The Dark Side of Open Source 

"Commercialise" is the UK spelling (response to 5:05)

Honestly, I think that you are talking about the dark side of humanity, more than open source. This purism and trolls exist in music, sports, movies, politics, comics, religions, everywhere. Open source is something really good and the people that politely pointed defold's mistakes are needed because defold fixed those mistakes because of them. Trolls are going to troll.

9:46 The BitKeeper saga is an interesting one. Linus seemed to think he could agree to the freeware licence (aka the “don’t annoy Larry McVoy” licence) for BitKeeper on behalf of the entire Open Source community. Then when Andrew Tridgell was commissioned to reverse-engineer the repo format (contravening the terms of the licence), Linus ordered him to stop. To which Tridge essentially replied “go jump in the lake”. And so McVoy was duly annoyed, and gave notice for the termination of the licence granted to the Linux kernel developer community. Linus went off to think about things for a couple of weeks, and came back with the beginnings of Git. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Agreed on the toxicity and violence that's never helpful nor productive. It happens in many ways: we've received insults at times that we made money or business around Open-Source software... but I'd say the supportive side of the community is always bigger and there to answer those insults for us, even. Except for one or two cases that happened via email. About having an open-source license preventing people to redistribute the software, I'm not sure. The point of open-source is to prevent lockdown from a company that owns the software. The right to redistribution has allowed projects to not die or be killed by companies in the past. LibreOffice is an example. The nasty side effects you mention, like people selling CDs of Blender, or Krita, etc., well, it happens even with closed source software. When we had a small game studio with my business partner, some people republished and resold some of our html5 games, no matter how bad they were, and they weren't open-source at all. Piracy is a big thing. Where I live now, you find big shops with illegal copies of movies and more, and it's considered normal. In other words, I don't think that the right to redistribute is what's causing people to do dick moves. And allowing redistribution has a clear purpose that's part of the open-source definition (at least OSI's). Companies can already derive licenses, use their own EULA, or whatever. It already has a name, as you pointed out in the video: source-available. It's completely fine. But there are reasons for these kinds of licenses to not become part of the OSI-approved ones. Somebody else mentioned it, but Stallman wasn't at the root of the Open-Source movement as in what became the OSI. Unlike free software, it stems from the idea that proprietary and open-source software can coexist. R. Stallman seems to be more into a political ideal where the *users* of software should have unbound freedom. That's the reason for the copyleft: it aims to guarantee that any copy or derivate of free software is still available to the *users* in the way it was intended by the original authors.

I am a really hardcore opensource guy and at first I was afraid of the title of the video but in the end I completely and absolutely agree with you 100 percent (okay maybe I disagree with the Stallman being the father of opensource part, he hates opensource but that's basically politics so let's move on...) You are absolutely right in everything else, this is an important matter and everybody should see this video gamedev or not. I'm a long time fan of your channel and you grow bigger and bigger in my eyes with every new video.

Are we going to ignore that "Poo fighters" is trending in Canada?

"Commercialise" is not spelt wrong, that's how it's written in en-GB

I think a lot of the extremely negative reactions are people thinking that this was not an accidental mistake, but intentional false advertising that they were hoping they would be able to get away with. And honestly this makes a lot of sense to me... The decision to make Defold "open source" involved a lot of people and a lot of time. Did none of them actually stop and read what "open source" actually means? Personally, I think the definition of open source can be easily misunderstood, but it also seems like a reasonable expectation for a company the size of King to figure it out.

The Zlib License stated that you can't redistribute the software under other branding The distribution of a modified version of the software is subject to the following restrictions: The authorship of the original software must not be misrepresented, Altered source versions must not be misrepresented as being the original software, and The license notice must not be removed from source distributions.

I've used to have my OS projects related to generic AI experiments and self-driving vehicles hosted at GitHub. I was even more than ok to support different users of my solutions and had no problems with people forking my projects, because majority of them had their PRs coming directly to my repo to improve overall solution(s), so everyone can benefit. Until one moment. When my coleagues from our Indian and Chinese branches( I work for trans-national corporation) sent me info with proofs that many students in India and China are using my projects as their diploma, or practical experiment project, labs, etc. Without even referencing me and giving any credits. This blew my mind, and I have immediately closed access to all my projects( actually I've provided access as "project team member" to all people that previously submitted PRs and agreed to make their forked repos closed). During the next 2 years I was getting at least 1 email weekly from some Indian idiots with complaints and threats regarding my decision( I can recognize and distinguish this style from others, because I work with Indian teams for 10+ years and 99.9% of Indian devs have the same emailing style and culture. Also, majority of emaillers had indian domains or IPs.). I've also had few hacker attacks during that time. Now, I believe that OS is a good thing and I am still participating in many OS projects, trying to contribute something valuable for the projects community. But I believe that 100% of mentally sick "true believers" should be forbidden from accessing anything that is created as OS. And all people that try to resell OS product without written explicit legal permit from the project owners and make money or get any other personal benefits in such way( like that example with Blender or my example with asian students) should face criminal charges immediately.

