We are humbled by the mostly positive reactions to the news we shared earlier today but also sorry for misrepresenting the license under which we make the source code available. Defold is a free and open game engine with a permissive license. The source code is available on GitHub and we invite the community to contribute.
We have updated the website to reflect this and we no longer use the term "Open Source" as to not confuse it with the OSD.
The Defold license, complete with a summary of what you can and cannot do, can be seen on our license page: https://defold.com/license/
Note: I'm not taking part in the OSS/FOSS drama, I'm just making a note that if you did want to change all occurrences, you might want to consider that one as well.
Thank you for this. I know it's a big undertaking to make a large project available to the community like this. Please don't let the side show discourage you.
Hey britzl, I appreciate the attempt to compromise on the terminology here. But, this falls flat pretty badly. "Free and open" is still trying to capitalize on the "free and open source" brand, and is going to mislead people into thinking it uses a FOSS license - seemingly deliberately. Can't you just call it "source available", which is the term we use for this kind of licensing model?
It's really not okay to be capitalizing on the FOSS brand without being FOSS. It's a kick in the groin to the FOSS community when companies do this.
The original feedback was largely requesting to not say "open source" and they've changed this. Much as I respect the position you always take on FOSS, the current position is a reasonable compromise between the original two standpoints, so I lower my weapon.
I don't really see this as an improvement over the previous situation. It's just misleading in a different way. In fact, it's worse: as far as I could tell, the term "open source" was used sparingly, to the point where I wasn't going to make a fuss about it when I saw this. Now, the term "free and open", which is equally misleading, is used much more prominently than "open source" ever was.
Not true. I went over the entire website and searched for "open source" and changed the wording. I did not add a bunch of extra "free and open" just for fun.
You seem to be confusing whether something is "open source" with "what kind of license does the code have".
Something being "open source" does not imply anything about its license.
Suggesting that only GPL-like software is allowed to use the term "open source" is crazy. It doesn't reflect the world we live in at all: there are thousands of projects on github without a license, or with some "free for non-military use"-type of license, or MIT/BSD-like licenses...
EDIT: "the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” (Richard Stallman, GNU Philosophy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... ). Not that Stallman did much better with "free software", which as the article argues, has the obvious meaning that 'the software is "for free"'.
Having to avoid expressions like "free software" or "open source" because two organizations decided to appropriate common english expressions to give them a complicated meaning is nuts.
> OSI decided to appropriate the term "Open source" to refer to something slightly weaker than "Free Software" but much stronger than "you can look at the source code". They are not in their right to do that.
This is incorrect. Over 20 years ago people who would later be part of OSI _coined_, not co-opted, the term (within the scope of software). It was coined to mean _exactly the same thing_ as "Free Software"; the OSD was directly derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and there have only been two licenses, as I recall, that are OSI approved and the FSF have said are non-free.
You also confuse "OSI-approved license" with "GPL", because the OSI (and FSF) have approved permissive BSD and MIT and many other non-copyleft licenses. Here you go: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
And? There are a lot of Open Source licenses, and even Free Sofware licenses besides GPLv3.
but neither does LLVM (and many people do not consider LLVM to be free software
Note that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are different - albeit related - things.
nor the dozens projects on Github that don't have a license at all, or that have a license of the form "Free for non-commercial purposes" or the millions of flavors of that ("Free for non-military use", etc.).
And those things are not Open Source. They may be "Source Available", or "Shared Source" or "Something Else", but "Open Source" has a de facto definition of "uses a license which is OSD compliant."
That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto (and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...).
The distinction really doesn’t seem that important for most use cases so it’s not that surprising a weaker, possibly more useful interpretation has become common...
That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto
There isn't any significant confusion. There is a token amount of confusion, which is pretty much always clarified every time one of these threads comes up.
(and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...).
It's de facto, not de jure, because OSI has no authority to enforce their definition, since they don't have a trademark (at least not a registered trademark) on the term "Open Source". What makes it the de facto definition is just usage. By and large, among the people who care about the legal details of Open Source licensing, the OSD is accepted. Yes, there are a handful of exceptions, but that's OK. It doesn't change the basic point.
I guess in my experience, the phrase is routinely used to refer to code availability and often the fact that a licensing fee doesn’t need to be negotiated or paid in order to run the code on our servers (either in an academic or corporate setting), which is a weaker requirement than the OSI definition.
Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning. I’m not saying it’s correct usage, but it’s definitely real and frequent.
It’s my impression a non-negligible number of people share the same understanding, evidence by the fact that this discussion apparently is recurring? Even those who corrected the Defold release language knew what was intended, even if they said it was incorrect usage of the phrase.
Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small; I just don’t think that is true based on my day to day experiences.
Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning.
I'm not talking about "people who are particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition" though. I'm talking about people who are "particularly interested in the actual technicalities of what OSS is", not all of whom may agree with the OSD. But I still argue that such a significant majority do that it constitutes the de facto definition.
Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small;
Not at all. I am saying that the people using that phrase in the "looser" sense, as you put it, are using it in a colloquial and not technical sense, and that such usage has no meaning as far as what the de facto meaning is, when used in an actual technical context. That's just lack of knowledge, not any attempt to create a different definition.
