this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
16 points (86.4% liked)
Technology
59232 readers
3899 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They are open sourcing, just keeping a proprietary license on it. Yes, it's weird, but it is not unheard of. The Unreal game engine's entire source code is open, anyone can read or submit changes to it. Even make changes and distribute said changes. But it's still a proprietary product owned by Epic Games, and commercial use is strictly controlled under the licensing terms. Open doesn't mean Free (as in beer), or Freedom (licensing). Those are three different things. It is just that people have associated the term open source with the entire Free and Open Source Software philosophy. But they aren't the same thing.
ZDNET is wrong, Winamp is open sourcing their code. The article is obtuse and refuses to elaborate or provide reasons about their claim that Winamp isn't open sourcing.
Why?
It not only can, we have several examples of corporate products that are open source precisely like this with this level of control.
Open source requiring a specific license is a decades old debate that continues to this day. We have like a million different licenses and people argue and bicker all the time about which ones are Truly Open source ™ and which ones aren't. It's all legalese that make most people have headaches. But there's one crux on this whole thing: Open source does not preclude commercialization of software. This is why people are proposing the term source-available software. Winamp might go for that model and the debate would still go on.
There is a different term for that:source-available
It is NOT open source. There is a meaning behind that specific term and they are said it in their announcement that they are only "opening up its source". Don't use that term for this.
A lot of companies are starting to do this most people are referring to it as source available rather than open source. I'm kind of surprised I don't just turn it into an electron app and get it over with.