8:27 rms does not consider himself as being part (and certainly not as the founder) of the Open Source movement, but of the Free Software movement. See www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html for how he sees the differences between Open Source and Free Software. See opensource.org/faq#free-software for the point of view from the Open Source side.

Looks like 98% percent of people don't read the licenses and 1% are straight up thieves or disrespectful of OSL Devs

12:45 There are non-Free CC licences. Only CC-BY-SA, CC-BY and CC0 are Free.

Thanks for shining light on this Mike. I entirely agree with you, it's a shame that people are misappropriating open source tools and scamming people. I understand why Defold added that mention in their license. In the cloud environment, projects like Redis and Mongo got scammed too by cloud providers rebranding and basically selling their projects on-demand without any kickbacks to the original project. We definitely need more licenses where the open source project is protected from these kind of abuses.

There's so much work put into RPG in a Box that I think it's super fair that they commercialize it. In fact, it does some stuff that Godot doesn't, and maybe vice-versa. It would a shame if a greedy (not as in money-greed but as in terms too vague applying to too many stuff) license like that would become common, making such projects pretty much impossible.

As a correction, Richard Stallman detests open-source as a term, preferring free software to define the copyleft licensing.

I'm a developer for more than a decade. I have seen my fair share of stupidity on the open source community. But I can say that most of people are really nice and I'm grateful to them. During my time at the college I studied software licensing and I can say the whole point is to pair the license with the needs of the project. For example, I have a very hard time thinking GPL is a good choice for libraries because of the viral nature, but may be to application software. Unlicense is a good choice for small libraries, code fragments or snippets. MIT, BSD, Apache and other have variable types of protections that accomplish the protections aimed by the software developer. It is fair to have a "economic protection" license to cases like the Defold Engine. I could not find any problems in the directives of The Open Source Definition . To make clear or correct something in this video, OSI do not make licenses per se, they analyze submissions to make the licenses compatible with OSI. It is up to the Defold team to make a move to create a license and lobby with OSI. In fact, this is a very good help to the community. Personally, I would use Defold for my projects as they are clearly stating their project has a restriction engine resale, not on games made with it. Engines like Godot are nice to fork and thinker - even if I make a new engine out of it, I would be morally compelled to return the code to them.

asperite for example had to make their custom EULA, but they are awesome!

I had spilled a little drop of liquid on my phone right as the little animation at the end happened, and my heart stopped because I thought I'd actually broken my phone's screen

8:18 I don't think a code of conduct would stop someone from saying rubbish like this.

I don't see how attacking people with different opinions than yourself and trying to demoralise the open source movement is a benefit to anyone. Many companies are trying to jump on the open source band wagon without wanting to comply with the licence model. Its a trendy thing to do these days. I agree they should use a different licence, such as a modified freeware etc where source code doesn't have to be given for everything. If they don't want to comply with open source, Don't be open source. Again, if you don't like some one, then don't bother with them, move on. Lastly, having an opinion, whether right, or wrong, is not trolling if you are merely giving an different or critical opinion. Attacking people for the sake of attacking, or for personal gain, more views, or personal "feelings" that aren't relative to the content etc., is! By the the way in Australia we use "ise" not "ize" as well in many words. ;)

I don't think this is "The dark side of open source" but "The dark side of humanity". People are stupid in every corner of the world. It has nothing to do with the Open Source Community. In fact, Open Source Community is very very awesome. I think this video could be misleading people to think bad about Open Source Community so I will dislike this video, even when I admire your work and I love your channel, because I really disliked it.

That's a shame about the harsh response the Defold folks got. I'd like to say I disagree with you on the idea of a license that prevents users from reselling an open source product within its own domain. It can be really frustrating to pay for something that's distributed for free, but there are also good ways to resell a product like that. If you give tech support for your version of the product that isn't available with the open source version, for example. There's probably things we haven't even considered in the future.

Honestly, I don't understand why Defold would be getting flack for this. Sure they may have misspoken, but we all make mistakes. Even though I don't use it that much, I love open source stuff! But every organization has a right to protect it's intellectual property, Defold has every right to keep their software as open/closed as they want. What you said about Blender was perfect, open source is great but there will always be people re-releasing it for a quick buck. I don't get why people go out of the way to harass those who work on Defold, they have every right to release and regulate source code as they see fit.

Actually some people's attitude on open source kinda turned me off of Godot. Whenever I posted some footage of my project I got the question if I wanted to share my repository or project. Or whenever I asked if thing X could be done with Godot, or why does thing Y not work as expected I got the response "Write it yourself!".

