If people could stop redefining words, that would go a long way to fixing our current strife.
Not a total solution, but it would clarify the discussion. I loathe people who redefine and weaponize words.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
509 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
61850 readers
4479 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I have some Aladeen news for you my friend
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
No open source license type where corporations still have to pay?
No, because that would no longer be open in the open source sense.
It's either open for everyone, or it isn't open.
Edit: sorry to whoever doesn't like it, but it's literally how "open source" is defined
No, software being free as in beer is not a necessary condition for being open-source. And if the code is not free as in beer, the pricing model can be whatever the hell you want, as long as the code is shared when the user is licensed. That can mean an expensive license for enterprise use coexisting with a free license for (say) researchers and individual devs.
No, not in the way GP wrote. You're not allowed to have your license discriminate between users, so you'd have to sell your software to everyone, not just big companies.
Either no one pays, or everyone pays.
Open source software can be sold at different prices to different customers, and still remain open source. Open source software can also be sold only to certain types of customers, and still remain open source. Who the developer decides to sell or distribute the software to, and at what price, is unrelated to how the software is licensed.
However, because the Open Source Definition prohibits open source software licenses from discriminating against "any person or group of persons", the customers who buy open source software cannot be restricted from reselling or redistributing the software to any other individual or organization.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
And that’s literally what the article says lol I don’t know why you were downvoted.
Emily Omier, a well-regarded open-source start-up consultant, emphasized that open source is a binary standard set by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), not a spectrum. "Either you're open source, or you are not.
The binary mentioned is different. Omier was saying either you share all the source code, or it's not open-source. You don't get to retain some proprietary blob for an essential component and still say the whole app is open-source. Pricing is an entirely different question.
I suppose that both cases apply here. He’s saying that you either comply with an open source license that’s defined by the OSI or you don’t. That includes the source code to be available yes, but the article also mentions Meta license has a restriction:
if you have an extremely successful AI program that uses Llama code, you'll have to pay Meta to use it. That's not open source. Period.
From my understanding, you can’t take an open source license, add random restrictions and still call it open source (“if it’s a corporation it needs to pay a % fee to me”). It doesn’t matter if 98% of the license is open source, at that point your software simply isn’t open source anymore.
You can definitely have multiple licenses, such as Qt does to allow statically linking it and to modify it without distributing the source code, but that simply isn’t an open source one.
load more comments
(1 replies)