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I see the open source movement as being about developers sharing their work in order to raise all ships and dramatically accelerate the rate at which participants in that community can build cool software.

A lot of that benefit comes from not having to worry about licenses: pick platform components with known open source licenses, build cool things with them.

I think the rise in not-quite-open-source licenses (especially projects switching to those licenses) undermines the things that I value about open source, and further encourages more projects to make those decisions in the future.




One of the motivations of copyleft licenses like GPL which are a part of open source, was the freedom for users to see and modify code. The fact that the user works with the software in a browser rather than inside a native app is a technicality which shouldn't mean that the principle becomes invalid.

Of course, this makes it harder for developers to monetize their work. But, instead of framing the discussion in terms of these conflicting interests and finding a balance, the term 'open source' becomes a debate target (even though the OSI definition includes AGPL which is also radioactive if one wants to monetize the work.)

So we have three parties 1) Users 2) App Developers who write commercial closed source code for the user facing app 3) Dependency Developers who write code used by App Developers.

(There is a simplification here as 2 can be a startup writing selling a closed source dependency used by other developers)

Just as App developers would like to monetize via user payments, some licenses allow the same option for Dependency developers while simultaneously allowing source code to be available and modified.

The basic idea behind such a license is 'free of cost and inspectable/modifiable code for almost all users, but commercial for large companies making a significant revenue from the software'.

There needs to be some work done, to make the license predictable - which users it requires to pay, and the price involved.




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