{"id":31095,"date":"2025-12-09T05:30:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T05:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/?p=31095"},"modified":"2025-12-09T05:30:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T05:30:06","slug":"matt-dhh-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/?p=31095","title":{"rendered":"Matt: DHH & Open Source"},"content":{"rendered":"

I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

37signals\/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy<\/a>, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson\u2019s insistence on calling it open source. \u201cOne more thing\u2026\u00a0\u00a0Fizzy is open source and 100% free to run yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to Freedom of Speech, DHH is free to describe his proprietary software as Open Source, a form of greenwashing<\/a>, and even though he wants to \u201cWell akshually\u201d denigrate those saying why this is BS<\/a>, we as free citizens are free to explain why, despite how fast he talks and confident he sounds, he\u2019s not always right.<\/p>\n

Myself and other \u201cActually Open Source\u201d leaders (including DHH) who release software under licenses that meet a common definition of Open Source<\/a> benefit from decades of prior art and an incredible foundation that lays out the philosophy and definition of what defines open source.<\/p>\n

For the layperson, though, it might be helpful to break things down in an analogy of authoritarian vs democratic regimes, or a core question of who holds the power.<\/p>\n

Proprietary licenses may grant things that feel like freedoms; for example, Fizzy\u2019s O\u2019Saasy license lets you download the source code, run it yourself, modify it, and use a public bug tracker, and you can see the software\u2019s source control history<\/a>. That\u2019s cool! Also, in the past several years, there have been Middle Eastern countries that have just now allowed women to drive cars. That\u2019s great! However, as a free person choosing to use this software, or choosing to live in a country, you have to ask yourself: Am I still free?<\/p>\n

No, you\u2019re not. You are allowed to do some things that are in and of themselves good, but ultimately, it\u2019s not built on a foundation of an inalienable right <\/a>or constitution; it\u2019s at the whim of the leader. O\u2019Saasy license has this restriction<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

No licensee or downstream recipient may use the Software (including any modified or derivative versions) to directly compete with the original Licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted, managed, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product or cloud service where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh wow, I can\u2019t compete with the leader. In how they choose to operate their business today, or however they might choose to in the future. My freedoms are at their whim. This violates rule 5 of the OSI definition of Open Source: \u201cThe license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to choose software and live in a society that doesn\u2019t discriminate.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not uncommon for people trying to take away your freedom to want to use the same words as those in truly free societies. North Korea calls itself the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea. Why? Per Google\u2019s AI<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Socialist Definition of Democracy<\/strong>\u00a0During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies used \u201cdemocracy\u201d to mean \u201cpeople\u2019s power\u201d through a single ruling party, representing the working class, as opposed to the multi-party \u201cbourgeois\u201d democracy of the West. North Korea adopted this lexicon, as did other communist states like the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, really democratic. In that sense, you can say O\u2019Saasy is an \u201copen\u201d \u201csource\u201d license. Perhaps a bubble of people will agree with you. But the rest of the world will use common sense and see that as a fraud<\/strong>. And most disappointingly for 37signals<\/a>, a company that prides itself on high integrity, it\u2019s false advertising<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source. 37signals\/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson\u2019s insistence on calling it open source. \u201cOne more thing\u2026\u00a0\u00a0Fizzy is open source and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}