Companies: shared code 99% of people: Open source other 1% of people: Omg! royalty free! source code

more people need to join the open source community to dilute the toxicity :/

That fadeout effect had me freaking out my that monitor had just formed a cluster of dead pixels

I didn't think this would become a drama channel 😅

The story behind that mailing list post is pretty interesting. Linus was talking about BitKeeper, his and a few other kernel developers' revision control software of choice. It was one of the earliest and most polished distributed revision control systems around (and thus a marked improvement over CVS/SVN that other Linux devs were using), but it wasn't FOSS. That mailing list post was just one relatively mild volley in a pretty epic flamewar. Splitting development across different revision control systems was never sustainable, and eventually the company who developed it stopped offering a free version anyway, so Linus wrote Git and basically took over the world (of RCS systems).

Has anyone actually taken an open-source game engine and resold it? it seems not an easy task to do if the original game engine has any sort of community behind it.

4:23 I get how this can be perceived as ironic at first glance, but the point of copyleft licenses like GPL is to guarantee the freedom _of end users._ Hence, it is unavoidable to impose some duties on developers/vendors. If you want users to have the right to study the source code, you have to force developers to provide the source code.

Yeah I agree that we need a new commonly accepted license that would deal with repackaging scams. When I was choosing a license for my engine I was thinking about adding the same clause as Defold did but decided against it as custom licenses seem to do more harm than good to a project. Alltough the implementation would be difficult because restricting publication in the same domain would be too restrictive in my opinion. There is not a lot of options when forking an engine to transform it into something else. Maybe something similar to "fair use" would do, where the derived work needs to be transformative, so deriving an engine and significantly improving its renderer and selling it would be fine, whereas just changing the branding wouldn't suffice.

@GamesFromScratch there is one subtle point I think you were missing here: When someone has an issue with one subtle issue with a licence of a product, and want it changed, it is often because they like the product and want to use it, but feel there is one subtle thing that prevents them from doing so. They don't want to go use something else, they like the product and want to use it, and find it frustrating that they can't, which is what's driving their motivation to want to influence the creators to modify their licenses slightly. The approach of telling those people in such cases to just use a different product if they don't like the license, is equivalent to telling them to FO. That in and of itself is pernicious and very subtly trolly. It defeats the purpose of increasing adoption of your product.

1:47 Other companies have done this sort of thing, calling it “shared source”, not “open source”.

And that kids, is the story of how a new opensource license called "Defold" was born.

I think you're right in lots of what you said, but I'd like say that the idea that GPLs are not free as in freedom is misguided. All the restrictions in GPL licenses are for prohibiting developers from making their software restrictive. It's like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance. It's like saying that a free society shouldn't prohibit people from keeping others tied in their basement. There are arguments that can be made against GPL, particularly about its practicality in this cruel economy, but it not being free is not one of them.

They called it Open Source. It wasn't. People reacted. They retracted it (other possibility was to say to heck with it, we're going open source all the way). Some trolls joined in the shit-show (what else is new?). How is this "The Dark Side of Open Source"? Ohhh, you don't like Stallman. You don't like GPL. The problem with BSD-like licences (MIT, Apache) is that while they allow more from the start ("don't give so much trouble") but they also allow to form a commercial / closed source project on the spine of an open source one. GPL does not, by making sure that everything that goes into the project is open source and everything that comes out is also open. These are two perfectly differentiated philosophies, have their pros and cons and most importantly reasons to be. I don't see how is this the "dark side". For me, any successful open source project has been a net win for humanity, no matter whether it's Godot, Blender, Linux, FreeBSD, Apache HTTP Server, GCC, Emacs, GNU they all command respect. They all have been a timesink for talented people thinking in something bigger than their own profit. Mind you, King did good with Defold and the harassment they got was unwarranted... ((even though Defold website's header still proudly says "Open Source"; you click the link and it brings you to a page that explains that it's almost but not open source)). What I do mind is "Stallman and his pack of trolls strikes again" and "GPL is for trolls" label, that is kind of an insult and harassment in its own way.

Recently Securas open sourced their game for godot community to learn from it and someone released it on play store as their own. A license should be made to prevent these type of situations.

The Defold licence looks fair for me

great video! thanks for highlighting these topics!

Wait wait, stallman didn't invented "open source" he did the "free software" thing, he also doesn't like when people use "free software" and "open source" as synonymous

Codes of Conduct.. i always think there's a reason it can acronym to COC.. missing a K maybe ?

I hope the Defold license gains enough traction to either stand on its own or the commercialization restrictions make it into the next revision of the Apache License. Even the GPLv3 with all of its restrictiveness only requires sources to be provided - it can't prevent the sale of another person's work.

well said.. 1. need a new license 2. support those who are moving towards open source..

