The fee could be really small but scale depending on factors like business size. Or there could be no fee outright for businesses smaller than a certain size.
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.
They’re still providing the code for people who buy the compiled software. And they are not restricting their ability to redistribute that code. So it’s still compliant with the GPL in the letter. However, if you redistribute it, they’ll refuse to service you further versions of the software.
It’s clearly a loophole because they can argue “ackshyually, we didn’t restrict you, we just don’t want further businesses with you, see ya sucker”.
Obsidian-livesync works very well If you have some self hosting skill / hardware. The sync happens in realtime and is almost like Google docs. Allows excellent sync between all devices
Because of a different Lemmy post, I’m just now trying out Orgzly. It looks terrific so far, and I think it meets all your needs. It stores everything in plain text, so you just have to sync the text files.
edit: as noptys points out, Orgzly Revived is what you want to use (and what I meant to recommend).
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.
sure, i love change for the better. the EU parliament is proof that change like this is possible, one just needs funding for lobbbyists like rossmann has done it.
I honestly thing we need that third party instance that audits proprietary code for the licenses it uses to see if there’s a breach. Then they could sue all the companies that don’t abide by the license. Most likely GAFAM would lobby against such a thing because they know they use a lot of opensource stuff that could force them to opensource their stuff, but honestly, fuck them. They’ve made a killing on the backs of free work.
Don’t kid yourselves, regardless of all your ideals open source only works because it’s free from a monetary perspective.
Companies work on patches to Linux or other software because it primarily benefits themselves, and they only use Linux because it’s free. Companies create hardware on Linux because it’s free. They can manufacturer cheap devices and people will buy them because they were low cost primarily because of the use of FOSS software.
Nearly all of FOSS is funded by corporations whether you like it or not, for the reasons you want to hear or not. The only thing that drives people is money.
The FOSS contributions from companies mentioned is only at the kernel level. And a lot that use the kernel, but with proprietary blobs for their hardware. I suspect that is because kernel/embedded development is hard and costly.
Most of the dominate OSes people use, with the exception of Windows, is based on an FOSS kernel, with then the layers above and applications being proprietary.
These software systems are being used to lock people in to the specific platforms and perform user hostile behavior. So while having the kernel be FOSS, it doesn’t result in user freedoms imagined by FOSS, it just companies reducing their costs.
they only use Linux because it’s free. Companies create hardware on Linux because it’s free
Companies use open source software because it’s the cheapest option. It’s all about margins.
Nearly all of FOSS is funded by corporations whether you like it or not
Yes, and FOSS can get a lot more funding if they charged companies even a little bit.
So as long as it’s cheaper to pay a fee to continue to use an open-source software than it is to hire a group of developers to produce and maintain the same thing, the idea is viable.
Hundreds of thousand of unpaid open source contributors would have a word about that. In fact, millions of voluntary workers in other fields, too.
You’re right that companies contribute to open source as well, and that their motivations are probably self serving. Your conclusion doesn’t hold water, though.
IMHO, money is something that exists in the world and that I need to live. It’s a necessary evil, not a universal human driving force. And believe me, I’m neither rich or even financially afloat.
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.
Generally speaking I agree; I like how Perens is thinking about it.
I do think it’s pretty well established that the GPL “has teeth” though. The FSF has a list of enforcement cases against fairly large defendants; it looks like their record is 2 for 2 in the US. I think it rarely comes up, just because complying with the terms of the license is so no-brainer-ly easier than trying to make the legal argument that you can use someone else’s stuff for free while thumbing your nose at the terms and conditions they want you to abide by in order to do that.
I think most of the “big company ignores the GPL” things you hear about are either things like RHEL, where they’re carefully skirting the line in a clearly bad-faith way that has some decent chance in court for some particular reason, or else someone breaking the GPL and then their legal department looking at it for 2 seconds and telling them to stop doing that. The cases where someone with anything to lose actually doubles down and says “fuck you” are rare I think for pretty obvious reasons.
(Also, I just learned this today: When Best Buy did this in 2009, the judge eventually made them give the plaintiffs the TVs as part of the damages when it was all done. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.)
I need to look into the Best Buy case you’re referencing.
But I doubt think you’re right that violation of the terms of the GPL is such a rare thing. Aside from people who just don’t use technology much at all, I’d imagine most folks have multiple devices sold in ways that violated the GPL and with no plans for GPL compliance (and no knowledge that they needed a plan for GPL compliance.)
On what is your doubt based? Like what devices do you have that you think are violators? Like I say I imagine that careless violations aren’t, like, un-heard of, but correcting them once things are explained is almost always the response. I mean, correcting the violation is usually free and easy. I’m not real familiar with the SFC, but I know they’re actively suing Visio right now, and I know the FSF is happy to bring cases to trial if it comes to that (they kind of like doing it it seems like).
