Dries is the Founder and Project Lead of Drupal and the Co-founder and Executive Chair of Acquia.
This week, Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson and WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg started fighting about what "open source" means. I've spent twenty years working on open source sustainability, and I have some thoughts.
David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH) released a new kanban tool, Fizzy, this week and called it open source.
People quickly pointed out that the O'Saasy license that Fizzy is released under blocks others from offering a competing SaaS version, which violates the Open Source Initiative's definition. When challenged, he brushed it off on X and said, "You know this is just some shit people made up, right?". He followed with "Open source is when the source is open. Simple as that".
This morning, Matt Mullenweg rightly pushed back. He argued that you can't ignore the Open Source Initiative definition. He compared it to North Korea calling itself a democracy. A clumsy analogy, but the point stands.
Look, the term "open source" has a specific, shared meaning. It is not a loose idea and not something you can repurpose for marketing. Thousands of people shaped that definition over decades. Ignoring that work means benefiting from the community while setting aside its rules.
This whole debate becomes spicier knowing that DHH was on Lex Fridman's podcast only a few months ago, appealing to the spirit and ethics of open source to criticize Matt's handling of the WP Engine dispute. If the definition is just "shit people made up", what spirit was Matt violating?
The definition debate matters, but the bigger issue here is sustainability. DHH's choice of license reacts to a real pressure in open source: many companies make real money from open source software while leaving the hard work of building and maintaining it to others.
This tension also played a role in Matt's fight with WP Engine, so he and DHH share some common ground, even if they handle it differently. We see the same thing in Drupal, where contributions from the biggest companies in our ecosystem is extremely uneven.
DHH can experiment because Fizzy is new. He can choose a different license and see how it works. Matt can't as WordPress has been licensed under the GPL for more than twenty years. Changing that now is virtually impossible.
Both conversations are important, but watching two of the most influential people in open source argue about definitions while we all wrestle with free riders feels a bit like firefighters arguing about hose lengths during a fire.
The definition debate matters because open source only works when we agree on what the term means. But sustainability decides whether projects like Drupal, WordPress, and Ruby on Rails keep thriving for decades to come. That is the conversation we need to have.
In Drupal, we are experimenting with contribution credits and with guiding work toward companies that support the project. These ideas have helped, but also have not solved the imbalance.
Six years ago I wrote in my Makers and Takers blog post that I would love to see new licenses that "encourage software free riding", but "discourage customer free riding". O'Saasy is exactly that kind of experiment.
A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH's company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is not open source.
I still do not have the full answer to the open source sustainability problem. I have been wrestling with it for more than twenty years. But I do know that reframing the term "open source" is not the solution.
Some questions are worth asking, and answering:
- How do we distinguish between companies that can't contribute and those that won't?
- What actually changes corporate behavior: shame, self-interest, punitive action, exclusive benefits, or regulation?
If this latest debate brings more attention to these questions, some good may come from it.
Read the original article
Comments
Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good.
Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support.
Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).
Most source-available licenses that I've encountered have no paid license requirements for users. They only require a paid license if you want to sell the product commercially. Normally, you're still allowed to use the software as a piece of a larger commercial product, as long as it does not compete with the original author, or "substantially reproduce the functionality" of the source-available bits, depending on the exact language.
By jasomill 2025-12-110:32 While it's true that this the kind of "source available" license the article is talking about, other examples exist.
For instance, the source code to Epic's Unreal Engine[1] is hosted in a private GitHub repo, accessible by anyone who agrees to a clickthrough license, and free for personal, educational, and commercial use up to $1 million gross revenue, at which point royalty payments are required.
> Personally I think differentiation between "open source" and "source available" is good
Maybe, but I think that "source available" isn't detailed enough and can mean many many different things.
> Source available means I can basically help debug issues I have...but I expect that a paid licence is required and will have a selection of limitations (number of nodes, etc).
Point in case. For me there is one group, under something like BSL or FSL or SSPL which mostly restricts you from competing with the project's creators (e.g. making your own SaaS out of it), but everything else is fair use, you can use it in prod to make money at any size, etc. And a separate, more restrictive one, which has size, or production restrictions (you can't run the software if you're a commercial entity).
Source available sounds like a good description for the second one, because it's just available, little more. But for the first one where you can do whatever you want with one single exception that doesn't impact 99.9999% of potential users, it's not a good and clear enough description.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-109:14 People run with OSI initiative as it is and consider it the golden rule when I agree with your 99.9999% of potential users line.