Many open source / free software people are stuck on the idea of the four freedoms, and I can see how they'd be apprehensive towards any clause that takes any of them away: maybe the freedoms will keep slipping, and the go-to license of 2030 won't have most of the freedoms anymore? Honestly, I think it's too much of a slippery slope fallacy, but I can appreciate the thought. On the alternative licenses: there are some licenses that take away some of the four freedoms to trade for other priorities, like not letting commercial entities use them, disallowing military applications, and such. I'm not sure I dare post a link in a youtube comment, so I'd recommend looking up "ethical licenses" and "License Zero" (freedom for individuals, sold exceptions for firms). I wonder if the business model of games (10-50 dollars a piece, consumer oriented) compared to other software (very expensive licenses or monthly fees, often business oriented) affects the practicality of open source in the field? Plus, games being oriented to younger people with less money, there is much more danger to allowing free sharing of programs, profit-wise.

You got a few things wrong here. RMS is not the founder of the open-source movement but he is one of its stronger opponents. He founded the free-software movement (or libre software). Software is considered free if it comes with 1) the freedom to execute it 2) the freedom to study its code 3) the freedom to modify its code and 4) the freedom to redistribute it (which doesn't prevent from charging money). Open-source (which is the same as code available) doesn't grant those 4 freedoms, therefore RMS opposes it. He doesn't even see it as a better alternative than closed software has it makes people complaisant and they stop caring about the 4 freedoms he sees as essential.

11:37 The fundamental problem with what you’re trying to do is define what “commercialization” means. For example, say you use some proprietary Adobe or Autodesk product under a freeware licence like “for education use” (a “student edition” licence, say) or “for personal/non-commercial use”. Does that mean you are allowed to distribute your work to others? What if you post it on a commercial site like DeviantArt or RU-vid, that shows ads? Are they allowed to make money off your work, while you are not?

I don't see how a CoC would have prevented the incident: it was a private interaction. CoC largely covers people's behavior in the context of the project itself: discussion on pull requests, discussion in mailing lists, etc.

4:53 - This license looks pretty good to me. I just don't like the GPL license where they require making your software become GPL too.

is a program open source... If the source code isnt publicly available, but available to anyone who downloads/buys a product ( like the download has source codes in it and the bought product is shipped with the source code) and all the other things are met ofc ?

There seems to be a disappointing lack of knowledge about the formation of the GPL and similar licensing systems that undercuts this video. The zealotry surrounding parts of the open source community is much easier to understand with a knowledge of history. There was rampant thief of ideas and code by for profit entities from hobbyist and academic communities at the time. This profiteering was starting to poison communities that were responsible for the bulk of innovation. GPL was conceived in the context of a larger exploration within the community. How to can retain the dynamism of the hobbyists and academic community? How to foster cooperation without participants feeling like their work will be profiteered off? This is of course an overly simplistic view and I encourage you to pick up a few books on the subject of who was doing what at the time.

It would be tricky, I imagine, to create a general license that prevents reselling, while still allowing selling a derived product. And when such a license is breached, it's a civil case, not a criminal one. So even if you see your open source product being sold on eBay, is it worth taking the offender to court? I can see why someone would want such a license but I think they'd be better off adding their own clause to an existing license, even if it does make some people ashamed to share a planet with you! I don't think this is a problem with general solution.

6:15 LINUS ATTACKS, it is super effective

I love the contrast between showing twitter with modern styling and then going over to the 'free software' side where it's all raw unstyled html from old bulletin boards. It's the aesthetic of the linux world - ultra bare bones unstyled html - it's a refreshing look still used by a lot of college professors and weather stations.

"I'm shocked such a license doesn't actually exist" Well, yeah, that's not an Open Source style license so there will never be an OSI approved license like that. It's incompatible with the OSI's values. Not that there is anything wrong with this kind of license, just that it's not surprising that there isn't an OSI approved one, and never will be one.

I think that some people got mad especially since they where using Apache all over the site when it was not actually an Apache but something a bit different. I did get the impression that they where kinda trying to tricking people into thinking it was Apache when they are using something different. I think it is somewhat reasonable to be mad when someone says we are using x license when they are using y license. This is especially true when marketing teams say a product is open source when it is not thinking it is a buzz word.

This was all very well said, I agree fully. Unfortunate

Open Source is fine, even the blender rebranding scams... People need to learn not to throw money at stuff they don't know/understand... One minute of research would show them its a scam.

Loved this video. Great work 😀

As an artist this is my problem with a big chunk of the Blender community. For them everything needs to be free and open, if you use adobe you are sheep, if you use autodesk you are the part of the problem softeware is not affordable.

Recommended reading: "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephan Kinsella.

Wrong... The motivation of the people that coined the term Open source (one of them LinusTorvalds) is to use communities to improve software(programmers for free & pro Businesses), while RichardStallman and the LibreSoftware movement is more pro users.

I have a name for what you propose: “no-sell-alike”. Kind of like CC share-alike. Also, GPL software IIRC has a restriction that it can’t be sold for much more than distribution costs?

