I want my worst enemies to be able to use my open source code against me and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business. When I want to write code with different restrictions, I do that and I don't call it open source.
If people want to create and promote their own utopian models that's their business. Personally I'd want nothing to do with that, and it definitely should not be called open source, just like any restrictive license.
On another note, a transaction is a meeting of the minds. When most people release open source software they want nothing in return and are owed nothing. That's how I feel about it. People who think they are owed something are like beggars who do miming or some such in the street and call it work. Nobody asked for it, some find it interesting and you might be able to guilt someone into paying but they didn't hire you and don't owe you anything. You can just not do it, it's only a job if you're explicitly hired.
Maybe open source means different things to different people?
To me, open source isn't a transaction (even one with "nothing owed" as it were), as much as a community. What I get from participating in open source is to be a part of that community. You just don't get the same interactions working on a closed-source, proprietary code, no matter how deep and rigorous your process is. Ironically, I have stronger bonds with some of my collaborators at other companies/institutions than I do in my own, and that's all thanks to open source.
The fact that some of these open source communities happen to have built world-class software that is used by FAANGs and Fortune 500 companies is cool and a testament to the power of this process. But it's also sort of tangential. And I think we're missing something when we reduce open source down to the licenses and code transfer, as if that's all it is.
>Maybe open source means different things to different people?
Sure, but when there's a widely accepted definition and you aren't making efforts to clearly distinguish your usage of the term from the common usage, then you're just trying to take advantage of all of the linguist context and baggage associated with the common meaning while actually meaning something completely different.
In other words, you want the goodwill that comes from being open source without any of the responsibility and obligation.
I also generally feel like most of the really substantial open-source projects are able to get a good amount of donations and corporate sponsors. People DO pay, when the thing you're creating (an operating system, a programming language, a database) is complex and business-critical.
But nowadays it seems like everyone who creates a JavaScript package that concats two strings together, wants to be able to quit their day job and live on donations. It's just not realistic.
Your feelings don't match reality. Very few people are earning good wages by building open-source software, even though there is no shortage of important projects. Most money being made is from side-hustles, which are jobs in of themselves.
A better question is which projects are actually paying all or most of their major contributors industry rates based on donations? It seems like the word "important" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. I bet even for the projects you have in mind that most contributors never receive a cent, and the major contributors have only received compensation for a fraction of their work if calculated at industry rates. A quick look at open collective should show you how little money there is to be made in open-sourcing code in of itself.
That clarifies the disconnect. I never claimed that open-source development pays "all or most of their major contributors industry rates". I said "most of the really substantial open-source projects are able to get a good amount of donations and corporate sponsors."
You seem to have misunderstood "good" to mean "everyone involved in the project will make equivalent to what they could have made working the same number of hours in Silicon Valley". When really all I meant was that the founder, and maybe sometimes a small group adjacent, can afford to spend all or at least part of their time maintaining and steering the project. If that's your argument, then you and I are in agreement.
Another commenter in this thread said it best - Open Source is a community. People participate in it because they enjoy doing so, not to get rich. If I can do something I enjoy, on my own schedule, entirely freed from corporate interests, and get rent money for it, I would certainly call that "good".
I am ( sort of ) surprised this is top voted comment. But for most of the time,
>and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business..... When most people release open source software they want nothing in return and are owed nothing. That's how I feel about it.
That was not what Open Source was about on HN. Since that would exclude GPL, and APGL. And there were even hint of movement that BSD and MIT would not be considered as Open Source. And any license that does not form and benefits the communities does not fit into the definition of Open Source.
Somewhat fortunately, that seems to have die down a bit. And judging by upvote on your post I guess there are still the silent majority that agrees with you.
> When most people release open source software they want nothing in return and are owed nothing.
sort of depends on the license.
GPL software is usually released to the benefit of the user, but the author passes on responsibility so that the rights are preserved when it is redistributed.
Isn't the whole point of the "open source" label avoiding all the idealism and business-spooking potential that comes with "free software" label? Of course that also includes some of the things you're talking about.
I also want more open-source code to exist, and that's why I want modifications of my code to also be open-source, at least to whoever is using those modifications.
> should not be called open source, just like any restrictive license
are you saying that licenses that guarantee users' permission to see the source code even if it's reused are "open source" licenses, and whereas licenses that allow code to be reused and distributed without allowing users to see that source are restrictive and not open source? I agree.
Your description of open source sounds like Public Domain. Take it or leave it, do whatever, as is.
I personally don’t think an environment where nobody owes anybody anything is conductive to building great software. When every individual is encouraged to optimize for their own benefit (max selfishness) you don’t get the best outcomes for society.
sure, but an entrepreneurial effort is one that is done without requirement of reward but expectation of being able to derive reward.
It seems a lot of what is called open source is done under an entrepreneurial model, the same as much writing, mimes on the street, or a million other things.
"People who think they are owed something are _like_ beggars who do miming or some such in the street and call it work. Nobody asked for it, some find it interesting and you might be able to guilt someone into paying but they didn't hire you and don't owe you anything. You can just not do it, it's only a job if you're explicitly hired."
NB. This statement is not suggesting anyone is a beggar. It is suggesting people can behave _like_ beggars by doing "work" without being hired.
