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.”
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.
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 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.
I don’t quite agree with some of the rationale
- I do think users have benefited from Open Source, but I also think that there has been an a decline in Open Source software in general
- I don’t think contracts are a good analogy here (in the sense that every corporate consumer of the software would have to sign one)
Having said this I do understand where he is coming from. And I agree that:
- a lot of big companies consume this software and don’t give back
- corporate interests are well entrenched in some Open Source projects, and some bad decisions have been made
- he does raise an interesting point about the commons clause (but them I’m no laywer)
I would like to remind everyone that the GPL pretty much exists because of (1.). If anything we should have more GPL code. In that regard I don’t think it failed us. But we rarely see enforced (in court). Frankly most of our code is not that special so please GPL it.
Finally I think users do know about Open Source software indirectly. In the same way they find out their “public” infrastructure has been running without permit or inspection the day things start breaking and the original builder/supplier is long gone and left no trace of how it works.
Since these days everything is software (or black box hardware with firmware) this is increasingly important in public policy. And I do wish we would see public contracts asking for hardware/firmware what some already for software.
I wont get into the Redhat/IBM+CentOS/Fedora or AI points because there is a lot more going on there. Not that he is not right. But I’m kind of fed up with it :D
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.
