Community source

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Community source is when the source code to proprietary software is licensed to members of a defined community, each member of which must explicitly enter an agreement with the code owner in order to be permitted access to source code.

By this definition, community source licenses are incompatible with both open source and free software, since in open source and free software anyone may have access to source code without entering into an agreement with anyone else (though they must accept the license).

A community source license cannot meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition, whose first provision requires free redistribution of software.

A community source license cannot meet the requirements of the Free Software Definition, since freedoms 1 (freedom to study) and 3 (freedom to modify and distribute modified versions to anyone) require open access to source code.

Other provisions of the open source and free software definitions may also violated, directly or indirectly, either by definition of community source, or in practice under particular community source licenses.

One motivation for community source may be to promote the use of software production and development models similar to those used in open source communities. But because the community is not open, those production and development models must differ in subtle or marked ways from those used in open source.

Another motivation may be to ease adoption by customers of complex software from a proprietary supplier, using trusted intermediaries to help.

Both these considerations appear to motivate the Microsoft Community License.

Other community licenses exist. By definition many of them are unknown outside their target communities.