Dilution of the term "Open Source?"

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.

theneverfox ,
@theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

As a developer, honestly I think this is a good thing.

Open source isn’t always a good thing. It’s not just opening the source, it’s a very specific way to develop software.

In theory, you make something open source, and other devs walk in and out, helping the project grow and helping with admin work. People can tag in and tag out as their schedules allow, and the software will grow organically and democratically, bigger than any single user

In practice, it’s politics. Contributing is rarely on a walk-in basis - but code is your ideas given form, and no amount of power is too little to trip over.

People are protective of their baby, but also don’t want to spend their free time interviewing contributors instead of working on it. And just like mods on top boards, managing a popular open source project attracts a very specific type of person

And finally, we live in a hypercapitalist society right now. Know what happens if you open source a project and it gains traction? Someone runs off and turns it into a service, usually the owner, but not always. Services tend to become the first class citizen, and are free to take investor money and make pull requests to serve their use case at the expense of someone using it themselves.

I think it’s safe to say Linux is the greatest open source project of all time. It’s a clusterfuck that has not lived up to the imagined ideals of open source - I think it’s great and too important to entrust to any group, but it’s a hot mess. And Linus Torvold didn’t open source it for years until it reached a point of maturity.

My point with all this is that OSS is fantastic, but it’s not a virtue intrinsically. After all, almost no one makes money on OSS, but plenty make money on turning such a project into a service.

Opening your source on the other hand? Other people can take bits and pieces to learn from, and people can audit it. If you keep out corporate use, I think that’s fair - I mean, even if you copy code for your own project, you quickly move beyond the 20% difference you need to remove their copyright claim if you’re building something different

I think we need to be more pragmatic about OSS… We need to make multiple philosophies for different people and different types of software

TootSweet OP ,

…20% difference you need to remove their copyright claim…

That’s… not a thing. It’s a widely-circulated myth and nothing more. There’s no magical percentage that makes a modified version not a derivative work.

theneverfox ,
@theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

It’s precedent. It’s not law, but it’s not a myth either - it’s a case study we go over with new programmers so they’re not afraid of undeserved lawsuits

TootSweet OP ,

Which case(s)?

theneverfox ,
@theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

Ultimately this. I believe the 20% came from a lower court opinion, but search sucks these last few months so I can’t find exactly what I was looking for

At the end of the day 20% different isn’t the actual standard, it’s more complicated than that. But it’s what we tell fresh developers so they have a baseline - they’re almost certainly safe at that point, and more importantly they feel safe to build things with a hard line like that

Ultimately, the supreme Court decided the case on a more fundamental level (so the % didn’t come into play at all)

BURN ,

Open Source has meant Source Available for quite a while.

FOSS is different than Open Source, and it’s a distinction that very likely needs to be made.

Barzaria ,

Free software!!

MigratingtoLemmy , (edited )

I’d like a license where the source is available but companies need to pay to use

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Something akin to the Creative Commons Share-alike non-commercial license?

MigratingtoLemmy ,

Oh, maybe that? Can that be applied to code?

toastal ,

So Prosperity 3.0.0 or Peer Production License?

Creative Commons does not work for code.

MigratingtoLemmy ,

Ah unfortunately, I’m not very good with licensing. But any license that can achieve what I mentioned would be perfect. I just want the authors of such software to be able to distribute their code without being fucked over by major corporations

toastal ,

Beware that these licenses are not compatible with GPL. You would have to dual-license or rely just on ISC, MIT, etc. types of licenses for libraries since GPL doesn’t allow you to restrict based on industry or business model. We would need a larger pool of copyfair or copyfarleft licensed code to have a reasonable pool of code in the Commons to pull from for free software but a lot of it is GPL.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Not directly.

Though I’d kinda like to talk to a lawyer about the viability of a license whose terms are something like

This software is furnished free of charge for use or study for any purpose other than shareholder profit. Use or study of this software for any purpose that would benefit businesses supported by shareholders is strictly prohibited.

Because I’ve got code I wouldn’t mind some folks who are selling art on Etsy or making games on itch.io using, but I’ll be throatfucked before I’d let Amazon or Facebook have it.

theshatterstone54 ,

Yeah, basically one of the CC licenses (probably this one, I don’t know CC that well) but for software. It’s been a license I dream of and have dreamt of for a while. I guess the closest we have is the GPL but eben rhat has been bypassed.

TootSweet OP ,

There’s no reason I know of why a license like that couldn’t exist, but it wouldn’t qualify as “Open Source” by the OSI’s definition.

paholg ,

Isn’t that what Unreal Engine has?

I’ve also heard it referred to as “source available”.

