in a fair world, all of these companies who abuse the GPL license woild get sued and have to face actual consequences. but the legal system favors the rich, and the FOSS dev is left to starve. killed by their own passion.

I mean just license it as such right? You can’t say it’s completely free for anyone to use then complain you aren’t getting paid.

All the people predicting doom and gloom for open source, but the reality is that without open source we wouldn’t be in the position where we currently are in terms of technology.

To be honest, I also think the patent system should be revamped as it is extremely flawed at the moment and prone to abuse by patent trolls, and it is stifling innovation.

Fuck no. A small business that is struggling to survive should be able to use WordPress for their website and Linux for their laptops without paying

TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use

You need to read the article yourself before writing TLDR. Spoiler: it is not about payments, it is about source code availability.

people are always going to be floating ways to save capitalism in the face of communities privileging freedom over greed.

this completely misses the point of free software, and fails to solve the problems Mr. Perens identifies with Open Source. He claims it fails to serve the “common person” (end users) and then proposes a solution that serves… only devs.

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… Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.

All these problems are already solved by free software. the rebranding of “open source” was a compromise on the principles of free software to make the movement palatable to profit-seekers. In the end, it predictably failed to improve anything. The solution isn’t to reinvent the wheel, it’s to stop making the wheel square because the square lobby insists they’ll only use it if it’s square. The solution is copyleft, and free software being used more than it’s defanged cousin.

The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest

That’s a feature, not a bug. On one hand, if people knew about free software they wouldn’t be as good consumers. On the other hand, internals should be opaque to users; just as devs don’t want to have to know how the logic gates in the CPU are routing their code to write code, end users shouldn’t have to worry about the politics of the communities that developed their code.

Open source is just another commons, and companies have a way of uncontrollably exploiting common resources until they collapse.

In the case of open source, it’s healthy in the sense that money is flowing, we have companies sponsoring projects, tons of code is available for inspection and reuse, etc. Very nice. But if you go back to the original concepts of free software, in many cases we struggle with actually exercising the four freedoms. Red Hat has engineered an EULA that basically lets them ban practices that had been thought protected by the GPL for at least a generation, and so on and so forth. So is the open source community healthy or dying? Doesn’t the answer to that depend on your priorities?

I think it would make a lot of sense to try to create an economic model that can fund open source software development without relying on corporate injections of cash. It’s not that they don’t pay for it ever, they just pay for it to the bare minimum extent. IE, the heartbleed fiasco – tons of companies were freeloading off one guy and like half the Internet’s security got fucked for it. Imagine if OpenSSL had had some kind of economic support structure in place to allow for, uh, more than one guy to manage the encryption library for like half the Internet before something insanely stupid and predictable like that happened. Well, we can never have that with corporate-controlled open source.

I think that the RHEL example is out-of-place, since IBM (“Red Hat”) is clearly exploiting a loophole of the GNU Public License. Similar loopholes have been later addressed by e.g. the AGPL and the GPLv3*, so I expect this one to be addressed too.

So perhaps, if the GPL is “not enough”, the solution might be more GPL.

*note that the license used by the kernel is GPLv2. Cue to Android (for all intents and purposes non-free software) using the kernel, but not the rest.

So, Open Source was already kindof the capitalistic fork of the Free Software movement. And it feels like Parens’ vision of Post-Open Source is about how to marry it more to “the market.” If it’s not clear from what I’ve said already, I’m not a fan of that specific aspect of it.

It is a problem that big companies reguarly violate the terms of the GPL. I hope good things come out of SFC v. Visio that give the GPL’s requirements of distributing source code with compiled code more teeth, but we’ll have to see. I do think the courts agreeing to interpret the GPL (at least in some cases) as a contract rather than as a license is a good thing. It was a gutsy move on the SFC’s legal department’s part, but the case shows more promise now that they’d made it than it did previously. Perhaps a GPLv4 that better deals with being interpreted as a contract is in order.

Though, I worry that what Parens has in mind for new licenses doesn’t address what I’d want to see from the Open Source movement and will ultimately move (Post-)Open Source in the wrong direction.

Specifically what I want from FOSS licenses is to be able to (and to have assurance that others have the option to) write and distribute software with assurances that no one’s going to use it to restrict users’ rights down the line. The GPL has historically been imperfect at that. The AGPL is better. But the GPL has always been explicit about requiring companies to distribute source code with binaries. What we need is that but with teeth in the form of some combination of court precedent and more effective legalese.

If current licenses have the problem that big companies just ignore the terms set out in the license, I wouldn’t imagine making a new sort of license with different terms like “big companies have to pay to get the benefit of using Pots-Open Source software” is really going to work.

All that said, I’m glad to hear discussion about the future of FOSS. I’m worried about where FOSS is now and where it’s going and am glad to see more strategic thinking.

Doesn’t make sense at all.

I keep seeing Redhat used an example, but they contribute a HUGE amount a source code and projects… Pipewire, systemd, rpm, DBUS and even the main XML addon for VSCode, etc.

I don’t think people realise how much poop linux would be swimming in if they went bankrupt…

Redhat are literally one of the big reasons why Linux is so seamless these days, and they’re solving a lot of the big problems. And from my understanding, they still contribute the code seperately anyway.

That being said, I agree money needs to go towards developers. However, a lot of them end up hired at major companies. And I don’t think this is the way to approach it

deleted by creator

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions (inviting corporations to exploit Free Software by trying to re-brand it).

These are my thoughts regarding FOSS for a long time. The sense of facilitating the development and freedom of the project has been distorted years ago, when large corporations put their hands on this project, controlling it. Just look at the amount of “OpenSource” soft and services controlled by Google, M$, Amazon, FB … Yes, they are free to distribute and modifiable by devs, but mostly full of APIs from these corporations, not controllable by the user, subtracting their sovereignty and only modifiable with effort by people capable of understanding the scripts and redirects they contain. For a normal user it is increasingly irrelevant whether the project is FOSS or proprietary, while these products and the internet in general are in the hands of these companies.

A simple question is enough, which one do you prefer to use? FOSS projects from large corporations, or Freeware from small independent startups, if you don’t have the knowledge to review the script anyway, almost impossible in millions of lines, with external references from large apps and services? It becomes decisions of mere trust, perhaps with the help of external services, such as WebKoll, Blacklight, Unfurl and similar, where in the end the license that the product has is irrelevant, with respect to security and privacy, often in question or not, in some like others. In the end only the intentions and ethics of the developer matter.

Yes, of course, the concept of OSS, FOSS and FLOSS requires a profound review and update, so that it does not become a destroyer of what it aims to protect and promote, a free internet.

• https://github.com/microsoft
• https://opensource.google/projects
• https://aws.amazon.com/es/opensource/
• https://opensource.fb.com/projects/
• https://code.gov …

So, basically the opposite of BSD3 license

This is exciting! He’s come up with an economic principle where entities engage in an equitable exchange of goods for money where the consumer of the good pays for the value they receive. This could really change everything! I wonder what they’ll call it?