The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
It also requires freedom to distribute modifications:
Derived Works
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
CC-BY-NC-ND is not “open source” (both due to the NC and the ND), it’s more of a “source available” type of license (when applied to source code). The difference between “free software” and “open source” is more ideological than anything else, they both define the same freedoms, just with different ideological objectives / goals.
That discussion concluded essentially the same thing I said: that both the OSI and the FSF have essentially the same conditions.
Don’t police perfectly innocent and common use of language please.
Using “open source” for all kinds of source, regardless of how restrictive it’s license is, is definitely not a common use of the term. People aren’t gonna start using “open source” like that just because a few people find it convenient and wanna police the term to force it to include software with source available, just because for their marketing it makes it sound more appealing.
No, these licenses are problematic. Fundamentally, it is proprietary software, and restricts me from full ownership and control over my computer.
No derivatives prevents me from modifying the program and maintaining the control I am owed to have over my device. Every bit of proprietary code is a percentage of my computer that is no longer truly mine.
No commercial usage is a continium fallacy. Is my blog commercial, because I advertise my resume on it? Is retroarch* commercial, because they have a patreon and get paid? Are “nonprofits” not commercial, since they claim to not want to make a profit? Or are only registered businesses commercial?
The correct solution to maintain softare freedom is for governments to extract money from the entities that profit the most off of free software, and use those taxes to fund free software. Germany is kind of doing this with their sovreign tech fund.
*Fuck the retroarch devs btw. Did a little digging, they seem to have been very problematic, and ran multiple harassment campaigns.
Some of these license are very clear about what is commericial. Some leave it to be ambiguous for the sake of allowing a case by case determination. The goal is often to help workers & the commons—say you as an individual are free to use it for, or others for places where folks have equal pay or say, or less than 10 seats. To say that since a software license says Amazon can’t use this but you can means it’s all proprietary means you are either Amazon or a goober to think these are equivalent. Something something baby out with the water fallacy [^1].
I am not sure reliance on the state is the best way, but it would be interesting to see the results.
What’s wild is the banshees here rarely acknowledge how AGPL works similar to these now adding restrictions instead of laying out what you can do, but daddy OSI approved it so it must be good.
Some of these license are very clear about what is commericial
The license chosen in this article is the Creative Commons license, which is not a code license, but instead one intended for art. On their own page, they acknowledge the difficulty with categorizing commercial vs non-commercial usecases:
In CC’s experience, it is usually relatively easy to determine whether a use is permitted, and known conflicts are relatively few considering the popularity of the NC licenses. However, there will always be uses that are challenging to categorize as commercial or noncommercial. CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.
What’s wild is the banshees here rarely acknowledge how AGPL works similar to these now adding restrictions instead of laying out what you can do, but daddy OSI approved it so it must be good.
“You must share source code of this service with your users” is not really an actual restriction on who can use the software and who can use it.
Fuck the OSI. They’ve done more harm to free software than any other organization. In the recent controversy with redis and SSPL, they refused to acknowledge the actual problem of the SSPL license, that it was unusable due to requiring all “software used to deploy this software” being open source. Does that mean that people who deploy software on Windows have to cough up the source code for Windows? What about Intel Management Engine, the proprietary bit of code in every single Intel CPU. Redis moved to a dual license with that a proprietary license. An unusable license… and a proprietary license = proprietary software. But instead, the OSI whined that the problems with the SSPL was that it would “restrict usage” because people have to share more source code. The OSI, and open source, have always been corporate entities that unsurp free software. Just look at their sponsors page and see who supports them: Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft…
The goal is often to help workers & the commons—say you as an individual are free to use it for, or others for places where folks have equal pay or say, or less than 10 seats. To say that since a software license says Amazon can’t use this but you can means it’s all proprietary means you are either Amazon or a goober to think these are equivalent. Something something baby out with the water fallacy
You are moving the goalposts. I argued against a license that restricts derivatives and commercial use. You are now defending licenses that target specific entities and seek to remain open to workers and the commons. A license that restricts derivatives is not this.
To be blunt, I would be okay with a license that specifically restricts retroarch devs from making derivatives, and I would find it funny af. I think that was what the Duckstation dev was going for with the noncommercial and no derivatives (since retroarch maintains forks of software in order to add it as cores), but I’m frustrated at what is essentially a shift to a proprietary license instead.
Although such a hypothetical license that targets the retroarch developers would not be approved by the OSI or the Free Software institutions, I don’t really care. Racists don’t get rights.
Why are you talking about Creative Commons? Everyone knows this isn’t for code (hence Fedora kicking out CC0 code) & everyone knows NC has a loose definition (& good intentions). There are plenty of options in licenses in the post-open source, copyfair, copyfarleft, & such that work for software that are not considered “free” or “open” (where open is more corporate than free, which free is obviously the better one) but still allow users to modify read & usually modify the source. These have their flaws—specifically the incompatibility with free software—but the heart is in the right place in trying to address the exploitation; I encourage the research & development of licenses in these spaces to help the commons. I, as a non-corporation, wish to defend not shame developers from choosing non-‘free’ licenses in these & similar categories for their software. This defense of alternative licensing isn’t moving a goalpost & always was the primary premise.
