[beyond-copyright] Noticing when a company offers OSS edition as SaaS.

[Karl Fogel]

Brian Behlendorf <brian at behlendorf.com> writes:
>I believe wordpress.com is also OSaaS, though IIRC they offer
>commercial templates and plugins provided by 3rd parties, and it could

*cough* *cough* you mean "proprietary", but yes :-).

>be the case that their billing and provisioning software is
>purpose-built and not widely released.  With software like ZPanel and
>Webmin and others there may be a way to avoid requiring sites to also
>open source their equivalent software and scripts, which are likely
>much more difficult to genericize. After all, we allow there can be
>OSS software that runs on proprietary operating systems and hardware.

Agreed: this should just be about the product the customer is buying, not the mechanism they use to buy it.  Billing and provisioning software doesn't need to be included, as long as none of it would be needed to do a self-hosted deployment.

>I like a carrot-and-stick approach - badges if they pass a certain set
>of criteria (self-attest, perhaps), and public shaming if they either
>are found to have failed those criteria or otherwise confuse the
>customers regarding which pieces are truly OSS/OSaaS.
>
>Since this is generally harder to interrogate than someone's public
>license, would it be inappropriate to suggest a certification program,
>one with fees to fund the human time to conduct a certification
>process?  Or is there some scalable way involving whistleblowers?
>Perhaps the self-attestation includes a provision swearing not to
>prosecute company employees who approach OSI or the public with
>contrary evidence.  Though, ugh, this is all more complicated than
>approving licenses.

Well, I'm not sure a verification process is needed -- the customers are the potential whistleblowers, after all, if they find that they're getting proprietary features that they didn't ask for.  Self-attestation by the vendors should be fine, the same way the original OSI logo is currently used.

Best regards,
-Karl