Is it? I thought open-source was a "business friendly" wording of free software. That is, the source code is made available, independent of what price (perhaps gratis) the author decides to distribute it. "Free as in freedom, not free as in beer" and all that. Am I missing something or did the OSI change the meaning to include that the sale price must be 0?
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.
So this “no selling” talk is defintely a diverging perspective and does not apply to all open source licenses. In fact I think it can’t apply to any, because commercial use is a freedom that would be restricted if it were true.
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In the world of pervasive broadband and cheap hosting, I don’t think this business model could work—everybody you release your stuff to will just upload it to a public site. Red Hat will terminate the support contract in that case, which to me feels like a legal exploit I’m kind of conflicted about.
You're also unable to restrict those who purchase your software from redistributing it:
> You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html )
That is enough to ensure that open source code is provided to the world for free. This is why we have a distinction between "open source" and "source available".
Not necessarily, the people you distribute the source/binaries to are under no obligation to give them to anyone else.
Programmers want to program, they started sharing code, then corporations started using it, and erasing the authors names. Originally there was no 'License', programmers didn't come together for the fun of creating 'Licenses'. They were forced to create license to cover their code to keep it open for anybody to use. The original licenses were really just to keep it free and provide attribution, so the authors were known.
While both may have been driven by ideals, many of the licenses typically applied by people who call themselves "open source developers" do not contain copyleft. Therefore it is inherently easy for corporations to "steal" the code. "Steal" in quotes, because when the developers chose a license, they should have been aware of that their software can be used in any context without they themselves ever learning about it or seeing any contributions flowing back, so it is not really stealing anything, but the developers short-sighted choice of license.
Sustainability in terms of keeping things open (libre) is more an area of licenses like GPL, AGPL, which contain copyleft. These are more commonly applied by developers calling themselves "free software developers". Most self-respecting free software developers will also call their software free (libre) software, instead of saying open source, even, if many open source licenses are also valid free software licenses.
Even the 2000s “Linux is a cancer” Microsoft chose to invent the term “shared source” rather than attempt to dilute “open source” when they publicly released some source code for academic and noncommercial use. (They still faced accusations of terminology confusion, which might well have been true.) In that respect, the recent attempts at redefinition by Mongo, Elastic, et al. are a truly novel strategy.
> its founder (ESR) invented the phrase
No, Raymond was at the meeting where it was coined, and he enthusiastically helped popularize the term. Christine Peterson invented it.
I wanted to grump about this not being written down, but even the OSI history page[1] mentions it. Huh. Thanks!