I think you should even be allowed to charge for a derivative program. However, you should be required to link back to the original project. Just enforce that the following text is directly above the buy button: "This program builds upon xxx. xxx is open source and can be downloaded for free >here

This is solved by the fact that the GPL requires the source to be freely available and be able to be freely distributed. Sure, you can copy and commercialise a GPL program, but people are still legally allowed to pirate it.

13:11 That's what the Commons Clause can be used for on top of an existing GPL 2.0/3.0 license. Sounds like you still got quite a bit to learn and I'd love to continue this dialog to see what it would take to make the perfect license for everyone to have access to exactly as you describe.

The actual dark side of open source is the Contributor Covenant

Everyone complaining about Mike saying Stallman invented "open source" instead of "free software" is literally missing the point of the entire freaking video. This video exists because someone made a semantic mistake and received horrendous harassment over it.

Dr. Stallman technically didn't invent opensource, but rather freedom software.

"you are free to do a lot of things, but you are free to not do a lot of things as well" about the GPL philosophy, its quite simple: you are free to do anything with this code, except restrict other people from using it or its derivatives as they wish. it prevents people from taking the code, creating an better version of it to wich may convince a lot of people to use (since its an improved version) and then preventing those people from doing the same thing. you are free to do everything except restrict other peoples freedom. that is why so many people defend it tooth and nail. its just like what would happen if an company like nintendo made something like mario maker, then update it with the ability to pay to play the levels made by the users while at the same time restrict the users from using the level editor/maker to make their own levels, people will get pissed of that nintendo is profiting from their labor while at the same time restricting their freedom you cant do something like that in GPL. on the other hand, its quite hard to make money with it, its not impossible, linus torvalds receives 10 million/year as salary because his code is very usefull for others, but not every project will get this mainstream adoption and support, most projects stay with 2/3 volunteers contributors and die as soon as those gave up on it, or just have thousands of forks sharing the revenue while at the same time dont contribute to an common goal, competing instead of cooperating, reinventing the whell and creating incompatible code, instead of colaborating in an common code base. MIT on the other hand, allow you to create an derivative code under other licence that may restrict the user, its the case for webkit/blink/chromium. many browsers nowadays are just the chromium code base, shared across all of then, with some proprietary modifications on top of it, mozilla firefox is the exception here. this model is easier to monetize, but it also incentivate competition instead of cooperation. i think tools like gimp should be GPL, because you can make money otherwise, example, making assets for games like textures, sprites or games with the content you made on it, and donate part of your income to thanks the project for helping you in your life and contribute with its improvment, the product is not directly profitable but its used as content creation tool for content that may be profitable. on the other hand, Mit works well when the "content" created use/needs code, for example, games are softwares, an game engine in gpl would force the content made on it to be GPL (unless the only GPL part is the GUI of the engine) , an mit game engine is much better in that regard that you can creative some derivative product on it and licence it as you wish, it can be gpl, mit, propretary anything you want. games dont seem to work in gpl anyway, there are a few exceptions that worked despite the fact that they are gpl not thanks to it, the main issue is that every one wants to make their own game but not an specific one, everyone wants to make an different game, so the incentive to colaborate in an game is much lower than the incentive to colaborate in an general purpose tool like an game engine.

Hmm technically the "or" in OSI definition could be interpreted to mean that either selling or distributing for free the source/derivative should be possible, not necessarily both. That is going into semantics, though. (Oh wait nvm licensing is basically only semantics anyhow) That being said looking at the license it really confuses me. They say any plugins/tools and selling them is just fine. Yet the actual license file says "“Game Engine Product” shall mean software used for video game development. This includes both the content authoring software and the software used to show the created content." "a) You do not sell or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Works as a Game Engine Product" It seems really odd to me that this could be used to legally block reselling the engine/editor but at the same time could not be used to go after someone who developed extension or plug-in for the engine and is selling that. Well regardless, I feel really sorry for them. They are going to be going through a lot of the rough turns all open source projects do but yet don't get to be acknowledged as part of the community for it. That being said I think it is valuable to have strict definitions. I do agree with the OSI definition and that Defold does not count as open source under it. (Even putting aside the fact that I think there is legal issues with the wording of the license.) I don't agree being toxic about it, though. Well anyhow, looks cool might check out at some point.

I’m with Defold with this. It’s not ethical to rebrand open source projects and sell them. We need someone big like apache or someone to create a new licence so it’s crystal clear the licence doesn’t allow abuse like rebranding and reselling for profit. Otherwise it’s “open source”. 🐯🐯🐯

Licenses give what copyright doesn't grant. That's why there isn't an "oss but no commercial". Copyright already gives the owner all rights including right to allow resale.

You need a code of conduct because of some random "rude" comments in regards to a project? The COC that are pestering and infesting open source projects now are horrendous.

