Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address.
“First of all, our licenses aren’t working anymore,” he said. “We’ve had enough time that businesses have found all of the loopholes and thus we need to do something new. The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That’s RHEL.”
Another straw burdening the Open Source camel, Perens writes, “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. 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.”
Post-Open, as he describes it, is a bit more involved than Open Source. It would 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.
Whether it can or not, Perens argues that the GPL isn’t enough. “The GPL is designed not as a contract but as a license. What Richard Stallman was thinking was he didn’t want to take away anyone’s rights. He only wanted to grant rights. So it’s not a contract. It’s a license. Well, we can’t do that anymore. We need enforceable contract terms.”
It’s an interesting idea, but the differences between copyright and contract law present quite a hurdle.
Either you release something publicly, licensing it under certain conditions (you can use it this way, but not that), or you cut a contract with a 3rd party for them to use it a certain way – something that only makes sense in a context where the wider public doesn’t already have those rights, otherwise a contract would be unnecessary.
You see it in some Free software projects: they’re licensed under something aggressive like the AGPL, but for a few you can buy a proprietary license. This of course limits community participation though, as to contribute, you must agree to these terms. I think React does something like this, forcing you to sign a contract to submit a patch.
He points out a number of problems that I’d like to see solved, so I’d love to hear his ideas, so long as they’re similar in spirit to the goals of the FSF.
You want open source treated well? Remove IP protections from closed-source projects.
It’s like patents versus trade secrets. If you show your work and agree to let anyone play with it, there are incentives provided. If you rely on secrecy… and people figure it out anyway… tough shit.
Can you provide some examples of software benefiting from IP protections like you mention?
You want examples of software protected by copyrights, trademarks, and/or patents?
You said ‘if people figure it out anyway’, so I was interested in an example where people are able to figure it out but not allowed to duplicate it
Reverse-engineering. Binary patches. Basically a free-for-all for anyone who owns a legal copy of a thing.
Please be advised I won’t give two shits about any hair-splitting over the word “owns.”
Are reverse engineering software and binary patches currently illegal?
In some contexts.
Is there a particular goal for this rhetorical poking?
Uh, genuine interest?
I don’t particularly agree with his impression that the average user doesn’t benefit from open source, or that they should know anything about open source.
The only popular operating system that isn’t based on an open source kernel is Windows. Nearly every mobile phone in the entire world is running an open source kernel. And I’d bet that nearly every computer system in the world has at least some open source software running on it.
And who cares whether the average user knows about open source software? The average Blender user doesn’t use it because it’s open source, they use it because it’s the best 3D modeling software. The benefits of open source software are usually what makes it enticing to people who have no idea what open source is.
I don’t quite agree with some of the rationale
- I do think users have benefited from Open Source, but I also think that there has been an a decline in Open Source software in general
- I don’t think contracts are a good analogy here (in the sense that every corporate consumer of the software would have to sign one)
Having said this I do understand where he is coming from. And I agree that:
- a lot of big companies consume this software and don’t give back
- corporate interests are well entrenched in some Open Source projects, and some bad decisions have been made
- he does raise an interesting point about the commons clause (but them I’m no laywer)
I would like to remind everyone that the GPL pretty much exists because of (1.). If anything we should have more GPL code. In that regard I don’t think it failed us. But we rarely see enforced (in court). Frankly most of our code is not that special so please GPL it.
Finally I think users do know about Open Source software indirectly. In the same way they find out their “public” infrastructure has been running without permit or inspection the day things start breaking and the original builder/supplier is long gone and left no trace of how it works.
Since these days everything is software (or black box hardware with firmware) this is increasingly important in public policy. And I do wish we would see public contracts asking for hardware/firmware what some already for software.
I wont get into the Redhat/IBM+CentOS/Fedora or AI points because there is a lot more going on there. Not that he is not right. But I’m kind of fed up with it :D
I’m not sure. The benefit of open source is that you can just take it and use it. And even incorporate it into your own projects. And it’s super easy, all you have to do is make the source available if it’s copyleft.
