Well, that was a read detached from reality. The author loves to rant and goes into philosophy, but that was never the point of any open source software license. The purpose of a license is to...
Well, that was a read detached from reality. The author loves to rant and goes into philosophy, but that was never the point of any open source software license. The purpose of a license is to deal with legal stuff, and this statement
Source-available code is just as open as open source code, in this sense. In terms of the permission we have to work with the software, proprietary software and source-available software are of a kind: There’s no permissive or copyleft license. Source-available code is “closed” like proprietary software, in this sense. That puts source-available software somewhere between proprietary and open source, but for two very different reasons.
Is really naive. you can sell source or binaries, and in fact on the dawn of the computing era a lot of software, even proprietary software came with source, since there were no good standardization and it was often required to compile something or to edit something just to get it to work. However, if your code is out there in the open people would take it and they would run with it. For a lot of open source Android applications there are dozens of clones on app stores, some people just put ads on them, some would go an extra mile to change some things, and it is extremely hard to prove if your code is stolen and inside of someones project. The internet and the ability to openly distribute any data effectively works against source-available software that isn't free, so the best thing you can do is adopt a free and open source license. If pirated versions are just versions compiled by other people then your application is effectively a donation-ware. Also what open source licenses that we have right now enable us to do is to effectively collaborate. It's a very tough legal goal to secure the project against disgruntled contributors, try doing that with a custom license that has to be argued in court. Accepting any contribution in such an environment is like a minefield. Same goes for contributors, they have to somehow protect themselves from any liability for potential faults in their code - imagine if a bug gets uncovered in Linux kernel, and some major corporation gets to sue the contributor that missed that bug?
If you are a single developer, or a small team working on some projects - you can try all kinds of distribution models, but there is a reason why we have a handful of "default" licenses around.
Well, that was a read detached from reality. The author loves to rant and goes into philosophy, but that was never the point of any open source software license. The purpose of a license is to deal with legal stuff, and this statement
Is really naive. you can sell source or binaries, and in fact on the dawn of the computing era a lot of software, even proprietary software came with source, since there were no good standardization and it was often required to compile something or to edit something just to get it to work. However, if your code is out there in the open people would take it and they would run with it. For a lot of open source Android applications there are dozens of clones on app stores, some people just put ads on them, some would go an extra mile to change some things, and it is extremely hard to prove if your code is stolen and inside of someones project. The internet and the ability to openly distribute any data effectively works against source-available software that isn't free, so the best thing you can do is adopt a free and open source license. If pirated versions are just versions compiled by other people then your application is effectively a donation-ware. Also what open source licenses that we have right now enable us to do is to effectively collaborate. It's a very tough legal goal to secure the project against disgruntled contributors, try doing that with a custom license that has to be argued in court. Accepting any contribution in such an environment is like a minefield. Same goes for contributors, they have to somehow protect themselves from any liability for potential faults in their code - imagine if a bug gets uncovered in Linux kernel, and some major corporation gets to sue the contributor that missed that bug?
If you are a single developer, or a small team working on some projects - you can try all kinds of distribution models, but there is a reason why we have a handful of "default" licenses around.