This is what so-called "tech" companies do. They create websites not because they have something to share but to observe traffic and web user behaviour, to collect data, and to act as an unrequested intermediary. They have no content that they themselves have produced. They get in front of and in between people trying to do stuff over the internet. "Let me help you with that." But nobody asked for it. Sometimes HN commenters try to guilt people into paying for "subscriptions" from an intermediary in order to view publicly shared content.
These companies never intended to pay anyone for content. Facebook/Meta and Google/Alphabet have been reluctant to pay for news. When new organisations asked for payment, HN commenters called this "blackmail." Then Elon Musk accused corporations of "blackmail" when they decided not to run ads on Twitter/X. Even the venerable volunteer-powered Wikipedia keeps asking for donations when its costs have been met and its employees are taking six figure "salaries". Today we learned that after lengthy negotiations OpenAI did not want to pay the NYT for their content. And so, the NYT has sued.
> I want my worst enemies to be able to use my open source code against me and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business.
Even when it's the ten trillion dollar combined market cap of FAANG (or whatever we call them now)?
Because that's not open source. That's free labor suicide.
Not the OP you're replying to, but yes, if I choose to open-source my intellectual property, then I definitely expect FAANGs to be able to use it for free. That's what I want when I license my code open-source or public-domain. I'm allowed to give my labor away for free, and I choose to do so.
By the standard definition, "open source" doesn't exclude FAANG companies from using it in those ways.
You'd need to provide and justify some alternative definition of what open source should be to make your final claim make any sense. As it stands, your claim "that's not open source" doesn't match the reality.
What is it that you want to know? The point is that in a society with a more socialist or communist approach, "ownership" of software can work entirely differently.
What the FSF calls "free software" and what OSI calls "open source" are essentially mechanisms for implementing such approaches in a capitalist context, in which the abstraction of "intellectual property" is enshrined in law.
I want to know how a socialist or communist approach can produce a viable open source ecosystem, and I want to learn about it by studying the actual results of an existing system, not the whim of theory.
If you want to make progress and improve things, but you limit yourself only to things that have existing examples, you're absolutely guaranteeing that you can only go backwards.
The act of defining limits on language associations is putting obligations on others.
No one cares to help you define or realize your semantic utopia either.
Language associations will always be mutable; that’s my utopia. You can pound sand trying to demand others speech be constrained by your sensibilities.
Exist in a religious-like state of biology where your mental model is essential, some kind of immutable linked list? No thanks.
Edit: note I made the same argument in different language. So much for the OPs premise holding water. People do care how others label things and the aggregate will make OP beholden to that. Good luck living your bespoke utopia OP.
He laments that users "don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest", but wasn't this the point of Open Source as compared to Free Software, to refocus the messaging from the user's freedoms to the economic benefit for companies?
The Free Software Definition mentions "user" 22 times and "freedom" 79 times, whereas the Open Source Definition has zero occurrences of these terms. It doesn't seem surprising that the user freedom message isn't getting through if you completely scrub it from the messaging.
Agreed. And if BP really wants to change this, he needs to focus on Free Software as a starting point, not Open Source. He complains about RedHat/IBM circumventing the GPL but completely missing the fact that the "more permissive" open source licenses actually condone such behavior. They would even allow IBM to not provide source to their own customers, nevermind prohibiting redistribution.
IMHO the biggest threat to Free Software is the proliferation of open source software. And so the biggest threat to all the open source users/lovers is their own lack of a meaningful philosophy on licensing.
> This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.
I think it would be clearer to say that the greatest threat to free software is the proliferation of non-copyleft free software which can be closed down if a company so wishes.
> the greatest threat to free software is the proliferation of non-copyleft free software which can be closed down if a company so wishes.
That's BS. First of all, companies have closed down GPL projects, because founding companies require copyright assignments on contributions.
Even the FSF does it, with the purpose of being able to change software to newer versions of the GPL, or to be able to sue for copyright infringement. And in the US at least, it's better if one entity is the copyright owner. But the issue remains thay the FSF could turn most of its GNU software proprietary.
The other reason for why it's BS is that it doesn't actually match reality. See LLVM vs GCC.
The biggest danger is companies releasing software with source-available, under proprietary licenses, using the Free Software / Open Source label for marketing purposes, diluting the meaning, which is otherwise well defined.
Like for example MongoDB and Elasticsearch, which grew due to being FOSS, then switched. And the license doesn't matter if the company has the right to switch, given they own the copyright.
I also predict this message will get "But Amazon" replies. Well, that's what FOSS is. Yes, it does grant Amazon the right to make money off your work. If you don't like it, then don't build FOSS, only to pull a bait and switch. FOSS is a terrible business model, because once a project is FOSS, it becomes part of the commons, and that's by design.
>> But the issue remains thay the FSF could turn most of its GNU software proprietary.
This is a good point. CLAs are bad because they are designed to allow a license change. The only organisation I would be likely to contribute under a CLA is the FSF, but that's mainly because RMS is still there and I know he won't pull the rug.
I remember rms saying that GPL software places no restrictions on how the software can be USED. It just means that the benefit goes to the users of the software.
Yeah, definitely. I just think it's worth noting that both organizations approve of basically the same list of licenses, and that even the FSF occasionally recommends using a permissive license depending on circumstance.
I do not understand bruces concern, maybe someone can make it clear to me.
