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Comment by hgs3 | Hacker News Reader

The only mistake Sentry made was caving to peer pressure. OSI does not own the term "open source". They applied to the USPTO for the trademark and were denied [1]. They self-admit that they "must rely on market pressure" because they have no legal standing.

The OSI definition of open source is anti-labor and corporate friendly. There is no reason for them to exclude non-commercial use from their definition. Even the Creative Commons has a "non-commercial use" license. The economic downturn should be a wake-up call for labor to demand a more pro-worker definition.

The only "good" recognized alternative at this time is the FSF and their copyleft family of licenses. They are very much pro-user and anti-corporation. If anything, Sentry should have considered the AGPL instead of the BSL.

[1] https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source

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> The only mistake Sentry made was caving to peer pressure. OSI does not own the term "open source".

I agree. After the last HN thread, and also zeeg's Twitter, I was disappointed to see him cave. There needs to be some real discussion here around the term, especially concerning the fact that OSI does not own the term. Caving to the mob^W^W"market pressure" with an apology for opinions on terms won't help kick off that hard discussion.

BUSL, SSPL, and ELv2 can be as-permissive, or even more permissive, than GPL in the majority use case.

Not all OSS is FOSS. And that's okay.

Yes, I can see why you might make this argument. [1]

[1] https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/blob/master/LICENSE....

Not trying to hide anything. Ask any of my users and they would tell you Keygen is open source.

Not by OSI's definition, but by theirs. They can use it permissively, so it is to them.

Yes, it is natural for people to look at what's offered, see "it's free for me to use" and think that it's open source software like everything else that the broader community has worked hard to accomplish over the past 25 years. The hard work that created a bountiful commons of public software that anyone can use for any purpose is taken for granted these days.

One day they may understand what they didn't have to fight for. But I hope they don't.

While the Creative Commons has a "non-commercial use" license, a work under such a license would not qualify as a "free cultural work" [1], which is the equivalent designation as Open Source Software for non-software works. Free Cultural Works give everyone the same essential freedoms that are required by the Open Source Definition.

I think when people make material available under a CC-BY-NC and call it "open source", the community should react the same way. It's neither open source, nor a free cultural work.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/fr...

> It's neither open source, nor a free cultural work.

This is where the change needs to happen: "free culture work" and "open source" should not be conflated.

The article you linked demonstrates that the Creative Commons defines a spectrum of licenses [1]. The OSI should as well. They could then "approve" the BSL the same way the Creative Commons "approves" the NC licenses.

It would be better for the OSI to stay ahead of this rather than ignore or fight it. They could then champion their own definition of the software license spectrum rather than risk losing control of it.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/cc_li...

The mission of OSI and the mission of Creative Commons are related, but that doesn't mean that the OSI should do everything that Creative Commons has done.

The overlap in mission between the OSI and Creative Commons is the "approved for free cultural works" label [1]. This came about during collaborations between the members of the Free and Open Source Software community and Creative Commons leadership in 2006. [2]

Software licenses with restrictions are nothing new or novel. From my perspective, "accepting" them isn't staying ahead, it's stepping backwards on a mission that has been a quarter century in the making.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/2008/02/20/approved-for-free-cul...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_Free_Cultural_Wo...

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