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'Our licenses aren't working anymore,' says free software pioneer:
Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement.
"I've written papers about it, and I've tried to put together a prototype license," Perens explains in an interview with The Register. "Obviously, I need help from a lawyer. And then the next step is to go for grant money."
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."
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.
[...] "They aren't really Red Hat any longer, they're IBM," Perens writes in the note he shared with The Register. "And of course they stopped distributing CentOS, and for a long time they've done something that I feel violates the GPL, and my defamation case was about another company doing the exact same thing: They tell you that if you are a RHEL customer, you can't disclose the GPL source for security patches that RHEL makes, because they won't allow you to be a customer any longer. IBM employees assert that they are still feeding patches to the upstream open source project, but of course they aren't required to do so.
"This has gone on for a long time, and only the fact that Red Hat made a public distribution of CentOS (essentially an unbranded version of RHEL) made it tolerable. Now IBM isn't doing that any longer. So I feel that IBM has gotten everything it wants from the open source developer community now, and we've received something of a middle finger from them.
"Obviously CentOS was important to companies as well, and they are running for the wings in adopting Rocky Linux. I could wish they went to a Debian derivative, but OK. But we have a number of straws on the Open Source camel's back. Will one break it?"
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."
Free Software, Perens explains, is now 50 years old and the first announcement of Open Source occurred 30 years ago. "Isn't it time for us to take a look at what we've been doing, and see if we can do better? Well, yes, but we need to preserve Open Source at the same time. Open Source will continue to exist and provide the same rules and paradigm, and the thing that comes after Open Source should be called something else and should never try to pass itself off as Open Source. So far, I call it Post-Open."
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.
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.
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. So it's a good time for open source to actually do stuff for normal people."
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. The way to avoid that, he argues, is to pay developers, so they have support to take the time to make user-friendly applications.
Companies, he suggests, would foot the bill, which could be apportioned to contributing developers using the sort of software that instruments GitHub and shows who contributes what to which products. Merico, he says, is a company that provides such software.
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. What's more, the financial arrangements have to appeal to enough developers.
"And all of this has to be transparent and adjustable enough that it doesn't fork 100 different ways," he muses. "So, you know, that's one of my big questions. Can this really happen?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ShovelOperator1 on Sunday December 31 2023, @12:21PM (3 children)
What should be done, is not to change the license drastically. It is to enforce complying with it.
There is a clear description what should be open in the GPL. It clearly prohibits forcing the need to use flashing tools stolen from Chinese software distributors, what is common in these Android phones. It clearly prohibits intentional sabotage of the code to make GPLed version unusable, which is present in more and more of web-based projects. It clearly states what should be done with patches.
The only thing we should do is to enforce the license both for people and for corporations. Currently corporations are not punished for license violations until they do something really awful, but not to authors, but to other corporations. For example, scraping and lossy compressing almost entire Internet with its variety of licenses and then sharing it on commercial license for one company's profit is not a crime - for the corporation. Meanwhile, when you, as an individual, do the same thing with e.g. a movie (this time compressing with lossy x264 instead of lossy ANN), you are a big bad pirate even if you don't earn from it!
Years of development of GPL-like licenses protected it well against TiVo-ization, forced unusability or flooding with responsibility claims. However, no license will protect against impunity of American corporations.
And this "free for one, closed for another" is a farce like these CLAs (most of them look like they're made to block libre forks after something goes closed), it will end like a cable TV - to remind, cable TV services were purchased because, contrary to the over-the-air TV, cable had little or no ads. Then, it started to have ads between movies. Then, like the over-the-air TV, it went with adding advertisement breaks in movies which was the reason why people abandoned the typical TV.
We can of course enforce the thing even more, put more strict claims in the license, minimize commercial usage to the support and directly separate these ("Leftists! Leftists!" - corporate trolls squeak), but it will not work if it is not enforced. And in current situation it's too late to enforce the law on corporations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday December 31 2023, @01:39PM (2 children)
Over the years I've heard some very strange arguments from management types about why "we don't need to publish our source code." I've heard of spurious agreements with vendors which make no sense. At one place, the site manager declared that we wouldn't be using any GPLv3 tools since they "infect our code." They really struggle to distinguish between using some software as a tool to accomplish a task or as a component in a product. Remember "Linux is a cancer?"
I've also been to lectures by corporate lawyers, which made much more sense and tended to align rather closely with my own reading of the various FOSS licences.
When the lawyers go to court, that's what really matters. The problem is, the only people who can afford those sorts of lawyers are large corporations.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Sunday December 31 2023, @02:54PM (1 child)
Most of "closed-source" mindset comes from non-coder people. They would prefer code to be value in itself so coders could be replaced more easily. While in practice it's not as easy. Most code bases are only valuable as long as their maintainers are active. Otherwise bit rot sets in, no bugfixes and ports to new platforms, no new features, etc. So only practical benefits of closing source is being able to fire coders and still keep income from existing codebase until it bitrots.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday December 31 2023, @03:16PM
It's worth understanding something else too: The sole benefit of open-source code, from the point of view of management, is that it convinces people they don't have to pay to contribute code (including maintenance patches) to their own company's code base. That's all that they want. Any talk that a suit makes about open-source values or philosophy, and even maybe releasing a patch now and then, is all about public relations and nothing else.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin