As far as I can tell it is AGPL licensed PHP code, you can download the code, run it, and modify/fork it freely. Code is open source, but it is not developed in the open.
The article doesn't mention GPL. It's unlikely that this code is GPL-licensed. Moreover, yeah, probably the customer can modify the code, but can they resell it or share it with someone else for free? If not, it's not open source.
From "The Open Source Definition"[1]:
> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
“I’m contradicting the author without validating my claim. And it’s super easy to validate my claim, but I just didn’t. When confronted, I complain that it takes greater than 10 seconds to verify my claim.”
This is curious behavior. There’s lots of incorrect and misleading articles. But I try to bring up questions only when exhausting reasonable investigations.
1. There is no link in the article to the zip file.
2. Searching for open3A in duckduckgo brings me to a page that spits out PHP errors and doesn't give me anything.
3. The only way that I now know where the zip file is, is because another commenter linked to it.
4. We've seen companies disguise something as open-source, when it wasn't.
5. Open source is commonly hard-to-sell.
So no, it wasn't 10 seconds to verify and the author didn't make it particularly easy to do so. My doubts are completely natural, given past news in "open-source". Are you commenting in bad faith?
I searched for “open3A” via Google (not ddg, but if I got errors on ddg, I would try “!open3a”) and the first hit is a German site. I don’t speak German, but I saw the download link [0] and downloaded the first zip and viewed the license.
I spent more time downloading the 4mb zip than clicking on stuff.
It’s not the author’s job to make answering my questions easy. It is my job to not make easily verifiable claims without trying.
I’ve dealt with lots of projects that are crappy about licenses and frequently have to download the tarball to look for licenses, just to check if I can actually use.
The author could make this easier, but she didn’t. That doesn’t mean I should go into attack mode because other people make bad claims. (And I suppose I give up after 10 seconds and don’t want to stick around for 20 seconds)
I also noticed that author doesn’t even link to her project. Maybe it’s because her project is in German and the blog is English. But I’d rather have more posts like this with whatever time the author can spend, than wait for it to sit in draft while unimportant details are finally added.
Thanks, I thought it was kind of refreshing how you weren’t linking to your site and liked to see content that didn’t just seem like seo or a sales pitch.
There is a trail of links from the article that will bring you to the download. Click on the author's name to see their profile, click on the project to see the project's profile, click on the link to the project website, then click on the link to the downloads page. While the trail is a bit much, it is important to keep in mind the article was an account of the author's experiences and it published on a portal for indie developers. A direct link may not have been seen as appropriate given the context.
While I agree with companies misrepresenting their products as open source as being a problem and believe the AGPL should have been mentioned, I do not see how the point about open source being hard to sell as being relevant. Not only are there are success stories in the world of open source, but the author made their success sound modest.
Basicaly you are just explaining that you've just done a very quick search. Fact that Duckduckgo doesn't gives the right answer an the first page is not an excuse. Actually, DDG printed a lots of comparison pages of business application for me, so I changed my search string, tried elsewhere, searched on indiehackers.com where she writed the post. This is more completely natural that becoming suspicious from nothing.
BTW typing only "open3A" in DDG gaves me the right answers all on the first page.
