- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.
He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they’d fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that’s usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.
It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.
What are your thoughts on it?
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So, basically the opposite of BSD3 license
Yeah pretty much
Great, let’s inject more capitalism!
Seems like you need to inject more reading comprehension.
I think that the RHEL example is out-of-place, since IBM (“Red Hat”) is clearly exploiting a loophole of the GNU Public License. Similar loopholes have been later addressed by e.g. the AGPL and the GPLv3*, so I expect this one to be addressed too.
So perhaps, if the GPL is “not enough”, the solution might be more GPL.
*note that the license used by the kernel is GPLv2. Cue to Android (for all intents and purposes non-free software) using the kernel, but not the rest.
What loophole? I think they’re just blatantly violating it
They’re still providing the code for people who buy the compiled software. And they are not restricting their ability to redistribute that code. So it’s still compliant with the GPL in the letter. However, if you redistribute it, they’ll refuse to service you further versions of the software.
It’s clearly a loophole because they can argue “ackshyually, we didn’t restrict you, we just don’t want further businesses with you, see ya sucker”.
Is there a court case about this already? Because that’s clearly not the intention of the GPL.
I don’t think that there is one yet, otherwise it would get famous. Not sure though.
Enshittification continues
Open source is just another commons, and companies have a way of uncontrollably exploiting common resources until they collapse.
In the case of open source, it’s healthy in the sense that money is flowing, we have companies sponsoring projects, tons of code is available for inspection and reuse, etc. Very nice. But if you go back to the original concepts of free software, in many cases we struggle with actually exercising the four freedoms. Red Hat has engineered an EULA that basically lets them ban practices that had been thought protected by the GPL for at least a generation, and so on and so forth. So is the open source community healthy or dying? Doesn’t the answer to that depend on your priorities?
I think it would make a lot of sense to try to create an economic model that can fund open source software development without relying on corporate injections of cash. It’s not that they don’t pay for it ever, they just pay for it to the bare minimum extent. IE, the heartbleed fiasco – tons of companies were freeloading off one guy and like half the Internet’s security got fucked for it. Imagine if OpenSSL had had some kind of economic support structure in place to allow for, uh, more than one guy to manage the encryption library for like half the Internet before something insanely stupid and predictable like that happened. Well, we can never have that with corporate-controlled open source.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which in June, under IBM’s ownership, stopped making its source code available as required under the GPL.
Pointing to popular applications from Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Perens says: "A lot of the software is oriented toward the customer being the product – they’re certainly surveilled a great deal, and in some cases are actually abused.
The reason that doesn’t often happen today, says Perens, is that open source developers tend to write code for themselves and those who are similarly adept with technology.
Perens acknowledges that a lot of stumbling blocks need to be overcome, like finding an acceptable entity to handle the measurements and distribution of funds.
Asked whether the adoption of non-Open Source licenses, by the likes of HashiCorp, Elastic, Neo4j, and MongoDB, represent a viable way forward, Perens says new thinking is needed.
Perens doesn’t think the AGPL or various non-Open Source licenses focus on the right issue in the context of cloud companies.
The original article contains 1,837 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I agree. Either use a business source license like Elastic and others, or fight for the installation of a third party that audits proprietary code for license use and sues if the rules haven’t been followed. It’s why I like the creative commons. They are quite realistic. Most of their licenses say: if you use this commercially, you have to pay. If not, then it’s free.
People who claim business source licenses are “not opensource” sound like such capitalist shills to me. It’s as if they’re shouting from the rooftops “it’s OK to fuck over opensource developers because principles matter more than reality”.
business source license
This is nonsense, Business source is not a free license. It is useless to try to invent new and clever licenses if they don’t even follow the basic standards for Free software. The solution to helping hackers/devs in their work is not to suddenly reinvent proprietary licenses.
You might be discouraged to know that CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 is a non-free/proprietary license since it restricts commercial use.
There is no crude “fucking over.” Creating software is a difficult task, and creating software that respects the user’s freedom means giving up the temptation to use your abilities for harm and personal benefit.
Fuck no. A small business that is struggling to survive should be able to use WordPress for their website and Linux for their laptops without paying
The fee could be really small but scale depending on factors like business size. Or there could be no fee outright for businesses smaller than a certain size.
That still sounds like a lot of confusion for small companies. especially given most FOSS is provided as-is without any legal consultant avaliable.
It’s also against the very idea of software freedoms in the first place. This is just reinventing proprietary licenses.
I mean just license it as such right? You can’t say it’s completely free for anyone to use then complain you aren’t getting paid.
