The culture war at the heart of open source
words.steveklabnik.com
words.steveklabnik.com
That is quite the inversion. Let’s take an example: search. Elastic has gone public while employing an army of Elasticsearch and Lucene committers, and while selling SaaS and cloud services around Elasticsearch and related projects, thus paying for those committers, creating a massive ecosystem/community, and revenue for themselves (plus return for their investors). A win like that would have been unimaginable in the pre-OSI era. Companies wouldn’t adopt Elasticsearch, wouldn’t put real data in it, and certainly wouldn’t pay some company to run it for them.
Instead, that era saw companies like Verity, FAST, Autonomy, and similar proprietary search engines. Can you even name a proprietary on-premise deployable search engine today? Even if you can, it’s probably powered by Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch under the hood. That’s how much the entire universe has shifted.
You won't often see GPL software in shipped commercial products, because when you ship stuff you might need to include proprietary components you don't want to have to open up. It still does happen from time to time though.
And boy, were they awfully buggy. And you didn't have access to the source to understand why it didn't work, and good luck getting any meaningful support.
Proprietary software really is hell. How that taught us to love the GPL.
Yet they hide behind a preacher who never stepped into the misery mill himself. You are on the soap box against borders while we mortals must play papers please.
Feel like earning money? Then pay back some of the dues, so that upstream can stay in business.
That preacher is the reason many anti-GPL folks can enjoy Linux, GCC and a comfortable POSIX like userland.
I wonder why they aren't all making FreeBSD a huge commercial success if GPL is so evil then.
Also all the tools you mentioned were incredibly productive and with way better documented than any equivalent open source solution today - assuming there is an equivalent open source solution (especially for something like dbase where the best you can find is somewhere between the awful joke that is LibreOffice Base and the plain awfulness of Harbour).
Honestly you used the worst examples you could come up with if you wanted to paint a "proprietary software bad, open source software good" image. Those were excellent tools (yes, including Visual Basic, which like any user friendly tool with a very low barrier to entry was abused to hell and beyond, thus - again like any user friendly low barrier tool - got a bad name for itself).
Delphi and VB and VC++ and the C Compiler suites for Solaris, AIX and IRIX were mostly fine by themselves, but cost money. Particularly the latter.
Nowadays you see people closing the nagbox in SublimeText to save 10 bucks (or whatever amount this is); back then nothing was free (as beer) and even less free (as speech).
The main thing that modern open source tools do better is the performance of the produced executable by modern compilers is better. But everything else, especially when you go into UI and UX, is much much worse (and most programmers increasingly treating their computers' UIs like terminals from the 70s doesn't help).
I'll agree that the majority of developers today do not want to pay for their tools, but of course with the proliferation of free (as in beer) tools it is expected that the value that people see in their tools (especially when they are surrounded by free tools, like programmers are) will drop dramatically.
I get that it's exaggerated for effect, but that's 1 in a billion....
(as a somewhat related stunning bottoms-up anecdote, a young-ish AIX sysadmin at my recent engagement absolutely positively refused to install AIX tools [1] on the servers, as he didn't want to pollute them with that "unsupported open source stuff")
[1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/aix-toolbox/i...
There's the rub.
The sheer amount of "open source" today is because it is a great marketing term for what is effectively proprietary software or feedstock for proprietary software. It's not popular culture due to its empowering users, or even the pragmatism of say being easier to debug, but because it is the specific technology that Surveillance Valley businesses are built upon!
Furthermore, dumped-over-the-wall projects like Android would be better referred to as "Shared Source" (with its association) - the Free branches are seemingly unable to actually keep up with the master!
I think the answer to the conundrum is still "Free Software", but IMHO the FSF needs a strong makeover. On fundamentals, Stallman was and continues to be very much correct. But he seems to have become less applicable due to not necessarily choosing the right battles or making the right compromises.
Here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436615) is a thread I wrote a few days ago expanding in the specific context of firmware blobs.
I'm not saying either tribe is right, so let's skip past the tribalism.
What we need is not new OSS/FSF, what we need is new economic models that are capable of measuring the value of OSS/FSF.
Here is an extensive treatise to fix all of this: https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...
> that FSF leads to monopolistic SaaS companies spying on you
Erm, what? Both BSD and GPL software are similarly vulnerable to being transmuted into SaaS.
This isn't an argument about specific licenses per se. What I'm calling out is "openwashing" in general.
The FSF at least has an intellectual framework to analyze this. You don't need to license your work as GPL, but you do need to think ahead about the users of your software. Imagine using a derivative of your own work, suffering an annoying bug that you know precisely what it is, and yet being unable to fix it because a middleman has prevented you from doing so.
I think that is a fair concern, but personally I'd much rather give my users unrestricted abilities to use my code, because I believe that any proprietary-tech built on my code will not be able to compete in the end game with any also OSS-tech built on my code. I also see the same that any OSS-version would outcompete (a)GPL-version, though I'm sure you disagree?
I'm worried that you face a forever-uphill climb. Whenever a proprietary group pulls ahead by developing some killer feature or improvement, your OSS group has to duplicate all of their work. Whereas if your OSS group pulls ahead, they can just fork you and put all their energy into pulling ahead again.
I think this analysis is a good argument for why you might want to put restrictions on those who would take advantage of your community's work. (Of course, it's important that the restrictions actually work and aren't burdensome to those who don't want to take advantage of you. Whether the GPL or any other license succeeds at that is debatable.)