I think that *one blunder?) is that OSI cant really consider SSPL or similar open source because it restricts access to one party so it breaches an freedom 0 or some freedom of open source which is fair but at the same time literally only impacting people competing against (in my opinion the funding of the project and its growth itself) if someone like amazon had created a redis service competing against redis itself lets say
I think its all kinda nuanced and we kinda need more discussion with source available.
By bloppe 2025-12-109:41 I agree with you the "source available" is overstretched. It's hard to come up with a good new label for the first group. Maybe "Open Use" or "Fair Source".
"Source Available" means that it can become "Source Unavailable" overnight.
See the "Our Machinery" fiasco.
Yes, Open Source isn't a complete defense against this (especially when there are copyright assignments). However, it sure makes it both a lot harder to pull off and a lot less useful to even try.
"Open Source" can also become "Source Available" overnight. See Redis, Terraform, etc. In the same vein, "Open Source" can also become "Closed Source" overnight.
In neither case does the change apply retroactively. It only applies to new contributions after the license change.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-109:082 reply Well technically Redis had a fork before it became source available known as valkey which is still in bsd license
Terraform was forked to create opentofu if I remember correctly
I think the most recent example is kind of minio for this type of thing no?
Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source since it seems that you haven't named any and I am curious how they can do that. There must be some legal laws protecting it.
By bloppe 2025-12-109:31 If a project switches from an open-source to a closed-source license, then from the outside, it just looks like the project was abandoned. The final commit that was published under the open-source license will always be open source. It's the future commits that are now closed source.
So no, I don't have any specific examples of that happening.
In the case of both Redis and Terraform, the forks were announced after the license change, not before. Indeed, the forks were motivated by the license change. The community didn't get a warning "hey, we're about to change the license, fork it while you still can!". It just changed.
That's what I mean when I say the license change does not apply retroactively. The commit of Terraform that existed before the license change is still open-source. I could create a fork branching off that commit today if I wanted to.
By bayindirh 2025-12-1011:11 > Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source...
The most prominent one is Solaris. It was open one day, and closed the next. Memo didn't say we're close-sourcing it, but moving to a cathedral (final release as open source only) model, but they never released the sources ever after.
Oracle lost all of the core developers over it.
This where Illumos took over.
> There must be some legal laws protecting it.
For permissively licensed code? Nope. Nothing. Even if you don't transfer the copyright, nothing stops someone from forking it and building on it closed source. That someone would be the company opening it or someone else.
In the olden days, when the internet was not that capable to allow collaborative software development, losing developers was a real threat. Now it's not. Developers are dime a dozen. You can close the source, hire some people and continue working on it.
However, this is Open Source model working as intended. Freedom to the developers! If a developer wants to work on a closed source fork, it's completely permitted, baked into the system.
This is why GPL (esp. v3), while viral, is superior. You can't change the license if there's a copyright holder other than you. You can't just fork and close the source. It's limiting to keep the freedom. A working (and arguably necessary) compromise.
By insane_dreamer 2025-12-1120:28 that's not what source available means to me -- it just means you can look at the source code -- what you can actually do with that code, or whether or not you need a paid license, whether you can use the code in a non-commercial case only but not commercial, all of those are nuances that would be specified in the license. There are many different options from highly restrictive to highly permissive -- the only thing they have in common is that you can see the source code.
"open source" can have restrictions too. GPL is highly restrictive because it requires any code linked with the GPL code to be GPL too.
By preisschild 2025-12-1010:20 > Open source, is, essentially software that I expect to be able to use commercially and tweak if required - but I'm own my own, and I pay for support.
AND it also means with copyleft-licenses that you are required to make the source code for those tweaks public too.
By jillesvangurp 2025-12-107:4613 reply I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. It makes outside contributions a lot less likely. Your active community of people working on the code base effectively becomes your employees.
There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing. Including free usage and distribution of the work they did. It's not likely to be helpful.
My attitude to source available products is the same as to proprietary products. I tend to limit my dependency on those. Companies have short life spans. Many OSS projects I use have a history of surviving the implosion of companies that once actively contributed to them. Developer communities are much more resilient than companies. Source unavailable effectively becomes source unavailable when companies fail. Especially VC funded companies are kind of engineered (by VCs) to fail fast. So, it's just not a great basis for making a long term commitment.
If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license. Somebody could take over the project or fork it or even create a new company around it. Some of the original developers would probably show up. A project like that is resilient against that. And projects like that have active contributors outside of the corporate context that provide lots of contributions. Because of the license. You don't get that without a good OSS license. I judge software projects by the quality of their development communities. It needs to have diversity, a good mix of people that know what they are doing, and a broad enough user community that the project is likely to be supported in perpetuity.
Shared source provides only the illusion of that. Depending on them is risky. And that risk is rarely offset by quality. Of course people use proprietary software for some things. And that's fine. I'm no different. But most of the stuff I care about is OSS.
