Hacker News Reader

Comment by m1el | Hacker News Reader

https://i.imgur.com/bSdusjH.png

It's not about "two-party system", it's about the "natural" distribution of software distribution models.

Commercial "source-available" software is probably more common than you realize -- it's more common in B2B and B2gov contexts than in B2C contexts though. You can be sure that when the US military buys licenses for software, they want to be able to audit the source code! Similarly, Tarsnap isn't open source but I provide the source code (and actively encourage people to audit it).

Well, then your comment dismantles the topic of the article.

Not really. There are three main roles in todays software eco-system. The developer, the administrator and the user. Each have interests that are orthogonal to the interests others.

The developer wants to get paid to develop the source code.

The administrator wants to be able to modify and deploy the source code and be paid for running the resulting program.

The user wants to be able to review the source code and administration logs.

Open source as currently defined covers 100% of the interests of the administrators and none of the interests of the other groups.

The AGPL kind of covers some of the interests of the users.

Closed source protects the interests of the developer.

Being a member of all three groups I would be very interested in a license that manages the trade offs so the admins, in the guise of google and amazon, don't suck up all the money from developers and turn users into a commodity.

Freeware/shareware is also a thing. Publicly available without the source code. WinZip comes to mind.

The Windows source code is available for some universities and some governmental agencies and some big companies, after signing a DNA and some additional paperwork, so it is somewhat in the "all rights reserved" "source-available" category.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

I'm not sure if many webapps like gmail that have a big chunk of the UI in javascript count as "all rights reserved" "source-available". The code is minimized, obfuscated, and perhaps is the result of the transpilation of the real source, and it must talk to the servers that has not public source code.

For those interested in this topic, the whole Microsoft Shared Source program is worth reviewing. So is the reaction to it.

There was lots of closed-source public domain software in earlier eras. The ethos of most of the non-commercial software on the British micros, for example, was never about the source.

Stuff written in BASIC naturally came with its own sources, but even then people would often obfuscate it to avoid derivative works being made. People wanted reputation, not money, and they didn't want their work ripped off, or for others to profit off their labours.

In the RISC OS community I was a part of, releasing source as a matter of course only became common with the influence of Linux. Before that, binary-only PD with homebrew or completely absent licensing was the norm.

Same on the C64, on the Amiga (where sometimes stuff had sources but no license), and on MS-DOS. Coverdisks often had PD on them and there were PD collections like Fish and later PD CD-ROMs.

Thank you so much for this comment. I've just added this page to my reading list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish

Your comment about obfuscated BASIC is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Might you be able to mention any particularly important or memorable programs distributed that way? I'd be really interesting to go back and try to find contemporaneous writing about the motivations you mentioned.

Not so much important or memorable: most of the really important stuff on RISC OS was small-scale commercial. There was also a tendency to use BASIC minifiers to make the program fractionally faster and somewhat smaller, so the boundaries with obfuscation weren't that clear.

As for the contemporaneous writing, I'd start with the comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroup archive on Google Groups, because it's searchable (and I definitely remember this stuff being discussed in the late 90s, mainly as a reaction against the rise of Free Software.

Incidentally, the decline of the RISC OS market really brought home to me the value of having sources available (and being allowed to use them). We had two significant breaking architectural changes (StrongARM architecture in 96 and the move from ARM's 26-bit to 32-bit addressing mode in the 00s) which cost us a lot of good software because the authors had moved on and nobody could fix the code.

> There was also a tendency to use BASIC minifiers to make the program fractionally faster and somewhat smaller, so the boundaries with obfuscation weren't that clear.

Interesting!

> comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroup archive

Thanks!

> Incidentally, the decline of the RISC OS market really brought home to me the value of having sources available (and being allowed to use them).

I have a few of these stories, but now I have one more.

There is plenty of source-available software, and I'd suggest your perception to the contrary might have more to do with thinking in the limited terms I described. For a recent example, isn't all software using the Commons Clause source-available, as I define it?

The reason there isn't much in the public-domain, closed-source quadrant is that permission without code is completely useless. For example:

I hereby grant you, m1el, an MIT license for the short novelty program I have just fixed in the tangible medium of expression know as my hard drive, project name Caveman. Enjoy!

Compare code without permission, which still has some limited value for others, especially educational and inspection value, as well as for the developers, in the form of access to free services.

I'd also put a number of public-patent-grant programs in that family. That's potentially much more interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com