The source IS made available to software. The license clearly says you must make it availble in the same method you get the binaries, which is what is happening here.
The GPL also guarantees the right to redistribute the software and sources you received. This is the part that IBM/RedHat are essentially circumventing, by canceling your access to new patches and versions of RHEL if you chose to exercise this right. This may be legal, but it certainly goes against the intent and spirit of the GPL, as Stallman himself has said.
> The GPL also guarantees the right to redistribute the software and sources you
> received
Right, so one receives software 'as a customer', does Red Hat have a requirement to provide you with source code going forward for infinity at no cost ? I don't know what reasonable is here but I do think that there are limits, it turns out that both ALMA and rocky somehow both work around this, I wonder how ?
Btw, I just checked that I can get access to the source of every package with my redhat.com account, however I do have a 'free developer subscription' so maybe that gives me/them access. Looks like there is still ways to access source.
As I said, the letter of the GPL is probably being respected.
But the spirit of the GPL was very much to be able do what old CentOS did: copy the latest version of RHEL that you were given access to and distribute it to others.
Paying RedHat once shouldn't give access to all of the code they will forever release from now on. But, if you want to keep paying, RedHat should keep taking your money and giving you the new code. They should not punish you for exercising your GPL rights by refusing to do business with you.
And Rocky are doing things that very clearly go against RedHat's wishes and will likely be stopped further down the line. They are "exploiting" the fact that RHEL for containers is released publically, not through a developer subscription, and that of course they are forced to give you the source code if they delivered a container to you. I'm fully expecting RedHat to close this "loophole" down.
I believe Alma Linux has taken a different approach and is no longer promising bug-for-bug compatibility with the latest RHEL. They are planning to start maintaining the RHEL code themselves, and take new patches from RedHat's CentOS Stream to try to match RHEL as closely as possible, if I recall correctly.
> They should not punish you for exercising your GPL rights by refusing to do business with you.
Maybe, but the GPL explicitly permits this by only requiring source to be distributed to those who receive the software.
If, instead, the GPL stated that source must be available to everybody when software is distributed to anyone, we maybe wouldn't have this RHEL situation? What would we lose if that were the case?
The GPL also explicitly forbids you from imposing any additional restrictions on the rights to redistribute the code you provide.
I think the main reason the requirement to publish the sources is limited to the person who receives the binary is simply practical. For one, there is basically no way to sue as a third party to a contract - even if the contract required you to publish all of your code openly, someone who didn't receive the binary can't really have standing to sue if you just don't publish it. Also, at the time the GPL was created, sending source code carried some measurable cost, so making it public would have been at least mildly expensive.
Yeah, I struggle with this conceptually. Projects like Kubernetes cannot be developed without corporations investing their engineers time. For that, they want a say in direction - maybe more fairly put, they want their problems and objectives on the table whether it benefits the project or not. Just reading the top 10 contributors to Kubernetes:
- Google
- Microsoft
- AWS
- Databricks
Most all of these companies have at one point or another coopted a project, sucked its life blood dry for their own means, and abandoned it. It's a weird, toxic relationship that we accept as normal because some projects can't do without corporate engineer time and money.
FOSS is kind of a different ballgame though. When I think of FOSS I think of my AppStore on PopOS; the apps there are sophisticated and useable, but if I'm being honest they're rarely "the best" at what they do. There's never been a FOSS CAD software that rivals proprietary alternatives, the email clients are lackluster at best, even IRC tends to take a back seat. That isn't to say the apps are bad, they're just not going to be "the best" usually.
Ideally we'd have a single license that encourages corporate use, adoption, and contribution but doesn't encourage them to coopt a project by injecting their engineers and interests into the management of said projects. Ideally there'd be a way for corporate interests to make money reselling software while also paying back, in proportion, to the project. That all seems like a very complicated balancing act.
To be fair, "lackluster at best" describes every email client ever made, proprietary or otherwise (though proprietary ones are better at hiding this under a shiny veneer).
Meanwhile, Kubernetes is probably a bad example, because nobody but large companies need Kubernetes, in the same way that we do not lament that people cannot build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in their garage.
FOSS offerings are almost always worse than their commercial competitors because of one obvious thing: people (that includes software engineers) need to eat and have shelter, and for 99.9% of us that means working for a living. Companies pay people to work on products that other people buy, ideally at a profit for the company. FOSS creators are rarely compensated meaningfully compared to the effort put in. The natural consequence of this is that most good engineers are not going to put much, if any, time in developing FOSS applications. The natural consequence of that is that these offerings aren't going to be as good.
In order to build a good email client application, you need more than just software engineers. You need product managers, designers, usability experts, internationalization experts, accessibility experts, tech writers, manual testers, etc. For whatever reason people with those skills tend to be less willing to contribute free labor to FOSS applications than software engineers.
That's a great point, too. Software applications are more than the code in them. All those other folks are required to make an application good. I think the "whatever reason" for these people is the same as for the engineers, though: they gotta pay rent, and working for free doesn't do that.
- Thunderbird is probably the best e-mail client around
- Blender is one of the best options for 3D rendering
- Linux is the best kernel around
- Firefox is for many the best browser you can find
There are several examples of OSS being best in class, it's just not the best in every class (yet, at least).
