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’s insistence on calling it open source. “One more thing… Fizzy is open source and 100% free to run yourself.”
Thanks to Freedom of Speech, DHH is free to describe his proprietary software as Open Source, a form of greenwashing, and even though he wants to “Well akshually” denigrate those saying why this is BS, we as free citizens are free to explain why, despite how fast he talks and confident he sounds, he’s not always right.
Myself and other “Actually Open Source” leaders (including DHH) who release software under licenses that meet a common definition of Open Source benefit from decades of prior art and an incredible foundation that lays out the philosophy and definition of what defines open source.
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.
Proprietary licenses may grant things that feel like freedoms; for example, Fizzy’s O’Saasy license lets you download the source code, run it yourself, modify it, and use a public bug tracker, and you can see the software’s source control history. That’s cool! Also, in the past several years, there have been Middle Eastern countries that have just now allowed women to drive cars. That’s 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?
No, you’re not. You are allowed to do some things that are in and of themselves good, but ultimately, it’s not built on a foundation of an inalienable right or constitution; it’s at the whim of the leader. O’Saasy license has this restriction:
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.
Oh wow, I can’t 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: “The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.”
I’d like to choose software and live in a society that doesn’t discriminate.
It’s 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’s Republic of Korea. Why? Per Google’s AI:
Socialist Definition of Democracy During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies used “democracy” to mean “people’s power” through a single ruling party, representing the working class, as opposed to the multi-party “bourgeois” democracy of the West. North Korea adopted this lexicon, as did other communist states like the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
Yeah, really democratic. In that sense, you can say O’Saasy is an “open” “source” 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. And most disappointingly for 37signals, a company that prides itself on high integrity, it’s false advertising.
(For what it’s worth, I tried to resolve this quietly with Jason Fried a few days ago.)
> Oh wow, I can’t 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: “The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.”
Reminds me of how social media platforms encourage you to invest time, money, and even customer loyalty into building a brand on top of an shaky algorithm that you ultimately don’t control. You’re required to play by their rules, operate within their guardrails, and work towards “mutual benefit,” that is until the social media platform decides you’re no longer relevant.
Thanks for sharing Matt.
It seems to be open source but not free.
The enshittification of DHH continues apace.
Very well written Matt. These posts, aside from proving such people wrong, can lead to more people getting to know free (as in freedom) and open source software. Thanks a lot.
It’s the “free as in speech” and “free as in beer” issue that’s been going on for decades, unfortunately. Just because something is open source doesn’t mean it’s Open Source.
The language is tricky and can either intentionally or accidentally be weaponized against truly free software. Over long enough timelines, true Open Source will always come out on top.
The moment a license says “you can use this, but you can’t compete,” it crosses out of open source and into controlled source, full stop. I get the business motivation behind that restriction, but words still matter, especially for those of us who have built real communities and companies on actual open licenses.
And the thing is, if this were truly open source, DHH and 37signals would still have powerful protections through trademarks and brand. It’s not like I could realistically spin up “BetterFizzy.io,” use their marks, or outpace their roadmap without massive funding and execution. Open source does not mean forfeiting control of your brand or your business direction.
They have the right to choose whatever license they want for Fizzy, but redefining “open source” to fit a business model is where the line gets crossed and where trust starts to erode.
Very well written, and I’m happy that someone finally exposed DHH’s hypocrisy.
I don’t know how they manage to hype their products. it’s always just a to-do application with some flashy colors, and then DHH markets it as if it’s some kind of AGI breakthrough
Jose Canciani has a good point that “Criterion #6 fits better with your complaint” — https://x.com/josecanciani/status/1998589099389944171
By the criteria of an Open Source license, this is not an open-source license. However, it is a license granted by the copyright holder on his terms, and remains legal. The O’Saasy license also lets us gain insight into how they developed that application, and by running it we also gain insight into how it operates. At that level, the O’Saasy license gives licensees access to the knowledge embedded in the source code, and so is a big improvement for the open source community compared to closed-source products like JIRA or Trello.
This is not different from the MIT vs BSD, MIT vs GPLv2, GPLv2 vs GPLv3, or GPLv3 vs AGPLv3 debates I heard a couple of decades ago. It’s a debate of purity versus practicality. For example, AGPLv3 is arguably the purest open-source license, but because of its source-code distribution license, many commercial creators will not use it for the products they create because it threatens their business by diluting their intellectual property, and many commercial creators of derivative works will not use it because they don’t want their commercial derivative work encumbered by the terms of the AGPLv3. i.e. the “pure” license is less appealing to many commercial creators.
The MIT license is less “pure” from an open-source standpoint because creators of commercial derivative works have an incentive to close the source code of that derivative work. However, creators of commercial derivative works will be more likely to use open-source code with a licenses (e.g. MIT or Apache 2.0) that don’t have the source-code distribution obligations of a GPL-ish license. i.e. MIT is a more “practical” license for commercial creators because it encourages the adoption of MIT-licensed components or systems in a commercial product, thus advancing the influence of “practical” open source software.