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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

This is non-free, actually. What's the point of self-hosting proprietary software?

Maybe you don't want another company to be able to look at your IP. Or maybe you want or need to hold yourself to a higher security standard then hosted alternatives. If your code is hosted with a third party out on the Internet, your own service now is only as secure as that third parties.

It's just weird to combine "free" with "proprietary" in a self-hosted context. If it's free and self-hosted, why are they not allowing access to the source? Considering the possibility of your IP being leaked by a proprietary program on your server, maybe that higher security standard should include an open requirement.

Given the success of Github:Enterprise I think this is not considered weird by a lot of folks (admittedly deep-pocketed ones :) ).

Open-source is not just about the product's source being visible. They would need people to review patches, venues to interact with contributors, a policy to publicize future features to avoid clashing with contributors' work…

they could also do visible-source.

Those are project management/administrative details that have nothing to do with the definition of open source itself.

As it stands, the project's continuous use of the word "free" to mean gratis when marketing software meant for other programmers (if it was for non-technical users, I wouldn't object), I find to be deceptive.

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