In practice, the final steps that are necessary to deliver something useful to the user are often considered the most boring and tedious (UI, documentation etc), so many F/OSS projects either don't bother at all, or provide something half-baked. But if the underlying libraries allow for a proprietary derivative, then that might motivate some businesses to come and do all that tedious stuff for $$$. Such businesses might not contribute back much, but they are also unlikely to fork - less code to maintain that way.
When that happens, I don't think it's a loss for anybody, really. The open code stays open and can be improved further, and it also gets used by more people in better ways. Some would argue that library developers aren't properly compensated, but the act of voluntarily releasing something under a non-copyleft license is explicit consent to that.
In the hypothetical "suffering an annoying bug" scenario, I would, of course, prefer to have the source so that I can fix it. But if the real choice is between having a product with an annoying unfixable bug (but plenty of other added value), and not having one at all, because nobody wants to build my extremely useful GPL'd library into a polished product, the obvious pragmatic choice is the bug.
How many closed-source projects use, say, SQLite? How many of them fork it?
Would we know if they forked it?
Software becoming free (as in everything, beer and speech) is a natural progression because our patterns of using software are not that flexible so when a new use case appears, in a few years the free software catches up and it is no longer possible to abuse the customers as before (like Autodesk is doing now), just as it should be. Not that this model is bullet proof, unfortunately.
I think I'd called this "spectator source". You can watch for free, but don't expect you'll really get much time on the field.
I doubt there is one aside from social norms that nobody would use such things.
That's because AOSP by itself is Android without all the integration work that's necessary to make a useful image for a specific device, and traditionally it's been a lot of work for each new version. Things are better in that respect since Android 8.0, which I think shows in frequency of both manufacturer updates and community builds.
I recognize that the embedded culture of zip+email version control has much to do with this - manufacturers don't care if the starting source was retrieving using git pull or wget. But that's merely an explanation, not a justification.
I don't worry about not being able to install the latest Debian on an older machine, because the drivers for the hardware have been carried forward.
I think MongoDB has had trouble with that despite AGPL license, which is why they did the entire SSPL thing.
If all that developers see happening to their free software project is that SaaS corps take it and squeeze it for money without giving back a single cent, people won't license as free software anymore.
Atleast with open source licenses the expectation of that abuse is always somewhat present but people will similarly stop using it if the abuse is too great.
> At least with open source licenses the expectation of that abuse is always somewhat present but people will similarly stop using it if the abuse is too great.
You talk about “free software” licenses and “open source licenses” as if they are different things. While the FSF and OSI are different organizations with somewhat different philosophy and strategy, the set of “Free Software” licenses recognized by the former is virtually identical to the set of “Open Source” licenses recognized by the latter.
But the set of licenses is essentially identical, the differences being in licenses where only one of the two groups has rendered an opinion, which arguably isn't even a difference other than in degree of certainty.
There is a difference between those two and there are definitely communities that prefer one over the other.
I find it silly to yell "but they recognize the same licenses" when that isn't what it's about at all...
Under your terminology, the GNU All Permissive License, despite clearly originating in the Free Software community, would be an ”open source” rather than “free software” license.
> There is a difference between those two and there are definitely communities that prefer one over the other.
The FSF, by the actual recommendations it states on its list of licenses, explicitly prefers copyleft licenses for large programs, but considers permissive licenses fine for smaller programs and supporting files (and has specific recommendations as to which permissive licenses should be used.)
The OSI is less prone to state preferences, and it'd be a misnomer to conflate the open source community with people who unconditionally prefer permissive licenses.
All of the recent issues have started with someone trying to reinvent Microsoft shared source idea where the focus is on code transparency not the right to modify and fork.
It's a common pattern of substituting the real movement with a cargo cult copy, where the original goals is replaced by a set of consumable you have to buy, that have killed far more important movements then the opensource one in the past where orithe attack does not come openly but as astroturfing campaigns crafted to subvert real criticism and create the impression that the purveyors of cargo cult movement is trying to save the movement where as the goal is usually to carve a way for them to generate the cash their investors/creditors demand if not to become filthy rich.
The opensource schism between osi and fsf was more about letting opensource escape the leadership by committee culture of academia and find a way for it to ride the corporate beasts as a symbiotic parasite through forking and re-merging. Where as the current manufactured crisis stems from the need of a bunch if startups to turn the relationship around and control the opensource project they back like a rider controls a horse which means preventing forks and independent commercial contributors.
The Linux project where nobody uses the mainline kernel tree directly in production is a good example of the OSI model, here we have a bunch of companies forced to provide code upstream in order to provide a Linux product downstream to their customers in a relationship where there is not a "Linux inc" monopolizing the revenue stream generated from the end users but where all of the commercial contributors gets the revenue from their individual customers.
What the likes of elastic or mongo that have been the center of controversy recently want is to become that single entity monopolizing the entire revenue stream of the opensource project they sponsor, which was also what oracle tried to become for MySQL and OpenOffice, as this is not an new conflict.
Would it be fair to argue that a flaw of the FSF is that it focuses on making free software (per FSF definition), but does not focus on how to encourage the maintenance and development of free software? It doesn't seem to focus on the creation of contributors: i.e. teaching new people how to fish, in the free software way, and thus it is a movement that is vulnerable to the ravages of time?
Teaching newbies how to "fish" in the OSS community is also something that saw a lot of focus as soon as the issue became clear in the 1990s, as the microcomputer community started getting internet links and interacting with the pre-existing free-software and hacker communities. We see a summary of this viewpoint e.g. in ESR's "Hacker-HOWTO" http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
> What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions.
