[dontdoxxme]

It is not open source, it is not free. It’s a term tacked on to the MIT license.

It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image?

Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the copyright discussions there.)

[m463]

correct. free software doesn't place any restriction on the USE of software. The rights go to the user.

The restriction is on the redistribution of the software - the same rights must be passed on when redistributing it.

this license places (complicated) restrictions on how the software is used.

[jrowen]

> It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image?

This strikes me as somewhat contrived. Like yeah, if you're gonna do some weird button-pushing thing, it's not worth it, steer clear, keep this product off your platform, easy. Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed?

There's a million ways to get value out of source code that don't involve pushing the envelope. I've accepted every EULA ever without reading and never once worried I would get in trouble with any of them, it's generally pretty easy if you're not trying to invent ways to do so.

[jchw]

> Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed?

It's not even open source in the first place if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is disallowed, as that would be discriminating on use case. It ultimately doesn't matter much to the open source community, as it effectively can't be used in otherwise open source projects, as the result wouldn't be open source and it is going to be license-incompatible with many projects anyways.

That said, I find it preposterous to accept this notion even ignoring that point. You shouldn't have to take it on faith that what you're doing is allowed by the copyright license—the whole point of the license is to make that clear. Everybody always shrugs off the risk of a malicious owner until Oracle acquires their dependencies.