ILikeBoobies ,

No, if you agree to their license then you have access to the source. There is no payment required

In your unreal account you need to link your GitHub account to it then you will have access to it

You can also modify and redistribute it/sell it without any fees (the license passes downstream so your users would still owe Epic royalties after $1 million earned)

p_q ,

it’s thoose kind of people you want to keep away from important stuff, so you know “open source” is the thing, man! ;-)

p_q ,

it’s thoose kind of people you want to keep away from important stuff, so you know “open source” is the thing, man! ;-)

rufus ,

Yes. I have exactly the same feeling.

And I think if the OSI coined the term ‘open-source’, they get to decide what it means. And words have meanings.

bitwolf ,

There is

  • OSS
  • FOSS
  • FLOSS

Don’t get excited about OSS it’s just a distribution model (and one that is popular for commercial start ups right now).

You’re looking for FLOSS.

toastal ,

There is also copyfair & copyfarleft

nodiet ,

Huh? I only know copyleft, what are those?

toastal ,

Imagine if the commons of code required corporations (not worker-owned) recipropcate value to a project. These licenses aren’t FSF-approved but there are valid ciriticisms of how big businesses are getting more value than they put in & how an indie dev maintaining an important library is barely scraping by.

Worth a read: lipu.dgold.eu/original-sin

Kaldo , (edited )
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

Muddying the waters is the oldest trick in the books, big corporations have even started doing it with "indie" games - Dave the Diver is stylized and marketed as an indie game despite being developed by a division of a multi-billion company Nexon.

I definitely have an issue with it as well, it's really hard to say whether something is actually FOSS nowadays or not, and whether it can be taken away or acquired by someone else down the line. That could be my fault as well since I never bothered to learn about the licenses beyond what MIT / Apache2 are, and even those I understand superficially.

There should absolutely be more pushback for things like these though.

wiki_me ,

Best you can do is accuse something of being open washing, or correct people by saying that it does not fit the OSI definition which is widely accepted (it’s based on debian guidelines) and the software is at best “partially open source”.

Having a github page with a list of problematic projects and licenses could be useful.

beeng ,

ClosedAI

ZILtoid1991 ,
@ZILtoid1991@kbin.social avatar

ClosedAL

I'm from the generation that used to have sound cards, and I'm very sad about what Creative did to the industry...

TootSweet OP ,

Oh shit! “Open washing” is a term I never knew I needed in my lexicon until now.

And yes. A running list of such projects would be awesome to have. I migrated all my projects to Gitlab when Microsoft bought Github (in retrospect, I wish I’d gone to Codeberg) but I’d love to see a project that collected examples like that in one place. I could probably be persuaded to start/maintain it. (As long as it’s not on Github. Lol.)

wiki_me ,

That might be useful if someone will want to learn if a particular project is not really open source, and raise awareness to the issue of open washing, if it will get enough links it might appear on search results raising even more awareness to the issue.

You could always start it, ask for positive feed back saying it will motivate you and validate that the efforts you are doing are useful, you could later abandon it and someone else might take it and continue to maintaining it.

ImpossibilityBox ,

Can we get a term like this for AI. I’m so goddam sick and tired of everything being called AI that clearly and obviously isn’t.

We developed a system that looks for red and when it sees red it KNoOOoOAwwWWss that it is seeing red and does stuff. It’s a super effective, ground breaking, world shaping, paradigm changing AI system. Give us money please.

PropaGandalf ,
@PropaGandalf@lemmy.world avatar

This is inevitable. You are fighting a fight against the natural development of a language. Maybe we really should start caring more about licenses but the terms will be used by other people nevertheless like they want.

TootSweet OP ,

You are fighting a fight against the natural development of a language.

Perhaps, but I fully believe the more successful I and folks who join me in that fight are, the more beneficial it will ultimately be to basically everybody who uses software.

pixelscript , (edited )

This failure of the word “open” to mean one clear and specific thing just feels like an echo of the failure of “free” to mean one clear and specific thing.

Someone came up with the term “free” in the context of software, and a bunch of people asked, “Ah, so that means I don’t have to pay for it?” And half the room went, “Yep, of course!” and the other half of the room went, “Ehrm, not exactly…” And from that point on, we’ve had to amend the word “free” with awkward qualifiers like “as in freedom, not as in beer”, or attempt to introduce a clarifying companion term like “libre” to try and capture one of the competing meanings.

I’m sure the “open” in “open source” is doomed to the same fate. “Source available” is to “open source” what “libre” is to “free”. An awkward clarifying companion term that only dorks like us bother to distinguish.

doom_and_gloom , (edited )
@doom_and_gloom@lemmy.ml avatar

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    TootSweet OP ,

    Honestly great question.

    While “Free Software” and “Open Source” have different definitions, and the movements behind them have largely different motivations, in practice I’ve heard mostly that there are no pieces of software that qualify as one but not the other. So in practice, they’re equivalent when referring to software licenses (though not so much when referring to the communities/movements.)

    Are FOSS and Open Source now synonymous because OSI dropped the term free?

