In contrast, https://github.com/asg017/sqlite-vec is dual-licensed under Apache and MIT, which makes it open source.

Ah, yes, this is a "source available" project, not what you would normally call an "open source" project. Still cool!

Odd licensing strategy here. It's like someone that wants the cachet of saying they are open source without being it.

Dang, I was really excited about this too.

I guess I'll either stick with sqlite-vec or give turso another look. I'm not fond of the idea of a SQLite fork though.

Do you know if anything else I should take a look at? I know you use a lot of this stuff for your open-source AI/ML stuff. I'd like something I can use on device.

You can point DuckDB at a SQLite file and it will read it using its special columnar format. I'm not sure if that's what you need, though.

I guess "free software" is well and truly dead as a term with any general cultural weight.

As long as threads like this appear, not yet.

But not for the lack of trying - people keep trying to redefine it...

There is the 'Additional Grant for Open-Source Projects' section that seems to permit inclusion in open source project. Do you mind explaining why you think this is not enough? I'm not an expert in licenses so genuinely interested in your take.

Let's say I have an open-source project licensed under Apache 2. The grant allows me to include the extension in my project. But it doesn't allow me to relicense it under Apache 2 or any other compatible license. So if I include it, my project can't be Apache 2-licensed anymore.

Apache 2 is just an example here - the same would apply for practically any open source license.

The one place I imagine it could still work is if the open-source project, say a sqlite browser, includes it as an optional plugin. So the project itself stays open-source, but the grant allows using the proprietary plugin with it.

I don't see why this would infect your project, though. You aren't using the code directly, you're using it as a tool dependency, no? Same way as if your OSS project used an Oracle DB to store data.

Unlike Oracle DB, sqlite gets embedded in your program binary. It's a library, not an external service, and this matters for OSS licenses

Ah true, I forgot because I always use it in Python, where it's built in.

The reason I choose to apply open source licenses to my project as I want other people to be able to use them without any limitations (beyond those set out in the open source license I selected, which are extremely permissive.)

If they depend on software that carries limitations, I can no longer make that promise to my own users.

Or does their extra license term mean I can ship my own project which is the thinnest possible wrapper around theirs but makes it fully open source? That seems unlikely.

I used to think this, but now I feel like anything I write will just be vacuumed up by bots and no human will ever even know about it, unless I include some kind of terms that at least make the work traceable to an artifact.

In this aggregate form, there is little difference between pseudocode snippets in a post like this one, versus a well-maintained library getting scraped.

The more I think about it, I don’t even really crave credit so much as the feedback loop that tells me whether I’m doing anything useful.

I haven’t solved this contradiction, so I still release under the MIT license.

from the way you say this, it seems you confuse cost free with freedom, free software being about the latter, just implying the former.

I was talking about freedom, hence the capitalisation to make that even clearer.

The parent only talked about ‘open source’, which has a huge overlap with Free Software, but the two still have different formal definitions (not to mention the completely different ideas behind them). This still left the (admittedly unlikely) possibility of the software in question being Free (as in freedom), so I felt it worth pointing out it wasn’t that, either. A common way to talk about software which is explicitly both Free and open-source at the same time is to call it Free and Open-Source Software.

I think the confusion is that "even worse" sounds like something meaningful but any license split between those two would be quite a fine hair and people tend to treat them as the same.

I mean, can you name any licenses that are one or the other but not both?

And I explicitly don't mean whether one of OSI or FSF approved a license when the other rejected it, because sometimes they make that decision based on nitpicks and not because of differences in principles.