There’s a popular-ish open source game I remember playing a few years ago, Warsow, and when I checked on it now, it’s been forked and while the fork is genuinely better and funner to play in so many ways, it expects to be launched through Steam. I wanted to tinker with maps and stuff and started researching, and while I did find what I was looking for somewhat in older Warsow-related threads, when I went to the official warfork-qfusion github repo looking for specific documentation for the new fork, I was greeted with a link to their Discord “if you have any questions”.

Yet this game brands itself FOSS, and it is technically released under a FOSS license and their github shows that they are actively developing it in cooperation with a community - just not a community you can be in without accepting certain walled gardens. It honestly sucks to see. I wanna access threads discussing this software, but I won’t be able to unless I go through an ID verification process and trust a silicon valley company to both secure my data and not use it in some nefarious way. And to even run the game, I had to accept Steam, which I honestly didn’t have to do in order to run Warsow back in the day, and I enjoyed that - what was wrong with just shipping a binary and letting people launch it how they like, with optional integrations? What’s wrong with having an open forum for tech questions? Why wall the garden that you’re making supposedly open products in?

In short, what do you call projects like this - the increasingly common projects that, while technically FOSS, put all their documentation and discussion on discord, and seem to expect their users to swallow unsavory default options or even use proprietary middle-ware or launchers? Proprietary FOSS?

  • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
    1·
    32 minutes ago

    There should be a term to distinguish between these different flavors of free. FOSS clearly has different levels of Free, but that doesn’t mean throw the baby and the bath water out. Something like caddy is clearly a different kind of FOSS than something like dbt fusion. So, there should be language to distinguish them. Then we can adequately talk about the matter maturely, using mature language with precise meaning.

    • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      10 minutes ago

      dbt fusion

      Seems to use the Elastic License: https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-fusion/blob/main/LICENSES.md

      Which is simply not open source in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Licensing_changes

      Elasticsearch and Kibana would be relicensed from Apache License 2.0 to a dual license under the Server Side Public License and the Elastic License, neither of which is recognised as an open-source license.[

      (although elasticsearch later changed back to the AGPL. As did Redis, and Mongo which also tried similar moves lmao).

      It looks like there are a mere 4 Apache 2 (open source license) programs inside, but the other 40+ programs are behind that ELv2 license, so the program can’t really be called open core even (term when some of the program is open source but some features are paid only and not open source).

      So no, DBT fusion is not FOSS. DBT Fusion is source available, which is the term used to refer to when you can read the source code but there are legal restrictions on what you can do with it.