I don't know much about Blender, but the other two, at least, have had substantial contributions by paid engineers (at big, well-known corporations), and likely input from non-engineers (e.g. product staff). They're exceptions to the rule of (F)OSS.
He laments that users "don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest", but wasn't this the point of Open Source as compared to Free Software
so not only is this problem not new, but also at least bruce perens has been aware of it all this time.
but what is happening today probably would have happened without the promotion of open source as well. so i agree, that it is time to act. GPLv4 anyone?
> is that 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.
This most certainly wouldn't have happened if "open source realism" didn't stood against free software "utopian" idealists. I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it?
Lastly, isn't redhat an enthusiastic supporter of open source ? The domain https://opensource.com/ is literally copyrighted and supported by redhat...
Open source supporters were celebrating Google's use of the Linux kernel in Android, hoping that this would promote it's usage. Android is now a Frankenstein spyware monster that uses mostly proprietary software.
I don't think that, say, Lineage or Calyx share the same privacy concerns as Google's android variant, or the myriad vendors' proprietary forks.
Of course, if most of Android were GPL instead of Apache, the lockin wouldn't be possible.
If you're referring to locked bootloaders and not being able to use the GPL kernel due to that, that was a defect in GPLv2 that was fixed in GPLv3 (that and software patents). TiVo was the one that induced that change, and the term was "tivoization."
“Open source” is free labor for SaaS companies, while the insistence on liberal free (as in beer) licenses makes it almost impossible to build a software business in any other way by flooding the market.
SaaS is the least free model for software. You have no privacy, no control, and in most cases can’t even export your data.
Thus open source actually minimizes freedom in practice, at least for everyone other than developers.
Note that it's specifically liberal licenses - the stuff powering SaaS tends to be Apache-, MIT or similar licensed. Most of the big SaaS vendors won't touch GPL code, much less AGPL.
I’ve seen this for years but so far it’s been hard to get others to see it. It requires holistic “systems thinking.” You have to go beyond the letter and the intent of the license or the open source movement and look at the overall effect it has on the incentive structure of the market.
It’s extremely common for well intentioned policies and movements to have perverse effects that aren’t anticipated because the effect emerges from the whole system rather than from any single part in isolation.
The effect of a thing is pretty much unrelated to its intent, hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The root problem is that humans are awful at understanding how a policy will manifest when embedded in a complex system.
I think this is also why every attempt at central planning a whole society ultimately fails.
I'm not convinced. The moment software could be released half baked, then patched later, the door for subscription pricing was open. Then the browser growing into an application platform moved things onto the server where it was easier to update things.
FOSS may have accelerated things slightly, yet the mediocre quality and incompleteness held back its impact for a long time. Server side those deficiencies were less visible and could be addressed more gradually. Ultimately I think SAAS was inevitable as everything shifted online. Now even single-player, closed source games require an Internet connection.
Yeah this is the elephant in the room. Running a powerful, centralized web service that gets accessed by many users on many different clients with everything synchronized and patched and updated in one place is such a better model than self-hosted for so many software use cases.
Sure if not taking privacy ("is my data being sold to competitors and anyone who pays? Will it leak to the web?") and strategic vision ("will this critical dependency be shutdown tomorrow") into consideration.
Unfortunately, the Affero changes to the GPL render it a nonfree license.
Free software licenses all have one thing in common: they speak only to redistribution, not to use. To use a free program, you only have to agree to the disclaimer (that if something goes wrong, it is at your own risk).
AGPL prohibits you from running a modified version of the program, if its functionality is publicly accessible, unless you release the modifications. That makes it an EULA.
No free software license requires you to release your modifications if the program is not redistributed.
The problem of siloed saas applications infringing on user freedoms cannot be attacked using copyright, without resorting to non-free licensing, which is an unacceptable.
Note that not everyone agrees that the GPL is a free license, in the first place. Software is maximally free if you can do anything with it you want, including incorporating it into proprietary software.
Many FOSS developers skip copyleft licenses and use MIT, BSD and such, myself included.
I can swallow the idea that GPLed software is free, but AGPL is out of the question.
It's not just scrubbed from the messaging: the actual goals are rather different. Stallman and the FSF were somewhere between indifferent to openly hostile to the goals of businesses while the "open source" wing was very much interested in making money and collaborating with others who wanted to make money.
Because when people ask them questions like “but how can my business operate with the strictures placed on them by your extreme vision of software rights?” his response is “too bad.”
I am a big fan of capitalism but it does have a tendency to drive out human discourse, as in this case, when companies think there is money to be made.
I think open source came first, though it wasn't thought of as such at the time. Sharing the source was just what some folks did. A company locking down the source to a printer was one if the reasons Stallmann decided to make the GPL.
"I noticed this because I had the good fortune in
the 1970's to be part of a community of programmers who shared software.
Now, this community could trace its ancestry essentially back to the
beginning of computing."
[...]
"And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy
of that software [for the broken printer]. So I was visiting there later, so I went to his
office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer
source code?" And he said "No, I promised not to give you a
copy." [Laughter] I was stunned. I was so -- I was angry, and I had no
idea how I could do justice to it. All I could think of was to turn
around on my heel and walk out of his room. Maybe I slammed the door.
[Laughter] And I thought about it later on, because I realized that I was
seeing not just an isolated jerk, but a social phenomenon that was
important and affected a lot of people."
