Nobody has any objection to companies making their source code available, and they are free to call their software “source-available”, “source-first”, or some other term because their source code is available. But if they restrict what users can do with the software, then it isn’t open source. MongoDB, Redis, and even FUTO now all recognize this distinction.

The FOSS community, at large, doesn’t tolerate the watering down of recognized terms such as “open source” by bad actors who want to co-opt the term for marketing while denying users the right to use open source software for any purpose. That is known as openwashing. This kind of misappropriation is not welcome in any kind of movement, not just the FOSS movement.

The free software and open source software movements both support rights for users, which include the right to use free software and open source software for all commercial purposes without restriction. These movements support the release of source code as one requirement for ensuring these user rights, but source availability is not the only requirement for a piece of software to be open source.

There’s no problem with creating another classification of restricted source-available licenses as long as it isn’t called open source, a term rooted in the open source software movement’s adoption of the Open Source Definition for over 20 years.

As for myself, I personally prefer source-available software over software with no source available, though I also prefer FOSS over restrictively licensed source-available software.

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Proprietary source-available software existed before open source software, and that’s what these restricted licenses are. The FOSS community does not appreciate businesses co-opting the term open source to promote software that doesn’t grant users the right to use the source code for any purpose.

Yikes. I’ll be sticking with NewPipe and other FOSS apps.