How does ​arachnode.​net consider itself "open source"?

http://www.arachnode.net/">http://www.arachnode.net - It's plastered all over the interwebs, "An open source .NET web crawler written in C# using SQL 2005/2008.

But yet, you need to purchase a commercial license for each machine it's installed on.

Do I have a complete lack of understanding of what open source means, or is this not open sourced?

AN is licensed per machine, not per user, so one Commercial License is required to implement the service to your users, and one Development License is required to develop your software, assuming that you are not developing a live application on the production server.

The Development license is limited to 10 Crawl threads, whereas the Commercial license does not impose this limitation.

Send me a private message with your country of origin for international pricing.

The license is paid only once.

Thanks,
Mike

Open Source means the source code is provided. This may or may not coincide with the varying definitions of 'free'

@AndyC: I see. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

The following entry from wikipedia confused me I guess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

Computer software

Open source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.^[19] Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Examples of open-source software products are:^[20]

Programming language

• PHP - Scripting language suited for the web

2 minutes ago, AndyC wrote

Open Source means the source code is provided. This may or may not coincide with the varying definitions of 'free'

No, that'd be "shared source".

I spent some time on their website trying to find information on licensing, and found this thread buried on their forums. Going by what the responses read I'm having a hard time classifying this as "open source" according to any of the OSI's definitions.

Interestingly, Arachnode uses Lucene.NET which is available under Apache 2.0 (similar to the BSD license), which is unfortunate, because I was hoping they'd get stung using a Copyleft license. Ah well.

That said, I think it's pretty galling of Arachnode to charge for this considering most of the 'hard work' is done by freely available libraries already (it says it uses HtmlAgilityPack, Lucene, and of course .NET's BCL). If your time was worth less than the $500-per-computer licensing price then you could probably write your own crawler that suits your doman-specific application within a few days.

@W3bbo: Revisionism in action.

Shared source = License Holders can view, but not modify source

Open Source = License Holders have the source and can view/modify it as needed, but don't necessarily have the right to grant a license to third parties.

OSI/FSF "Open Source/Free Software" = As above but with an inherent requirement that source can be automatically licensed by third parties without incurring any licensing fees.

Notably the OSI/FSF definition keeps subtly changing in this direction of "Free beer, not just free speech" whilst subtly pretending that they aren't. Even the GPL still carries the vague claim that you could sell GPL software (although that has always be subtly undermined by various subclauses), which would make it a non-OSI compliant license. 

@AndyC:

From the thread on their site that W3bbo posted...

Finally, every implementation of arachnode.net that you place on your servers 

or customer servers requires a separate license.

..

is licensed per machine, not per user, so one Commercial License is required 

to implement the service to your users, and one Development License is required 

to develop your software, assuming that you are not developing a live application 

on the production server.

So what If I don't deploy it until after I am done "developing" it? Do I still need 2 licenses?

Presumably no, if you assume you'll never want to further "develop" it.

I would develop it. I am just too lazy to write my own polished crawler. That's really all I want, I already have my lucene indexing coded up, so that part is worthless to me. And I can easily design my own better (+ MVC3) search page than what he is selling. Meh. I'm bitter, that site left a bad taste in my mouth.