Defold is a solid engine to build games on. Sure, you can't re-brand the engine, but who cares? Generally speaking, people who build games don't build engines and people who build engines don't build games-- the exceptions are very far and few, and the exceptions are not the rule. Defold is an engine for game developers who want to build games. If someone wants to build an engine off the back of other people, they can use Godot, or some other MIT license-based engine. They have the freedom not to use an engine. I mean, nobody has a gun to their head and is forcing them to use it. I can do what I want with software I build, they can do whatever they want with software they build-- it can be open source, it can be closed source, it can even be half source or half-assed. Everyone on the development team can flip everyone else the middle finger and tell them to GTFO even... the only real choice someone has about a license is to use it or not use it. Insulting someone because their license and the availability of their product doesn't cater to them-- that's just asshattery, and they should just go build their own engine and license it however they want.

I would be down if even Godot didn't allow people to resell Godot as the only requirement.

It's funny how one can use the cons of language to make a matter confusing. In Polish, we have two separate words for "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer" and there's no way to mix them up.

I don't know if this is a common sentiment that people would agree with, but I would also add that open source programs often feel very "different just for the sake of being different". I've wanted to get away from the awful company that Autodesk has become for so long and learn Blender, but its operation makes no sense to me. Tell this to the typical Blender zealot and they'll always say "but it makes sense once you get to know it!" Why should I have to "get to know it"? Unity, Maya/3dMax, Substance Painter/Designer, and others all use a similar control/navigation scheme and it's great. I don't want to wrestle with learning something overly-difficult.

Commercialise isn’t spelt wrong, both are correct, commercialize is more common in the United States.

At least they corrected themselves you could do an entire series on companies that purposefully manipulate open-source which easily creates angry sentiment like the email defold got.

Open Source is a Spectrum

As much as I think you're pretty right with licences, you shouldn't have targeted directly specific persons (Richard Stallman) to prove your point since you're doing worth than what you criticize in Bjorn Ritzl's post. When I learned Defold he was there and he and the Defold community were the nicest people of all game engine communities I talked to. People makes mistakes, particuliarly when they're pushed to the edge. That doesn't mean he is a bad person.

A handful of people have (correctly) pointed out in the comments that Stallman is not the father of Open Source, but it actually goes a step further than that: Eric Raymond and the OSI created the Open Source definition *specifically as a reaction to Stallman's toxicity and trolling.* It was basically conceived as, to use modern parlance, a sort of #NotAllSourceSharers movement, saying "we believe that there should be ways to make source code freely available and shareable, without all the anti-proprietary ideology Stallman and those nutcases at the FSF want to saddle you with." They used more polite language than that of course, but to those of us who were there at the time, the message was heard and understood loud and clear.

There's nothing particularly "mind-blowing" about the fact that a no-reselling open-source license does not exist, particularly given that this whole thing got started by Defold using the term "open source" in a way that contradicts the Open Source Definition specifically by doing this. That means that such a license *can not exist by definition,* any more than "non-wet water" can exist. It was deliberately set up that way, "a feature, not a bug," as programmers like to say. So now the question becomes, why was it set up that way? But you already know the answer, because you talked about it in this video: RPG In A Box. The ability to create commercialized derivative works is seen by the OSI as a good thing worth protecting, a situation whose benefits outweigh the drawbacks of the occasional scam such as selling free assets unchanged on the Unity Asset Store. So then why not make it say "you can't sell this *unchanged*"? Well, technically speaking, putting your own name on it and doing nothing else is still a change, and obviously that violates the spirit of the idea hard enough to make it worthless. You can't have that; better fix the license. But once you say "you can't sell it unchanged, and there are also certain changes that don't count," you end up going down a big, messy rabbit hole of definitions and technicalities that would end up massively complicating the license and requiring new revisions every time some clever person found a new loophole, leading to schisms in the ecosystem of people who prefer the one license to the other. (Just look at the GPL v2 vs GPL v3 situation. Someone found a loophole in the GPL, the FSF "fixed" it, and what they came up with did not gain widespread acceptance; heck, they couldn't even get the GPL's highest-profile "poster boy" project to move to it!) The problem of scammy copies can be fixed with simple, free education and due diligence. This makes it far less of a problem than this video is making it out to be. Defold are the ones coming across looking bad in this, not just for their misappropriation of the term Open Source -- which, as you pointed out, appears to have been an honest mistake that they fixed as soon as it was brought to their attention -- but for the thought process behind it. Saying "we're not going to make any money off of this project *and you can't either*" comes across as all sorts of wrong. They're being the proverbial "dog in a manger" in this case, being Stupid in the Carlo Cipolla sense of the word.

Open source licensing has become a bit of a mess. Not only many of them aren't compatible with each other, but some of them are so badly written that there are now multiple versions of the same licenses, that may or may not be compatible with eath other either. It's sad to see there is so much good work out there that can't be used for anything meaningful because they restricted themselves.