IMO, the SSPL solves this. If you only use/develop FOSS stuff as RMS intended, you can use SSPL without an issue. Don't use or develop FOSS everywhere? Pay for a separate license. It's unfortunate that OSI and friends are OK with the AGPL but not the SSPL, and IMO shows that they think the status quo is OK when clearly it's sustainable for FOSS creators.
The SSPL is notable in that it effectively forbids hosting the software to be used by other people.
To comply you must provide 'the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service'
A plain reading of this means that for a standard web app you would need to release not just the application code, but also code for the web server you are using, the os you are using, its drivers, device firmware, the os/firmware for your routers, your deployment stack, and probably more I'm missing. You better not trigger a deployment from a Windows computer using Chrome!
Even if I'm using open-source stuff for all of that it would need to have licenses compatible with SSPL such that I can relicense and release them all under the SSPL. I believe GPL is incompatible so that counts out most software I would use to host a webapp.
To me it seems like a fundamentally unreasonable license because for all practical purposes it is entirely impossible to comply with section 13.
Red Hat has not fucking stopped making its source available. It's making it difficult for non-customers to get the source, and that is within their right. The GPL family of licenses do not state that (1) you're obliged to redistribute anything to anyone; or that (2) if you redistribute binaries to Party A, you're obliged to redistribute sources to Party B (let alone the entire public).
Red Hat's behavior is not any kind of loophole in FOSS licensing that's worth worrying about. It's just a shenanigan they are pulling because they think it will help them stay paid.
The loopholes worth fussing about are SaaS (peple having absolutely no control over the software because they are using someone else's installation remotely) and tivoization (locked down hardware preventing users from exercising their rights in regard to the FOSS operating system it runs)
It's correct that the GPL does not require RH to distribute the source code to anyone but their customers. That's not the issue though! The issue is that if I, as a RH customer, execute the rights given to me by RH via the GPL and pass the sources to a third party, RH will terminate my customer contract. The license does not proscribe this in letter but it seems to go against its spirit.
Although RH terminates the contract, they cannot stop you from using and redistributing what you got out of them, or even creating your own fork of RH.
They don't want to pay their engineers to work on Red Hat only to have some free forks follow the work, so they came up with the idea of eliminating and likely blacklisting customers who look like are there just to pick up changes for a fork.
Red Hat should be applauded for trying to find a business model which is compatible with copyleft, yet prevents freeloading.
Stallman never wanted to create a license that was anti-business, that's why this kind of thing is possible. A license which says you cannot drop or blacklist customers for any reason wouldn't be a free license.
There is an abundance of distros out there; anyone who doesn't like Red Hat for any reason can easily use something else.
It will be interesting to see whether Red Hat's ploy works out in the long run. Will it help grow their business, or will it turn out to be detrimental due to a backlash effect. Obviously, some people don't like it; it's a question of are there enough of them to matter.
There is also the question of whether a free fork of Red Hat that people can develop and test with without becoming paying Red Hat customers really is bad for Red Hat (as they are obviously convinced) or whether it is actually good.
> you cannot drop or blacklist customers for any reason
Trade law in Europe works like exactly that: you do not get to choose your clients; you either have to serve anyone that is willing to pay, or no one at all. The US should definitely adopt this principle.
Are there any limits to that principle? What if a particular customer openly advocates for, let's say, the destruction of the state of Israel? Should a business be required to serve that customer?
If literally true as you have written it up, it's pretty stupid; e.g. a brick-and-mortar store should be able to ban someone who shoplifts, or harasses staff or customers.
> a brick-and-mortar store should be able to ban someone who shoplifts
I don't even like this. Shoplifters should all go to prison, but once they've paid their debt to society and been rehabilitated, they should be allowed to do everything that law-abiding citizens can do, including going back as a legitimate customer to stores that they previously stole from.
The idea that someone can compel a company to keep doing business with them after the vendor decided they don’t want to anymore and hold no contractual obligation to continue doing business with the customer is hilarious. This is the equivalent of people getting the Car Dealer Chatbot to sell them a Tesla for $1.
Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives to Red Hat. They don't have much in the way of really unique IP. Many successful companies run Linux without a single Red Hat license.
in 1997/1998 I ran into GCC C++ bugs. the (for money) cygnus release had them fixed about a year before you got the fixes on ftp or public mailing lists or news groups.
I was a student with no income and I couldn't afford the pro version of the "free" compiler.
If you'd like to see Bruce Perens' presentation from 2021 about post-open source licensing, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRl-it1-ruI&t=470s . The title is misleading; the latter half of the video discusses licensing.
Lol, ok, maybe they are not working for you and some non- negligible amount of people, but this should not be generalized neither as "our" licences nor as "not working anymore". There are plenty of software I use for which GPLv3 works like a charm. E.g I loved how Apple ditched bash as the default shell because of GPL.[1]
What I like (or at least what I read here) is the acknowledgement of Stallman and the GPL as generally a success, in terms of analyzing the lay of the land, setting up a particular legal framework and letting it do its thing -- noting that "its thing" was never complete and total open source domination (which is probably an impossible and silly goal) and instead just trying hard to ensure a baseline-slash-practicable idea.
The parts of this complaining about the usability of open source software are filled with such irony.
I don’t think paying developers is going to help this particular problem. For starters, we can stop referring to non developers as “common people”. Many are experts, including technical experts, in other areas.
