Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good.

Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support.

Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).

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bloppe 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most source-available licenses that I've encountered have no paid license requirements for users. They only require a paid license if you want to sell the product commercially. Normally, you're still allowed to use the software as a piece of a larger commercial product, as long as it does not compete with the original author, or "substantially reproduce the functionality" of the source-available bits, depending on the exact language.

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preisschild 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support.

AND it also means with copyleft-licenses that you are required to make the source code for those tweaks public too.

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bsder 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Source Available" means that it can become "Source Unavailable" overnight.

See the "Our Machinery" fiasco.

Yes, Open Source isn't a complete defense against this (especially when there are copyright assignments). However, it sure makes it both a lot harder to pull off and a lot less useful to even try.

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bloppe 2 hours ago | parent [-]

"Open Source" can also become "Source Available" overnight. See Redis, Terraform, etc. In the same vein, "Open Source" can also become "Closed Source" overnight.

In neither case does the change apply retroactively. It only applies to new contributions after the license change.

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Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Well technically Redis had a fork before it became source available known as valkey which is still in bsd license

Terraform was forked to create opentofu if I remember correctly

I think the most recent example is kind of minio for this type of thing no?

Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source since it seems that you haven't named any and I am curious how they can do that. There must be some legal laws protecting it.

	▲	bloppe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If a project switches from an open-source to a closed-source license, then from the outside, it just looks like the project was abandoned. The final commit that was published under the open-source license will always be open source. It's the future commits that are now closed source. So no, I don't have any specific examples of that happening. In the case of both Redis and Terraform, the forks were announced after the license change, not before. Indeed, the forks were motivated by the license change. The community didn't get a warning "hey, we're about to change the license, fork it while you still can!". It just changed. That's what I mean when I say the license change does not apply retroactively. The commit of Terraform that existed before the license change is still open-source. I could create a fork branching off that commit today if I wanted to.

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sofixa 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good

Maybe, but I think that "source available" isn't detailed enough and can mean many many different things.

> Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).

Point in case. For me there is one group, under something like BSL or FSL or SSPL which mostly restricts you from competing with the project's creators (e.g. making your own SaaS out of it), but everything else is fair use, you can use it in prod to make money at any size, etc. And a separate, more restrictive one, which has size, or production restrictions (you can't run the software if you're a commercial entity).

Source available sounds like a good description for the second one, because it's just available, little more. But for the first one where you can do whatever you want with one single exception that doesn't impact 99.9999% of potential users, it's not a good and clear enough description.

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		People run with OSI initiative as it is and consider it the golden rule when I agree with your 99.9999% of potential users line. I think that *one blunder?) is that OSI cant really consider SSPL or similar open source because it restricts access to one party so it breaches an freedom 0 or some freedom of open source which is fair but at the same time literally only impacting people competing against (in my opinion the funding of the project and its growth itself) if someone like amazon had created a redis service competing against redis itself lets say I think its all kinda nuanced and we kinda need more discussion with source available.
	▲	bloppe an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I agree with you the "source available" is overstretched. It's hard to come up with a good new label for the first group. Maybe "Open Use" or "Fair Source".