Evidence of toxicity in fandoms

commercialise isn’t spelt wrong - it’s the EU/UK/AUS spelling

I'm pretty sure the "can't charge for something too much like this thing" license as you described is impossible. A "derivative" work is a very, very low bar. Including a free low-poly mesh in your game, then printing out a game screenshot showing the model, then making a painting of that screenshot, 100% makes your painting a "derivative" work of that low-poly mesh in the eyes of copyright law. If it was non-commercially licensed, you cannot sell that painting. It doesn't matter that the market for paintings and the market for low-poly meshes are unrelated. If the license allows derivative works commercially, but then only a few small changes are necessary to basically resell the original. re-branding or adding a few triangles might qualify depending on the judge. At least in the USA ,the copyright-holder of the original work has the exclusive right to create derivative works. If they license that right to you, you must abide by the terms of the license. I'm not sure it's the same in other countries. (Of course, I could be wrong about something here. My knowledge of copyright law comes from 1 semester in college, from the research I did online just now trying to find out if a copyright license like what you described here existed, and from regularly watching Leonard French's RU-vid channel Lawful Masses about copyright.)

I want to make a couple of points so this is going to be a bit of a longer comment. First, I think they made a mistake and they fixed it, is a bit so simple. The open source movement has traditionally been very community and collaboration driven and always had a strong ideological component. In recent years though many companies have adopted and utilised open source without subscribing to those ideological ideals. This goes from using restrictive CLAs, projects being controlled by a single company, dual licensing strategies, developing projects not in open, but in house and only occasionally releasing source code to only releasing tiny portions of a stack reducing open source essentially to a marketing buzzword. This puts the old open source movement in a bit of an identity crisis and I can understand that its members get a bit upset, though that does certainly not excuse the toxicity that some members express. Having established this already tense situation, Defold's error is a bit more severe than a silly faux pax. By the way, their website still says open source in their navigator. Second, while I agree that you should never harass projects for their choice of license, I think it as just as reasonable to lobby for a specific license at it is reasonable to lobby for open source in the first place. Hence, I will continue to advocate for copyleft licenses as it can protect open source projects against some of the problems that come with increased commercialisation. Third, I don't think creating a license specifically to forbid commercialisation would be a good idea or even solve the issue. There are are typically three scenarios in which someone would commercialise open source software. First, as a scam. I doubt scammers are going to be impressed by a license clause. Just look at all the fake, malware infected flash player updates or how many if not most Android phone makers violate the GPL by delaying kernel releases for month. Second, someone might fork an open source project, extent it and make it a commercial product. This poses a severe risk to companies who release only part of their product as open source and try to commercialise certain features or addons. A competitor could come, reengineer those features and then undercut them. Copyleft clauses are in my opinion a far less harmful way to deal with this. If a general copyleft clause is too restrictive they could have even excluded software created with with a modified engine. Third, many places still don't have stable or cheap internet access. For many, physical mediums are still the only way to access software. I think it would be a grave mistake to deny those access, by preventing commercial distribution.

Commercialise. 's English English, innit.

Personally I don't really like the fact that only OSI dictate how the OS is. If someone don't use OSI-approved license, the software is not really opensource. Isn't it enough that source code which opened to everyone (to some degree) called open source?

> "I'm not attacking anybody here" Well, you did attack Richard Stallman here, didn't you? You could argue that you didn't "attack" Stallman as much as just "point out why (and how much) you don't like him", but then isn't the comment made that you consider "toxic" also essentially the same thing? Describing verbosely their dislike? (Keep in mind, this is barring his recent "comments", which you stated as only an example of it.) Don't misunderstand me, I understand that the OpenSource / Free Software communities (yes, I used plural, I'll explain why in a bit) has its own radicals, trolls and cult-like followers, their own... unpleasant individuals, and I'm not denying that. But more often than those "vocal minorities" are just that -- "vocal" -- and rarely, if ever, straight up inflict harm upon somebody, and being techies that they are, a lot of them have fewer social skills and lack tact, and the best (and most efficient) way they know how to communicate and deal with social situations IS to be blunt, with no regards social standards. And more often than not, they have reasons to believe or say what they need to. I'd wager that, a lot of times, it's mostly self-righteous who are worse because they often end up doing worse things, but with sweeter and "conventional" verbiage, and using subversive and restrictive tactics to undermine the very ideals and ethos that the community initially stood for. And that's what those "radicals" are afraid off, because they're not so much as "radicals" as they are "orthodox". And even though you may consider them to be in the wrong, they aren't so necessarily. That's Richard Stallman. Free Software and OpenSource wouldn't have been as massive and standardised as they are now if he wasn't as "radical / trollish" as he is, because keep in mind that beyond just a programmer he is also an ACTIVIST for Free Software, and his activism was essential in the era of restrictive licensing of softwares, and what set it apart from commercial projects. He has a vision that he continues to stick to, for fear of the vision being eroded, despite the newcomers into the community -- and that's what split Free Software with Opensource, which continues to be the case. The arguments between Stallman and Torvalds isn't necessarily a case point of whether one is right and the other isn't, nor can it simply put one or the other in the "troll" category just because you don't agree with them. Instead, regardless of whom you agree with, all that should be apparent is that there's a conflict of differing values. Even though Opensource borrows a lot from Free Software, just because a software has an open "source" does not always necessarily imply it is "Free Software"; Stallman has even written on lengths about this. That's what this discussion boils down to, and that's where our current situation -- the tweet-wars you've mentioned -- takes us back to. Simply tackling the banality of social-standards and conventional beliefs, waxing poetry saying, "Guys, plz don't act like #icks," is never going to solve the root cause of the issue, which can only be understood by the differences in ethos and judging them accordingly. In that grand scheme of things, arguments about licenses is trivial (because licenses change) when you consider that they TOO stem from the issues between CENTRAL ETHOS of those philosophies entirely, let alone challenging the nuances of what can be categorized as "open" in the Opensource community. You might consider Stallman to be a "troll" or "toxic" or whatever other epithets you'd rather throw at him, but we can't deny that he's "OUR troll". We can disagree with him and have issues with his statements or stances, but we'll still have a great deal of gratitude towards him. Yeah, I agree, he's a wacko -- but he's still OUR wacko. The same holds true for Torvalds, who has been called worse what you and I have called Stallman.