Second, to make software with great usability, we need to pay some of those other experts to help. Designers, user researchers, and also the users of software of a given domain. None of that has anything to do with software licenses.
Generally agree with the interview subject's topic, although obviously don't know the specifics (which is pretty much where all legalese really matters).
However, been having similar thoughts lately with GitHub. I see people who appear to be supporting an entire subtopic of the Linux, Android, or iOS ecosystem, and there's ... $50 / month?
It was really weird personally, cause I think somewhere I thought those people got paid. And then instead its "wait, you're rewriting all of Google's examples for them? So they actually work?"
And unfortunately, I find myself guilty of this, because they're such unusable junk. For anybody who's ever had to implement In-App Billing on the Play Store from scratch with an example that doesn't work, we can totally be friends.
> 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.
This seems horrible due to its complexity and poor filter for who contributes.
I’d rather just buy software licenses from Microsoft et al and let the corporate governance guide projects from whatever this new madness is.
It’s funny because commercial software exists. Projects are free to sell and customers free to buy. We don’t need some new subscription type. Just sell software and stop trying to get cool kid points.
Of course redhat/ibm sucks for how they’ve misused open source, but that’s a separate issue.
How is this new license going to be enforced by people without money, power and/or lawyers? Otherwise nothing is solved IMO.
I know several corporations that actively violate the GPL license of "poor" people's projects that have no money or desire to litigate, so they get away with it.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it. Hours of trying to convince management that it's actually not OK to release a product that's completely built on open source software without even attaching an open source license/acknowledgement to it.
They (along with the SFC, EFF and others) will only ever do so if you sign all copyright over to them, AND they have to want to help you specifically in the first place. I know many projects that have tried to go to them and were all told to pound sand.
It's not a slam-dunk case if you can't afford or aren't interested to litigate in the first place, which is many of such projects.
Interesting problem domain, though the skeptic might suggest that any proposed global amendment to social contract at the intersection of technology, commerce and existing multi-jurisdiction legal systems is going to be a "hard sell" with minor traction at best.
It seems the majority of technology's social influence appears to be heavily clustered toward the early phase of either abject redefinition of existing domains (eg. mass manufacturing) or the introduction of completely novel domains (eg. internet). Once popularity is achieved you tend to see a social norm forming around the new technology and old hierarchies and interests reasserted. We've seen this, for example, with industries such as advertising, media conglomerates and banking surviving the internet.
Given this broad pattern, perhaps a more appropriate pathway to explore if seeking globally significant structural evolution in the social contract might be retaking direct ownership of hardware and services. Some potentially aligned contemporary parallel macro-opportunities include the growing devolution of tertiary education (ie. potential for public uptake of a parallel pedagogical pathways leading to increased youth involvement), greatly reduced custom hardware fabrication costs, affordable non-cellular wireless hardware (wifi mesh/LoRa), existing open courseware, increasing global recognition of the urgency and severity of trans-national environmental challenges, and the dangling UBI social question.
But while the engaged learner clearly benefits from openness and information (at least until they encounter commerce), and a business might be said to enjoy access to a pool of better educated employees and reduced operating costs, ultimately corporate position in most markets depends upon the maintenance of an edge which is historically based on either trade secrets or government-mandated monopoly (patent law) neither of which are particularly applicable to software or business methods and thus the open source movement.
This would appear to be the unresolved dichotomous core of the issue.
I like the idea that our open source approach must evolve. However, I'm not entirely convinced that moving to a contract approach is the way to do this - after all, one of the largest reasons that open source proliferated these past few decades is that it offered a range of both copyleft licenses like the GPL that promoted freedom first and foremost, as well as a wide range of permissive licenses like MIT that promoted code adoption in other (possibly commercial) projects. Thus, a contract approach would likely require a wide range of complex contract types, and this may dissuade adoption.
1. The "hard" position - if you don't want "permissive" don't release it as open source is very "hard" and it does fly against what is a clear and growing view that whatever open source "truly" means, it's not supposed to mean exploitation of others work for free by large corporate entities. (who weirdly also are involved in finding a lot of development)
2. The "soft" position (this builds a community, which is the major benefit) also ends up allowing for exploitation.
3. the term "exploitation" is biased in the debate and shows where I sit. But using others work without payment and with no clear intention of keeping to the intention of the license they provided seems a good choice. FOSS found a loophole in the law and made a whole new means of making the law support community and individual rights - that the payment you make to me is to forward restrict your rights. If you can get out of that obligation have I had any payment?
4. There are two options going forward if we want to put that obligation back / create the utopia we are vaguely dreaming of
- Force a chnage in the interpretation of the current license - something like GPLv2 really means GPLv3.
- chnage the license (going forward) - ie GPLv4000
But both are fraught with problems.
In the end we are looking for a non-governmental solution to a problem that governments are clearly designed for - reallocating wealth according to human and social notions of fairness and / or most appropriate use of resources when the market fails to do it.
We pay scientists who will
mostly release open source work, the question then becomes why not coders and then which coders.
That does not seem a good solution - so perhaps it's government action to re-open the market in FOSS?
> ”I think that AI is always plagiarism," he says. "When you train the model, you're training the model with other people's copyrighted stuff.”
