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:
I wasn’t too psyched about reading this article, but I was surprised at how sensible it is – among a bunch of pretty good points he makes, this is one of them:
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.”
From the end user’s point of view, there is absolutely no open-source-ness to your Android phone. (BSD which iOS is based on was always designed to make this a possibility, but the GPL was not.) They’re using all this software which was supposed to be authored under this theory of GPL, but except for the thinnest thinnest veneer of theoretical source availability, it’s proprietary software at this point.
RMS actually talked about this. He laid out this vision of this bright future where you’d always have access to the source code for all the software on your computer and the rights to take a look at it or build on it or modify it, and some reporter said, well yes but what about all these other urgent problems that are ruining the world with private industry trying to make money at all costs and destroy it all. And RMS said, more or less: Yes. It bothers me a lot. But I don’t really know about that, and I know software, and I felt like in this one specific area I could write a bunch of software and solve this one problem in this one area where I felt like I could make a difference. If other people could get to to work on these other more urgent problems that’d be great, because they also bother me a lot.
Yeah, 100%. At this point the resources invested in MacOS / iOS have probably exceeded even the decades of work they were able to leverage by starting with FreeBSD / NeXT / Mach / whatever else.
(Edit: Actually, not 100% true. Macs are still very BSD-like under the hood; I actually really like development on Macs because I can basically treat them as BSD systems with unusual package management and a fancy GUI. For that reason they’re far preferable for me over Windows or pre-OSX Macs. But yes, your point is well taken that iOS development at this point has far eclipsed anything they started out from in terms of LOC and time spent.)
BSD which iOS is based on was always designed to make this a possibility, but the GPL was not.
Can you elaborate on this? I would have said exactly the opposite. That the GPL’s copyleft scheme and requirement of providing source code was very intentionally meant to be a way to prevent big corporations from taking advantage of users via software. I’ll admit that vision hasn’t born the fruit (that I’d’ve said) it was intended to. But wasn’t the intention there?
Meanwhile, BSD doesn’t have any provisions intended to keep some big company from distributing compiled binaries sans source code with lots of antifeatures added.
The terms of the GPL specifically require that you be able to specifically demand all source code of any GPL’d code on your smartphone (or smart TV or toaster or garage door opener or whatever) so that you can build at least the GPL parts of the firmware for your own devices. If the courts would just back that up, you would be able to recompile all the GPL’d parts of your smartphone’s firmware and run that on your phone. That was the intention of the GPL. And the terms of the GPL have been used to bear fruit in that direction. OpenWRT wouldn’t exist if Free Software advocates didn’t threaten legal action if… who was it… Broadcom?.. didn’t comply with the GPL and release its source code.
There is still Tivoization to contend with. (Locked bootloaders, basically.) Some (like Bradley Kuhn) think the GPL’s terms are sufficient to prevent that from being a problem already.
I think we’re saying the same thing; maybe I worded it confusingly. BSD is supposed to allow proprietary-ization, and GPL is supposed to prevent it. Apple is within both the letter and spirit of the BSD license with what they’re doing with iOS. Google is technically within the letter of the GPL with how they distribute Android, just as Redhat is technically within it in how they distribute RHEL, and honestly maybe both cases are fine, but it’s far from the intent. The spirit of the GPL is that people who would receive an Android phone would know that the relevant parts of their phone’s software are open source and have a realistic ability to modify them, which I’d argue is true for pretty much 0% of even tech-savvy users today.
If the courts would just back that up, you would be able to recompile all the GPL’d parts of your smartphone’s firmware and run that on your phone.
Firmware? You mean kernel, right? (in addition to whatever low-level userland tools are GPLd, which I’m sure is a bunch.)
I don’t think Google really did anything wrong here. The letter of the law is being upheld pretty well in what they’re doing. I think the issue is the cell phone manufacturers making it de facto impossible to modify your cell phone. I don’t think the GPL actually makes any requirement for modifying the software in-place being a requirement (nor should it IMO), and providing the source code is done carefully in accordance with the license. It’s very different from the “fuck you I take your stuff, sue me hippie” stance that Broadcom took. Broadcom very clearly broke the law.
