Today FUTO released an application called Grayjay for Android-based mobile phones. Louis Rossmann introduced the application in a video (YouTube link). Grayjay as an application is very promising, but there is one point I take issue with: Grayjay is not an Open Source application. In the video Louis explains his reason behind the custom license, and while I do agree with his reason, I strong disagree with his method. In this post I will explain what Open Source means, how Grayjay does not meet the criteria, why this is an issue, and how it can be solved.
Uhhhh what? That’s not how any of that works.
“No discrimination against persons or groups” is about protected classes.
Interpreting it to mean “anyone for any reason” would mean that open source allows people to simply assert sole ownership of it, because to not allow them to is to discriminate against people who want to assert sole ownership. That’s an ad absurdum broadening of the OSI ethos.
Edit: a helpful commenter has found where on OSI’s website it does prohibit non-commercial-use clauses…
…and the blog author was in fact incorrect in their assertion that it violates the personal discrimination clause (clause 5). It is a violation of Clause 6, “No Discrimination Against Field of Endeavor.” Also, the section specifically talks about prohibiting its use by a business, which is not the same as its sale by a business.
Oh no. This person literally IS trying to just be able to start charging money for someone else’s code.
That happens all the time, never has been a problem, and it should not ever be.
“People steal the profits from others’ labor all the time, that’s normal and good.” - You
I suggest you learn how free software actually works unless you want to look like an idiot.
It’s not an open-shut answer. Ubuntu is Open Source, but they also have clauses requiring certain changes you must make to remove trademarked branding before you can distribute or sell it commercially, much like the clauses the author is talking about. There are tons of discussions about the specifics of what qualifies as FOSS.
That’d be covered by #4:
Exactly and the model of make changes and remove trademark has worked very well for them. Why not introduce arbitrary other limitations when they are clearly not neccessary?
I am not the CEO of Grayjay, so I can’t speak to their reasons, but Canonical is a massive organization with a dedicated legal team (which anyone who wishes to OEM Ubuntu has to negotiate with directly, per the license - you can’t just remove branding yourself and go) who know the ins-and-outs of trademark law, and knows what they can and can’t do without accidentally giving up their Trademark claim. I know I sure wouldn’t feel comfortable navigating that.
Your point is that copyright law is easier to enforce than trademark law? I doubt it. I personally don’t care that the lawyers you will definitely need for this and for long do exactly.
People build on top of each other’s work all the time. That’s normal and good.
If the people selling are passing someone else’s work as their own, that’s stealing. Otherwise, it’s just Free Software working as intended.
If someone is writing software but wants to prevent redistribution, then go ahead and make a license that forbids it. But then don’t get to call it “Open Source” or anything like that.
Which they are, unless they somehow only charge you for the portion of the code they wrote, in which case it wouldn’t run afoul of this license anyways, since you’re not charging for Grayjay. :)
Also, looking at OSD.org, nothing requires allowing commercial redistribution of the original code outside of as a component of an aggregate package, in rule 1.
Rule 3 says that derived works must be allowed (and says nothing about being charged money for) using the same license as with the original distribution, which would in this case mean a license that restricts commercial redistribution.
Also, the author of this has clearly not read many of the OSI licenses, because MANY of them revoke the license if patent litigation is initiated against the distributor:
The point is super simple: if the author of Grayjay has any provision in the license saying anything to the effect of “you can only redistribute this under certain conditions”, then it’s not Open source as defined by OSI. You may not agree with it and you might fully support Grayjay’s opinion, it doesn’t change the fact that it. is. not. open. source.
Can you please link to where on opensource.org it says that? This just sounds like your or a general community interpretation. I don’t see that in writing anywhere.
I literally quoted their website NOT saying what you claim, and your only response is, “nuh uh, it’s what I said.”
Interestingly, the OSI seems to argue that noncommercial is a violation of the 6th clause, rather than the 1st or 5th.
Thank you, that is a good find. The other person I’ve been talking to hasn’t been able to cite anything from them. I’ve updated my top-level comment with this info.
Interestingly, I wonder if they distinguish commercial use from commercial distribution, which the author is talking about. Not allowing someone to use the software as a business is very different from not allowing them to sell it as a product.
edit: Reading more into this, I do think this is about prohibiting use of software by commercial entities, not prohibiting entities from selling the software. Apparently this is actually a point of disputation within the community, with people like Richard Stallman insisting that you can prohibit commercial redistribution and be Open Source.
This makes sense as to why Clause 1 only asserts that it must be freely-redistributable when bundled together with software from other sources.
Do you not see the contradiction in this statement? Where do you find the line of what is stealing and “working as intented”?
There are so many licenses for this model already, I’m inclined to believe that you havent actually published any OSS yourself and your attitude in these threads are mildly said, off putting.
I am a big fan of OSI and support their work, but you are treating them (based in what i can read in this thread) like some holy, all defining entity, of what is open source. They are not, and true open source, cannot, and should not, ever derive its power from a central agency setting rules and definitions. If that happens, that will be the end of open source.
Please stop gatekeeping OSS, it hurts all of us
Edit: some autocomplete stupid grammar
Open Source != “Source available”. The whole point is that distinction is important, and there are plenty of companies now (MongoDB, Elastic and more recently Hashicorp) that are trying to claim to be “Open Source”, but in fact use licenses that prevent redistribution and impose conditions to use, which means that they are definitely not open.
There you go. You can find projects that I’ve done for myself, projects that I’ve done while working for companies with real open source products, small libraries that were not core to the company and I convinced them to open source…
You know what they all have in common? All these licenses (MIT, GPL, AGPL) adopting allow code re-use, modification and redistribution.
First: please don’t use the Royal We. It’s a cheap rhetoric trick.
Second: you know what really hurts me. Companies that use “Open source” as a marketing point and to build community but remove freedoms when it’s no longer in their interests.
But I never used a royal “We”, in fact “we” was never used in my text at all. I used us, to refer to all the other comments that you can note does not agree with your assessment of open source.
Instead of you arguing my “cheap rhetorical skills”, how about you actually answer more than, estimated, a fifth of my statements? How about you stop with your own victimization of " what really hurts me". Because that, in essence, is actually cheap rhetorics.
I fully agree that when companies do this, that it is disgusting. But you have to take a step back and look at the actual effect. This is not by any means new, it happened likely before I was even conceived.
What would you say your point is. To shame grayjoy or make a point that this is a threat to open source? Both? Neither?
If you redistribute someone else’s open source code as open source but change nothing why would I get it from you and not the original developer? There is no incentive and no reward to “steal”.
If you make enough changes to create additional value I might and then it is “working as intended”
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