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No, it has nothing to do with "amateurs". Whether the source is open and what the license dictates are two wholly different things. The danger is exactly in conflating the two.

Take for example the NPOSL-3.0:

A variant of the Open Software License 3.0, this license requires that the organization using it is a non-profit and that no revenue is generated from sale of the software, support or services.

https://tldrlegal.com/license/non-profit-open-software-licen...

The source is open, but you can't use it outside of non-profit orgs. It's "Open Source™", it's approved by OSI, and it can still get you in legal trouble.

discuss

cyphar|7 years ago

Huh, how on earth did that get approved. It violates Section 6 of the definition: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" (which specifically has the example of discrimination by disallowing software use within a business).

Personally I never liked the OSI's definition of "open source", and the FSF definition of free software has always felt (for me) to be far more fundamental.

candeira|7 years ago

If you never liked the OSI's definition of "open source", what do you think about the Debian Free Software Guidelines?

About the discrimination of fields of endeavour, please read the sibling comment to yours. I think you and the grandparent have both misunderstood the license.

candeira|7 years ago

You've misinterpreted the license. What it says is that the licensOR (not the licensEE) is a non-profit. That is, by publishing your original software under the NPOSL, you claim that you are a non-profit organisation. That's it.

Nowhere does the license say that you can't use the code outside non-profit orgs. In fact 17.d says very clearly that if you're not a non-profit, you are allowed to distribute your modified works, but under the original OSL license, not the NPOSL. So you can use, modify it and distribute it, only with a complication in the licensing.

The other amendment the NPOSL adds is where the original OSL gives a grant of patents and a warranty of provenance, and the NPOSL explicitly doesn't, because it's designed for non-profit companies, which have no money, so it's intended to reduce legal exposure.

It's a Free Software license in my opinion, and I bet you a drink that Stallman and the FSF would consider one too, even if they would not recommend using it.

Also note that the license's author is Laurence Rosen, who was General Counsel of the OSI, knows more about software licensing than most people, and who explains the details and rationale of the NPOSL in [1]

[1] https://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm

If you have any other license that's OSI-certified and you think is non-free according to the principles of the FSF, I'm interested in learning about it.

One thing to take into account, though, is that the OSI is a certification body, and the FSF isn't.

Thhis means that the list of Open Source (according to the OSI) licenses is closed and published on their site. The FSF gives a set of principles and also publishes a list of licenses with some analysis, but the FSF's list is non-exhaustive, nor does it pretend to be. There are infinite potential free licenses that the FSF will not list, because its doesn't count license certification as one of its goals.