There's no reason to jump down a new user's throat. If you are annoyed by a question, move on, let others deal with it if they so want. Or improve it.
You could adopt Sai Baba's philosophy: Before you speak, ask yourself: is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?
Or you can just go with Ellen Page's: This world would be a whole lot better if we just made an effort to be less horrible to one another.
You could read https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2018/a-case-study-in... as well.
If you read further in ESR's document, you'd find out that this is exactly what he predicts will happen! But let's not pretend that this isn't a sort of hostility towards those who ask questions in unhelpful ways. Even entirely non-violent, passive resistance is hostility - of a sort! This is what ESR is trying to fix here, by addressing the root problem that causes it.
But then you're keeping them ignorant. Letting them know they're expected to do their part is a net positive in the long run, for everyone involved.
The problem is with the BSD licenses where people can take and not give back. It’s not a matter of who gets paid - but whether the primary beneficiaries are giving back their source code. They are the ones most incentivized to write new code.
The controversy is not that some companies migrate to GPL or AGPL licenses but that some companies want to take a two sided contributor/maintainer relationship and turn it into an one sided contract by adding clauses that lets them prevent forking the core into product that compete with their own proprietary derivatives, which no OSI aproved license does.
As the FSF did actually release open source license that deal with the issue of cloud providers forking an opensource project without contributing code back in 2002(the actual current AGPLv2 license is from 2007) it's nonsense to say that you cannot close that hole with a OSI approved license.
It seems the convenience of hosting services on the same infrastructure you already run everything else on (the cloud) outstrips the value of the trademark. This is new uncharted territory. So while it was always allowed by the license - in practice it was not as big a problem as it is today.
The hosting providers have always absorbed a huge amount of the revenue from opensource web infrastructure without a direct payment line back to the trademark holder, as companies like SUSE and RedHat acts as successful middlemen and co-developers of a lot of frameworks they don't have the trademark on.
The idea that owning a trademark on an opensource project entitle you to the bulk of the revenue started in the VC circus about a decade ago prior to that you did it for other reasons or as a part of an consultancy operation in collaboration with a wider community. The OpenSource by license but build by a single company model expecting to operate on the shareware model of the 1980ies PC industry is what's new not the existence of non-paying hosting companies or large enterprises as potential rivals for support revenue.
The stale, tired lecture that Stallman's been giving for the last 15 years about ethics isn't persuasive any more because the really odious code isn't running on my machine. Whether facebook's codebase respects their engineering team's collective freedoms or not simply has no bearing on my experience as a user. I'm getting exploited either way.
But Eben Moglen and rms have been warning about both problems since before you evidently noticed the second one.
Mainframes, X Windows terminals, Netware, ....
I still hold strong that this "war" is getting silly. This whole thing seems so antithetical.
Open source is being chosen by developers and startups because it has technical benefits, it's appealing, it attracts attention, etc. The reason why it is all of those things is exactly because of what open source is. If you control the monetization strictly, it's not open source, and it loses the appeal. Simply having source available isn't appealing to me. Contributing to a project like that is just free labor. I see few mutual benefits.
In my personal opinion, SaaS is not exploitation. Being able to do this is the point. The difference today is that there are people releasing software as open source under licenses that permit others to monetize their software... and then are shocked when they actually do it. Last time I made this argument, I mentioned Linux, and being the quintessential open source project it's a super good example of how open source can be collectively beneficial. I stand by this, and I would presume Linus is not bothered by the massive monetization of Linux. Since that's the point.
If someone wants to build proprietary software, please do. The open source community can survive without another NoSQL database, I'm sure, and nobody will blame you. Few will do this, though, because many want to eat their cake and have it too. Whatever. In any case, please don't attempt to conflate "open source" with "shared source" in the meantime. I've said it before and I will say it again: You aren't saving open source. You are saving your profit model. And nobody blames you for that. I say this as a continued user of Caddy, Redis, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm an employee of Google, these are my personal opinions and not those of my employer.
P.S.: Steve, I'm really curious about that Gender bit. Are you going to clarify your thoughts on that?
I'd like to know as well. Most others here have suggested that it's a veiled reference to "techbros" supposedly taking over the FLOSS community in the 2000s and 2010s, but that's both silly and would not represent a change in gender anyway, but rather a shift in broad social attitudes (including those relating to gender) away from the traditional hacker-values of openness and personal autonomy.
The short version: RMS worked at AI lab who had a laser printer. It jammed a lot so he wanted to fix the code, but he could not because the code was non-free. His inability to fix the printer, despite having programming skill to do so, was stymied because Xerox wouldn't let the AI lab have the source code. To add injury to insult, the person at Xerox that told him no was a previous student at the same university, who basically said that he could not give them a copy because he had signed a NDA.
That is the original motivations and reasoning behind the GPL. To prevent that situation from happening and allow the programmer to fix the bug in the code.
> If you control the monetization strictly, it's not open source, and it loses the appeal.
Hmm, open source and free software both say nothing about money. Could you elaborate a bit?
> Simply having source available isn't appealing to me. Contributing to a project like that is just free labor. I see few mutual benefits.
I think you'll like my next post. :)
> P.S.: Steve, I'm really curious about that Gender bit. Are you going to clarify your thoughts on that?
