Here's an example in the wild of an argument for what's come to be known as "shared source", proprietary software whose code is available for use or modification under specific conditions. In this case, only by individuals and cooperatives.
https://social.coop/@Zee/108845391252990200
I've been advocating for software freedom for about 20 years. I assumed the social benefit arguments for the Free Software Definition (and the OSI equivalent) would be easy to defend in discussions with people who already mostly agree with us. The benefits of fully free code for scaling up cooperative organizing just seem obvious to me. I thought that sharing the history of Open Source, and the practical problems caused early on by license proliferation, was all we needed to do.
But Shared Source licenses and their advocates have proved to be remarkably persistent. Is the problem really that they don't know the history? Or is it that I'm stuck in the past? Is there something important I'm failing to see here?
@strypey I didn't know about Shared Source licenses before you mentioned them, but, to me, they seem like an awfully bad idea that could potentially harm the Free Software movement by muddying the waters.
“No, Shared Source is ethical because I decide that only marginalised/disadvantaged people can access it.” What's the difference then between that and fully propietary applications? Both are about restricting access.
Free Software is about NOT restricting freedoms. That's why the GNU licenses force everyone to use and share it in the same terms that it was created. (And, incidentally, that's why I consider Open Source to be unethical, as it allows itself to be used in proprietary software.)
@josemanuel
> the GNU licenses force everyone to use and share it in the same terms that it was created
I think you mean*copyleft* licenses. But programs under non-copyleft licenses are also Free Software, so long as they fit the Free Software Definition:
@josemanuel
> Shared Source licenses ... could potentially harm the Free Software movement by muddying the waters
This is my concern. Up until recently, if people saw source code published online, they could safely presume it was under a license compatible with their software freedoms (as expressed in the FSD/OSD). Shared Source means they now need to check for commercial use restrictions and morality clauses (eg only the vaccinated can use this code).
@josemanuel IMHO morality licenses are pretty sinister. Using copyright to push your own morality on other people is kind of authoritarian. Imagine the situation reversed; a vaccine licensed to be accessible only by people who release any software they are involved with writing under a Free Software license. Most people can intuitively see that this would be unethical. But for some reason doing exactly the same thing with morality licenses on software is fine?
@josemanuel
> I consider Open Source to be unethical, as it allows itself to be used in proprietary software
LGPL was designed to allow a library to be used in a proprietary program. FSF endorses the use of the Apache 2.0 license, which allows code components to be used in a proprietary program too.
You seem to be using "Open Source" to mean pushover (or "permissive") licensing. But GPL and other copyleft licenses are compatible with the Open Source Definition:
https://opensource.org/osd