This is certainly true of OpenAI and Google. But Adobe Firefly is trained on only on their own Adobe Stock images, licensed content, and public domain content.
I just had a look at the Adobe stock licencing and royalty terms and I'm not 100% clear that they are bulletproof either. They certainly don't mention AI training in their terms (I guess they argue that this would fall under the "developing new features" part of the clause).
It does seem however seem a significant change of the terms, as Adobe was essentially paying contributors based on their downloads (i.e. how often their work was used), but the whole AI model is they use the work to not having to pay the contributors anymore.
I think this entire thing is nonsensical in the first place. Plagiarism is not related to copyright at all, it's related to credit and attribution. I can plagiarise something in the public domain, for example:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to [NAME]
Happy birthday to you!
(Written by me.)
In any case, I heavily disagree with Bruce. The whole point of the free culture movement is reusing and remixing previous works, and AI is the ultimate remixer.
Why Software Should Be Free made a case against copyright as well. It's quite disappointing to see open source miss the point of free software once again.
> Plagiarism is not related to copyright at all. The whole point of the free culture movement is reusing and remixing previous works. I can plagiarize something in the public domain
I'd half-agree, but I don't think "breaking copyright" matters to the question of "is LXM 'AI' plagiarism?".
Like you say you can plagiarize without braking copyright(for cases where the copyright allows usage without attribution such as with public domain), and it's also possible to break copyright without plagiarism(e.x. redistributing with attribution when you don't have the license).
But I think this is irrelevant to the point being made. LXM's need to take in a large amount of data, and then the outputs are attributed to the "model" rather than the originators of the material.
Since most of the content being digested by LXMs is not public domain that's where copyright gets twisted up with it, since for the majority of LLM training data 'plagiarism' and 'breaking copyright' come from the same act of redistributing/using without attribution(and since the "LXM" is considered to have created the data by most people the 'plagiarism' comes in).
That's a good point. I'm not sure how attribution should even be done in this situation though, considering that we have millions (billions?) of sources. A mega attribution file, maybe?
As a creator I feel like that's not very useful, to be a single name in billions. Of course I'd still like attribution if the work was significantly based on mine.
Free culture remixing and reusing is fine with me, when it's done creatively by people. When a company systematically automates and productizes the concept it becomes an issue.
I don't mind if another artist paints with my brush...
I wouldn't like a factory set up producing works with my brush en masse.
This is just a batshit insane thing for a person who supposedly promotes the creative commons to say. Plagiarism isn't learning how to write articles like the NYT or how to write code like Linus or RMS. That's still the case if I program my computer to do it.
I think it makes sense. Plagiarism is literally taking someones work/ideas and passing them off as my own. If I were to read 100 NYT articles(one of which is about some event) and then write my own article afterwards that uses similar details of the event or is laid out in similar ways, that's plagiarism.
When you program a machine to do the same thing but 1000x more efficient, it's still plagiarism.
At some point (maybe not yet) It's hard to say convincingly that what AI outputs is plagiarism but human output isn't. Not because AI is conscious or whatever, because it never outputs exactly what was in the training data and like humans combines everything they know to solve the issue in front of them
Can't the same argument be used to say "lossy compression is not plagiarism".
If I encode a movie with H264 there is no way to get it to output "exactly what was in the training data" and I can argue that "like humans extract important information from large dumps of data, the algorithm does the same".
I don't have any reservations about calling an H264 encoded video redistributed with the wrong attribution "plagiarism", so I don't see what's different about Large X Models that they deserve a special pass.
It sounds like we should just make all these AI open source and freely available to prevent any single individuals or corporations from monopolizing the profit off of it.
Companies also use Contributor License Agreements
and similar legalese(ToS/User Agreement/Company Code of Conduct) to confine their "open source" code
into some semi-commercial/proprietary components and
"public components": the code is nominally open, but dealing with it
requires accepting the terms of the company hosting it.
Even companies doing it in the open, on Github have
the guts to claim they're champions of open source.
> define the corporate relationship with developers to ensure companies paid a fair amount for the benefits they receive. It would remain free for individuals and non-profit, and would entail just one license
If anyone is interested in helping out with business side of the project, please reach out jed@poss.market
First, Parens was a part of "OSI" and their point was to make "free software" amenable to business. It's just a bit much on the nose to now see him annoyed at the results.
I don't know anything on "post-open", but some of the article sounds like he wants something like what ASCAP is to the music industry.
About redhat... the moment redhat went "enterprise" with RHEL is the point when they stopped being publicly friendly with their "enterprise" patches (remember when patches in the srpm became obfuscated... pepperidge farms remembers) and servers.
I am generally not sure about forcing corporations to pay developers, but I am all for demonopolizing corporations have over their ability to make a profit off FOSS, if that makes sense.
I really appreciate how Bruce is approaching the reality of how the idea of open source played out against how technology has found itself used in the real world. I'm optimistic for a future where open source is less of a religion or a marketing angle [1], and more beneficial for those who share their knowledge for the world to use and receive fair compensation.
If anything it would appear that compensation for sharing software, and knowledge, is threatened by those in ai whose only way to monetise is leveraging free labor. One way to prevent that is to make such property more scarce. People are already pulling the plug on sharing knowledge due to it.
