No, Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today
No, Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today
danb.me
No, Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today · Danb Blog
9 comments
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Gumroad made itself more transparent by releasing its source code and becoming a source-available project. That deserves recognition, even though Gumroad is not open source due to its restrictive license. Software is only open source if it does not discriminate against any person or group, even when the discrimination is viewed as positive.
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Again, these puritan open source defenders. "It's not open source if $bibleQuote". "Just call it source available". And all the other arguments.
From what I gather, the licence is still in the spirit of open source, just not to the letter. It doesn't want large businesses taking the code , making a competitor and nor contributing back.
These open source defenders do not care about developers and their lives. They just want the code be released in a manner that respects their bible, to the letter.
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You literally attach a license to every comment you post. The rules which make that license effective are the same rules which make Free Software and open-source licenses effective, too. Show some solidarity; you're part of the community too, and you should feel comfortable making the same demands as the rest of us. When you say that "open source defenders" are distinct from "developers" you are contributing to a schism for the sake of aggrandizing employment and exploitation.
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Their license is not a free software/content license, as it has a non-commercial clause.
I'm frustrated with non-commercial as a clause because it feels difficult to define. Even though selling the content is pretty clear cut, there are so many ways to reuse content that indirectly make money, in a society where everything is business. If I use this content on my resume and then that gets me a job, was it a commercial usecase?
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If you slap AGPL or something on it corporates will have no choice but to open-source their products built on top of your software.
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Open source gets wildly abused by big business. So I'm fine with that.
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Fine with the licence this dude wrote or with defending the "one true" definition of open source?
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From what I gather, the licence is still in the spirit of open source
It's not though. It's wildly against it. The spirit of open source is that anyone can take open source code and use and modify it. This isn't the case here.
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the licence is still in the spirit of open source
that's the problem. The license is only good in spirit, and simply doesn't work in practice.
For example, a corporation could run a subsidiary business which doesn't make enough money to violate the license, which then rents use of the software to the the big corporation. Google used to use a similar scheme, to shift money around and essentially evade taxes.
Although in a legal system where money is a win button, you can't really win going to win even if they just decided to violate the license.
Anyway, if you don't want big corporations to use it, just use the AGPL.
Google basically bans use of the AGPL internally — you can't even install AGPL apps!
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