What I will say is that the speculation of this as being about "brogrammers" is incorrect. I don't want to super get into it, because my thoughts aren't fully formed, and this is a hot-button topic. What I will say is that, in the last 20 years, our discipline has grown, and women are returning to it. If you take the large public figures in both movements, like RMS and esr, both have attitudes and beliefs that are... not great, on topics like sex, gender, and other social issues. In general, the social stuff around these movements is very masculine, and often socially regressive. This makes it hard for women to care about these movements. Obviously, these are mostly broad generalizations, and there have been some women who are involved here. I know several women who are very passionate about both Open Source and Free Software. But I've also spoken to many who say "never", and the numbers speak for themselves.
You are describing "techbro" culture, but the FLOSS hacker culture which RMS/ESR subscribe to has always been quite different. Hackers' social beliefs are far from unified, but it would not be wrong to describe them as resolutely anti-authoritarian. And their pioneering use of networked communication channels (sometimes even doing away with easily-visible real names, and preferring pseudonymous handles) has definitely helped foster an attitude of gender-equity. Of course, hackers - like anyone else, really - have had to deal with the fact that very few women are in technical professions in the first place. But it would be quite wrong to place the blame for this underlying social fact on the FLOSS community itself!
To me, the fact that they say nothing is the important part, and it's why the whole thing works. At first I thought it was weird that GPL didn't limit commercial use, and now I think it was absolutely essential that it didn't.
>... If you take the large public figures in both movements, like RMS and esr, both have attitudes and beliefs that are... not great, on topics like sex, gender, and other social issues. ...
Interesting. Well, I don't personally see the connection just yet but I'll keep an open mind. It seems like there probably is something to be said.
Ah, gotcha. :) Thanks.
The GPL does restrict how you REDISTRIBUTE it. If you modify the software, you must distribute the modifications when you redistribute it.
Businesses that just use the software are fine with GPL.
But businesses that want to redistribute GPL software cannot fork and close it.
But they're businesses and have revenue, so they can pay others to use their software, or just use MIT/BSD licensed code that allows fork and close.
Apparently, FSF is too preachy and OSI is too business-y and thus following "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" style, a new, third movement of producing software that is free to copy, free to modify, etc. will naturally arise on its own.
There are allusions to brogrammers who know nothing more about OSI than 'It's on GitHub!!', I'm not sure how charitable that is but I can say for several years that no matter how many wiki walks I've taken down the history of Linux, GNU et al which is probably where some of those brogrammers fell as well. IDK the difference, does it really matter, might as well stop looking into it any further than that.
The schism and lack of unity between church of FSF and church of OSI has probably had a net detracting effect on getting software to be more permissible, even if the absolute effect has been way more FS/OS software than would be expected otherwis.
I could be totally wrong, I didn't show up for computing until the Win 95 days.
> a new, third movement of producing software that is free to copy, free to modify, etc. will naturally arise on its own.
I think this is a bit too teleological. I'm not confident that such a thing will happen. I think that the environment is ripe for something to happen, but I don't know what that is. That's exactly because of
> IDK the difference, does it really matter, might as well stop looking into it any further than that.
I don't think that most people's conception of open source matches the FSF/OSI definitions. Does it really matter? I don't think it does for most people. I do think there's a values mis-match there though, and that means there's the possibility for a new thing that's a match. I think there are significant obstacles to that project, though. That's for the next post. I hope that I actually write it though, I've been trying to for over two years...
To be honest, I'm still not sure what people think OSS is. I personally align heavily with the FSF model but that's mostly because I live in an industry (embedded) that obsesses over proprietary everything and thinks their shitty source code is the apex of valuable intellectual property (\rant) but I get that the story is very different on the other side where everyone is publishing Yet Another Javascript Library. Maybe this is all just a product of our environment?
(I personally prefer the FSF model, but think that the OSI has won, at this point. All my software is Apache2/MIT these days. And even though I prefer it in the abstract, I have a lot of criticisms of both.)
Looking across the aisle, I do wonder from time to time if the AGPL was a sort of breaking point. GPL always "threatened" industry at the desktop level and lower but once everyone's beloved FAANG+/- was in the cross-hairs the discussion maybe degraded a bit.
I think so, but I tend to think of it as not the AGPL's fault, exactly. That is, the GPL was a product of its time: it's very concerned with the details of writing non-networked C code. It pre-dates the web! It was impossible to forsee these kinds of changes, and it just so happens that it was not really prepared for them. The AGPL was an attempt to plug that hole, but it was too little, too late.
To me, this seems very analogous to some economic models I could mention. Communism sure sounds good, but I feel pretty confident in stating that the wild growth Capitalism has encouraged has made even the poor much better off than they would be in a system that was purely communistic for the same time period.
That said, I wouldn't call our current system purely capitalistic, which I think goes a long way towards explaining why the poor have an increased standard of living, and points towards the truth of what you're seeing (and what we've been seeing more recently with "interesting" business models using Open Source). The middle ground is often much more beneficial than the ideological extremes.
To bring this back to Free Software and Open Source, do we think there would be nearly as much high quality free software if Open Source had not introduces the large talent pools and funding of businesses? Would Open Source have had anything to entice those businesses with had not Free Software provided the base upon which to build the current ecosystem? They both provide a large benefit, but for different aspects. I think a mix of them is the most beneficial way forward, whether that's a third way, or a vacillation between these extremes as more licenses are developed and tweaked that change how the market for software of this type responds.
I don't buy the FSF position that Open Source is only about efficiency, collaboration etc and that Free Software is superior - it is the same thing, albeit different language but the concepts are identical. Playing moral superiority is only counterproductive to FSF. Btw I wish them to succeed even if that might literally mean becoming a tax exempt church so that we could all be praying by the holy book of Emacs.
