral way to go” to “Oh fuck those corpos, they could have at least said thank you”.
Personally I hope more devs push for “Open source, but check the license” so they get credit where credit is due. I think it’s completely fair for them to use a license that says “You are free to use it however you want - but if you start charging for your product I get a cut.”
You make some good points but yeah, if you licence something under a license that allows corporations to do this don’t be surprised if they do.
I don’t know if there’s some license out there that allows free sharing of code with a limitation around using it in for-profit products and profit sharing for them and whether such a license would even work.
There’s no reason why such a license couldn’t exist, but if it did/does, it wouldn’t meet the OSI definition of “Open Source” nor the FSF definition of “Free Software”. Both terms require that resale of the software be explicitly allowed.
There are FOSS licenses (notably the GPL) that say that if you do resell (or otherwise redistribute) the software, you have to do so only under the same terms. (That is, you can’t sell a proprietary fork. But you could sell a fork under FOSS terms.) But none that say “no selling.”
For many companies (especially large ones), the GPL and similar copyleft licenses may as well mean “no selling”, because they won’t go near it for code that’s incorporated in their own software products. Which is why some projects have such a license but with a “or pay us to get a commercial license” alternative.
That’s the gist of GPL.
It’s perfectly legal for me to sell copies of any GPL code (forks or unmodified) for as much profit as I like and not share those profits with the original authors.
Fine yes I was mixing up that charging for it and the gotcha of “If you want to use my source code, then your code also needs to be at least GPL”, as in no closed source. So yes, they can make profit off of it, but then they also have to open source their code
The GPL also enforces that you need to share your code, which isn’t necessarily what these devs want.
This is what I was remembering incorrectly, thank you for the correction
The problem here is who this “I” is. Often times, there are dozens or hundreds of contributors. Do they each get a cut? Do they all get a cut of a cut? How is that cut calculated?