Counterpoint: I’ve often wished the proprietary software I use was source-available so that I could fix bugs for myself.
The idea of doing free work for a company does feel weird. But when some bug is really getting on my nerves, being able to fix it and not have to deal with it anymore is a huge benefit!
By hodgesrm 2025-12-1212:57 Or understand what it's doing internally. I used to dislike Oracle User Group presentations because it seemed as if most people were just guessing what the database was doing under the covers. MySQL presentations on the other hand (a) showed code and (b) were often given by the authors.
By geerlingguy 2025-12-1018:27 This; there are a couple 'freeware' style apps I use where the developer sticks a source tarball on a website alongside the download. Having access to that means I can tweak something for a weird scenario, or fix a bug on a new OS release, and if I want, I can send the patch back to the developer.
As others said, being able to audit software and point out bugs is thousand times better than hunting in the dark if there's no Open or Free alternative is available. Compiling it yourself and comparing with the binary you have (reproducible building) is billion times better.
I personally choose Free Software first and Open Source Software second. However, if I have to choose between two proprietary options, I'd choose the source available one. I might not be able to patch/touch it, but at least I can see and verify.
By seba_dos1 2025-12-1016:53 > I personally choose Free Software first and Open Source Software second.
Given that functionally these terms are pretty much equivalent, how do you decide which project is Free Software and which is Open Source? By how it calls itself?
The BUSL license requires shifting to an open-source license no later than 4 years after publication. I'd be happy to contribute to a BUSL-licensed project knowing my contributions will shift to an MIT license within 4 years.
And the original authors don't have to worry as much about Amazon eating their lunch.
By preisschild 2025-12-1010:161 reply While that is certainly better, the original point still stands. If the company goes bust the latest source code will only be open source after 4 years. By that time other software has likely taken over the need in the first place, because not having that need fulfilled for 4 years is mostly not reasonable. And older versions often don't have compatibility with new versions either.
By bloppe 2025-12-1018:59 A bankrupt company will try to sell the rights to the software. If nobody buys it, and it's completely written off the balance sheet, then most likely they will just flip to an open source license ahead of schedule.
And if they don't, 4 years isn't that long to wait for something that nobody wanted to buy in a fire sale anyway. Especially if you're free to use it the entire time, just not resell it.
By jillesvangurp 2025-12-108:471 reply Good for you; you seem like a trusting person. I'd recommend against spending your time on that. Or at least try to get paid for it.
I tend walk away from anything with a shared source license. I don't invest my time in it. I don't finish reading the README. It's an instant red flag.
By bloppe 2025-12-109:00 The whole point of having a license is that you don't have to rely on trust. It's right there in the license. There's no way to weasel out of it.
"Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License" ... "To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or any later version, or a license that is compatible with GPL Version 2.0 or a later version, where “compatible” means that software provided under the Change License can be included in a program with software provided under GPL Version 2.0 or a later version"
By piaste 2025-12-1010:18 > I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. [..] There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing.
Don't need to make PRs to benefit from the source being available. Running software whose source code has been under public eyeballs, and that I have compiled myself (or that a trusted third-party has compiled) is far more secure than running a binary blob that may or may not do what the developer's marketing page promises.
> If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license.
Closed-source apps have had source-code escrow clauses for a long time, exactly to avoid that problem. "If my company shuts down, you get all the source code and can do whatever you want with it."
Such clauses can, and should, be brought over to source-available licenses, where they would also be trivial since you don't even need a physical escrow.
20 years ago, I used to consult with Fortune 500 companies that run Oracle and IBM products (web servers and Java frameworks).
These are distributed as enterprise binaries. It's common to face _at least_ one or two weird errors in production. Then you have to raise a ticket to support.
Would you like to know how it is discussing a binary-obfuscated error with Customer support? And then after few weeks being assigned to a newly joined fresher? And so on and on, where every person or layer every week says "you're doing it wrong" and you have to restart your proofing and explanation process from scratch?
Hint: After few weeks/months of this (or after 4 times of restarting your proofing process), you start questioning your sanity and life choices.
In those days, all I wished for is just "source-available", so that I can just debug myself what is going on and provide a concise bug report, instead of talking to support.
The weird part is, I'm pretty sure, on the other side, Oracle/IBM also LOST money in that same process. They had to hire an army of people. It was lose-lose on both sides.
Source-available means customers of that software can perform debugging themselves and file pretty good support tickets.
If you are an enterprise today, you would absolutely consider make it source-available to save on your own costs.