This talk says “[Free Software] is generally everywhere and a lot of these smart devices that you buy off the shelf most likely is running some sort of free software but most people would never know that. Generally it’s not indicated anywhere that it’s running any type of free software. There’s no written offer for sources which is sadly the most popular… the written offer for source code seems to be the most popular way that they go about distributing the software but generally they don’t follow up with it or what they distribute is not really that.”
This article mentions that “I’ve been on a mission in recent months to establish just how common and mundane GPL violations are. Since 21 August 2009, I’ve been finding one new GPL violating company per day (on average) and I am still on target to find one per day for 365 days straight.”
I’ve got a robot vacuum cleaner that runs the Linux kernel and Busybox but came with no written offer for source code. (Per the article above, I’ll refrain from naming and shaming the company.) I might go look at the documents that came with my smart phone a little later and see if I can find any written offers for source.
Hm, interesting stuff. Yeah, maybe it’s more common than I was aware of – that’s still a little weird to me, because there are entities like FSF that are so happy to go to bat for people legally if they do want to make it a legal issue.
Maybe it’s made a little more complex because a lot of authors don’t want to “punish” the company involved so much as they just want people to comply with the terms of the license, and a lot of companies aren’t violating the license out of maliciousness but just from lack of knowledge or it just being more difficult than it sounds to keep your ducks in a row with source availability.
FWIW, I know Android phones generally have something buried in the settings where it explains what the licensing is for the code on the phone and with a theoretical offer for the source if you want it. That seems like what the Youtube talk is about; just creating the technical tools so that people can be in compliance without it being a pain in the butt that costs your engineers time and costs you money to do which companies are going to be tempted to avoid. But yeah, maybe people are getting sloppy about it in a way I wasn’t aware of; that’s sad to me if so.
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.
It’s more that they avoid the spirit of the licensing, not the terms (except Red Hat of course).
I suppose you can split this into two separate arguments:
If you had also read the article BTW you would have realized that spoilers: it’s not about source code availability.
You saw the first few paragraphs about the Red Hat drama and didn’t read further.
Reading the whole thing you’d realize it’s a list of reasons why open source software hasn’t become popular with the wider public, and his proposed solution to this.
I just included the idea he is proposing, others can read the article to see his reasoning.
It has the potential to be the fediverse app, allowing users to curate content from any other ActivityPub platform in one app only. Do you want to see and interact with communities from Lemmy and photos from PixelFeed? Do you want only Mastodon and PixelFeed? Or Lemmy and PeerTube?
I know you can do that with other platforms, but they maintain their own content visualization, like viewing a Lemmy post in Mastodon looks odd.
I like the idea of separate tabs to see different content the right way.
Also, it’s easier to install. I remember the old days when Friendica used to be in Softaculous and other auto installers used in shared hostings.
Before it gets more love I think it probably needs a flagship instance. Friendica’s one of a handful of older fediverse projects where it is legitimately difficult to find an instance to sign up on.
Peertube as far as i can tell does not have a flagship instance, and seems to be doing fairly well, venera.social works better for me then another instance i tried which had random log offs and seems fairly popular.
Peertube absolutely also has this problem but I’m not sure general peertube instances really make sense at this point anyhow. There are a couple of hobby instances but if you’re not into that there’s not a whole lot you can do.
I remember when I could install Friendika (yes, that long ago) on a low spec web host. Probably 15 years ago, and it didn’t last.
Like you say, it ought to be the easily self hosted alternative to Facebook. The one you could suggest to your non-techie relative as a Fediverse gateway. Yet after a couple decades of development, it’s still esoteric and awkward.
I met the main developer at the CCC congress two days ago, and we talked about it a bit. The problem is that he is only a backend developer, and the front ends for Friendica are a really old and messy codebase.
I think the best option for Friendica would be to fork one of the available alternative front ends for Mastodon and adapt it for the additional functionality of Friendica. But they need a frontend dev to help out with that.
Friendica is a Facebook-like app? Which means you use your real identity and connect to real life friends. This also means all that data gets passed around to any instance that wants it via activity pub. Given the potential for abuse there that is just inherent to the app, I don’t think I would ever be interested in a service like Friendica.
Did you read the article? This is 100% the opposite of his point. He wants to, among other things, publicly fund development of open source, at the expense of private companies which are currently profiting from it in arguably-abusive fashion.
This is what I use. The project is dead and had some bugs that kept it running on my system right away, but as it’s open source, I was able to fix the code a little bit to success. Just wish it was a little friendlier on cpu or could be selective on which apps to run instead of recording nonstop regardless. I have it start up with Steam for now though.
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