Originally open-source under the General Public License, DuckStation‘s license was changed first to PolyFormStrict License and then to CC-BY-NC-ND. These changes prohibit commercial use and derivatives of the emulator, including packaging it for distribution.
Yeah. It’s not supposed to be for code. Didn’t stop the Duckstation developer.
There are plenty of options in licenses in the post-open source, copyfair, copyfarleft, & such that work for software that are not considered “free” or “open” (where open is more corporate than free, which free is obviously the better one) but still allow users to modify read & usually modify the source.
I would have to evaluate those licenses on a case by case basis, but I suspect I would find the vast majority of them okay enough. But again, this is moving the goalposts. I was expressing my concerns issues with the CC BY NC ND, but you have changed the discussion to be about other licenses. Although interesting, they are not relevant since the DuckStation license is not those.
I still think government funding for free software is the correct solution, however. I generally find all of the post open and whatnot licenses have restrictions can be problematic, or loopholes that can be abused to get out of the “good” restrictions. I noted a while ago with one of the licenses that demand that corporations making over some amount giving up a percentage of their profits, that Google used to do a scheme where Alphabet (parent company of google) was the actual owner of the google logo, and then they rented it to Google at an absurdly high price, in order to artificially lower Google’s profits. I think that it would be too simple for the extremely wealthy companies to do something similar and use post-open licensed software without consequence.
Taxing corporations is hard, but having every individual entity behind a software try to extract resources from a corporation will be harder. “Divide and conquer”. My understanding is that license violations are a Civil case, meaning you have to spend money on lawyers and other legal things and… you would be going against some of the richest entities in the world in a court where money is basically a win button.
And of course, allowing society to continue to rely on proper Free Software licenses, ensures software freedom is preserved.
usually modify the source.
No. If I cannot modify the source, then I don’t really view a difference between it and proprietary software. Both the OSI and Free Software Foundation at least require the ability to modify the source code, in order for a license to actually count at FOSS under their guidelines — and I agree with them. Code I cannot modify, is a piece of my computer I do not own.
Not what I am arguing, but we do have two issues: 1) naming/branding for these types of licenses 2) FOSS banshees acting like these licenses aren’t acceptable & the whole idea is binary good or evil
Yeah, it definitely is more appealing from a marketing perspective.
I do understand why some projects might wanna use the term, it’s to their advantage to be associated with “open source” even if the source code itself has a proprietary license.
The problem is that then it makes it harder / more confusing to check for actually openly licensed code, since then it’s not clear what term to use. Already “free software” can be confused with “free as in free beer”.
According to the definition from the Open Source Initiative, “open source” also requires free redistribution. See the first point (emphasis mine).
It also requires freedom to distribute modifications:
CC-BY-NC-ND is not “open source” (both due to the NC and the ND), it’s more of a “source available” type of license (when applied to source code). The difference between “free software” and “open source” is more ideological than anything else, they both define the same freedoms, just with different ideological objectives / goals.
See discussion here. Open Source is a valid term for this. Don’t police perfectly innocent and common use of language please.
That discussion concluded essentially the same thing I said: that both the OSI and the FSF have essentially the same conditions.
Using “open source” for all kinds of source, regardless of how restrictive it’s license is, is definitely not a common use of the term. People aren’t gonna start using “open source” like that just because a few people find it convenient and wanna police the term to force it to include software with source available, just because for their marketing it makes it sound more appealing.
And there is nothing wrong with folks choosing such licences—especially if trying to get paid or not exploited.
No, these licenses are problematic. Fundamentally, it is proprietary software, and restricts me from full ownership and control over my computer.
No derivatives prevents me from modifying the program and maintaining the control I am owed to have over my device. Every bit of proprietary code is a percentage of my computer that is no longer truly mine.
No commercial usage is a continium fallacy. Is my blog commercial, because I advertise my resume on it? Is retroarch* commercial, because they have a patreon and get paid? Are “nonprofits” not commercial, since they claim to not want to make a profit? Or are only registered businesses commercial?
The correct solution to maintain softare freedom is for governments to extract money from the entities that profit the most off of free software, and use those taxes to fund free software. Germany is kind of doing this with their sovreign tech fund.
*Fuck the retroarch devs btw. Did a little digging, they seem to have been very problematic, and ran multiple harassment campaigns.
Some of these license are very clear about what is commericial. Some leave it to be ambiguous for the sake of allowing a case by case determination. The goal is often to help workers & the commons—say you as an individual are free to use it for, or others for places where folks have equal pay or say, or less than 10 seats. To say that since a software license says Amazon can’t use this but you can means it’s all proprietary means you are either Amazon or a goober to think these are equivalent. Something something baby out with the water fallacy [^1].
I am not sure reliance on the state is the best way, but it would be interesting to see the results.
