I obviously strongly disagree with this. An FSL licensed project turns into full, undeniable open source after two years.
> Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about it.
Two years isn’t a lifetime. If there is value left the community has full rights to do something with it. No legal worries can stand in that way. You can even rebirth a new company from that if you so desire.
I think I understand why you strongly disagree with the label. Those who call your license "source available" without qualifiers are, from your perspective, committing the noncentral fallacy (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-non...). While your license is technically "source available" according to the Wikipedia definition, it is not a typical example of a "source available" license, which usually doesn't grant additional freedoms over time and doesn't become free-as-in-freedom. I don't really see a fix. The difference between "technically category X" and "typical of category X" is an eternal universal source of bitter conflict. The best advice I can give to people embroiled in one is to care less about "technically category X" if at all possible.
Besides inventing a new label and adding a qualifier like "delayed open source", one admittedly unlikely thing licenses like FSL could try is to "reclaim" "source-available". It doesn't have to mean "a megacorp lets you peek at the code if you agree to not use it for anything interesting". The typical expectations of a source-available license could shift to less onerous and less restrictive.
All the adults in the room realise that "source available" is just an accurate descriptor for what they do, but sentry won't accept anything without the term "open source" in it. They view themselves as open source and the fact that they don't use an open source license is merely an incidental thing they do to deal with some of the challenges of being open source. Instead of admitting their position, they seek to change the definition of open source to match what they are doing.
> The best advice I can give to people embroiled in one is to care less about "technically category X" if at all possible.
I think there is nothing technical about FSL being source available. Open source is about being communally built and communally owned. Everyone contributes and everyone is free to profit. By contrast, this is a license where everyone is free to contribute but only the owner is free to profit. The only difference is that two years after the owner stops profiting, the software opens up to everyone else.
Source available is honestly better for everyone than closed source, and sometimes even better than open source. The only really bad thing you can do is use a source available license while misleading people into thinking you're open source, because you are taking their work under false pretence.
Note that I used "technically" as the opposite of "typically". My suggestion is to care less about being in a category you don't want to be in when you are different from its representative members where it matters to you. (In this case the category is source-available licenses.) Focus your advocacy on how you differ instead of arguing membership. ("Yes, we are a source-available license. Don't let it turn you away. There are critical differences between us and source-available licenses you don't like. We are better than old read-only and new Commons-Clause licenses because..."—not literally this, but that's the idea.)
It is in software development. You don't even deny that the project stays source available while developers care about it.
> If there is value left
So, once you've extracted as much value as you want from something, the community is free to have whatever's left? I think "you can have the scraps" is an excellent summation of that philosophy.
temporary monopolies are a trivial "solution" for the economic incentives problem, but of course it's not not really a great one. discontinuities usually cause their own issues, and even 2 years of vendor-lock-in can do nasty things to an OpEx budget.
