SSPL is a free license

Posted Sep 7, 2025 0:54 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: SSPL is a free license by immibis
Parent article: Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

No. You're wrong. Give this up.

OSI has rejected it as an open source license. Debian has rejected it as DFSG-compatible. FSF does not list it as a license for free software.

https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-sourc...
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915537
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

None of the three organizations in our community that are respected for the purpose of classifying licenses as sufficiently free for use by the community has stated that the SSPL is free. The SSPL is therefore not a free license.

You want to say it's an immibis-compatible license, go ahead. You want to say all three of our license-approval organizations suck, go ahead. But it's not open source, it's not DFSG-compatible, and it's not Free. Those decisions are not yours to make, and those decisions have been made.

SSPL is a free license

Posted Sep 7, 2025 17:26 UTC (Sun) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (2 responses)

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - you've quoted Debian basically saying "we don't want to have to deal with this" and if you look up the FSF's position, it's basically the same thing.

SSPL is a free license

Posted Sep 7, 2025 20:49 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

You: This power supply is UL-listed!
Me: No, it doesn't appear on their list of certified devices.
You: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!

SSPL is not a free license

Posted Sep 8, 2025 0:29 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

I would summarize the expressed opinion in the Debian link rather as "This is clearly not Free Software".

I appreciate that this is in direct opposition to your view, but when everybody else says that's a dog and you're still sure it's a cat, it's time to re-consider, isn't it in fact possible that you're just wrong and it is a dog after all ?