There's going to be a lot of complaints about open-source restricting access.

It's going to keep happening because it just doesn't make sense for a lot of previous business models that supported and open-source project, something that was seen recently with tailwind.

In one of my projects, one that remains source-available, I had encountered an "open-source justice warrior" that made it their mission to smear the project because of the switch, grasping at straws to do everything they could to paint my intentions as malicious.

It's really too bad, and will only hurt the availability of free alternatives if one cannot provide the source under a "just don't commercially compete with the paid version of the product" license without getting branded as a scamming cash grabber

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drnick1 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Source available with various arbitrary restriction is non-free software. What the "open source warriors" take exception to is presenting a project as "open source" or "free" when in reality it is not.

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skeledrew 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A thing cannot be considered free/open source if there are restrictions on what users can do with it. If a maintainer wishes to put a "don't compete commercially" license then it should be clearly labelled as source available, not open source. To do otherwise is to deceive the open source community, which has a particular and well defined understanding of what "open source" entails.

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luipugs 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you arguing that copyleft is not open source?

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mgulick 12 hours ago | parent [-]

From https://opensource.org/osd:

> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

A non-commercial clause is a discrimination against a field of endeavor and thus non-open-source. The license cannot restrict how the user is able to *use* the software and still be open source. There can however be requirements to distribute the source code when distributing the software, ala GPL.

	▲	pocksuppet 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://opensource.org/sponsors

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andrewstuart2 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My main complaint about the project changes we've seen lately is that these companies are happy to take all the code that previous contributors have written for free in good faith, and profit off of it without any sharing. The whole reason I and many people have contributed to some of the projects out there is under the premise that I've been given something great/useful for free so I'm going to give back for free. If you want to create a project that's source-available or whatever you want to call it, from the start, you'll probably even get my support.

Sure, it's totally legal for the company to change how they operate in the future. But it burns all that good faith of previous contributions in favor of profit. And so yeah, I hope the companies that pull this crash and burn in proportion to how much free code they accepted from contributors that they now wish to profit from.