In my opinion, the issue is that a cell phone is such a free-software-hostile environment that arguably GPL software shouldn’t “be allowed to” come into contact with it in any capacity if the spirit of the GPL were being upheld. IDK how you can write something like that into a license though. And I think that’s what Perens is saying – that we need a new model that comes closer to the spirit in terms of what the actual result is.
(Edit: Actually, maybe making it a realistic possibility to drop in a recompiled replacement should be a part of the GPL. I remember people were talking about this decades ago with signed bootloaders and things, so that a recompiled kernel wouldn’t boot on particular machines unless you broke the DMCA by doing something to your hardware. I said I wouldn’t like any attempt in the license to forbid that, but on reflection, it sounds like maybe a pretty good way to better uphold the spirit of the GPL with particular legal language.)
Ok, yeah. I think I misinterpreted the bit of your post that I quoted.
About Google, it’s not necessarily Google who manufactured your phone. It is if you have a Pixel, but it might be Samsung or LG or ZTE phone or whatever. And it’s not necessarily them who sold you your phone. It might be T-Mobile or Mint Mobile or AT&T. Whoever conveyed GPL’d code in object form (as the GPL puts it “embodied in, a physical product”) has the responsibility of ensuring you can get from them the source of all GPL’d code on your device. Including all derivative works and modifications.
Derivative works includes kernel modules. Which includes device drivers for, say, 5G modems and fingerprint readers. And those are the kinds of things (aside maybe from tivoization) that are the biggest hurtles for making a fully free firmware for a given device.
So, yes, I mean the kernel and derivative works of the kernel like drivers. And of course anything else on the device that is GPL’d.
Plus, the GPL also includes what is necessary to compile and install GPL’d code as part of the source code. Some of the implications are pretty cool. See this article by Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy for more info.
I think if companies did comply with all this, FOSS could benefit ordinary users who don’t even know what FOSS is a lot more than it does now.
In my opinion, the issue is that a cell phone is such a free-software-hostile environment that arguably GPL software shouldn’t “be allowed to” come into contact with it in any capacity if the spirit of the GPL were being upheld.
How are phones free-software-hostile? I know IOS is, but Android not really. There’s a list of open source Android distributions. Although not very good, they are viable.
Actually, maybe making it a realistic possibility to drop in a recompiled replacement should be a part of the GPL. I remember people were talking about this decades ago
It does feel out of place how that isn’t in the GPL.
There’s a list of open source Android distributions. Although not very good, they are viable.
Yeah, I get that. This is why I’m not fully in agreement with Perens that this is an urgent problem.
How are phones free-software-hostile?
Because the whole idea of the GPL was to usher in a future that was like the environment RMS grew up in, where you always had the source code to all your stuff and you could examine or modify or build on it. Linux machines are in actual practice that way, which is super cool. Android phones are basically not, from the viewpoint of almost any mortal human. I think the argument is that the efforts that the manufacturers make to close off modifications to the phones, and then put software on them that’s sometimes hostile to the best interests of the phone owner, means they shouldn’t be able to use all this GPL-licensed software for free in order to build the phones they’re selling.
I worked at a company that had an open source policy. They wanted to use as much open source as possible but didn’t want to contribute back in any way. I explained to them that’s the antithesis of open source. If they find a bug, they should be willing to try to fix it or at least help fix it. Now all the code they wrote internally was closed source.
I’m fine with closed source projects but don’t use open source and just leech from it. Eventually people will stop or bugs will never get fixed. Everyone needs to chip in either money or time.
Depending on the nature of the changes, it might be more advantageous to tell them that it’s easier (i.e. cheaper) to contribute changes upstream, rather than maintaining them separately forever. Also, the good will and reputation boost involved can be significant.
Don’t say it if it isn’t true or anything, but in a lot of cases it’s true.
They didn’t ever touch the open source code. They’d just open a bug or feature enhancement. Why it annoyed me so much. I believe open source is best when everyone contributes something. Either time, money, or something of value.
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.
composer isn’t how you deploy software; it’s just how you download the dependency shitsmear for proper packaging and deployment as a verifiably consistent artifact. Enough of the hokey shit, please.
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.
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.
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