By jillesvangurp 2025-12-1011:071 reply That's a great reason I steer clear of products like that. Oracle is not a DB I've used since 2005. There's no need. The market for closed sourced databases imploded to basically legacy products that predate when open source databases became a sane default choice. I guess some banks/insurers still might talk themselves into believing it's a sane choice for new projects.
I guess source available is better than source unavailable + hand wavy support from a company that's out to milk you for revenue for as long as they can get away with it.
But it's a weak substitute for proper open source that you can just fork and fix if you need to without having to beg some indifferent company to pretty please fix their legacy shit and offering to do free work for them. If it's open source, chances are that there are still some others around also using the same software and sharing your pain that can support you or benefit from your fixes.
I don't see the value of most shared source projects. Usually there are very decent OSS alternatives. And the lack of those usually just means one will pop up shortly and displace whatever it is you are using. Any benefit to these projects tends to be short lived. OSS developers like to copy what is good and add it to their own projects.
E.g. most nosql databases ended up having postgresql absorb whatever it was that made these things interesting. Several shared source things (mongodb) are at this point looking a bit dated and backwards. That's also exactly what happened to MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, and all those other long forgotten databases that people used to use last century. There's very little technical reason to use any of those at this point.
By bloppe 2025-12-1019:37 > But it's a weak substitute for proper open source that you can just fork and fix if you need
Many source-available licenses explicitly allow this, as long as you don't try to sell your fix commercially to others. You can certainly share it with others, it just has to be free of charge.
By aatd86 2025-12-109:32 Maybe that's the whole point. Entities which rely on the product enough to propose contributions are more likely to be paying customers who really need to have a given feature available?
People seem to complain that they are burnt out by open source quite often so not sure that there are that many contributions apart from a couple projects.
It may also protect a project against business vultures. If you are trying to monetize your project but someone richer than you forks it and offer it for free, what can you do?
Yet, by being source available, the code is still auditable. It is easier for people to understand how the software works. And nowadays you can fine tune an LLM over it I guess...
Seems that is might also be a valid perspective? You can probably have a kind of bus clause so that source code does not become abandoned?
By throw0101a 2025-12-1011:52 > There's little to no benefit to outside users.
As a sysadmin I have sometimes wished I had source available for certain things as it would help in debugging what is going on with a certain error/behaviour. strings(1) only gets you so far.
By singpolyma3 2025-12-1112:35 Most open source never gets outside contribution either.
The point of sharing the code is to benefit the user. Or to benefit yourself because of the marketing that comes from users wanting this. Not to get free labour.
> I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license.
I treat it as "business plus", not "FOSS minus". And of course, some source-available licenses convert to FOSS over time.
> Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing.
Funny, that's the same complaint FOSS companies have about AWS free-riding off their hard work and then competing. They switch to source-available licenses because a FOSS license allows flush FAANGs to exploit them.
By preisschild 2025-12-1010:18 You can switch to a copyleft-FOSS license that requires users like AWS to effectively contribute back too. And this way you stay "open source".
By jillesvangurp 2025-12-1011:29 > They switch to source-available licenses because a FOSS license allows flush FAANGs to exploit them.
And then they die because they cut themselves off from the OSS community.
Most shared source companies don't actually fare that well. There's a history of these companies spawning new OSS competitors based on forks. Or just not gaining any traction at all.
The "boohoo amazon killed my business" thing isn't as widely spread as you think. They only offer a few hundred services. Several of those are based on open source things. If I were an investor, I'd be reluctant to invest in shared source companies. Unlikely to have long term stamina, extremely likely to be outpaced by some OSS thingy, likely to see users jump ship as soon as they can. I think a few investors probably learned that lesson the hard way.
Shared source from day 1 just means you probably end up running a niche business and are by definition not very investable. Usually these things if they get funded at all are doomed for some acquihire scenario where they end up in the hands of professional revenue milkers like IBM or Oracle. Nothing good happens to users of those projects when that happens. Developers leave in disgust and start new projects. It becomes abandon-ware.
A second argument here is that if Amazon thinks you are worth hosting in managed form, that means they see a multi billion $ market. This doesn't happen until after you are successful typically. And there are plenty of people who don't use Amazon who might still like to use the same stuff. It's a great validation that you have a valuable project and that there is a huge market for it. You just don't get to be the monopolist in that market.
There are millions of open source projects out there that are just fine. Most of those don't require VC funding, or IPOs, or other cash grab mechanisms to sustain themselves for a long time. Most of the really successful projects actually see active contributions from those FAANGs as well. E.g. MS is one of the most active contributors to the Linux kernel. Google as well. OSS actively used by FAANGs represents the most solid open source code out there. Guaranteed to be well supported for ages. Loads of active contributors; many of them paid for by those companies.
