On the BitFlux blog today, there's a new post with a subject that's becoming more and more of an issue with the online community and the popularity of open source software - When is open source really Open Source?.

There's a new Swiss CMS on the market (or at least I only lately heard about it), called Contrexx. They claim to be Open Source all over the website. But if you look closer, although you can download the source code for free, you're not allowed to build commercial (like company) websites with it. If you want to do that, you need a commercial license, which is not really cheap for such a system (IMHO). Here's the actual Open Source license in German only.

He goes on to state that he doesn't have a problem with them making some money off of it (their business model and all), but the issue is that it's not really "open source" in the traditional definition - and he feels it's "cheating". I've seen more and more companies doing this with their software. They open the source to the community because they want the innovations and updates that can come with more eyes looking at the same code, but they want to reap all of the financial benefits themselves.

Sort of destroys the "open source" world that so many developers are working hard to create...