So when people say open source is business friendly, they don't mean that the vibe is business friendly, they mean that it removes a restriction and allows more avenues to make money.
I will add that if the difference between the FSF and OSI definitions of OSI don't matter...perhaps they should merge and join forces? Get the (not that it sounds great to say it this way) least common denominator between the two definitions, unify the Orgs, and present a unified front to prospective learners. There's propriety software and FOSS, the former word is defined in the dictionary, the latter word/acronym is defined at freesoftwareisopensource.stallman , rthar than the "it's over here at the FSF websites, on your right, past the "Linux should be called GNU/Linux arguments" aisle."
I don't see how merging would be possible because FSF and OSI have incompatible philosophical differences to sharing/distributing software.
E.g. OSI is compatible with permissive licenses such as MIT License and BSD License. That's totally against what FSF and Stallman is about and their GPL license reflects that philosophy.
> This license is sometimes called the MIT license, but that term is misleading, since MIT has used many licenses for software. > > This is a fine license for a small program. A larger program usually ought to be copyleft; but if you are set on a lax permissive license for one, we recommend the Apache 2.0 license since it protects users from patent treachery.
and
> This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license with a serious flaw: the “obnoxious BSD advertising clause”. The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software nonfree.
Note that some software licences may qualify as being a free software license, yet be not compatible with the GPL. Those are two different things.
Essentially all of the permissive OSI-blessed “open source” licenses are also FSF-blessed “free software licenses”; they are not “totally against what the FSF and Stallman is all about.”
To both dragonwriter and steveklabnik,
Saying "totally against" was too strong. Let me try to clarify.
Yes, the GNU license list has "The following licenses qualify as free software licenses, and are compatible with the GNU GPL."[1]
To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with underlying philosophy of FSF and Stallman. That just says using those licenses as part of GPL projects is acceptable. However, they don't really fulfill Stallman's strategy and objectives.
An example of what I mean by BSD & MIT not aligning with Stallman's objectives would be past comments about him missing the chance to include Chris Lattner's LLVM/clang project in GCC.[2]
Presumably, Stallman would have not let llvm/clang become permissive-BSD license like Lattner did. He would prefer llvm/clang's valuable capabilities to be licensed as copyleft-GPL just like GCC. (More commentary on that style of thinking.[3]) To him, the permissive licenses "helps the enemies create proprietary software" (paraphrasing previous Stallman comments).
That's why I believe FSF and OSI have fundamental incompatibilities. The MIT & BSD licenses being on the GNU "approved" list doesn't really solve that.
EDIT to add reply to: >The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be provide.
I disagree because it seems that Stallman has taken great pains to explain why they are not aligned on the freedoms that software should provide. There is some overlap between FSF and OSI but that's different from alignment.
[1] from: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license (whether or not compatible with th GPL) is compatible with the FSF philosophy—It may not be compatible with the FSF strategy, because the FSF has a strategy, but that's a slightly different issue.
The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be provide. They differ on how problematic they view software that does not do that, and (largely as a consequence of the preceding disagreement) on how to best move toward a view where the benefits of software providing the freedom they agree on is broadly enjoyed.
I don't think this is accurate. Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license can be relicensed under the GPL because nothing in it contradicts the GPL. BSD, MIT, Apache, etc. licenses don't put any restrictions on how you can relicense the software, therefore they can be relicensed under the GPL.
The philosophy if the FSF is that you should have access to the code of the software you run, and that all software should be GPL. It helpfully offers a list of software that can be used as a base for GPL'd software.
In this case, "compatability" should actually be read as in "IBM-compatable" not as "simpatico" or "synonymous."
I wish that too, the problem off course is that FSF as an organization is absolutist and that would never work.
This recent install-fest threads illustrates this vividly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435791
We, OSI and FSF are both free-as-in-speech; they both use definitions centered around th freedom of the licensee.
I use the word "participatory" because it seems like a lot of complaints about the current state of free and open source software hinge on a lack of reciprocity. You have the individual maintainer of a small project, who feels burned because there are people out there making money on her back. You have companies like Red Hat making life harder for CentOS because Oracle are a big pile of freeloading jerks (old news, I know). You have other companies like Google strategically open sourcing some of their technologies for commercial advantage. We have complaints about maintainers who orphan their projects, and we argue about whether it's OK to complain about not getting something for nothing any more.
It seems like all of this strife comes from disagreements about what expectations we should have for all of the stakeholders -- owners, users, contributors, and maintainers. Not all of this can be spelled out in a license, as we've seen in the rise of CLAs and COCs. And so I use "participatory" in the sense that participating in third-way open source would impose some obligations in addition to the entitlements enumerated by the license.
And they give nothing back. No money, no developer hours. They take the fruits of a fledgling ecosystem and experience great productivity and performance improvements in their commercial products and reap increasing profits on the backs of people who naively just thought "I just want people to be able use my code is all".
The third wave does not recognize the tremendous costs associated with giving away productivity to corporations. It costs society broadly, because it empowers business interests to exploit workers and customers for greater revenues not through their own ingenuity or innovation but through the labors of others given away freely. That isn't being generous on the parts of the developers who wrote the code for those that most need generosity.
> The third wave does not recognize the tremendous costs associated with giving away productivity to corporations.
I think they do, and that's where the unrest is coming from. This realization has come after, not before, actually contributing.