Going slowly from "not so nice" to "a bit a of a troll" to "he's a dick!" :P

It's a way more permissive license than the GPL and people really claimed it's not "open source"?

Opensource is source available - does not infer a license to alter code. GPL, Apache and MPL explicit cite and allow clause to protect the individual contributor's right to maintain ownership regardless of whether you edit code or not. On the other hand there's MIT & BSD style Opensource licensing that allow you to freely edit code and distribute compilables without having to provide source. Regardless of finite licensing clause, the biggest problem with O.S. is ignorance and entitlement generally originating at sources that probably haven't ever contributed to anything outside of flame bait and meme. Also have to watch out for the L33ts whom undermine the communities that they're "supporting" -almost looks like insurgency at times like trolls purposely trying to make "their" community look like garbage. It's a mess right now, but it's far better than it was. Agree with this video almost, if not, completely.

I have a few points regarding the stuff mentioned in the video. First of all I fully agree with your points about the choice of license and the need to call out these trolls harassing folks what ever they reason might be. I hope my comments don't sound like one of these. My first comment is about RMS's relation to Open Source. I know this is probably not that imporant for the average viewer but RMS doesn't have anything to do with Open Source. He is considered to be a father of Free Software movement. OpenSource initiative is an attempt to remove some politically charged rethorics from free software and repackage it in form more friendly for the for profit organizations. Free Software primarily stands for user's control over computing while open source primarily focuses on the pace of technical advancement enabled by sharing the code. Stallman himself is oppose to the OSS movement and doesn't like to be associated with it. Even though he is odd weirdo and troll as you've suggested yourself I think he still deserves not to be associated with movement he is opposed to. The second on is about the missing license that would prevent commercialization of software derived from the original software distributed under the license. Linux kernel was originally distributed under such license. That is before Linus adopted GPL license for the kernel. As far as I know he considered the original license to be a dumb idea that didn't help the project much (note that kernel might be quite a different thing compare to game engine though). Among other things such licensing would prevent companies like Red Hat, Suse or Canonical to provide commercial support for Linux to the extend they do now. The advantage of GPL license over MIT or BSD style one is exactly by preventing this. Since the derivative work must be released under the same license the advancements done by other developers must be available to merge back upstream. With non copy left license like BSD or MIT there is always a risk of someone taking the code and releasing better version of software which can't be up streamed because the derivative has incompatible license. So in fact if you're in favor of preventing this, GPL is likely much better license than any non copy left license. My additional subjective comment on the 2nd issue with reselling the OSS is that it's much more political issue than what it might seem. Whole notion of being a seller as profession is about selling stuff to people and making profit while doing so. Salesman's job is pretty much about finding product and finding buyer and connecting those two. This is sort of hard thing to oppose. I would also consider schemes similar to ones you mentions as fishy but surely even these people made some investment on a marketing and could have contributed to finding out larger user base for these projects. The question if they deserve to charge money in the process seems to me to be very similar to asking if capitalism is ethical or not. Surely this is not the right place to go too much deep into these issues. I just wanted to mention that this simplified "don't sell the gifts you got on Christmas" in my opinion doesn't have place in software licenses. I hope it at least provides some alternative points of view. For me it was valuable to see yours despite the fact I don't agree with all of your points.

I know it's out of topic but what would you say is the biggest and most popular open source game engine?

Dark side: After spending hours reading bad code (for example: spaghetti go to, switch fallthrough,... ), you try to find out what bastard wrote that code & where he lives to kill him.

You should do more os topics. Tbo licensing is so confusing in os world.