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
…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.
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
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)