If it really is fully open-source please make that more visible on your landing page.
It is a huge deal if I can start investigating and deploying such a solution as a techie right away, compared to having to go through all the internal hoops for a software purchase.
How hard is it to go to the GitHub repository and open the LICENSE file that is in almost every repository? Would have taken you less time than writing that comment, and showed you it's under MIT.
It's not entirely uncommon to only have parts of the solution open. So a license on one repo might not be the whole story and looking further would take more time than giving a good suggestion to the author.
Agreed. For all the people arguing "just click the link and the license is there!!", I have been burned several times before where a technical solution has a prominent open permissive license github repo (MIT or similar etc) based component as its primary home, only to discover later on that essential parts of the system are in other less permissive or private repos behind subscriptions or fees.
The rest of us get around that particular issue by going through the source code and all the tradeoffs before we download, include and adopt a dependency, not after.
Good for you! This of course doesn't help in the situation where a dependency author retroactively changes the licensing state of a component, or reconfigures the project to rely on a new external dependency with differing license states (experienced both of these too!).
Having the landing page explain the motivations of the authors vis-a-vis open source goes a long way to providing the context for whatever licensing is appearing in the source repos, and helps understand what the future steer for the project is likely to be.
There are loads of ostensibly open source projects out there whose real goal is to drive sales of associated software and services, often without which the value of the opensource components is reduced, especially in the developer tooling space.
> Good for you! This of course doesn't help in the situation where a dependency author retroactively changes the licensing state of a component, or reconfigures the project to rely on a new external dependency with differing license states (experienced both of these too!).
No, but I also don't see why that matters a lot. Once you adopted a third party project as a dependency, you also implicitly sign up to whatever changes they do, or you get prepared for staying on a static version with only security fixes you apply yourself. This isn't exactly new problems nor rocket science, we've been dealing with these sort of things for decades already.
> There are loads of ostensibly open source projects out there whose real goal is to drive sales of associated software and services, often without which the value of the opensource components is reduced, especially in the developer tooling space.
Yeah, which is kind of terrible, but also kind of great. But in the end, ends up being fairly easy to detect one way or another, with the biggest and reddest signal being VC funded with no public pricing.
If I have to dig through your website/documentation to find basic information we’re not getting off to a great start. It’s pretty common for open source projects to proudly proclaim they are open source from the get-go. “____ is an open source tool for ______.” Simple as that
Seriously all the nitpicking I see of any project people post here but “tell us you’re open source at the top when you’re open source” means we’re lazy? Being open source is an important decision and you should tell people! It’s a good thing!
Isn’t a big part of getting a project out there actually letting people know what it is? Especially if you’re trying to give a tool to the open source-valuing community. That’s a high priority for them. That’s like having a vegan menu and not saying you’re a vegan restaurant anywhere public facing.
I agree it's a good thing, but I'd also agree it's not something you need/have to shove in people's faces, especially when it's literally one click away to find out (The GitHub icon in the top right takes you to the repository, and you don't even have to scroll or click anything, the sidebar shows "MIT License" for you).
There is a GitHub icon fairly prominent on the top right. Choosing to spend precious text for a fleeting would be user on it is a choice and not everyone wants to market that fact very prominently. Should everyone who writes their project in rust include that prominently as well? It seemingly markets very well and a lot of people seem to care about that as well.
It is a huge deal if I can start investigating and deploying such a solution as a techie right away, compared to having to go through all the internal hoops for a software purchase.