(1) Pragmatic debates about the usefulness of copyleft vs. BSD/X11/MIT/etc. in various situations (and for various goals), (2) a (tribal, and mostly imaginary?) "business vs. hackers" narrative, and (3) RMS vs. everyone else.
OSI itself doesn't figure prominently in how I think of open source. I realize Open Source^tm is something that OSI legally defines, but going all the way back to the endless Usenet arguments in the '90s, the "open source vs. free software" conflict was never really about OSI vs. the FSF (IMO). It was more about accepting a multitude of licenses as acceptable alternatives, vs. adherence to the strictest and most complicated one (plus accepting Richard Matthew Stallman as your personal lord and savior).
It also felt like "open source" meant promoting a bunch of things as a common good, but "free software" meant promoting something very specific as good, and calling out a bunch of other things as evil. It's like working for a charity vs. being in someone's army. I wonder how much this contributes to which side is more appealing to someone, based on their values and personality.
Maybe this has become way more convoluted since the '90s, but I always considered open source to be a superset of free software. All GPL'd software is open source, but not all open source software is GPL'd. It's less of an "x vs. y" conflict, and more of a "(x, y, or z) vs. x" conflict, with a bunch of cultural and personal baggage tacked on to it.
The FSF was always very clear that the BSD-type licenses (at least once the minor issue of the "advertising clause" was dealt with) were Free Software licenses in their opinion. The Debian Free Software Guidelines always covered a wide variety of permissive "open source" licenses, and in fact the DFSG was used as the basis of the OSI's Open Source definition.
So I've never seen Open Source as a superset of Free Software - or vice-versa. Rather, they have always been almost or even exactly the same set. It's not, and never has been, about alternative taxa - instead, the difference was always more one of marketing.
It's not a question of What - it's a question of Why. The Why of Free Software is "So that people are free to share and modify the software they use", and the Why of Open Source is "Because this method of development creates better software.".
If a new movement does crystallise, it will be because neither of these Whys satisfy the new constituency, and their new answer to Why Permissively License Your Software? will be their rallying point.
It doesn't matter so much if you had software freedom, if all you had was the freedom to study, which is only one of the four freedoms.
You need the freedom to modify, and freedom to install modified versions, and the GPL guarantees that.
Question: How many IoT devices out there are running GPL'd firmware, providing source code, but no method to actually modify the device (or the current method is unmaintained and broken)?
Answer: A lot!
If you can't request sources and build & install them, it's a GPL violation.
Rebuilding and reinstalling linux on IoT devices is a necessary step towards privacy and security on those devices.
GPLv3 is intended to be better at this than GPLv2, specifically the anti-tivoization bits: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.en.html
Just some self-reflection. Thank you very much Steve for doing so in your usual engaging style.
His company had ~10 employees.
We decided we were not a good fit.
"GitHub!!!!" may be a lazy answer, but why isn't "gender!!!!" an equally lazy answer?
2. I didn't say that "gender!!!" was an answer; I said that the answer is complex, and that things like gender play one role in it.
3. I didn't give any answer here, explicitly, so it cannot be a lazy answer.
To such people, preserving and contributing to the canon of free software became an important cultural mission very closely tied with the concept of human freedom itself: if anyone with a computer is to be truly free of the predations of governments and corporations, they must be running free software, and inasmuch as people still can't do that for 100% of their uses for a computer, that's an open problem to be solved. These people are likely to be very conscientious (being programmer types) and to have actually read the GNU Manifesto, CatB, and related documents.
These days, Raymond's message of "open source is good for business" is so accepted in the tech world that it's the first form of this ideology many (if not most) open source devs are exposed to. A lot of that has to do with the first, second, and third dot-com booms that open source helped to kick off, which vastly expanded the pool of developers and developer wannabes with the promise of startup-founder riches. The composition of people involved with open source has changed from "mainly hackers" to something including many more business types, who are far more "practical" in that they are concerned with the following quarter's bottom line (or their own paycheck) much more than any ideology. So they understand that open source is good for business, but do not comprehend the relationship of free software to individual freedom and society as a whole. They are concerned with what's good for business. And if closing the source partway or all the way delivers higher projected revenues over the next fiscal quarter or year, so be it. That's a sacrifice they're willing to make.
It's unfortunate that we haven't communicated our values to the wider community nearly as effectively as Stallman or Raymond might have hoped. Comfort can be taken, I suppose, that we are still better off than we were in 1995, when software development was 99% proprietarywith expectation of payment, and giving your software away meant you were either some sort of communist, or didn't value what you wrote too much.
1. You are free to use this software for non-commercial use.
2. If you'd like to use this software for commercial use, you must either actively contribute to this project, or provide a donation to the project maintainers at Patreon / Paypal / Liberapay, etc.
Want to use the work of others for free, then to you what others get.
Willing to actually help upstream keep doing what they love, then great.
Users only need to pay for a license if they want to distribute statically linked software with Qt, if it is licensed in a way that is LGPL incompatible.
This is true now, but was not always the case.
Qt is also interesting in that there is also an agreement in place with the KDE Foundation that ensures that the Qt Company will always offer the core parts of Qt under a "proper" open source license. If they choose to switch to one of these non-commercial licenses again, then KDE is entitled to release the source under a BSD license if they want
Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source: The Politics of Open Source https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0745324142/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_...
Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Experimental Futures) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0822342642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_...
Looking forward to it.
In the meantime, consider a couple of kernels: Linux and sixth (or seventh edition) Unix. Unix wasn't released under a free or open license, but the effects were similar to an open source license: you could give away your changes if the recepient had an ATT license.