By bullfightonmars 2025-12-108:472 reply In the case of Fizzy, the app that 37signals has made “source available”, the real motivation for publishing is form of advertising for Ruby on Rails.
DHH is on a mission to show that you can write great software with way less bullshit than is in vogue.
This code base is sparkling in its design. No build frontend, server side rendered templates, minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity, extremely simple models, jobs, and controllers.
It has < 3000 lines of js with incredibly rich interaction design, when was the last time you saw that?
By ahartmetz 2025-12-109:23 >minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity
Damn weirdos. Next you're going to tell me that you can deploy it without k8s or even a container?! /s
By insane_dreamer 2025-12-1015:37 Looking at its license[0], it more open-source that source-available. It has a non-compete restriction as a commercial hosted service, but otherwise you can do what you want with it.
[0] https://github.com/basecamp/fizzy?tab=License-1-ov-file#read...
By mhitza 2025-12-1010:52 I don't mind the idea of contributing back with fixes on a sources available project. Especially in the context of work.
It does however make it unlikely for me to pick and use the project in the first place.
And definitely not a fan of living through the "era" of open source term washing, post truth, tech influencers and their echo chambers.
DHH says Y, now dozens of impressionable Xs will start parroting the same thing.
By techterrier 2025-12-109:05 It's a way for SaaSy companies to do business in Europe.
By hmans 2025-12-1012:21 [dead]
I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects.
I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes.
The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but more meaningful "open source" out there.
I certainly don't have all the answers here but the entire $300B+ SaaS industry (and a bunch of other stuff that behaves like SaaS) was built in great part on a loophole in the GPL. More precisely, many of the people who licensed their code under GPL were eventually dismayed when they realized you could sell access to whatever you like built on top of that code, over a network, and you wouldn't have to distribute the source. The AGPL was devised to close this loophole.
There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected!
The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys.
I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-108:552 reply I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party
Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing...
It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.
> which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party
Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)
Big companies will rather ignore your project than use an AGPL licensed product. For them it's just not worth the hassle.
Maybe 1 out a 1 billion software is so revolutionary that licenses be damned. But maybe we should temper our expectations a bit around the software we build!
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-1011:091 reply Interesting, I might write my software under AGPL but still I guess some questions arise as if sure the big companies might not use my project but some smaller companies can still create an competing product.
As an example immich is an AGPL based software which has its own instance and then https://pixelunion.eu (I think gives more free stuff like 16 gig instance etc) and then competes with immich itself
They can do this because they release any changes they make or they don't change it that much .
> Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)
What I want is if someone uses my open source product and then uses it to create an competing product, I am under no obligation to release it under a foss and much rather then release it under an source available license
By crapple8430 2025-12-1016:19 The type of audience Immich targets, pretty fundamentally limits the appeal of any hosted solution, unlike a lot of the infrastructure-type of project a lot of these "big cloud taking my code" complaints come from.
That's why SSPL was created. People working in tech companies have expressed extreme vitriol for SSPL - I wonder why.
The SSPL isn't the best designed license, but it is "more AGPL than AGPL"
SSPL doesn't help with the real problem that SSPL/etc companies complain about though; that AWS won't give you money when they turn your software into a service and will compete with you to reduce your income.
Of course, the license is kind of irrelevant to that situation, Amazon will just reimplement your stuff from scratch if it is popular enough.
By immibis 2025-12-119:01 Okay? You might as well not make it easy for them by letting them copy your software verbatim? What's this argument that since life isn't fair you might as well just give up and help the evil people? People following this argument are one reason evil people are so powerful.
Why? What is meaningful about sharing code with the threat of a lawsuit if someone copies it? Is sounds like you want the term to be erroded?
By benrutter 2025-12-1011:01 To explain where I'm coming from a bit more, my thinking is something like:
"open source" where crucial parts of making a system work, or where the project scoops up eager contributors and them schisms the community once it's finished using their work, tends to have a negative effect.
If those projects were more explicitly either "closed source"/"source accessible" etc, then the open source community could focus their efforts on projects that actually embraced genuine openness and hackability.
Of course - I'd rather there was more actual open source. But what I really want is for "open source" to be some marker saying "this is a project that's open and built by/for the community".
User consent. Uninformed consent is not consent.
You cannot meaningfully consent to running software on your devices, or running your life on software, when that software's source is unavailable.
By koolala 2025-12-108:34 Why does that require there to be 'less open source'? Nothing is stopping that already today. Impact wise, everyday people can't use build tooling so this kind of thing only effects people that are 1 keystroke away from modifying the code and not being allowed to share it.
