Any time someone uses the word "sustainable" in regards to a FOSS project, I know they're buttering up the community as they plan to make the project not FOSS anymore.

In this particular case, it's not as bad as that, as Open WebUI is merely introducing a more onerous version of the BSD advertising clause. BSD 4-clause was considered a FOSS license but, in practice, demanding specific forms of attribution was incredibly problematic, especially in projects with multiple contributors. The attribution clauses in Creative Commons licenses are similarly if not more problematic; to the point where there is a cottage industry of copyleft trolls abusing pre-4.0 licenses as a way to rugpull people and coerce them into massive settlements.

Furthermore, the way this specific attribution requirement is written sounds like a possible future trademark landmine. Like, imagine if Firefox shipped with an attribution requirement that prohibited removing the trademarked Mozilla branding. That would effectively make the project non-FOSS because anyone who wants to use their FOSS rights is in a catch-22. Either you violate copyright and remove the trademarks, or you violate trademark by using your rights under the license in a way that violates trademark policy.

I'm also particularly not fond of the plan to demand CLAs and sell white-label licenses; my personal opinion is that you should almost never sign a CLA for a FOSS contribution. At the very least CLA signers should be getting paid a revenue share of the white-label licensing revenue.

Why does this keep happening? Do people not understand the implications choosing an open source license.in the first place? There are a million licenses, in fact you can just make your own one up! But when you choose a class of license the specifically allows commercial exploitation... you don't get to act wronged when it happens.

I am skeptical that this change meets the Open Source definition. I can understand that they want to experiment with something new, but the OSD includes a non discrimination clause, you cannot restrict or grant different rights in an open source license to different groups. What they should do instead is dual license, with a license that a acheives their goals for the general populace, plus special licenses for specifc groups that allow them to do things the open source license doesnt. I'm not a fan of CLAs like that, but they are requiring a CLA anyway.

> we started seeing a pattern we couldn’t ignore: bad actors taking our work, stripping the branding, selling it as their own, and giving nothing back. That’s not open source—that’s exploitation.

That is Open Source, and “Open Source” has always been the corpo-friendly version of “Free Software”. It's very funny to see so many people pointing out “This doesn't meet the Open Source Definition!!!!” like there's any reason to care. OSI themselves will tell you that “open source” as we know it was a product of AOLTimeWarner's desire to get people to work for them for free: https://opensource.org/history

“The [February 3rd, 1998] conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”

I want philosophically-focused software that puts the rights of human-persons above the desires of corporate-persons. Fuck “Open Source” lol

What really is the moat of openwebui? I have seen at least 4 - 5 react UIs with similar functionality (chat, RAG, document library).