With all due respect I find this view shallow and very incomplete. Open source is not a set of licenses, it’s people, companies, code, etc. The only reason to ever talk about open source in terms of just what the licenses say alone is if you are dealing with legal issues. The licenses themselves are nothing more than a tool used to facilitate open source within the copyright system.
Again... legal obligations and morality are two different things. Morality is subjective. You can’t encode morality or subjectivity to that degree into a license. You can’t legally enforce the spirit of a community or movement.
Obviously GPL strikes some kind of balance by trying to encode a legal provision that forces collaboration, and that’s cool. But GPL is a trade-off. It creates legal problems that don't hugely benefit anyone. ZFS on Linux is a perfect example of where GPL hinders a perfectly in-spirit action that would mostly be to everyone’s benefit.
Whether you prefer erring on the side of caution or on the side of flexibility is more of a personal thing. I tend to use a BSD license, and I don’t personally care what happens to my code. Still, that doesn’t mean that I think there aren’t ways to abuse that where someone benefits and open source loses.
>ZFS on Linux is a perfect example of where GPL hinders a perfectly in-spirit action that would mostly be to everyone’s benefit.
Sorry, I can see where the frustration comes from here, but from an outsider's view the CDDL is just as much to blame. It takes two for there to be a license incompatibility. If there is some piece of information missing here then let us know, although in my experience the lawyers don't like to make this sort of thing public.
>I tend to use a BSD license, and I don’t personally care what happens to my code. Still, that doesn’t mean that I think there aren’t ways to abuse that where someone benefits and open source loses.
I also use non-copyleft licenses a lot, but accepting that other parties are going to profit and not give anything back has always been a part of that. It's not a total loss -- it gives you an in to lobby them hard for donations, support payments, consulting fees, or some other kind of contribution.
you are swapping Free Software with open source everywhere.
open source was coined exactly to stride away from any spirit and ethical standings, focusing only on the code and its practical advantages when available to be shared. This way, enterprise can be more likely to accept it. (also because English-based enterprise is deemed too dumb to understand free can mean two different things)
Free Software is the thing that sees practical and ethical advantages as an indivisible unit. And it's fine to sell Free Software as long as you guarantee the buyer's right to acquire the source, in the case of the GPL for example.
That’s the FSF point of view, and I and others respectfully disagree. I don’t believe open source is better because of ethics, I do think open source would not work if everyone were as unethical as possible. I will continue to use the term “open source” to refer to the whole shebang, which has been best for communicating to most people who aren’t fighting over terminology semantics as a means to push ideology.
As a suggestion, be slightly more careful when stipulating sides. The FSF, mine and others interpretation contrasted with the OSI, yours and others would be a fairer statement. There are individuals using "Free Software", and there are organizations using "open source".
One of the key points of the creation of the term "open source" was the distancing from the ethical aspects of Free Software - to turn its face on it and "hope for the best". Yet, of course the ramifications of ethical creation, usage and sharing are usually still there on "open source" projects, since it's how things often tend to go when creating Free Software - _despite_ the new term, not _because_ of it.
> I will continue to use the term “open source” to refer to the whole shebang, which has been best for communicating to most people who aren’t fighting over terminology semantics as a means to push ideology.
By charging "open source" with the ethical+practical unity of Free Software, you are doing exactly what the very creators and advocates of the term wanted to avoid - "ideology". Therefore this point sounds so... weird?
Again... legal obligations and morality are two different things. Morality is subjective. You can’t encode morality or subjectivity to that degree into a license. You can’t legally enforce the spirit of a community or movement.
Obviously GPL strikes some kind of balance by trying to encode a legal provision that forces collaboration, and that’s cool. But GPL is a trade-off. It creates legal problems that don't hugely benefit anyone. ZFS on Linux is a perfect example of where GPL hinders a perfectly in-spirit action that would mostly be to everyone’s benefit.
Whether you prefer erring on the side of caution or on the side of flexibility is more of a personal thing. I tend to use a BSD license, and I don’t personally care what happens to my code. Still, that doesn’t mean that I think there aren’t ways to abuse that where someone benefits and open source loses.