> Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
[0] https://github.com/campsite/campsite/blob/dae5db8611e8adc057...
If there's a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
From their README.md [0]:
> This is an open source version of the Campsite app.
[0] https://github.com/campsite/campsite/blob/10197238bbbefd9c9a...
Ok, your birthday party and weeding are excluded.
If you are in a dinner at home foe two, is it a party?
Funerals?
Let's buy a real champagne instead.
[1] It has a microphone and a camera and GPS and use AI to detect parties. The data is send to the servers and stored securetely.
Words are context sensitive. Openness here refers to the user freedoms, which go beyond the permission to read but not reuse.
Source that is merely available could be regarded as dangerous, if you happen to later copy ideas from the proprietary origin in your own implementation without even being aware of it. I could see the point in trying to stay away from it as programmer.
Good thing we’re not debating the term “free software“… ;-)
I'm pretty sure if this went to court a judge would say it's legally is open source because the source code is open. The fact, FOSS folk want to add a bunch of requirements to open source to make it harder for commercial software just stinks and that is really what it is. "You can't claim you're open source because you limit competitors using your code for free" Pfft.
What do you think they don't rule on what things mean?
Talk to some lawyers. I'm sure you could bring the first lawsuit to try to get a judge to rule that everyone should agree with you on what "open source" means.
Good luck with that.
Fair enough; I agree that having that one organization be the sole decider of Open Source is weird, so I'll happily accept as open source anything that the FSF or DFSG approve.
> "You can't claim you're open source because you limit competitors using your code for free" Pfft.
Correct. If you're trying to get the marketing advantage and let other people give you free work, then you get to play fair and other people also benefit. That's what those words mean.
This free work everyone talks about is not free. They need to maintain it, they need to review it, they need to baby-step new contributors, etc. That costs money.
Not to mention, most aren't doing it to get free work. They're giving stuff away and folk are crying because they can't use someone else's work as free work.
Look at any major open source product and you'll see nearly all the commits are done by paid employees. Open source is built on free work is a lie. Open Source is largely paid for.
It's a 2-way street on value and time.
No, the community does it to get to use the software for free. That's enough. The right to make a competing company that just uses the software is not in the minds of most community members.
I'm convinced the other people who care about this freedom don't contribute to anything.
It's opt-in. No one forces a project to pick open source. They don't get to decide what's enough.
You clearly want open source to mean something other that what it by default means. A better place to put your efforts would be like folks over at fair.io, perhaps. It's not faring well IMO, but it's an honest take in the "no competing company" direction.
They could have open sourced it in a way which would have allowed customers to atleast maintain their own install. But instead they release it under a license which says "non-commercial". So even if you were to export your own data you can't even self-host it.
It seems to me rug pulls such as these are bad for the entire industry. Why would you invest in these kind of products if there is real chance you'll get rug-pulled?
This is the closest I've found- https://mattermost.com/
As for the license, it's their code and they can release it under whatever license they want, but they obviously shouldn't call it open source. Usually companies do this sort of thing to take advantage FOSS's reputation, but in this case it just looks like ignorance to me.
I would say they do it because it conveys to the average person that they can get the source code and modify if they want to. This whole source-available, etc nonsense is just confusing for everyone.
But not use it for its intended purpose, which is kinda important.
But that's about everything that comes to my mind...
You would not be able to install it and sell users right to use it, but you would be able to install it in-house for your own employees.
None of us gets to say that there are some commercial purposes that are ok and some that are not. You have to go by what it says. Or put it this way, some day someone what wants to use it against you, can and will go by what it says, and they will be right and win that argument.
This license is really pretty bad because while they try to allow educational use, educational use is itself usually also commercial use. If you use it in a class that you charge for, if a school that charges tuition uses it, if a youtuber even so much as uses it in a video that has either ads or a sponsor... those are all conmmercial use of the software.
Relying on the the rights-holder to just not persue it, ever, including next year when the rights-holder is some new owner, is just gambling.
Trying to carve out non-commercial is just misguided and ultimately self-defeating in my opinion. It is better than purely traditionally closed software, but ultimately really not by much.
The primary value is, if you happen to rely on this software and can't avoid it, then having any form of access to the source is better than being helpless to the usual black box. At least you can fully document mysteries that aren't fully documented, let alone maybe being able to debug or customize.
Here's an excerpt from the license:
- 1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public
License, the Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide,
royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable
license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed
Material to:
- A. reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole
or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only; and
- B. produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material for
NonCommercial purposes only.
I can "produce", "reproduce" and "share" the licensed material. I'm definitely not sharing it, so if "running the code" is allowed at all, it must fall under the "produce" or "reproduce" categories. The text is pretty clear that you can only "produce" and "reproduce" it for NonCommercial purposes as well, so what does that leave me with?
That's exactly an n-th example of why this non-commercial clause is bogus since the very beginning of CC, and particularly unadapted for software code: no one is able to define clearly what commercial means, and what perimeter it applies to.