Now people want to add money to the mix, define valid use-cases, have me file paperwork to become a non-profit etc… Especially adding money to the mix could turn out bad in my eyes. Currently people are incentivised by other things. Software development and usage is a level playing field and you get gifted awesome programs. I’m really not sure if more capitalism helps. (But yes, I also think it’s annoying that companies like IBM, Amazon and Google make big money and often don’t contribute. And maybe handling money is unavoidable, for example since nowadays many projects need to pay for infrastructure, or do automated builds / tests / CI and that also costs money unless Github helps you out.)
I already dislike the growing amount of Source-Available software, and software that contains the commons clause. Can I now share this with my friends? Can they invite some more people to the instance? Do I need a lawyer and do proper accounting if they contribute paying for the server? What if the software relies on other software (libraries/databases) that aren’t free anymore?
As many others have already stated: he‘s on the wrong track.
Open source is great and works for developers and tinkerers. The fact that we dont have a law that a company has to pay what this product would cost in the open market is not open sources fault. On top: one reason open source is growing like crazy is the convenience these megacorps have with implementing it everywhere. We need to cast out those taking for themselves and dont give back.
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 don’t think I like this guy.
Why? I read most of the article and he seems interested in benefitting common users, even if the licensing system has to be more complex than the current state. He cites the same abuses that have driven enshitification.
Because modern proprietary software is built on the backs of open source projects, but the devs who manage them are poorly compensated (if at all) — essentially doing thousands of hours of unpaid labor that the private sector exploits for profit.
That seems to be what this guy wants to address.
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Sure, enforcement is important or the license is meaningless. But that’s not what the article is about. This is about the current Redhat situation. And libraries and databases which are legally correctly used by big tech and simultaneously struggling to pay for their servers. And people not being able to make an income with such projects.
I need to think about it some.
Completely unrelated, but nice username. I loved her character in Black Sails.
As web developer working in a company as consultant, I think often that I use a lot of free software like framework / library and tools to build proprietary applications without paying the free sofatware I use.
I feel sad about that, that our clients and my company do not want to pay ( with some exceptions ).
That’s a social problem.
Maybe some laws our just another culture about take care of our commons can change that.
We can still hope. :/I’m not sure what this guy is smoking, but I don’t want any. He talks about licenses being different from contracts, but there isn’t any significant difference. He talks about developers getting paid instead of releasing their work for free, but there’s nothing stopping anyone from doing this right now. Plenty of products offer business licenses separate from their copyleft licenses. Anyone who releases their software under GPL or whatever chooses to do that, because that’s what they want to do. If they wanted to make it only source-available, or to sell source access, they would have.
A lotta words to describe what’s inevitable under a capitalist model of software creation and distribution and an ideology that limits itself inherently.
It seems like Perens is discovering what RMS already predicted a long time ago (ironic considering he quotes him), that Open Source will fail its users in terms of freedom (i am not speaking about Open Source as a development model but a political movement and collective who use the term to define itself).
The Open Source community has shown itself to be unreliable in defending our freedom. The lax attitude toward nonfree tooling like Github and copyleft licenses has shown itself to create issues like the ones mentioned by Perens. It’s a bad look when hackers are forced to use nonfree software to participate in open source development when libre solutions either exist already or can be spearheaded by these same hackers (source hut comes to mind).
The GPL enforces itself and hunting companies that violate the GPL was never the goal (when they are sued by the FSF, it is only so that they publish the source code by the license terms). The purpose of the GPL was to create a community of hackers to build software under a protected copyleft domain. These problems that perens mentioned are applicable to the pushover MIT/X11 license which unfortunately has lured hackers into believing that the current capitalist tech field would respect them (EEE and enshittification debunk this). Pushover licenses were a specific strategy for certain pieces of software (miniscule libraries, open file formats to replace closed/patented ones) but have been overused to the point of meaningless.
TL;DR a movement that appeals to capitalist corporate interests rather than emphasizing freedom on ethical/civil grounds will be limited by that same system.
The goal of the hacktivist struggle was always to create software that protects the users freedom as nonfree software is inherently unjust. With enough free software we can kick out the dirty contracts, patents, and licenses used to control us.
Of course those who identifty with Open Source can have their own set of strategies and beliefs, but the dominant culture and attitude are accurate to what I mentioned above. Open Source has always been a sister movement to the Free Software Movement in terms of ideology. It’s why FOSS is such a controversial term, it would be unfair to awkwardly (FOSS only excacerbates the confusion about “Free”) group these two communties together who differ in many key ways.
