A Post-Open World
A Post-Open World
Have FOSS licenses outlived their usefulness? Bruce looks at what might come next in the world of free and open source software.
Have FOSS licenses outlived their usefulness? Bruce looks at what might come next in the world of free and open source software.
“Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company’s systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.”
- Open source leader gets redpilled on permissive licenses.> publishes work under a permissive license which explicitly allows converting it into proprietary software without giving any work back to the original developer.
> Big corporation does just that
> open source guy complains about big corporation and says "FOSS licenses have outlived their purpose"Duh! That's why Richard Stallman created the GPL from the start and advocates anyone who wants to further the goal of freedom to use copyleft!
Had everyone used strong copyleft like AGPL or GPLv3+ instead of cuck licenses and the game would be MUCH different with corporations grabing work gratis from open source devs.
This is not an issue with free (as in freedom) software licenses, it is the issue of open source. Open source tries to give freedom to users without ever speaking about freedom, instead marketing the move to open source as a technical advantage. This, as Perens says in the above quote, has not resulted in more freedom for the user. Richard Stallman has been saying for many years that this approach will not work - see the essay “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software” (can be found in Free Software, Free Society, Selected Essays of Richard M.Stallman and probably on gnu.org).
Corporations are more powerful than they've ever been and fewer people have the option to contribute to FOSS. FOSS has also been coopted by corporations (see elastic search, redis, or any crippled product whose FOSS version doesn't do shit and is just used to market to people who think it's important). I don't think FOSS has outlived its usefulness, it's just very difficult to drum up the amount of work it takes to support it on a worldwide scale, but forcing financial support with the contracts mentioned in the article is just a way for corporations to have even more say in how FOSS is developed (or not developed). He mentions several examples of corporations screwing over the FOSS community and he wants more of their influence? It doesn't seem like a great idea to me even if it seems convenient short term.
Bingo.
This is the problem with any kind of forced financial support - it leads to centralized control, and not likely by those who mean well.
As a remedy, Perens proposes that licenses should be replaced by contracts. He envisions that companies pay for the benefits they receive from using FOSS. Compliance for each contract would be checked, renewed, and paid for yearly, and the payments would go towards funding FOSS development. Individuals and nonprofits would continue to use FOSS for free.
One of the people coining the term is more levelheaded and realistic than the average FLOSS community member.
I've actually tried to promote paying for opensource in multiple companies and there has been either silence or responses like "it's free, why should I?" or "I would, if they sold a license". Perens' ideas are actually up to date and I believe we need a license for opensource like the creative commons licenses: free for personal use paid for commercial use. Companies shouldn't be able to make profits from free work without paying back.