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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
