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Comment by gavinhoward | Hacker News Reader

This is partially why I began to look at source available more: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t... . And what I found is that source available can still be good for end users, leaving us most of the four freedoms, including control, while discouraging dealers.

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Nice analysis!

I agree that there shouldn't be a stigma against licenses that aren't FOSS. There's no shame producing software that's not open source, and if you're open about it (ie not calling it FOSS if it isn't), sharing it under a different license (such as the SAMS licenses you mentioned).

Today "open source" is often a marketing term (if any proof is needed, see LLama :), often "let's build a community of users on our discord as a loss leader into our startup sales funnel" term, and ... in a very few cases .. "let's build together, rising tide lifts all boats" thing.

I see a real risk that we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater and will end up with a lot of useful code hidden behind terrible licenses. Rather than going source available with a dual licensed commercial license, maybe go the middle way of Fair Source[1] which gives you an exclusivity period for commercialization but later turns into Open Source.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the people behind that model.

[1]: https://fair.io/

Parent's post explicitly listed FSL as a possible solution. We also recently adopted it in our startup. (Edit to add: I think his beef with FSL is just that it's not OSS. I like the "fair" term as sort of in-between commercial and FOSS).

Agree that if non-lawyers (or corporate lawyers with no experience in open source licensing) craft something, they might regret it down the road. Better to pick and choose between now plethora of available options.

I have no beef with FSL. FSL is totally fine.

I would just prefer to have more liability protection.

> I would just prefer to have more liability protection.

Would be curious what you have in mind. The FSL comes with a default no warranty disclaimer.

Specifically, a disclaimer of duty. https://yzena.com/yzena-noncommercial-license/#no-duty .

For why, see questions 33-36 at https://yzena.com/yzena-noncommercial-license-faq/ .

I'm not a lawyer but I think licenses like this have a potential to be very problematic. Even the termination clause of the GPL has turned out to be challenging and primarily is not an issue because it's being ignored / re-instantiated despite the license text. If a court however would ever rule on this, that might be problematic.

(Also the fact that this license was not written by a lawyer in itself seems … less than ideal)

That is why I need lawyer money.

But I have actually gotten halfway with a lawyer. A lawyer actually wrote the No Duty clause.

Radical copy left like agpl already discourages tons of people, so I just use that

I think the AGPL is complicated and it requires further investigation before picking it. And AGPL with and without a CLA is a completely different beast, and if you take contributions then you really need a CLA unless you, yourself are okay with the implications of the AGPL.

(I wrote I about about my challenges with the AGPL recently here: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/9/23/fsl-agpl-open-source-busi...)

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