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0 pointsgiantg24y ago0 comments

"If you were to design a source-available nonfree product, and call it 'open source', this court would find you guilty of false advertising."

It's not really about any of that. If you read the court opinion, it's basically copyright protection infringement on the basis that someone copied a product and changed the licensing in violation of the original license. The false advertising claim is on the basis that the duplicate software is free and open source, because it can't be free and open source if the original license forbade that.

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pie_flavor4y ago· 2 in thread

The original license is AGPL with an added non-commercial clause. To say 'the original license forbade that', where 'that' is being FOSS, is to either agree with me, or to claim that the court is instead offering opinion on what constitutes 'free', which is five times as loaded as 'open source'.

giantg2OP4y ago

This is a false dichotomy. I don't have to agree with you as the elements of your example are substantially different from the case, leaving other possible outcomes. This ruling does not create precedent on the definition of open source. The court is addressing the violations of the terms of the license and the misrepresentation of being a drop in replacement.

Can you quote the ruling where it defines open source, or Open Source? There are several definitions in the dictionary and OSI is only one of them. There is still debate in many communities about whether open source and a noncommercial clause are compatible or not. That's not something the court needs to look at in this case.

pie_flavor4y ago

They specifically cite the misrepresentation of the software as 'free and open source', they specifically say it's literally false as opposed to simply misleading, and they specifically say it's because they couldn't remove the Commons Clause. That means they are, in fact, judging whether the definition of free and open source includes the Commons Clause, and specifically judging that it doesn't. Either that means they're judging 'open source', or they're judging 'free', or 'free and open source' is its own third term that doesn't quite mean either.

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