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Comment by stoolpigeon | Hacker News Reader

Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project. ---------------

I wasn't familiar with Craft. Looking at it they seem to have their own license and it seems pretty restrictive. Can anyone point to any existing discussions about the implications of the license and if it is truly open source?

I understand FOSS projects that have some kind of payment option, but I don't understand how the code can be available but there is no way to run it without paying for it. The language of the license is also rather informal. As a layman it has an appeal to me but at the same time I'm wondering how some of those things are defined.

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> Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project.

Where did you end up finding this information? How did you not see the "pricing" link in the navigation at their website? Or did you not look at their website? If you're having to pay for the software, then you probably don't need to dig much further to see that it's not FOSS. You seem to be making this more complicated than it actually is.

I'm not sure it's so cut and dry. We tend to reduce things down to binary thinking, perhaps by training.

There do exist several prominent FOSS projects that also have pricing pages. They usually charge for hosted/managed deployments of their project or binary distributions (e.g. compile it yourself for free). While I believe it poses a conflict-of-interest, there are also a number of FOSS projects with pricing pages for "enterprise" features.

I went to the repo and read the license. The article made me think it was sold but open. Lots of FOSS software has purchase options. That alone doesn't indicate if something is foss or not. The license confused me, as I stated but they have another file "Contributing.md" that explicitly states it is not a FOSS license. Now I just wonder why anyone would work for them for free.

The post linked here has the section "The question of open source" and it states "While their source code is open, they do have commercial licenses and cost money (though a modest sum)." That is where they link to the github repo. I'd say all that wording also muddies the waters. I guess it's "open" in the sense that you can read it. But I don't consider that to be open. I guess they are drawing a distinction between FOSS and "open". I can't argue that but I still think the way it's written is confusing. (or maybe I'm just not current on how these terms are being more commonly used.)

The first line of the license is a copyright statement from the developer. The wording of the license itself is owned by the creator.

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