Well the question is, how would such a license look like? Or would it be a contract and not a license?
I guess I should ask a lawyer these questions, but I wanted to see what others here thought about the idea.
TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use
You need to read the article yourself before writing TLDR. Spoiler: it is not about payments, it is about source code availability.
If you had also read the article BTW you would have realized that spoilers: it’s not about source code availability.
You saw the first few paragraphs about the Red Hat drama and didn’t read further.
Reading the whole thing you’d realize it’s a list of reasons why open source software hasn’t become popular with the wider public, and his proposed solution to this.
I just included the idea he is proposing, others can read the article to see his reasoning.
Companies should be required to pay if they take the software, modify or fork it, and then sell it to others. That’s the only case in which I think anyone should be paying for libre software.
For example, the linux kernel is used by android. Google modifies the kernel source and sells it to phone manufacturers. Linus Torvalds (and the rest of all kernel devs) deserve a stipend for the use of their work to generate profit. Also, the modifications should be legally required to be open sourced if they don’t pay.
If companies are required to pay, then the software is not libre. I understand your intent, but this isn’t a solution (even if it was, it would just mean that it would just be a tax for small companies, Meta and Alphabet aren’t worrying about a tax), building a stronger community is.
Commercial software is not mutually exclusive with libre software, and things like copyleft exist to prevent companies from using libre software to create proprietary software.
The ability to modify the code is a central tenet of free software. The GPL takes care of making those modifications available to others. That effectively is the payment the original devs get.
Doesn’t make sense at all.
I keep seeing Redhat used an example, but they contribute a HUGE amount a source code and projects… Pipewire, systemd, rpm, DBUS and even the main XML addon for VSCode, etc.
I don’t think people realise how much poop linux would be swimming in if they went bankrupt…
Redhat are literally one of the big reasons why Linux is so seamless these days, and they’re solving a lot of the big problems. And from my understanding, they still contribute the code seperately anyway.
That being said, I agree money needs to go towards developers. However, a lot of them end up hired at major companies. And I don’t think this is the way to approach it
“Post-Open Source”
Overly-teleological modernist framing has hopelessly fucked up tech discourse. Too much declaring things the future and hoping people will just believe you.
people are always going to be floating ways to save capitalism in the face of communities privileging freedom over greed.
this completely misses the point of free software, and fails to solve the problems Mr. Perens identifies with Open Source. He claims it fails to serve the “common person” (end users) and then proposes a solution that serves… only devs.
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… Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.
All these problems are already solved by free software. the rebranding of “open source” was a compromise on the principles of free software to make the movement palatable to profit-seekers. In the end, it predictably failed to improve anything. The solution isn’t to reinvent the wheel, it’s to stop making the wheel square because the square lobby insists they’ll only use it if it’s square. The solution is copyleft, and free software being used more than it’s defanged cousin.
The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest
That’s a feature, not a bug. On one hand, if people knew about free software they wouldn’t be as good consumers. On the other hand, internals should be opaque to users; just as devs don’t want to have to know how the logic gates in the CPU are routing their code to write code, end users shouldn’t have to worry about the politics of the communities that developed their code.
These are my thoughts regarding FOSS for a long time. The sense of facilitating the development and freedom of the project has been distorted years ago, when large corporations put their hands on this project, controlling it. Just look at the amount of “OpenSource” soft and services controlled by Google, M$, Amazon, FB … Yes, they are free to distribute and modifiable by devs, but mostly full of APIs from these corporations, not controllable by the user, subtracting their sovereignty and only modifiable with effort by people capable of understanding the scripts and redirects they contain. For a normal user it is increasingly irrelevant whether the project is FOSS or proprietary, while these products and the internet in general are in the hands of these companies.
A simple question is enough, which one do you prefer to use? FOSS projects from large corporations, or Freeware from small independent startups, if you don’t have the knowledge to review the script anyway, almost impossible in millions of lines, with external references from large apps and services? It becomes decisions of mere trust, perhaps with the help of external services, such as WebKoll, Blacklight, Unfurl and similar, where in the end the license that the product has is irrelevant, with respect to security and privacy, often in question or not, in some like others. In the end only the intentions and ethics of the developer matter.
Yes, of course, the concept of OSS, FOSS and FLOSS requires a profound review and update, so that it does not become a destroyer of what it aims to protect and promote, a free internet.
Most of these problems are literally just capitalism. This solution is just a band aid, and even then is unlikely to be implemented in a way that will help the problem.