Given the AI copyright debate also currently on the front page, I’m a bit less optimistic. We might end up with a lot of software not using open source directly, but having AI rewrite a roughly similar version just different enough to barely not count as plagiarism.
I feel like the motivations are at odds with the suggestion. If the problem you want to solve is that consumer software is not open source, charging companies to use it isn't going to change anything.
==
Open Source as a movement has failed IMO for the economic reasons always mentioned, but what we have actually produced is a software commons where individuals and companies cooperate on the production of infrastructure and release it to everyone for free.
On the face of it this is obviously great, but I do wonder if this reduces the amount of software actually being produced since competing with free is very hard. We all know developers are an incredibly difficult market to sell to, and I wonder if open source contributes to this.
OSS companies seem to be abandoning their OSS roots because it turns out competitors copying your work is a real concern once you hit maturity.
To me, this is actually the biggest question to solve for OSS: how can we use Capitalism's ability to accrue resources to useful products to produce the optimal amount of software.
==
OSS has also dramatically improved trust in random code since we're getting source and not binary blobs. Getting software utilities from the 90s was/remains sketchy since you actually have very little confidence in what you are getting. It's not perfect, but software that gets built from CI or from a distro in the open is far more trustworthy.
Former red hat employee and open source developer myself. I am working on a system where the whole design requires the code to be open, so eliminates a lot of bad actors by default.
I think the current model of relying on licenses to enforce open source software is subject to interpretation by humans and hard to enforce.
Good point, and the answer is "I'm not sure". I've made a system where code is published by default with all apps and components released, so the only way to hide code would be to obfuscate the code. I'm not even sure how this would fit into existing licenses/copyright law
> Free Software, Perens explains, is now 50 years old and the first announcement of Open Source occurred 30 years ago.
That is what one may fairly call an "Alternate Fact". The term "Open Source" is well-documented to have been coined in early 1998 (not quite 26 years ago).
The pure philosophy of free software is socialist like. Or communist if you want to say. It has its role if you buy it. But the creative people might want a different take. Hence gpl 3.0 is so hard to get adopted even if you are on the free software camp. It goes quite far to some.
Somehow we have to find a way to be market as well. Not pure market. But somehow a mix. This mix takes time as the whole idea of open/free source is new approach vs patent/copyright (general even open/free is a kind of copyright or copy left)/secret or abandon/share/public.
I think the fundamental issue is that free software and open software are enablers but not products.
Free software and open software reducing your costs in making products that make money. Be they services (a la Google/Facebook), hardware, operating systems (a la Apple and Darwin), or books (a la OReilly), or consulting (a la IBM).
Open source itself doesn't make money.
So if you can open source and reduce your maintenance costs of something that is required for your product but not really a differentiator it is a win.
If you try to make money from open source itself, either you will fail, or else you will end up either de-facto abandoning open source, or else doing shady legal things to get around it (see the example of Red Hat/IBM in the article).
But would you say that Ardour is an exception and not the norm? From what I can remember, it's not like you didn't struggle with making Ardour (see [1]) a profitable business.
In fact I vaguely remember that at one point you were seriously considering abandoning the project for financial reasons right?
That was just as the turnaround began, in fact. That particular period was difficult because it was preceded by significant income from commercial sponsors. Dealing with an 80% income reduction wasn't that easy, psychologically, even if the previous situation had barely lasted a year.
One look at OP's account would give you "ardour" as a hint to what product this might be. 5 minutes of scanning ardour's webpage would tell you that the "O'Rly? school of Open Source business" blueprint doesn't apply here.
> At this time, the main force behind Ardour is delivered by two people, with less constant contributions from 2 others, and occasional contributions from on the order of a dozen others. Consider that we do support, web site maintenance, documentation, feature enhancements, debugging, as well as development.
> There’s more people (perhaps another dozen) pitching in with translation, release engineering (preparing Ardour for users), Mantis triaging (“Mantis” is the bug database used to keep track of known problems, “triaging” the process of prioritizing/verifying bugs) and other necessary tasks.
We're not trying to be wealthy, just comfortable. In addition, the freedom from conventional work demands is worth a significant amount to me, and I suspect the same is true for my colleague and friend in Berlin.
There is also additional revenue flow via Harrison Consoles' Mixbus, which is a separate commercial product based on Ardour. The amount that flows "directly" to Ardour is small, but the overall amount does add another person at Harrison working on the software in a mostly-full-time capacity.
Also, which market should we be aiming for when defining "market rate" ?
They certainly can do that (as well as build it themselves). Linux distros all offer builds, for example.
I've tried to build a community where supporting the continuous full time development of the software is seen as a social good, and thus worth participating in even if the software itself is available at no charge. Most of our income comes from "subscriptions" which have nothing to do with the licensing-style arrangements seen today, but are merely a recurring payment agreement that gives us a consistent income, allowing us to avoid endless "got to make a new release" mania.
If people want to create and promote their own utopian models that's their business. Personally I'd want nothing to do with that, and it definitely should not be called open source, just like any restrictive license.
On another note, a transaction is a meeting of the minds. When most people release open source software they want nothing in return and are owed nothing. That's how I feel about it. People who think they are owed something are like beggars who do miming or some such in the street and call it work. Nobody asked for it, some find it interesting and you might be able to guilt someone into paying but they didn't hire you and don't owe you anything. You can just not do it, it's only a job if you're explicitly hired.