The results were SunOS, Solaris, and other monstrosities like AIX, HP-UX, Irix, and a dozen others, all different enough to prevent compatibility and ensure lockin. This lasted until the Unix environment collapsed under it's own weight.
On the other hand, there's only one Linux, under the GPL. There are forks, but few have real momentum. Major improvements are absorbed into the mainline kernels.
Likewise, in the C and C++ compiler space, gcc (its internal bit rot not withstanding) ate all of the other options.
You don't see the difference in most open source, possibly due to the momentum of Apache and Mozilla. Or possibly because most software has a short half-life. But see Amazon and Google's cloud support offerings.
Licenses express ideology. Choose your roots carefully.
http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2017/03/22/happy-...
Saying this is money does not seem to mesh with the world we live in where RedHat provides services with free copylefted software valued at billions of dollars. Free copylefted software is big money now for better or worse.
Also, I have to say that I think it's a mistake to view "open source" as solely motivated by commerce. One big practical difference between FSF and OSI is how accepting they are of permissive licenses like BSD and MIT. Basically, OSI likes them and FSF doesn't. (Or at least FSF prefers copyleft licenses like GPL.)
It's true that permissive licenses are more commerce-friendly, but one could also argue that they are more freedom-friendly as well. After all, with a permissive license, you can add your own proprietary extensions to a codebase and then sell the resulting executable without sharing the source for the extensions. With copyleft licenses, you are restricted from doing this. Thus permissive is arguably more free-as-in-freedom.
Of course, copyleft advocates argue that copyleft licenses are more free in a larger sense, in that they guarantee that the code stays free. And, you know, maybe they're right. But I think it's something that reasonable people can disagree about. Whereas a lot of copyleft advocates seem to think that permissive licenses are a sign of moral weakness.
I would say the permissive licenses are "free" in a libertarian sense, and the copyleft licenses are "free" in maybe an anarcho-syndicalist sense.
It seems like a lot of people are convinced that copyleft licenses are more ethical than permissive licenses. I'm afraid I just don't agree with this.
To anyone acquainted with the history of Christianity (or religion more generally) and the history of libre software, the parallels are simply fascinating.
From the Book of St. IGNUcius, 12:1-12:
Then began rms to speak to the people this parable; A certain person created a program for perself, and sent its code to other programmers, and went into a far country for a long time. When per returned, per sent an email to the programmers, now selling the software as a service, that they should forward any code that they had improved, so that other programmers might benefit from it: but the programmers ignored the email, and refused to acknowledge the debt.
And again per sent another email: and they ignored this one also, and maligned per on other mailing lists, calling per greedy and envious for prestige, and still refused to acknowledge the debt. And again per sent a third: and this one, too, they ignored.
Then said the creator of the program, What shall I do? I will send the code of my latest extension to the program under a copyleft license; it may be they will understand the obligation of using libre software and the reciprocal sharing of code when they read the license and modify the code.
But when the programmers saw the new code, they reasoned among themselves, saying, this is a vast improvement on the original: come, let us obfuscate this code and delete the license, that we may continue to sell the software without giving back.
So they added the code to their the program and deleted the license. What therefore shall the original programmer do unto them?
Per shall come with lawyers and sue these programmers, and shall then give the source code to others.
And when they heard it, they said, Google forbid.
And he beheld them, and said, What is this then that is written, The license which the engineers rejected, the same has become the backbone?
Whosoever shall fall upon that license shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.
And Silicon Valley and their coders the same hour sought to lay hands on him; and they feared the people: for they perceived that he had spoken this parable against them.
The name is source available and you don't need to have a movement for that. I don't see any schims here, essentially it is a more transparent version of freemium where you also can see the code and that's all decades old.
Source transparency? Maybe we can popularize the idea that it's considered an altruistic act for tech media companies to escrow their source with academic organizations? This would help academics and museums preserve the exact media experience of each generation.
From the article: Somewhere along the way, Open Source ran into a problem that many movements face: the members of the movement no longer understood the ideology that created the movement in the first place.
Why shouldn't the values change? If people share source for prestige/recognition, to benefit from "more eyeballs" and to share the maintenance expense of shared infrastructure/libraries -- what's wrong with that? Society still benefits. The world isn't the same place where Stallman first thought of GNU. Why should the exact same ideology apply? What's wrong with some evolution?
> I’m not here to argue if the FSF has accomplished this goal
You reference the FSF here, but introduce it with its full name in the next paragraph. I assume that's because you moved stuff around slightly in editing. It's a small thing, but it's slightly weird seeing it used and then introduced afterwards.
To me, the current economic systems (left, right, center) are all sub-optimal. I assumed automation would obviate most human labor and usher in a kind of Golden Age (cf. Bucky Fuller, et. al.) Instead, we have pocket computers that serve as strip malls and surveillance devices. (I'm in SF, where we have people living in tents in the shadow of shoddy "luxury" condos. This is hella dystopian y'all.)
To someone like me, if you're programming a computer and NOT working towards a post-historical techno-utopia then you're kinda part of the problem.
We have split the atom: no one should go hungry anymore.
Blah blah blah, RepRaps, blah blah, universal basic income, blah...
Why is it dystopian? Some moral and economic systems value individual distinctiveness. What better way to express this distinctiveness than one's choice of living arrangement?
[0] That is to say, to the extent that the houseless can actually be considered making a choice, or at least having made that choice in the past and are now stuck on that path.
