this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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No, because that would no longer be open in the open source sense.
It's either open for everyone, or it isn't open.
Edit: sorry to whoever doesn't like it, but it's literally how "open source" is defined
No, software being free as in beer is not a necessary condition for being open-source. And if the code is not free as in beer, the pricing model can be whatever the hell you want, as long as the code is shared when the user is licensed. That can mean an expensive license for enterprise use coexisting with a free license for (say) researchers and individual devs.
No, not in the way GP wrote. You're not allowed to have your license discriminate between users, so you'd have to sell your software to everyone, not just big companies.
Either no one pays, or everyone pays.
I've seen quite a few that have restrictions based off your size, like if its 1-5 ppl no charge, anymore and the cost increases as you go up.
Open source software can be sold at different prices to different customers, and still remain open source. Open source software can also be sold only to certain types of customers, and still remain open source. Who the developer decides to sell or distribute the software to, and at what price, is unrelated to how the software is licensed.
However, because the Open Source Definition prohibits open source software licenses from discriminating against "any person or group of persons", the customers who buy open source software cannot be restricted from reselling or redistributing the software to any other individual or organization.
Right, which means that you practically cannot give open source software for free to non-corporations while selling it to corporations while still being fully open source, as the corporations can simply get it for free from any non-corporation.
Exactly!
I appreciate the clarification, thank you!
And that’s literally what the article says lol I don’t know why you were downvoted.
The binary mentioned is different. Omier was saying either you share all the source code, or it's not open-source. You don't get to retain some proprietary blob for an essential component and still say the whole app is open-source. Pricing is an entirely different question.
I suppose that both cases apply here. He’s saying that you either comply with an open source license that’s defined by the OSI or you don’t. That includes the source code to be available yes, but the article also mentions Meta license has a restriction:
From my understanding, you can’t take an open source license, add random restrictions and still call it open source (“if it’s a corporation it needs to pay a % fee to me”). It doesn’t matter if 98% of the license is open source, at that point your software simply isn’t open source anymore.
You can definitely have multiple licenses, such as Qt does to allow statically linking it and to modify it without distributing the source code, but that simply isn’t an open source one.