TootSweet, 1 year ago

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.