> Skiff was presented as open-source, the back-end never was so it was not possible to self-host it. In addition, the type of license used (CC-BY-NC-SA) is meant for artworks and more geared towards showing the code than making the service operable by others.<p>That’s not open-source, it’s open core. Calling it open-source is a straight-up lie.
True open-source is useful even if a company gets acquired or changes their business model, because 1) the old version stays open-source so you never lose access, and 2) it can be forked and remain updated to compete with the now-proprietary version. Like when Terraform got forked into OpenTofu.<p>1) should be enough on its own to make nobody care if the company changes the license, but we live in a world where people expect all types of software to have continuous improvements. Still, 2) means there’s a group can ensure the open fork has everything the closed original does, by putting in as much effort as the company. In practice the forks often fall behind and sometimes they die, but it’s for the same reason the companies move away from open-source: it’s harder to make progress without funding, and it’s harder to get funding with open-source.<p>EDIT: I also get that the term “open-source” is diluted. But my understanding is that it means <i>all of the source (i.e. code) is open (i.e. public)</i>. Otherwise, why even call it open-source in the first place? Non-code data like assets, training data, and keys can be private (provided the key isn’t encrypting any code), which lets people sell open-source products; a server can use a key to ensure that clients purchased the product (and a checksum to establish that the client’s source hasn’t been modified), but the server’s code should be open-source (so people can run modified versions locally but must buy the official game to play on the official servers).<p>I suppose there’s some loophole a group can use to create something under this definition of “open-source” and revoke access to prior versions later (at a minimum they can exclude you from the official servers). But at least I don’t know any occurrence of this ever happening, and it’s certainly a lot harder
and less likely than revoking access to “open core” (which is just, not publicizing the majority of your code, so that even calling it “open” is debatable).