My creds: Been in open source for 25 years, one of the earlier users of Ubuntu when it launched in Fourways, South Africa (remember those sleeved CDs they used to send for installation media) though I hardcore rep Debian, have deployed and supported countless tools across 3 continents, the most memorable being Mambo which later became Joomla, though I switched to Drupal.
I think the label has been hijacked by many corporations to front an ethical FOSS front but in reality release a hobbled version of their software that is inherently open source at the core, but, has a commercial hard gate around certain things, like scalability/performance/high availability, authentication and security (big yikes here), integrations, usability, reporting and analytics etc… you get where I am going with this. I respect that people have to do what they have to do to eat and grow, but there is blatant misrepresentation happening and it needs to be called out. Or maybe I am wrong here?
This is contrary to OSS definitions. Personally, I’m not a fan of the strict position OSS takes with things like SSPLv1, but I’m the vocal minority.
Free software and open source are the same thing in the accepted definition. A good example of where this is tough is something like MongoDB, where it’s free to run and source available, but the license doesn’t allow you to resale it as a service. This was done to stop companies like Azure and AWS from making millions without supporting development, while not restricting most business use.
By OSS standards, Mongo is not free, and is not open source.
Yes, that’s why I added ‘personally’.