What’s wild is the banshees here rarely acknowledge how AGPL works similar to these now adding restrictions instead of laying out what you can do, but daddy OSI approved it so it must be good.
1: Wikipedia
The license chosen in this article is the Creative Commons license, which is not a code license, but instead one intended for art. On their own page, they acknowledge the difficulty with categorizing commercial vs non-commercial usecases:
“You must share source code of this service with your users” is not really an actual restriction on who can use the software and who can use it.
Fuck the OSI. They’ve done more harm to free software than any other organization. In the recent controversy with redis and SSPL, they refused to acknowledge the actual problem of the SSPL license, that it was unusable due to requiring all “software used to deploy this software” being open source. Does that mean that people who deploy software on Windows have to cough up the source code for Windows? What about Intel Management Engine, the proprietary bit of code in every single Intel CPU. Redis moved to a dual license with that a proprietary license. An unusable license… and a proprietary license = proprietary software. But instead, the OSI whined that the problems with the SSPL was that it would “restrict usage” because people have to share more source code. The OSI, and open source, have always been corporate entities that unsurp free software. Just look at their sponsors page and see who supports them: Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft…
You are moving the goalposts. I argued against a license that restricts derivatives and commercial use. You are now defending licenses that target specific entities and seek to remain open to workers and the commons. A license that restricts derivatives is not this.
To be blunt, I would be okay with a license that specifically restricts retroarch devs from making derivatives, and I would find it funny af. I think that was what the Duckstation dev was going for with the noncommercial and no derivatives (since retroarch maintains forks of software in order to add it as cores), but I’m frustrated at what is essentially a shift to a proprietary license instead.
Although such a hypothetical license that targets the retroarch developers would not be approved by the OSI or the Free Software institutions, I don’t really care. Racists don’t get rights.
Why are you talking about Creative Commons? Everyone knows this isn’t for code (hence Fedora kicking out CC0 code) & everyone knows NC has a loose definition (& good intentions). There are plenty of options in licenses in the post-open source, copyfair, copyfarleft, & such that work for software that are not considered “free” or “open” (where open is more corporate than free, which free is obviously the better one) but still allow users to modify read & usually modify the source. These have their flaws—specifically the incompatibility with free software—but the heart is in the right place in trying to address the exploitation; I encourage the research & development of licenses in these spaces to help the commons. I, as a non-corporation, wish to defend not shame developers from choosing non-‘free’ licenses in these & similar categories for their software. This defense of alternative licensing isn’t moving a goalpost & always was the primary premise.
Because (from the article):
Yeah. It’s not supposed to be for code. Didn’t stop the Duckstation developer.
I would have to evaluate those licenses on a case by case basis, but I suspect I would find the vast majority of them okay enough. But again, this is moving the goalposts. I was expressing my concerns issues with the CC BY NC ND, but you have changed the discussion to be about other licenses. Although interesting, they are not relevant since the DuckStation license is not those.
I still think government funding for free software is the correct solution, however. I generally find all of the post open and whatnot licenses have restrictions can be problematic, or loopholes that can be abused to get out of the “good” restrictions. I noted a while ago with one of the licenses that demand that corporations making over some amount giving up a percentage of their profits, that Google used to do a scheme where Alphabet (parent company of google) was the actual owner of the google logo, and then they rented it to Google at an absurdly high price, in order to artificially lower Google’s profits. I think that it would be too simple for the extremely wealthy companies to do something similar and use post-open licensed software without consequence.
Taxing corporations is hard, but having every individual entity behind a software try to extract resources from a corporation will be harder. “Divide and conquer”. My understanding is that license violations are a Civil case, meaning you have to spend money on lawyers and other legal things and… you would be going against some of the richest entities in the world in a court where money is basically a win button.
And of course, allowing society to continue to rely on proper Free Software licenses, ensures software freedom is preserved.
No. If I cannot modify the source, then I don’t really view a difference between it and proprietary software. Both the OSI and Free Software Foundation at least require the ability to modify the source code, in order for a license to actually count at FOSS under their guidelines — and I agree with them. Code I cannot modify, is a piece of my computer I do not own.
I guess it’s better than not providing any source code. What’s wrong is calling it “open source” when it isn’t.
VVVVVV and Anodyne are some examples of “source available” games.
Not what I am arguing, but we do have two issues: 1) naming/branding for these types of licenses 2) FOSS banshees acting like these licenses aren’t acceptable & the whole idea is binary good or evil
As long as we don’t call them free, libre, or open source I don’t care. We can’t make the terminology any more confusing for those.
There’s limited vocab to choose from & source available isn’t an appealing one
Yeah, it definitely is more appealing from a marketing perspective.
I do understand why some projects might wanna use the term, it’s to their advantage to be associated with “open source” even if the source code itself has a proprietary license.
The problem is that then it makes it harder / more confusing to check for actually openly licensed code, since then it’s not clear what term to use. Already “free software” can be confused with “free as in free beer”.