    I’m not really sure there’s any sense in which the OSI ever used the term “free.” The Free Software movement used the term “free” and the Open Source movement and the OSI were born out of a splinter group that broke off from the Free Software movement.

    I think terms like FOSS and FLOSS are popular partly because again when speaking of software the two are (or at least in practice might as well be) synonymous.

    I think there’s also a certain extent to which both the Free Software foks and the Open Source folks recognize that a bit of solidarity between the two groups will ultimately benefit both. So each is willing to give nods to the other by sticking an “F” on the front of their “OSS” or an “OSS” on the end of their “FL” or whatever.

    doom_and_gloom , (edited )
    @doom_and_gloom@lemmy.ml avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    TootSweet OP ,

    why do we have two different terms?

    Well, I do think it’s still quite useful to have separate terms for the movements. I’d say it’s probably safe to say that “Free Software advocates” believe that all software should be FLOSS whereas “Open Source advocates” think it’s fine for FLOSS and proprietary software to coexist in the whole software ecosystem.

    Would we be having issues over the term “source available” vs. “open source” if the Free was never dropped from Free Software?

    That’s an interesting question. The term “Free Software” is kindof tied up in connections to Richard Stallman. (Say what you will about that, but having a well-known personality at the head of a movement, even if it has disadvantages, does have upsides.) And the dude is the avatar of pedantism. And I think to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Stallman, that comes through when you use the term “Free Software.” To the point that it’s hard to imagine the term used to mean something other than the four freedoms.

    Meanwhile, I imagine a lot of people, when they use the term “Open Source” don’t think of any particular person. Eric Raymond and Bruce Parens are much less known than Stallman.

    “Open Source” is a term that’s also much closer to the mainstream. Folks who say “Open Source” are “normies”. If someone uses the term “Free Software” you can likely expect an hour long lecture from them on why the term “GNU Plus Linux” is better than “GNU Slash Linux”.

    I think maybe when companies started “open washing” (a term I just learned) efforts, “Open Source” was a much easier target for dilution than “Free Software.” Because again, when you think of the term “Free Software,” you think of pedantic Stallman listing off the easy-to-enumerate four freedoms. When you think of the term “Open Source,” you probably think of a Firefox logo and not Raymond or Parens and not really the ten specific points in the OSI definition.

    So in a way, I wonder if “Open Source” hasn’t served as a bit of a shield for “Free Software”. Because “Open Source” was the easier target and “Free Software” is a much more niche concept. (And also arguably because Linus/Linux is more associated with Open Source than Free Software.)

    Historically, if the term “Open Source” was never coined, I imagine people would have tried to dilute the term “Free Software”. I suspect they may have had less success, but not no success. And in that case, the term “Free Software” would be eroded today in ways it’s not given that “Open Source” served as a buffer protecting “Free Software.”

    What benefit is there in referring to FOSS as Open Source as opposed to FOSS?

    Ah. Well, I could see people who use the term “Open Source” loosely also using “FOSS” loosely more so than I could see them using “Free Software” loosely. But I suppose if someone usrs the term “FOSS”, there’s… I guess a stronger case that they shouldn’t be using the term loosely than if they’re using the term “Open Source.”

    I’m not saying I’m ok with using the term “Open Source” loosely. But I did admit there may be a possibility we need to start thinking in terms of choosing our battles in the OP.

    folkrav ,

    I’m utterly convinced overloading the term “open” was a very bad mistake in terms of how much confusion it created. Yes, “open-source” in the OSI definition means open to read, but also open to modification and redistribution. Having to make the distinction and explain the difference with “source available” is in itself a failure in communication.

    shrugal ,
    @shrugal@lemm.ee avatar

    That’s what you get when you use one existing word for a somewhat complex set of principles. It makes it easier to talk about it, because you don’t have to learn new vocabulary or go through the list of requirements every time, but it also opens the door for misinterpretations. Imo it’s good that we have a simple term for it, but we also have to educate people to make sure it doesn’t lose its proper meaning.

    It would be nice if the term “open source” could get some kind of legal protection. Like you can’t call your product “cheese” if it doesn’t have at least x% of actual cheese in it.

    Kaldo ,
    @Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

    I think the only thing we're missing is the official OSI definition for open-source-for-reading-but-not-modifying so we don't use the same name as for the open-source-for-reading-and-modifying code? The issue seems that we don't have OSI-defined names for both, just for one, so people started misusing it unknowingly while the businesses misused it maliciously.

    andruid ,

    Libre Software was/is the best strict definition of this to me.

    jack , (edited )

    The term “open source” was confusing from the beginning. Insisting on “free software” has kind of an autistic vibe to it. “Libre” will probably not catch on. I like your idea of just calling it “GPL” or “MIT licenced” software etc

    havocpants ,

    Exactly, “open source” was a dilution of free software in the first place. Kids today.

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