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Bruce Perens Solicits Comments on First Draft of a Post-Open License

posted by janrinok on Saturday March 09 2024, @09:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the stepping-stones-to-sofware-freedom dept.

canopic jug writes:

Bruce Perens is working on licensing for a new, post-Open Source era to take open source licensing past the apparent stalling point it has reached on its way towards software freedom. As he noted earlier, current licenses are not meeting that goal and businesses have either found loophole or just plain been allowed to ignore the licensing. A move more towards a contract is needed.

At the link below is the first draft of the Post-Open License. This is not yet the product of a qualified attorney, and you shouldn't apply it to your own work yet. There isn't context for this license yet, so some things won't make sense: for example the license is administered by an entity called the "POST-OPEN ADMINISTRATION" and I haven't figured out how to structure that organization so that people can trust it. There are probably also terms I can't get away with legally, this awaits work with a lawyer.

Because the license attempts to handle very many problems that have arisen with Open Source licensing, it's big. It's approaching the size of AGPL3, which I guess is a metric for a relatively modern license, since AGPL3 is now 17 years old

The draft license is quite long since it covers quite a few scenarios.

Previously:
(2023) What Comes After Open Source? Bruce Perens is Working on It
(2018) The Next 20 Years of Open Source Software Begins Today

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday March 09 2024, @11:55PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Saturday March 09 2024, @11:55PM (#1348075)

    The problem isn't the existing licenses, but rather the ability and will to prosecute violators.

    There's an arbitration clause.

    It won't matter one bit if the new approach is contract based, as the same lack of prosecution will persist.

    Copyrights doesn't cover AI training and generative output so if you train a model on non-permissive code and then prompt the model to produce a competing product, that product isn't be considered a derivative work by current laws as there's no human authorship. So, it's possible to "AI-wash" anything and make a few manual tweaks to the output to effectively gain authorship over just about anything out there if your AI is good enough. Worse still, the TRIPS agreement includes that "human authorship" wording so even if your own country extends its copyright protections to cover it, other countries will be able to disregard it entirely.

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