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SparkDevNetwork / Rock

An open source CMS, Relationship Management System (RMS) and Church Management System (ChMS) all rolled into one.
http://www.rockrms.com
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Rock RMS describes itself as "open source" but the license is not open source. #5068

Closed kfogel closed 2 years ago

kfogel commented 2 years ago

The Rock RMS project describes itself as "open source" (e.g., in README.md, and in the "About" section of the project's GitHub home page), but the Rock Community License is not an open source license.

Possible solutions:

  1. Change to an open source license -- certainly my preferred solution :-), and I'm happy to chat about open source licenses if you'd like to explore that option -- or
  2. Just don't describe the software as "open source".
jonedmiston commented 2 years ago

Updated the readme to be more clear about the limitations of our license.

pnorman commented 2 years ago

The software is still described as "Rock RMS is an open source Relationship Management System (RMS) and Application Framework for 501c3 organizations1"

jonedmiston commented 2 years ago

We believe that is the best way to describe our project to our community.

kfogel commented 2 years ago

@jonedmiston Well, words only mean things when people agree they do, of course. If you decide to use "open source" to mean something different from what the rest of the software industry uses that term to mean, no one here can stop you. But it's guaranteed going to mislead people -- as it misled me -- over and over, just as if you sold bottles of apple juice but labeled them "milk".

For reference, here, here, and here describe how this came up in another project (later in that thread you can see that the author of that project fixed the problem).

(Also for reference & for the convenience of others: I assume commit 22f496ed212b is the README change you're referring to. That commit doesn't mention this ticket, and you didn't mention the commit ID in your comment above, but hopefully my mentioning it here will create some kind of linkage at least in GitHub-land.)

ssddanbrown commented 2 years ago

I would just like to re-iterate @kfogel's consideration since "Open Source" has an established definition which the "Rock Community License" does not meet. Projects like this would often instead refer to themselves as "source available" or simply just "open".