commentary on why I'm only interested in finding/using software when it is Open Source

title: Not Open Source Not Interested published: true description: commentary on why I'm only interested in finding/using software when it is Open Source tags:

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published_at: 2026-05-06 11:46 +0000

The title of this article "Not Open Source Not Interested" is something I say to myself a lot while I'm reading about this or that software online.

While I know what I mean by that phrase, it might not be apparent to others, so I thought I'd take some time to explain that meaning.

There are times when I want to do something and would like to find software to do it for me.

But for me to use software, it will need to be Open Source, otherwise I just can't trust that it only does what it purports to do.

So when I'm looking for software to use, and I see that something is proprietary, I usually stop there and move on. I don't get annoyed, or feel that I should pester the creator of the software. They don't owe me anything, and they're welcome to ply their craft to trade with people who are happy to trust them. I'm just not interested. I have full respect for people who do make a living from the software they put online.

I'm lucky in that I have a full time job that pays me a livable salary. And when I retire I can expect to have a superannuation pension that will be a livable proportion of that income. I don't consider myself wealthy, I've never owned any property, I rent - I'm GenX not a Boomer. But I can say that when I write code and put it online I'm not doing so to make a living.

I do put up some of my own software - not much really, mostly fragments, but Foldatry is a real tool that I use daily - and give it an Open Source license so that other people can use, adapt or learn from it as they see fit.

That last point is important - "learn from it" - because I think I have some innovations in there. Indeed, the reason I wrote it is because I couldn't find anything that does what it does. And I don't mind if anyone else learns how it does those things, and then writes their own software to do similar or same things.

And in writing their own software, they can choose to license that how they see fit. Perhaps some other Open Source license or even as something proprietary.

The very way that I rely on copyright law to enforce the license of my software means I have to respect their choices too.

Now, I did apply the GPL3 license for my code, and that is so that if they want to use my code directly, then I want them to keep its grants of freedom to others just as I gave it to them. It's that simple.

p.s. there is a strange middle territory, which is where I can't find whether software is proprietary or not.

Now this is a little surprising, because you might think "who would do something as Open Source and not be upfront about this?" To which I can only say that I have seen this a few times. In some cases I think it's a passive redirect, so that those who don't care will buy it like an ordinary product but those who know can find the source (and/or the download) repository. In other cases I suspect that for some forms of "enterprise" software, it has been some kind of thing to hide across the marketing material, even if for other customers being Open Source is a vital sales point. I'm not about to blame someone who makes genuinely Open Source for also knowing that some of their clients have been brainwashed into thinking it's a bad sign.

In some other cases I've seen software makers are simply oblivious to the whole concept of Open Source. While this was more common in years past, it can still be encountered now and then. While this is sometimes also a case of people with a pathological hatred of Open Source, usually those people are very clear about it. But even so, once in a while... you'll come across one who presumably gets all their business by word of mouth, and so their web site has no real need to clarify their position.

p.p.s. going back to that "learn from it" aspect - I'm really not fussed about my code being scraped by Large Language Models and regurgitated - with some variable amount of mastication - into code that someone will then apply a different license to. (Or perhaps discover at some point that such code does not qualify for copyright.) Anyone prepared to trust such reworked code and/or then continue to rework it, has already separated themselves from my direct code well enough for me to not feel affected - and I certainly wouldn't want my name attributed to such a thing.

p.p.p.s. I've used the term "Open Source" throughout for simplicity. I generally prefer to use FOSS, for Free Open Source Software. Some people like to argue as if there are significant differences between the terms "Free Software" and "Open Source". There simply isn't, which I've covered in an article at How many and of what nature are the license approval differences of the FSF and the OSI ?