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.”
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.
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.
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. 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?
I don’t think I like this guy.
Completely unrelated, but nice username. I loved her character in Black Sails.
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’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.
