I wonder if we could create a tax incentive for this. For example, if a publisher commits to open sourcing N years after release, they get a break on sales. Or get to capitalise R&D more aggressively during development.
The open code to the software we use should not be a handout or a gift ex post facto.
The open code to the software should be an invitation: to collaborate on it, audit it, or frankly do anything you want with it (e.g. WTFPL); before, during, and after using it.
You're not wrong, but given the world we live in the incentive would be better. And I would say that's the sort of "non-reformist reform" that's liable to push towards the ideal, not appease and reinforce the status quo.
> You're not wrong
"Not wrong" seems like a... generous... description of this viewpoint. Lots of places tried the system of "all housing is publicly held"; it was not a success.
Open source should be a big tent - it should be an answer to questions people have many different motives for asking. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/29718/is-the-wtfpl-g...
I mean, really. It just seems batshit insane to me that this is problematic.
> Third-party software made available under one of these licenses must not be part of Google products that are delivered to outside customers.
This policy covers all 3 versions of the GPL. And yet they made Android, based on the Linux kernel.
As copyright pushed to things beyond books that also made it easy to forget that original "open source" idealism behind copyright. It's tougher to build a new movie out of the components of a published movie than to build books from the components of published books.
Patent law is where the idea was applied to something that needed "source control preserved": describe an invention in complete detail in a public registry so that others can recreate and get a powerful limited monopoly on it, but as soon as that limit hits everyone should be able to recreate it.
Software patents have long been a mockery of that original spirit of patent law, but "open source projects by companies get stronger piracy protection/what have you for the first X years of their registered life" is really what software patents should have been in the first place, based on the original goals of what patents were for.
Create that tax incentive, and 99% of publishers will slap the "open source" label on something 5 or 10 years old which is completely unmaintained, unusably buggy, and virtually unreadable. Nothing of value will be gained, and big companies will have yet another tax loophole.