Selling the code? (you're a software editor) You could say it's covered/forbidden by the license.
Selling the service the code gives when it is running? (you're a PaaS) You could say too.
Selling anything unrelated to the code and the running app (say, oranges), but using the app to organise privately within a corporation? (you could be a shop owner installing the software for yourself and your team within your own building) 1/ the license says nothing about it, 2/ if it were covered and forbidden, how would it be even enforceable?
Agree with you on this one and I'd go step further: CC licences in general are poor fit for software.
> Selling anything unrelated to the code and the running app (say, oranges), but using the app to organise privately within a corporation? (you could be a shop owner installing the software for yourself and your team within your own building)
CC disagree with that interpretation: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre... (also https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial).
Excerpt (that I think is most relevant, but it's definitely a nuanced issue):
> uses by for-profit companies are typically considered more commercial [...] one exception to this pattern is in relation to uses by individuals that are personal or private in nature
Based on this, I think the common agreement would be that this is commercial use.
> how would it be even enforceable?
That's not a point for ignoring the license. If you download pirated movies, games, or other software, it's very unlikely you'll get caught, but you're still committing a crime.
However in this case, it actually can be enforcable. If the organization is eg. a startup that raises venture funding or is getting acquired, legal due dilligence will involve examination of all licences for software used.
That's not what I understand from these pages (that only reinforces that even to CC, NonCommercial is not a clear criteria).
They also note NonCommercial as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” which perfectly matches my 3rd case above.
For instance, you perfectly can print and display an NC image as a poster in your professional office, it's not "commercial".
> That's not a point for ignoring the license.
It's definitely an argument to ignore this part of the license: an unenforceable item is effectively void.
> If you download pirated movies, games, or other software, it's very unlikely you'll get caught, but you're still committing a crime.
Beware, that's different here. Downloading/uploading pirated items is illegal. Here, the NonCommercial clause is so ambiguous that even CC doesn't know how to put it. So its enforcement is even further delicate and open to interpretation.
Right, but this discussion is in context of software for planning work, not someone decorating an office.
Planning work is not the work, it's something around the work, similar to a poster (that could very well present information valuable to the work, but still not be the work you're selling in the end).
So this would ensure that everyone’s contributions continue to help the wider community. As a side effect, it would also prevent anyone from using your work without releasing the source code for their project or product, benefitting open source as a whole.
The choice is obviously ultimately yours. I personally didn’t realize the benefits of GPL until recently.
https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/eupl-a-better-choi...
Is this accurate? I thought GPL only required distributing the source alongside binaries. If you're running GPL code as a web service, I don't think there's a requirement to release the source to your users.
[0] "[...] your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (...) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version"
(That being said, a copyleft license is miles ahead of the CC NC license for software!)
Campsite Is Winding Down (2 points, 23 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42480734
Welcoming Campsite's Founders to the Notion Team (2 points, 24 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475934
Realizing the dream of good workplace software (33 points, 3 months ago, 28 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41805009
Show HN: Campsite – Posts, calls, docs, and chat in one app (6 points, 5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41182414
Notion bought the company. They have no reason to want the product to actually be open source, because they'd just be helping a potential competitor.
"We will only consider pull requests and issues regarding self-hosting or critical fixes. "
Having this makes the messaging a bit confusing. You will accept improvements and bug fixes which we can use commercially but you can't - Did I read that right?
It’s rare that we get to see the complete picture of something that has many paying customers like this, and I’m thankful for the Campsite team for sharing it.
notion bought skiff and that burnt me
Good thing I'm too bitter and jaded to get in to any new saas offering, especially new and hip ones. This can't burn me. Anymore.
So neither one is related to the outdoors at all.
This should be reconsidered to something a little more permissive
I really wonder how that happened. Was there like no traction whatsoever? 5 months doesn't seem like an awfully long amount of time to give a product a chance.
Some people want to be founders, others want to solve a specific problem. There are definitely ideas I have that if I was offered a salary to solve them from a company I would take it rather than found to solve the problem.
Now that's an interesting comment. This product is called Campsite not Campfire but I was confused by that myself.
I'd not heard of Campsite before but it sounds like it might have been in the same problem space as 37 Signal's old Campfire product.
Does anyone have any more background and if the two are related?
That being said, for educational purposes, making the code publicly available is a nice gesture and I see a lot of values. I wish more companies would do that so the industry as a whole learn from the talents of others - because yes, these people are incredibly talented.
sounds like there won't be a team to maintain it.
Also code is like math which is public domain.
Or at least the right to put something into the public domain.
Same with moral rights of the creator.
Code is explicitly not like math. There's been half a century of case law about it.
It would be fair for them to have released nothing.
I do think its a shame that it can't legally be combined with GPL'd free software
"Open source" means something specific to a lot of people. You may have issues with how OSI operates (I do too!) but let's not muddy things further.