Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch

[richardfontana]

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Description

Liquibase has migrated to the Functional Source License, which is not an open source license, as Liquibase itself acknowledges. But this repository continues to misleadingly characterize Liquibase as an open source project, particularly in various places in the file README.md.

Steps To Reproduce

View github.com/liquibase/liquibase, or the contents of the README.md file, to find out about the liquibase community project.

Expected/Desired Behavior

The README.md file and any similar project documentation will no longer misleadingly suggest that liquibase is still an open source project.

Liquibase Version

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Database Vendor & Version

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Liquibase Integration

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Liquibase Extensions

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OS and/or Infrastructure Type/Provider

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Additional Context

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Are you willing to submit a PR?

• I'm willing to submit a PR (Thank you!)

[rancar2]

@richardfontana, Functional Source License (FSL) is an open source license as the source code is available for both community and commercial contribution and meets the criteria for inclusion as an OSI Approved License. Would this change be necessary if FSL sought a formal review and FSL was approved as an official OSI Approved License?

As I think it's helpful for others:
For those who don't know Richard's work, he's one of the three principle authors of GPLv3 along side Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen. He's also the former director of the Open Source Initiative from 2013 to 2019, and he's the current legal council to IBM's Red Hat division, which had multiple projects being impacted downstream of this change.

[ssddanbrown]

Functional Source License (FSL) is an open source license as the source code is available for both community and commercial contribution and meets the criteria for inclusion as an OSI Approved License.

@rancar2 I'm quite confident that's not the case. I believe the FSL license text would go against criteria 1, 3, 5 and 6 of the Open Source Definition due to the limiting of provided rights to specific "permitted purpose".

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, FSL is intentionally not Open Source, but rather Fair Source. We invented Fair Source precisely to clarify the true meaning of Open Source as multi-vendor community, vs. single-vendor corporate-owned. Help us grow Fair Source to avoid confusion in the future! :D

[chadwhitacre]

Btw here's an epic thread if you want to go down the rabbit hole—you'll find @ssddanbrown in there among others. ;-)

Let's get Liquibase listed on fair.io! 🙌

[petepickerill]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention @richardfontana. I've created a pull request to update primary documentation. There are still references to 'open source' and 'oss' in various corners of the repo that we'll continue to review, but this should cover the README in the interim.

[gastaldi]

As I think it's helpful for others: For those who don't know Richard's work, he's one of the three principle authors of GPLv3 along side Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen. He's also the former director of the Open Source Initiative from 2013 to 2019, and he's the current legal council to IBM's Red Hat division, which had multiple projects being impacted downstream of this change.

Richard Fontana is also in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fontana

[rancar2]

@ssddanbrown, I'm not confident in "A Permitted Purpose is any purpose other than a Competing Use" is in direct violation of 1, 3, 5 and 6 of the Open Source Definition.

@richardfontana, the issue has been resolved by @petepickerill as you requested, but can you still weigh in where FSL is falling short of the the Open Source Definition by OSI for posterity's sake? It would be lovely to get FSL accepted by the OSI so "open source" or "Open Source" can be used by FSL projects freely in the 2-year period where there is an additional "A Permitted Purpose is any purpose other than a Competing Use" clause before being fully Open Source/open source when the license changes to MIT or Apache at the 2-year mark post release.

[richardfontana]

@ssddanbrown, I'm not confident in "A Permitted Purpose is any purpose other than a Competing Use" is in direct violation of 1, 3, 5 and 6 of the Open Source Definition.

@richardfontana, the issue has been resolved by @petepickerill as you requested, but can you still weigh in where FSL is falling short of the the Open Source Definition by OSI for posterity's sake? It would be lovely to get FSL accepted by the OSI so "open source" or "Open Source" can be used by FSL projects freely in the 2-year period where there is an additional "A Permitted Purpose is any purpose other than a Competing Use" clause before being fully Open Source/open source when the license changes to MIT or Apache at the 2-year mark post release.

I don't view the OSD as the only authoritative source of what "open source" means (rather I think the OSD imperfectly reflects a traditional community view on what open source is). But it's pretty clear that the FSL falls afoul of the OSD (as Sentry and Liquibase themselves recognize). The OSD makes clear that open source licenses cannot discriminate against fields of endeavor or persons and groups, and that would include prohibitions on competing uses.