Not Open Source!!!

[jan-ale]

Any creative commons license with a non-commercial clause is non-free, and is not open source, by the OSI Open Source Definition. The website claims that it is open source, depsite this. Please at least remove the claim that it is open source.

[smith558]

Hi @jan-ale. Thanks for bringing this up - I appreciate the clarification, and I understand where you’re coming from.

However, I do want to stand by the phrasing “open source” as it currently appears in the README. In this context, we're using the term in its plain, literal sense: the source is open, readable, and community-maintained. Anyone can view the material, propose changes, and contribute through pull requests. That’s what open source means to most readers outside the narrow OSI/legal definition, and that’s the spirit of this project.

I absolutely recognise that under the formal OSI definition, “Open Source” excludes licenses with a NonCommercial clause. But that standard is one of several competing definitions, and its intent was primarily to define a set of software licensing freedoms - not to dictate ordinary descriptive language for educational or community content. This project is a book, not a software library, and “open source” here simply describes its open collaboration model, not its compliance with a particular certification body.

To avoid confusion, I can add a short clarification in the README along these lines:

“The source of this project is open and community-maintained. The book content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, which means it’s not OSI-certified ‘Open Source’ software, but the repository is publicly available and welcomes contributions.”

That way, the language remains accurate in the everyday sense while acknowledging the technical distinction for those who care about OSI terminology.

In short: the intention isn’t to misuse a protected label, but to communicate that this project is openly developed and community-editable, which is very much in the spirit of open-source culture, even if the license differs.

PS: Lastly, it’s worth noting that we cannot change the licence. The original Learn You a Haskell work by Miran Lipovača was released under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, and this project, being a derivative, is legally bound to use the same terms. Our goal is to preserve and extend that original work within those boundaries, while keeping the development process as open and community-driven as possible

[jan-ale]

oh! quite a long reply! thanks!
however, i still believe it is wrong to use the term "open source", as this generally is understood to refer to free works.
it is generally considered incorrect to use "open source" to mean source-available.
i admit i am very biased against this, as i strongly believe that all creative works should be free cultural works, and that all software should be free software

[ulysses4ever]

I can add a short clarification in the READM

This is a good compromise I think. But easier on the reader (as in: less to read) would be simply to replace the two occurrences of "open-source fork" in the readme with something that doesn't clash with existing uderstanding, e. g. "source-available fork". It's short and clear. Win-win to my mind.