What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source?

To an outsider it looks like counterproductive bickering between people on the same team.

> What principles and values of the open source movement are protected by staunchly refusing to allow "source available" to call itself open source?

The part where the license says "Don't run this on your server and charge people money for it, or we will sue you"?

I know that everyone thinks of Big Tech absorbing your project into their SaaS when they do this, but there are other ways (say AGPL) to combat that. O'SaaSy seems to me to be essentially a "give us your code for free, and you can self host it, but don't dare to charge $$ for it or else!" license.

Now you're bringing lawyers into the picture for anyone who's hosting your software on their servers. It's very reasonable for a SaaS company that wants to defend its moat, but it's not Open Source.

(Talking of, I'm actually curious if anyone has seen actual self-hosted Fizzy instances in the wild.)

If something is open source and follows an OSI approved license I don't have to ask a lawyer to review the license before I integrate with that code.

The moment you change a single line of that license I now have to pay extremely close attention to those details again.

This isn't a naive idealism thing - there are very solid, boring, selfish reasons for caring about this.

FOSS was founded on The Four Essential Freedoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... that GPL/LGPL were devised to embody. Shared source licenses don't adhere to freedom 0.

These terms are designed to trick people exactly like you. "Source available" means you can sue anyone that shares a modification of your code for any reason you want to make up.

I think it comes to analogies, with open source you have a public park you are free to use. With source available it is public park you are free to look at behind a fence... So not actually public park. Still a fine thing to exist.

As user as well. Difference between I can use this for free and I have to pay to use this. Even if I can see parts inside is significant.

It might not be real principle, but at least it is real difference.

> bickering between people on the same team.

Uh.. are they?

I'm somewhat sympathetic to licenses that will be open source in X years, but the open source ethos is that, with proper attribution, we can do whatever with the code, the only restriction being that for some projects a derivative work needs to also be open source (while others don't care even about that)

If we were to welcome non-open source projects into a larger community, we should probably begin with licenses that forbid the usage of the software in military and things like that. Which fails to be open source for the same reason: it puts limits in how you can use the code

Yes, it's a spirit vs. letter argument isn't it? Or _Open Source_ and _open source_.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#...

Its literally against the first of the four essential freedoms of Free and Open Source Software

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

Some people have internalized the words "open" "source" to mean more than the words, even going so far as to eschew the benefit (which was at the heart of the Stallman problem) because it doesn't fit the desired ethos and license. It's counterproductive, indeed.

They’re not at all on the same team. “Open source” is given away for free, to do what you want with it. Source available is not. Fundamentally they have nothing in common other than the fact that you are allowed to read the source code.

Not the same team. Open source isn't really about the license, and it's also not even really about the source; open source is a philosophy centering open development and collaboration. Sharing the source is necessary, but not sufficient. Too often, "source available" means you get to see the source, but you are not invited to participate in development, and certainly you're not going to be participating in collaboration.

"Source available" projects want the benefits of being associated with that egalitarian philosophy because it's popular amongst technologists, who are their initial customers. But they don't want to actually practice the philosophy because their core interest is protecting their IP to turn a profit, not open collaboration and development. Outside contributions are considered a liability in many source available projects [1].

This is important because source available projects have in the past resulted in a "rug pull", when the project gets enough airspeed, so they start putting more work into the closed source to placate their investors. Once the technologists are not the primary users, the entire source available charade is done. The available source becomes deprecated, features are moved to the closed source branch, and eventually the available source rots.

One final point: if we call source available "open source", then what are we going to call open source to differentiate it from source available. Because they're actually different things.

[1]: For example, many projects won't even allow outside contributions, but when they do, you'll have to sign some sort of contributor agreement: https://www.scylladb.com/open-source-nosql-database/contribu...

Edit: (this is to the response below me, as I'm rate limited now and I'm going to bed so I'll forget to post this tomorrow)

If anyone tried to do this then the project would be forked immediately. An open source project can go closed source, but as an OSS project, everyone should already have everything the need to keep it going despite that, and that all remains open. That's why we love open source.

Also, it'd be really hard to pull off if they've accepted a lot of outside contributions -- when you submit code to an open source project, you retain the copyright. This is not a problem as long as the project is licensed under the agreement under which they submitted the commit, which only grants rights to redistribute under that license. At least that's how it works with Apache 2.0 (I believe, IANAL). So to go closed source, they'd need agreements from all of their contributors to do so.

Now, it can happen. MongoDB is an example. But as far as I can tell, you'd have a hard time of it if you accepted contributions from people and they.