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431 points dangle1 | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.876s | source
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Calavar ◴[] No.41861254[source]
We've lost a lot with the deletion of this repo. Not the code - that's already out in the ether - but the absurdist comedy of the issues, pull requests, and commit history of trying to piecemeal delete third party non-FOSS software.
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TheCraiggers ◴[] No.41863375[source]
The other thing we lost is that future companies will think again before making their code public. It's already such an incredibly rare thing in the wild, but now companies and their lawyers will see that Winamp was exposed to potentially lawsuitable behavior that wouldn't have come to light had they never opened the code.
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fluoridation ◴[] No.41863868[source]
All of this happened because the company didn't want to open source the code, they wanted to openwash it and get free labor from the open source community. If another company wants to do the same and they decide not to because of this, nothing of value is lost.
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ezekg ◴[] No.41864088[source]
> they wanted to openwash it and get free labor from the open source community.

This is such a ridiculous accusation. Why do discussions about source-available models often turn into accusations of soliciting free labor? Why can't authors just provide access to source code, but reserve some or all of the distribution rights? It's their code, after all. Nobody is forcing 'the open source community' to contribute under the terms set forth; anybody who does contribute does so under their own free will, under the terms set forth by the license.

It doesn't always have to be a binary choice between open source and closed source, nor does it justify further accusations of "openwashing."

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KetoManx64 ◴[] No.41864203[source]
Didn't the original version of their license state that you weren't allowed to do anything with the code, including forking it? It was "source available" but you're not even allowed to make a local copy of the code to look at it. People as a whole don't mind source available, Louis Rossman's FUTO's software is all source available and while they got a small minority of FOSS diehards complaining about it, they're doing great. Immich, FUTO Keyboard, FUTO Voice input, and Grayjay, are all source available, but the company was honest and didn't try to pull stupid shit like "you're not allowed to fork the code" in their license.
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ezekg ◴[] No.41864243[source]
To me, this seems to be a misunderstanding of the license text and the author's intent. The original license simply reserved all distribution rights. People assumed you couldn't even fork into a public GitHub repo in order to make pull requests, but afaict, the author clarified that the intent was not to prevent forking on GitHub, but to prevent redistribution of the forked software instead of contributing the changes back upstream. The right to make changes to the software for internal use was always there, afaict.
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mort96 ◴[] No.41864955[source]
How the hell do you combine "open source" and "all distribution rights are reserved for the original developer"? That's a nonsensical combination, the whole point of open source is that you can make your own copy with your own changes and distribute it to people
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1. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.41865027[source]
You are confusing Open Source with Free Software. GPL family of licenses are the ones propely securing everyone's right to distribute modifications.
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2. pxc ◴[] No.41866905[source]
This is wrong. Permissively licensed (MIT, BSD, WTFPL, Apache, etc.) free software is still free software. Open-source requires the provision of the same right to distribute modified copies as free software does.

Copyleft licenses like the GPL assert the same right recursively for downstream users, more or less (details vary between copyleft licenses). But granting the right (to distribute modified copies) to first-order recipients of the source code is common to all free and open-source licenses. That's great! I imagine it's what you're getting at with the phrase 'properly secured'.

But to qualify as open-source, a license must allow redistribution of modified copies, and copyleft is not the only kind of free software license

See (for instance) the Free Software Foundation Europe's FAQ entry 'what is open-source software?':

https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/legal/faq.en.html#opensource

as well as the Criterion 3 of the Open Source Initiative's open-source definition: https://opensource.org/osd

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3. mort96 ◴[] No.41867424[source]
No, I believe you're confusing source available with open source.
4. Elinvynia ◴[] No.41868258[source]
Ah yes the totally unbiased OSD made by companies wanting to exploit free labor like Amazon.

I dislike prescriptivist language. I will continue calling things open source whenever I can see the source code, no matter the license.

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5. pxc ◴[] No.41868708{3}[source]
> Ah yes the totally unbiased OSD made by companies wanting to exploit free labor like Amazon.

The OSD does not originate with Amazon. Its ideas and text are drawn from the free software movement and indeed from a not-for-profit, volunteer-driven, community-based project-- namely Debian. Its text is essentially lifted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The term 'open-source' was created to describe an effort by a commercial entity, though-- for the project that would eventually give us Firefox, at a time when the web was dominated by a deeply proprietary monopoly in Internet Explorer.

But all of this should be common knowledge among 'hackers'. At any rate it is extremely easy to discover.

> prescriptivist language

Talk about knowing enough to be dangerous! lol.

> I will continue calling things open source whenever I can see the source code, no matter the license.

Okay? You are successfully resisting being nagged about your use of terms. You are also broadcasting your ignorance of the giants whose shoulders software developers stand upon today.

Software, like many things that can satisfy human needs and wants, is an instrument and mechanism of power. In particular, software and the terms under which it is distributed are often a mechanism by which the software publishers exert power and control over the software's users. 'Open-source', like its more frank ancestor 'free software', exists to signal terms of software distribution that variously protect users from certain strategies of domination by software vendors. Historically (and recently!), that signal associated with the phrase 'open-source' has been a fairly clear (if simplistic) one, because the phrase's usage has been consistent.

When you choose how you will or won't use the phrase 'open-source', you are making a choice about how useful a signal that phrase will be for such purposes in the future. What language is 'correct' in this case gets at a practical and political question we can alternatively get at without any commitment or appeal to a notion of linguistic correctness. That question is this: should there be ready ways to identify terms of software distribution that seek to spare software users from domination by software suppliers?

If one's answer to that is 'yes', then it takes a bit of footwork to get to 'I intend to participate in applying this established safety label to unsafe things'.

> calling things open source whenever I can see the source code

This kind of behavior is arguably a predictable outcome of the strategy of distancing the licensing tactics of the free software movement from that movement's explicit politics, articulations of its on motivations, etc.