An article in which our writer takes the competition to task for using the term “open source” in the headline to an article about “fauxpen source.”
Excuse me for taking up a few paragraphs worth of pixel space on a Saturday morning for a bit of a rant, but I saw something from the website TechRepublic that I thought needs correcting.
On July 25, that’s a little over a week-and-a-half ago as the crow flies, the popular tech-focused website TechRepublic published a pretty good article by Ben Abbott that catalogs the spate of recent companies that have moved their bread and butter software offerings from open source licensing to fauxpen licenses — that is, licenses that attempt to appear to be open (often using phrases such as “source available”), but which in fact are proprietary licenses, usually with a freemium aspect for noncommercial use.
That’s been happening to too much software lately, Abbott says, pointing to the container platform Docker and the infrastructure-as-code software tool Terraform as examples. In addition, the article covers Llama 3, Meta’s “open” license for its LLMs, and explains that the consensus in open source circles is that an “open source” license that hasn’t been officially approved by Open Source Initiative — the open source community’s clearing house — isn’t an open source license at all.
Abbot gets it all right, and I have no qualms with his article. Read it. If you don’t know about the differences between true and false open source licenses, it’ll explain them to you. It’ll also explain the ramifications for your business if you try to treat one of these fauxpen licenses as real open source. It could cost you some big time money.
My problem isn’t with the article, its with the headline that reads, “Some Open Source Software Licences are Only ‘Open-ish,’ Says Thoughtworks,” which seems to give open source status to licenses that are only “openish.”
OK, I get that some of you will think that I’m skating on thin ice here, and you have a point. Yes, the headline does imply, if you understand open source and can read between the words, that some licenses that seem to be “open source” are actually merely “openish” — which is exactly what the headline means to imply. But that’s not what the headline says, especially if you don’t know the open source landscape. To the uninitiated, the headline can be read as: “‘some open source software licenses’ are really ‘open source software licenses,’ although Thoughtworks says they’re only ‘openish’.”
I also get it that my complaint here will seem petty and nitpicking to many, and that headline writing isn’t as easy as it might at first glance seem.
But I also get that when you get away from the people who work and play in open source space, people have trouble grasping exactly what it is that we call “open source,” and even in this day and age that includes too many people who work in tech, and especially people who work in tech with offices upstairs in the C-suite where decisions are made. When those people might be reading, you don’t want to confuse them with a lack of clarity.
Again, it ain’t no big thing — until it is. Like when you get sued for treating a source-available license too much as if it were the GPL.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Grrr: TechRepublic Headline References Fauxpen Licenses as ‘Open Source’
Commentary and Licensing
An article in which our writer takes the competition to task for using the term “open source” in the headline to an article about “fauxpen source.”
Excuse me for taking up a few paragraphs worth of pixel space on a Saturday morning for a bit of a rant, but I saw something from the website TechRepublic that I thought needs correcting.
On July 25, that’s a little over a week-and-a-half ago as the crow flies, the popular tech-focused website TechRepublic published a pretty good article by Ben Abbott that catalogs the spate of recent companies that have moved their bread and butter software offerings from open source licensing to fauxpen licenses — that is, licenses that attempt to appear to be open (often using phrases such as “source available”), but which in fact are proprietary licenses, usually with a freemium aspect for noncommercial use.
That’s been happening to too much software lately, Abbott says, pointing to the container platform Docker and the infrastructure-as-code software tool Terraform as examples. In addition, the article covers Llama 3, Meta’s “open” license for its LLMs, and explains that the consensus in open source circles is that an “open source” license that hasn’t been officially approved by Open Source Initiative — the open source community’s clearing house — isn’t an open source license at all.
Abbot gets it all right, and I have no qualms with his article. Read it. If you don’t know about the differences between true and false open source licenses, it’ll explain them to you. It’ll also explain the ramifications for your business if you try to treat one of these fauxpen licenses as real open source. It could cost you some big time money.
My problem isn’t with the article, its with the headline that reads, “Some Open Source Software Licences are Only ‘Open-ish,’ Says Thoughtworks,” which seems to give open source status to licenses that are only “openish.”
OK, I get that some of you will think that I’m skating on thin ice here, and you have a point. Yes, the headline does imply, if you understand open source and can read between the words, that some licenses that seem to be “open source” are actually merely “openish” — which is exactly what the headline means to imply. But that’s not what the headline says, especially if you don’t know the open source landscape. To the uninitiated, the headline can be read as: “‘some open source software licenses’ are really ‘open source software licenses,’ although Thoughtworks says they’re only ‘openish’.”
I also get it that my complaint here will seem petty and nitpicking to many, and that headline writing isn’t as easy as it might at first glance seem.
But I also get that when you get away from the people who work and play in open source space, people have trouble grasping exactly what it is that we call “open source,” and even in this day and age that includes too many people who work in tech, and especially people who work in tech with offices upstairs in the C-suite where decisions are made. When those people might be reading, you don’t want to confuse them with a lack of clarity.
Again, it ain’t no big thing — until it is. Like when you get sued for treating a source-available license too much as if it were the GPL.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Published in Commentary and Licensing