RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115692071460280703

Wrote about this recently as well. We don't want Source Available to become the standard. Its not gonna help - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2025/oss-and-sas/

#sourcewashing #OSS #OpenSource #SourceAvailable #SAS

From business POV, #sourcewashing / #openwashing move makes complete sense. Atleast 50% good PR with split opinion. Cos people will rally behind you based on your past. It's just not #OSS. Thats all.

This is also why I think it's just better to start a project as proprietary than OSS if you are a business. You can always turn it to an #OSS project and community will hail you a hero. But other way around is not pretty. Which kind of makes sense. Cos you are breaking promises.

This whole @getsentry thing and #sourcewashing in general feels like folks who didnt know differences between permissive license and copyleft license & how it effects their business.

Not now when they have $$$ & knowledge about it. But in the beginning. Now that they are big and have $$$, they can afford to create a new license & not give freedoms as per #OSS.

Its very unlikely that they would've done this in the beginning with no reputation.

I wonder, is OSS license literacy that low?

I say we call these licenses like FSL as source-washing (like green washing?). It explains the intent perfectly. At least my initial look says so.

Just make the product proprietary. Why are you trying to give a false sense of #opensource when it is not #oss ?

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/11/19/cathedral-and-bazaaar-licensing/

#sourcewashing

@unix_discussions "The firmware for the Intel VPU will be closed-source."

Wow, much #sourcewashing very in alignment with Intel as usual, where apparently Linux is the only libre/"free" open source software in existence.

Unfortunately, there is an awful lot of #sourcewashing (I have no idea if this is the correct term, sort of similar to #greenwashing, but promising libre/free open source software and firmware and hardware).

Thankfully it isn't ubiquitous.

However, it's not enough to believe vendors at face value!

I remember a colleague and I following Isis' coreboot instructions for a Thinkpad.

To say that the instructions were insufficient would be an understatement.

Was it #sourcewashing ?

I dunno.

But there were many other reasons over time which inspired less and less trust in what they put out.