Not just that, it’s also the worst pick for such a move. The non-commercial clause in CC is very unspecific, meaning that it’s liberally interpreted in some jurisdictions, and very strict in others. They’d be better off with one of the “fair source” licenses that at least has more clarification.
For all we know it could be the investors (I assume they were venture backed?) declared any source release must prevent any potential reboots or direct competitors. Capital is only a fan of open-source when they serve to profit from it, after all.
Source-available is still fine by me. You can run a personal (or non-profit, or whatever) instance of it to keep the spirit of the tool alive, and you can learn from what they did to apply the ideas to your own engineering problems. Not every source dump needs to be OSI-approved or reusable commercially.
Sure, I’d have preferred an AGPLv3 code dump, but startup lawyers are extremely allergic to the letters “GPL” and immediately shut down any conversation that includes them, in my rough experience over the years (almost always a degree or two removed from the lawyers themselves, to be fair).
Clearly intentional. I’m not sure what the point of this was. Potentially a PR move? Clearly it would spark some WTFs… and as someone who never even heard of Campsite until now, it worked.
Second, this is one giant “init” commit, with no way to figure out how the code evolved, what was the reason for a change/line of code (thanks to git blame).
I’m often sad that for many people “FLOSS” means “uploaded to a public github repository” :(
They’re pretty upfront about the intentions in the very first paragraph of the readme:
The codebase is provided as a reference for those interested in learning how Campsite works. We welcome forks of this repository for use in non-commercial projects.
It was 100% close-source privately-funded codebase and they’re releasing it for other people to learn from and self-host. None of us were owed this, frankly, and I applaud them for doing it.
Isn’t it a possible privacy issue if you include usernames and commit messages? Couldn’t an EU based individual complain about their data being in there? They could have also been doing very embarrassing things like keeping secrets in code?
I’d rather a squashed commit than never seeing the source.
Yeah, open sourcing out of a corporate environment with the full commit history is an enormous amount of work for an unclear amount of value for the organization.
If you don’t like it, you should write from scratch your own team messaging platform, and share it under a permissive license. The authors have no moral, ethical, or legal obligation to let you make commercial derivatives of the software they’ve shared with the public.
The NonCommercial variant of the Creative Commons license suite is not open source because it restricts what you can do with it.
The codebase is merely source available.
Not just that, it’s also the worst pick for such a move. The non-commercial clause in CC is very unspecific, meaning that it’s liberally interpreted in some jurisdictions, and very strict in others. They’d be better off with one of the “fair source” licenses that at least has more clarification.
For all we know it could be the investors (I assume they were venture backed?) declared any source release must prevent any potential reboots or direct competitors. Capital is only a fan of open-source when they serve to profit from it, after all.
Source-available is still fine by me. You can run a personal (or non-profit, or whatever) instance of it to keep the spirit of the tool alive, and you can learn from what they did to apply the ideas to your own engineering problems. Not every source dump needs to be OSI-approved or reusable commercially.
Sure, I’d have preferred an AGPLv3 code dump, but startup lawyers are extremely allergic to the letters “GPL” and immediately shut down any conversation that includes them, in my rough experience over the years (almost always a degree or two removed from the lawyers themselves, to be fair).
Clearly intentional. I’m not sure what the point of this was. Potentially a PR move? Clearly it would spark some WTFs… and as someone who never even heard of Campsite until now, it worked.
This is one of the worst way to “open source” something :/ .
First of all, this is under CC-SA-NC, which is not approved by the Open Source Initiative, and also not approved by the Debian Free Software Guidelines. CC-SA would be fine, even though it’s not great for code, but CC-NA-SA definitely breaks the freedom 2 & 3.
Second, this is one giant “init” commit, with no way to figure out how the code evolved, what was the reason for a change/line of code (thanks to git blame).
I’m often sad that for many people “FLOSS” means “uploaded to a public github repository” :(
They’re pretty upfront about the intentions in the very first paragraph of the readme:
It was 100% close-source privately-funded codebase and they’re releasing it for other people to learn from and self-host. None of us were owed this, frankly, and I applaud them for doing it.
Isn’t it a possible privacy issue if you include usernames and commit messages? Couldn’t an EU based individual complain about their data being in there? They could have also been doing very embarrassing things like keeping secrets in code?
I’d rather a squashed commit than never seeing the source.
Yeah, open sourcing out of a corporate environment with the full commit history is an enormous amount of work for an unclear amount of value for the organization.
Speaking of floss, my man here is a goddamn horse dentist. They didn’t have to release none of this. This is a good thing.
If you don’t like it, you should write from scratch your own team messaging platform, and share it under a permissive license. The authors have no moral, ethical, or legal obligation to let you make commercial derivatives of the software they’ve shared with the public.
Not to be confused with Campfire, by 37signals. (I was confused until I went to the website.)
It’s great to see more complete apps going open source, congrats!
I have to say though I’m against the very premise of Campsite. Slack is great.