Did you just equate suffering from typhus, hepatitis, bacterial infections and other diseases directly tied to homelessness with a "choice of living arrangement"?
Did you do this while being aware that homelessness is a "choice" that historically begins with an acute lack of capital that forces an event called eviction?
Until a society arrives at a consensus in which a sufficiently large quantity of individuals with access to sufficient resources are obligated to offer free housing and other benefits to everyone, that society has implicitly chosen to accept the existence of a population of individuals who live in tents alongside sidewalks.
You are correct. I'm one of the few people who actually deliberately chose to be homeless, but I was a rarity. Even so, most of the people who wind up homeless have made one or more decisions that led them to their current state. They made a choice among the options they (thought they) had. A few, like me, were making a lifestyle choice. Most of them just made a bad choice.
> Until a society arrives at a consensus in which a sufficiently large quantity of individuals with access to sufficient resources are obligated to offer free housing and other benefits to everyone, that society has implicitly chosen to accept the existence of a population of individuals who live in tents alongside sidewalks.
Again, you're correct. In Utah they are building houses and giving them to homeless people.
In SF we spent about a quarter of a billion dollars (~$250,000,000) on homelessness last year, and we only have at most about ten thousand homeless people. Most of them would really like some better choices. Not just for housing but also for jobs (a lot of people I met on the street were willing to work if they could.)
So, to answer your question from above, that's what makes it dystopian: we as a city are willing and we have the resources, but we're just failing.
Eviction, the gateway to homelessness, is in no way a choice. Inability to accumulate, pay or borrow capital is so seldom a choice, the word is effectively meaningless in the context.
>Until a society arrives at a consensus in which a sufficiently large quantity of individuals with access to sufficient resources are obligated to offer free housing and other benefits to everyone, that society has implicitly chosen to accept the existence of a population of individuals who live in tents alongside sidewalks.
That is true, but it has to be said it totally contradicts your first point, because sufficient and sweeping redistribution of housing and housing capital is the answer to nothing but the coercive suffering felt by those who lack capital, not the answer to some alleged "choice" taken by the sufferers.
Be careful what you wish for. There's ways to fix that on both the supply side, and on the demand side... and the latter has made for quite a few interesting supervillains in popular fiction. And somewhat counter-intuitively, "fixing" the supply side often just leads to increased demand.
Like many problems, it's easy to assume you have a perfect solution before you actually understand the nuances of the problem. Let's not assume "We're smart" immediately means "this is easy". Some problems are inherently hard.
Some would suggest that splitting the atom is more relevant to the latter than to the former :-)
I also find it odd that one of the reasons to use the term open source was because of the ambiguity with the meaning of free. Even with this reason, the majority of open source software is free/gratis.
I agree with the problem we are facing now, we are just not educating many developers on free and open source software. It is probably something we need to improve on.
The personal politics of some of the founding figures is perhaps helpful to understand the history but I don't think it's necessarily that useful in understanding the movements today.
From the horse's mouth:
> Early drafts of GPLv3 allowed licensors to add an Affero-like requirement to publish source in section 7. However, some companies that develop and rely upon free software consider this requirement to be too burdensome. They want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement. By publishing the GNU Affero GPLv3 as a separate license, with provisions in it and GPLv3 to allow code under these licenses to link to each other, we accomplish all of our original goals while making it easier to determine which code has the source publication requirement.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SeparateAffero
The "administrative burden" is not academic, by the way. Where I work we spend a lot of time and money checking that we are compliant with every license pulled in directly or indirectly into our products.
FSF faced fork threats when it floated AGPL-GPL merger in GPLv3.
I didn't mean to imply that. The AGPL however greatly expands the scope of folks to whom the burden applies. Some companies can basically just look for AGPL to exclude because they don't distribute anything.
Others (like us) must check everything.
I personally am more IP-liberation minded, but I more generally want some apparatus whereby I can inspect, modify, and reuse the software running on physical devices I own in totality. Its better for society as a whole to be information-positive than negative in the general case, and that applies to IP in general as well.
The FSF has made way too many compromises over the years about, say, hard drive firmware or monitor firmware or "single use device" firmware to be ideologically rigorous. If a device is in such a condition that you cannot modify code running on it, the impetus should be to move towards mandating devices be reprogrammable - even if it means desoldering a chip and reprogramming it via FPGA.
To this day I'm not entirely sure where such an ideology should fall, but the general availability of all code in use combined with other societal improvements like a minimum standard of living would enable users to improve their own devices collaboratively and organically. Its how almost all learning and innovation in the past came about, before we siloed ourselves off in private to try to outrace the lowest hanging fruit against everyone else in tandem with wanton waste of time and resources to capitalize on artificial state scarcity apparatuses as a source of profit. Its really gross to think about.
I have no idea when this was written. It uses the word "today" four times and is written in the present tense but is it referring to events as of a day ago, a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago?
Please put dates on your articles. Otherwise they read as spam, cynically positioned as "evergreen."
This is Svbtle's decision, not mine.
It's ever-so-slightly worse than undated: The date appears in extreme light gray before you hover over the headline.
Meanwhile, every founding member of the OSI is mentioned.
1. I tried to write the article without mentioning anyone's name.
2. I didn't like it as much as when I quoted from particular sources, so I started putting names in.
3. Personally, I am more sympathetic to RMS and more biased against esr. I really, really struggled to actually link to esr in this piece, but in the end, decided it was right. But I just didn't think about Stallman. My desire to work against my bias ended up just biasing my work.
Writing is hard.