Valve have released the latest small update to Team Fortress 2. Following on from the update released at the start of May, it's another that pulls in some community-provided fixes thanks to the source code being available as part of the Source SDK update.
Well boy howdy do I have news for you lol.
Tf2 is open source now - just with non-commercial strings.
Just to be pedantic, if the source is available, but there are restrictions on how the source is used, it’s not open source.
Open source licenses do not forbid anyone from using the source code for any purpose.
Not really. Open source isn’t synonymous with libre or free software.
I can have software that is protected via extremely restrict commercial licenses and open source. In fact, there are many examples.
No, those would not be open source.
Definition of Open Source: https://opensource.org/osd
No, that’s the OpenSource Initiative’s definition for what they endorse.
Open source quite literally means the source is open. That’s it. Otherwise there would be absolutely no point in having terms like FOSS or libre or whatever else.
They’re not OSI approved, but that’s about it. Ubuntu is not FSF approved, and guess what, it’s still a GNU operating system. We are not forced to follow definitions from specific orgs.
You can follow whatever you think is best. I’ll stick to and evangilise what I view to be the correct definition of open source.
What makes Ubuntu a GNU operating system isn’t the fact that it’s FSF approved, it’s the fact that it uses GNU tools.
Exactly. You’re precisely right. Which is why:
What makes software open source isn’t the fact that it’s OSI approved, it’s the fact that the source is open for scrutiny.
What? The two things have nothing to do with each other. A GNU operating system doesn’t need to be open source or have its source code available anywhere. A GNU operating system just means it uses GNU tools.
You could write a new kernel from scratch, never distribute a single character of the source code, make an operating system with your new kernel along with GNU tools, and even sell your operating system, which the GPL allows for. The GNU tools would still be open source, sure, but your operating system would be neither open source, nor have its source code completely available.
Fair enough, then a more apt statement would be a permissive non-commercial license with media assets injected from the base game (alla GMOD)
I’ve heard the term source available be used, though not sure how popular it is.
So does that mean anyone can do what they want with the code?
Everything non-commercial
Which means it isn’t truly open source, just that the source code is available.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that the source for TF2 is available, but it’s not open source.