I see it more like somebody who doesn't know much about cars referring to an engine block as a carburetor. Even if a lot of people make that same mistake, it's still a mistake and the actual definitions of "engine block" and "carburetor" don't change.
Copyleft, free software, and open source all have different meanings, and GitHub has no restrictions on the license of software using its platform, and you're deliberately confoudning these things here to sow confusion. There are millions of different software licenses, yes, but that doesn't make them all open source. Give me a break. Is Windows "open source" by your reckoning? I has a license, after all, and I can decompile it, after all.
We're talking about EULAs, but your article and the Swartz case concern Terms of Use, which are related but different. Terms of Use concern access to someone else's computer system, hence why overzealous lawyers and prosecutors have tried to expand the CFAA to cover them.
EULAs concern what an end user can do with a piece of software on their own system or systems they control. I don't see how this intersects the CFAA at all.
Defold is Free, meaning that it doesn't cost anything to use and you don't have to pay any royalties.
Defold is Open, meaning that it is possible to modify and extend. It is actually possible to extend the engine even without source code access thanks to our native extension system.
The words "free and open" together, especially in this context, lead to a very strong association with free and open source software, so strong that a reader might not even notice the difference and think you're talking about FOSS.
Try googling "free and open" and tell me that this choice of words is not misleading after seeing the results.
Ironic. 'Gaslighting' is a term which specifically means manipulating someone into doubting their own memory and sanity by constantly contradicting what they have experienced. Co-opting it to mean any kind of misleading language dilutes the original meaning and is attempting to tap into the significant negative connotations of the term.
Behavior which explicitly meets your definition is seen a lot too in openwashing, like claims that the OSD retroactively defined "open source" or that there's never been a consensus on the meaning.
But your definition is exceedingly specific, to the point of rendering the term much less useful. Here's the Wikipedia definition given verbatim:
> Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes such as low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's beliefs.
I agree that it's often falsely claimed that 'open source' was co-opted, though I suspect this is quite frequently not deliberate, since the term has become so common it seems 'obvious' that it was commonly used before being coined by the OSI (I in general support using the term 'open source' precisely, and I was in support of those calling for the removal of its use to describe this license). But I still think gaslighting is the wrong term to use for doing this (the wiki definition you've given doesn't differ significantly from what I said). revisionism, maybe, and it certainly doesn't match the definition and context in which it was used in your comment above.
You are categorically incorrect here. Being open for modification is broader than just being extensible. He's using language correctly, and you're reacting emotionally to this whole situation.
Yes it comes close to the open source branding, no it is not the open source branding, they even distance themselves quite clearly right in the header of the page.
>You are categorically incorrect here. Being open for modification is broader than just being extensible.
What does the word "open" have to do with extensibility? Absolutely nothing. You had to phrase this as "open for modification" to make your point, why isn't "open" alone sufficient? My local museum is open from 10 AM to 8 PM daily, at least when COVID-19 is behind us. Does that mean I can bring my own exhibits, or remove the existing ones? No.
"Open" alone is fine. "Open source" has a specific meaning. "Free and open" is deliberately cribbing off of the well-known phrase "free and open source". How about this: why is "open and free" less suitable?
I added the "for modification" to reference the open/closed principle of object oriented programming. For many programmers the word open has everything to do with extensibility.
"Open and free" sounds like a great suggestion, maybe we could lead with that? Maybe I missed some discussion about that suggestion, I only responded to your remark about the word 'open'.
The typical way to describe this, especially in this sector, would be "royalty-free", right? "Royalty-free shared source game engine" would be about 10x better than either "free and open" or "open and free", which sounds intentionally misleading (even if it's not).
No, because the royalty says something whether you have to pay, but what is meant is that it's not just shared source, you're actually allowed to use modify and extend the source, under certain conditions.
Folks here were previously arguing that when Defold is said to be "free", you're not saying it's capital-F Free, but instead that it's gratis. Now you're saying that the "free" part was referring to something like the FSF's version of free (albeit incompatible!) all along. Pick a position.
No, you started to talk about things being gratis ("royalty-free"), and I'm pointing out that that's not what we're talking about.
Or are you saying that because I'm stating that open is referring to the licensing, that implies the free refers to the gratis part? I guess that's correct, but that's not a point I raised earlier so I'm not inconsistent in my position.
> No, you started to talk about things being gratis
No. That didn't begin with me. This entire discussion is filled with people defending your use of "free" to mean gratis.
> I'm pointing out that that's not what we're talking about
Okay, well now it's not clear what you're trying to communicate with the word "free".
My point was that if you were using the word "free" to mean gratis, then the best thing would be to call it "royalty-free" instead. That's already the accepted nomenclature for creative/industry use, anyway, and it'd be the least confusing choice for this case in particular.
Since I'm not using the word free I'm not trying to communicate anything with it. I think maybe you're confusing me with someone else. You're in the wrong thread at the very least.
Jeez, why did I forget I wrote that. You're totally right I apologize. In my defense it wasn't my idea to call it that, but it makes total sense that you'd start a discussion about it, I guess I was just confused.
We have updated the website to reflect this and we no longer use the term "Open Source" as to not confuse it with the OSD.
The Defold license, complete with a summary of what you can and cannot do, can be seen on our license page: https://defold.com/license/
We have also Tweeted this: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517