Niche Twitter opinion request!
Soliciting thoughts on “source-available” licenses. When are they most/least appropriate? Are there better/worse specific licenses for certain circumstances? Best writing on the subject?
Conversation
Replying to
Context here is: I would like to encourage some avenues of mash-up and collaboration for , and eventually I’d like to actually-OSS everything. But I still feel insecure enough in my crowdsourced funding model that I want to leave some options open for the near future.
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My impression is that people get very fired up when (1) something looks open-source, or they imagine it does, but it's not; or (2) something used to be open-source, but later goes source-available.
So my suggestion is just to be very clear up front about it.
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I've seen source-available licences only in the context of 'middleware', when you make a strategic decision to depend on a product. E.g. a physics engine for a big game, or a syncing solution such as ensembles.io by . Something where you become dependant.
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I think it makes someone much more likely to purchase a license. You adopt something when you know it has longevity. Eg. An Apple framework is not going anywhere. But what if you aren’t at Apple’s scale? How do you impart confidence? Source Available is a way to do that.
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I also think people worry too much about code or ideas being stolen. Most software holds no mystery. It is just the accumulated result of lots of hard work. Stealing anything useful is just as difficult as building the whole thing yourself.
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Agree with this a lot! Code often doesn't work the way you want out of the box for something new, so you either need to change it yourself or ask to do it.
It is another way to stay involved and keeps some of the value close to the original person who wrote it.
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I've had this in draft-form for a while, so thanks for the nudge:
Quote Tweet
"source code availability is the singular condition that necessarily precedes all other definitions and principles for free and open software. It is where the switch from closed to open happens, and the difference is literally night and day."
openeveryone.substack.com/p/on-the-spect
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