And there is nothing wrong with folks choosing such licences—especially if trying to get paid or not exploited.
No, these licenses are problematic. Fundamentally, it is proprietary software, and restricts me from full ownership and control over my computer.
No derivatives prevents me from modifying the program and maintaining the control I am owed to have over my device. Every bit of proprietary code is a percentage of my computer that is no longer truly mine.
No commercial usage is a continium fallacy. Is my blog commercial, because I advertise my resume on it? Is retroarch* commercial, because they have a patreon and get paid? Are “nonprofits” not commercial, since they claim to not want to make a profit? Or are only registered businesses commercial?
The correct solution to maintain softare freedom is for governments to extract money from the entities that profit the most off of free software, and use those taxes to fund free software. Germany is kind of doing this with their sovreign tech fund.
*Fuck the retroarch devs btw. Did a little digging, they seem to have been very problematic, and ran multiple harassment campaigns.
Some of these license are very clear about what is commericial. Some leave it to be ambiguous for the sake of allowing a case by case determination. The goal is often to help workers & the commons—say you as an individual are free to use it for, or others for places where folks have equal pay or say, or less than 10 seats. To say that since a software license says Amazon can’t use this but you can means it’s all proprietary means you are either Amazon or a goober to think these are equivalent. Something something baby out with the water fallacy [^1].
I am not sure reliance on the state is the best way, but it would be interesting to see the results.
What’s wild is the banshees here rarely acknowledge how AGPL works similar to these now adding restrictions instead of laying out what you can do, but daddy OSI approved it so it must be good.
1: Wikipedia
Some of these license are very clear about what is commericial
The license chosen in this article is the Creative Commons license, which is not a code license, but instead one intended for art. On their own page, they acknowledge the difficulty with categorizing commercial vs non-commercial usecases:
In CC’s experience, it is usually relatively easy to determine whether a use is permitted, and known conflicts are relatively few considering the popularity of the NC licenses. However, there will always be uses that are challenging to categorize as commercial or noncommercial. CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.
What’s wild is the banshees here rarely acknowledge how AGPL works similar to these now adding restrictions instead of laying out what you can do, but daddy OSI approved it so it must be good.
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“You must share source code of this service with your users” is not really an actual restriction on who can use the software and who can use it.
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Fuck the OSI. They’ve done more harm to free software than any other organization. In the recent controversy with redis and SSPL, they refused to acknowledge the actual problem of the SSPL license, that it was unusable due to requiring all “software used to deploy this software” being open source. Does that mean that people who deploy software on Windows have to cough up the source code for Windows? What about Intel Management Engine, the proprietary bit of code in every single Intel CPU. Redis moved to a dual license with that a proprietary license. An unusable license… and a proprietary license = proprietary software. But instead, the OSI whined that the problems with the SSPL was that it would “restrict usage” because people have to share more source code. The OSI, and open source, have always been corporate entities that unsurp free software. Just look at their sponsors page and see who supports them: Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft…
The goal is often to help workers & the commons—say you as an individual are free to use it for, or others for places where folks have equal pay or say, or less than 10 seats. To say that since a software license says Amazon can’t use this but you can means it’s all proprietary means you are either Amazon or a goober to think these are equivalent. Something something baby out with the water fallacy
You are moving the goalposts. I argued against a license that restricts derivatives and commercial use. You are now defending licenses that target specific entities and seek to remain open to workers and the commons. A license that restricts derivatives is not this.
To be blunt, I would be okay with a license that specifically restricts retroarch devs from making derivatives, and I would find it funny af. I think that was what the Duckstation dev was going for with the noncommercial and no derivatives (since retroarch maintains forks of software in order to add it as cores), but I’m frustrated at what is essentially a shift to a proprietary license instead.
Although such a hypothetical license that targets the retroarch developers would not be approved by the OSI or the Free Software institutions, I don’t really care. Racists don’t get rights.
I guess it’s better than not providing any source code. What’s wrong is calling it “open source” when it isn’t.
VVVVVV and Anodyne are some examples of “source available” games.
Not what I am arguing, but we do have two issues: 1) naming/branding for these types of licenses 2) FOSS banshees acting like these licenses aren’t acceptable & the whole idea is binary good or evil
As long as we don’t call them free, libre, or open source I don’t care. We shouldn’t make the terminology any more confusing for those.