this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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Written by somebody who naively thinks open-source means: the source code can be viewed.
Typical game journalism incompetence.
Yeah unfortunate. At least the first comments there corrected them.
There was some asshole on the threadiverse saying that copy-left licenses weren't open source, since you weren't allowed to profit off the free code.
I say this at the risk of signal posting this regressive view to say that anybody should be allowed to view and learn from software, and benefitting from such work while closing off future access is shitty. Find some other way to make money that doesn't involve freeloading off of someone's contribution to community.
You are allowed to charge for most libre-licensed software, but of course in practice if it's popular enough somebody else will just build it and undercut you.
I do wish there were more institutions funding FOSS work though it can be hard to measure the benefits and progress for individual projects.
Some countries fund it -- QGIS for example is used and developed by governments as an alternative to ESRI products. Maybe there are other examples?
https://members.qgis.org/en/members/list/
I was using QGIS in work to simplify geometries of US postal code geo jsons and it was an impressive bit of kit. I enjoyed how 2002 it looked, but underneath it was an absolute machine.
Open source does literally mean that. But it doesn't mean that everything you build using open source is itself open source by proxy.
Edit: ah, I see now, you meant to say "written by someone who thinks source code being viewable means it's open source".
No, my wording was intentional. I was describing the journalist’s direction of inference, not asserting the definition in reverse. They saw the term “open source” and mentally reduced it to “the source code is viewable”, which is why I phrased it that way.
It means that PLUS many more conditions. If you remove those additional conditions it's not open source anymore but "source available".
To be precise: open source implies source-available, but source-available does not imply open source.
Heh your "precise" statement is literally what I said. Cheers.
What you're talking about is "source-available." I.e. being able to read source code but not having licensing rights to redistribute or make changes.
"Open-source" means that being able to modify and distribute changes is built into the license of the code.
For example, Minecraft Java is source-available in that decompiling Java bytecode is trivial - enough so that tools exist which can easily generate a source code dump. However, actually distributing that source code dump is technically illegal and falls under piracy, so it isn't open source.
Edit: I didn't see your edit, this comment is kind of pointless, oh well