"I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/51038205
What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?
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...or non-profit... But I agree...
If it's non profit AND not open source, it seems a bit shady, doesn't it?
Maybe, but not necessarily. You see, there could be plenty of reasons to protect ones code...
Like backdoors, Lax security, technical debt, etc
Thanks for that pessimistic comment.
I don't know what could be the reason for a non-profit to not open-source the code of a publicly available tool/product, except to hide or keep their property
Is that not a good reason, if you are trying to help people, and competitors likely would damage that mission? There's a thousand possible reasons, and I really wonder why you can't imagine any of them...
Because if you care about user you should be at least transparent to them, in your example you could make your codebase open-source with a license restricting it for commercial uses
You can't. Blocking commercial use stops a licence being open source. If you don't want commercial competition, then you need copyleft, so anyone using your code has to share their modifications with whoever they give binaries to. If they end up using your code to make a better product, then it'll have to be open source, too, and you can incorporate the improvements back into your version.
Maybe I'm wrong but they are many type of "open-source" licenses, sure they do not respect the GNU Open Source but they are pretty reasonable and I think that it exists license that do not allow you to use it for commercial uses
EDIT : my bad, I've seen that making the commercial uses forbidden is no more open source license but CC-NC so you're right :)
@foremanguy92 @AnyOldName3 yes, unfortunately, you are wrong. The term "open source" also contains a clause about not restricting the use. Think "open cage", not just "open book".
Only some definitions of open source state that. The concept has existed long before the free software foundation.
While personally agree with the FSF. To say it is an exclusive definition of open source is just outright false.
@HumanPenguin Well obviously we can't apply definitions of the likes of Meta or Google, who are trying to bend it towards their business goals, and also of some random internet bloggers. So apart from those, can you link to any applicable definition of open source which doesn't grant the freedom of use?