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 agree. Either use a business source license like Elastic and others, or fight for the installation of a third party that audits proprietary code for license use and sues if the rules haven’t been followed. It’s why I like the creative commons. They are quite realistic. Most of their licenses say: if you use this commercially, you have to pay. If not, then it’s free.
People who claim business source licenses are “not opensource” sound like such capitalist shills to me. It’s as if they’re shouting from the rooftops “it’s OK to fuck over opensource developers because principles matter more than reality”.
Listen, it’s a screenshot from when I was using windows back in 2020. It’s from Facebook messenger, I just didn’t feel like downloading and uploading when Lemmy has a url link I can drop here. Sorry, I get why you hate Facebook, me too. I just find it convenient to use the link feature. Again, privacy badger is a useful add on I use that helps blocks Facebook and X (Twitter) widgets.
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.
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.
All the people predicting doom and gloom for open source, but the reality is that without open source we wouldn’t be in the position where we currently are in terms of technology.
To be honest, I also think the patent system should be revamped as it is extremely flawed at the moment and prone to abuse by patent trolls, and it is stifling innovation.
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”.
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.
This to me is a good question. The lack of something concrete that sounds like “yes, that would definitely work” is something that makes me have reservations about this whole thesis… but that said I think it has some merit.
Mysql and Qt already have a pretty solid model, where there’s a GPL-enabled alternative that the community can use, or you can pay a fee to use the commercial version. You could scale that up to something where if you want to pay a certain fee, you can use lots of currently-GPL software (maybe any that’s been assigned to the FSF or something with the FSF shepherding the whole thing). Then, we can stop the sort of benign neglect of companies that are sloppy with their licensing of uboot or Busybox, and just tell them to start paying the fee if they don’t feel like dotting all their "i"s as far as licensing, and then use the fees to fund development of open source software that’s needed but doesn’t have a lot of motivated developers working on it.
I’m not as convinced that it’s necessary as Perens is. Like I think he overblows by quite a lot the impact of RHEL skirting their licensing, because in his mind RHEL is such a big part of the computing world when in reality it’s not. But it sounds like he’s describing real problems and the solutions make some version of good sense to me.
This is a common misconception. A couple times, it’s even gone to court. Both Cisco and Best Buy had to pay nontrivial amounts of money, and in the case of Best Buy, it hilariously had to give to the plaintiffs its inventory of TVs which contained software copyrighted and GPL-licensed by the plaintiffs.
GPL licensed does not in any world mean “completely free for anyone to use”. For end-users, it does. For companies that want to resell the GPL-licensed software, it means, you can do it for free if you comply with the terms of the license, and if you don’t, then you can’t. There’s not a monetary exchange, but there are licensing terms you need to comply with which were apparently important enough to the people that wrote the software for them to apply that particular license instead of some other one.
If you disagree, that’s completely fine, but that doesn’t mean you can all of a sudden resell their software and use their work for free, even if there are other people (in compliance with the license) who can.
They were selling TVs with GPL-licensed software inside without complying with the terms of the GPL. When challenged, their defense was some version of “But it’s completely free for anyone to use!”
They didn’t have to give up every one of their TVs of any model, just the infringing models (the ones that used Busybox without complying with the GPL).
IANAL and I don’t have the actual court papers, but is seems to me they were violating GPLv2 Section 6.
Essentially, what this section says is that if you distribute a chunk of software (in this case, the firmware embedded in a smart TV) that in its compiled form contains part or all of a software library covered by this license (in this case, Busybox, which is a bundle of common shell utilities you use every day in a Linux terminal, compacted into one binary to fit onto embedded systems), you have to do one of these four things:
Package the source code of the GPL’d library with the distribution itself. If your executable contains a version of it modified by you, those modifications must be in the source. In this case this would require putting the raw source code for Busybox on the TV itself in a place the user could access it, or perhaps bundling a flash drive with the source code on it with the TV.
Include a written offer to send the source to anyone who asks for it, at no cost (except for the cost of transfer itself if applicable, e.g. postage), and honor that offer for at least 3 years. I believe this is what most companies that use GPL’d code do.
If the distribution happens at a designated place, offer the source at that same place. This is mostly relevant to download pages, not physical products.
Verify that the customer already has a copy of the source distributed in advance. This is a specific edge case that makes no sense in this context.
This lawsuit was brought about because the sellers of the TVs that contained Busybox were not doing any of the above four things, and those sellers ignored or ghosted plaintiff when plaintiff contacted them about it.
Violating the (spirit of) the license (without violating the letter, because of loopholes in the license) is exactly what Perens is talking about.
He’s not “complaining he isn’t getting paid.” I think it’s pretty rare that the people working on open source software are actually hurting for money or anything. He’s complaining that the actual practice of how the software is being used, RHEL and Android on phones and etc, isn’t doing well at reflecting the vision of the computing world the GPL was supposed to create. Then, as one possible solution, he’s proposing to kill two birds with one stone with a new license where the companies that are skirting the license right now can have to fund the development of particular types of open source software that need to get done anyway but is lacking right now (because of lack of profit motive).
You might or might not agree with his thesis; as much as I think it’s interesting and insightful I have some reservations about it. I just thought you were misunderstanding his whole argument as being in terms of money, that’s all.
GPL isn’t the only open source license. This comment is beyond bizarre because it seems to imply that all open source software is GPL? And of course when software is licensed as GPL, that license can be enforced when someone breaks it (like your example). The original comment never mentioned GPL, it was about when something was licensed ss free. So when you give an example where it wasn’t licensed as such, what was the point?
From the link, Best Buy paid $90,000. That’s awesome! Wouldn’t there be a ton of opportunity in suing these big, careless companies that are violating open source? Seems like this would be “the solution”
I think mostly they prefer for people to just fix their delivery to comply with the license, as opposed to causing antagonism towards the community by going straight to a lawsuit. But yes, there are definitely teeth to it if some company for whatever reason doesn’t want to fix their infringement.
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