Thoughts on Post-Open Source?

TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.

He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they’d fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that’s usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.

It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.

What are your thoughts on it?

BaumGeist, (edited )

people are always going to be floating ways to save capitalism in the face of communities privileging freedom over greed.

this completely misses the point of free software, and fails to solve the problems Mr. Perens identifies with Open Source. He claims it fails to serve the “common person” (end users) and then proposes a solution that serves… only devs.

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… Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.

All these problems are already solved by free software. the rebranding of “open source” was a compromise on the principles of free software to make the movement palatable to profit-seekers. In the end, it predictably failed to improve anything. The solution isn’t to reinvent the wheel, it’s to stop making the wheel square because the square lobby insists they’ll only use it if it’s square. The solution is copyleft, and free software being used more than it’s defanged cousin.

The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest

That’s a feature, not a bug. On one hand, if people knew about free software they wouldn’t be as good consumers. On the other hand, internals should be opaque to users; just as devs don’t want to have to know how the logic gates in the CPU are routing their code to write code, end users shouldn’t have to worry about the politics of the communities that developed their code.

oscardejarjayes,

Most of these problems are literally just capitalism. This solution is just a band aid, and even then is unlikely to be implemented in a way that will help the problem.

GarbageShoot,

“Post-Open Source”

Overly-teleological modernist framing has hopelessly fucked up tech discourse. Too much declaring things the future and hoping people will just believe you.

yournamehere,

what an idiot. the eval process is funny stupid and costly. the consequences will be companies both avoiding to use foss and also be less secure for using closed source. and then there is ai. code written with ai is not copyright-able and i bet anyone will prefer ai dumb code over costly foss code. may that dev rott in hell for this egomaniac idea of a free world.

Zerush, (edited )
@Zerush@lemmy.ml avatar

These are my thoughts regarding FOSS for a long time. The sense of facilitating the development and freedom of the project has been distorted years ago, when large corporations put their hands on this project, controlling it. Just look at the amount of “OpenSource” soft and services controlled by Google, M$, Amazon, FB … Yes, they are free to distribute and modifiable by devs, but mostly full of APIs from these corporations, not controllable by the user, subtracting their sovereignty and only modifiable with effort by people capable of understanding the scripts and redirects they contain. For a normal user it is increasingly irrelevant whether the project is FOSS or proprietary, while these products and the internet in general are in the hands of these companies.

A simple question is enough, which one do you prefer to use? FOSS projects from large corporations, or Freeware from small independent startups, if you don’t have the knowledge to review the script anyway, almost impossible in millions of lines, with external references from large apps and services? It becomes decisions of mere trust, perhaps with the help of external services, such as WebKoll, Blacklight, Unfurl and similar, where in the end the license that the product has is irrelevant, with respect to security and privacy, often in question or not, in some like others. In the end only the intentions and ethics of the developer matter.

Yes, of course, the concept of OSS, FOSS and FLOSS requires a profound review and update, so that it does not become a destroyer of what it aims to protect and promote, a free internet.

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