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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?
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Great, let’s inject more capitalism!
Seems like you need to inject more reading comprehension.
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, but 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.
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.
Can you elaborate on this?
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.)
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 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.
BSD which iOS is based on
Note that Apple’s OSs have very little to do with BSDs unless you deem coreutils the only criteria for an OS’ quality.
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.)
I mean just license it as such right? You can’t say it’s completely free for anyone to use then complain you aren’t getting paid.
Well the question is, how would such a license look like? Or would it be a contract and not a license?
I guess I should ask a lawyer these questions, but I wanted to see what others here thought about the idea.
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.
You can buy a license to use software. That’s how a lot of software works.
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.
wouldn’t a company like best buy have millions of dollars of inventory of TVs?
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).
What did they infringe on?
That’s all well and good. But it still doesn’t change the whole not getting paid issue. Unless they violated the license lol
What were they not complying with?
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
What loophole? I think they’re just blatantly violating it
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”.
Enshittification continues
Is there a court case about this already? Because that’s clearly not the intention of the GPL.
I don’t think that there is one yet, otherwise it would get famous. Not sure though.
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.
Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions (inviting corporations to exploit Free Software by trying to re-brand it).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which in June, under IBM’s ownership, stopped making its source code available as required under the GPL.
Pointing to popular applications from Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Perens says: "A lot of the software is oriented toward the customer being the product – they’re certainly surveilled a great deal, and in some cases are actually abused.
The reason that doesn’t often happen today, says Perens, is that open source developers tend to write code for themselves and those who are similarly adept with technology.
Perens acknowledges that a lot of stumbling blocks need to be overcome, like finding an acceptable entity to handle the measurements and distribution of funds.
Asked whether the adoption of non-Open Source licenses, by the likes of HashiCorp, Elastic, Neo4j, and MongoDB, represent a viable way forward, Perens says new thinking is needed.
Perens doesn’t think the AGPL or various non-Open Source licenses focus on the right issue in the context of cloud companies.
The original article contains 1,837 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use
You need to read the article yourself before writing TLDR. Spoiler: it is not about payments, it is about source code availability.
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.
So, basically the opposite of BSD3 license
Open source is just another commons, and companies have a way of uncontrollably exploiting common resources until they collapse.
In the case of open source, it’s healthy in the sense that money is flowing, we have companies sponsoring projects, tons of code is available for inspection and reuse, etc. Very nice. But if you go back to the original concepts of free software, in many cases we struggle with actually exercising the four freedoms. Red Hat has engineered an EULA that basically lets them ban practices that had been thought protected by the GPL for at least a generation, and so on and so forth. So is the open source community healthy or dying? Doesn’t the answer to that depend on your priorities?
I think it would make a lot of sense to try to create an economic model that can fund open source software development without relying on corporate injections of cash. It’s not that they don’t pay for it ever, they just pay for it to the bare minimum extent. IE, the heartbleed fiasco – tons of companies were freeloading off one guy and like half the Internet’s security got fucked for it. Imagine if OpenSSL had had some kind of economic support structure in place to allow for, uh, more than one guy to manage the encryption library for like half the Internet before something insanely stupid and predictable like that happened. Well, we can never have that with corporate-controlled open source.
“more than one guy to manage the encryption library for like half the Internet before something insanely stupid and predictable like that happened.”
That exactly happens WAY more often with open source than when corporations “manage” software. Corps even go to court and stop security from happening abusing all sorts of laws just to not have to fix their security flaws. (Argueably corporations might be forced by law abusers to keep the flaws open which is a counter argument against corporations managing software and that would also explain “empty patches” regulary delivered by some companies)
With open source (as in free speak AND in free beer) everyone can fix problem by either doing or by learning-then-doing even if this means changing the underlying concept to fix design flaws i.e. in protocols. And that actually happens more often than i would wish sometimes. But this does not happen with company based software - no matter if 100% proprietary or with winding-public-licence-loophole licences. Companies are the exact opposite of a warranty for fixes, instead products are abandoned even if hundrets of thousands of customers still use it AND still need it. As we live in a capitalist world, companies canjot The warranty for the possibility of a fix only exists within completely public code (again as in free apeak AND in free beer). And the usual case is that every limitation to that (not published, restrictive license)
Fuck no. A small business that is struggling to survive should be able to use WordPress and Linux without paying
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.
That still sounds like a lot of confusion for small companies. especially given most FOSS is provided as-is without any legal consultant avaliable.
It’s also against the very idea of software freedoms in the first place. This is just reinventing proprietary licenses.
Companies should be required to pay if they take the software, modify or fork it, and then sell it to others. That’s the only case in which I think anyone should be paying for libre software.
For example, the linux kernel is used by android. Google modifies the kernel source and sells it to phone manufacturers. Linus Torvalds (and the rest of all kernel devs) deserve a stipend for the use of their work to generate profit. Also, the modifications should be legally required to be open sourced if they don’t pay.
The ability to modify the code is a central tenet of free software. The GPL takes care of making those modifications available to others. That effectively is the payment the original devs get.
If companies are required to pay, then the software is not libre. I understand your intent, but this isn’t a solution (even if it was, it would just mean that it would just be a tax for small companies, Meta and Alphabet aren’t worrying about a tax), building a stronger community is.
Commercial software is not mutually exclusive with libre software, and things like copyleft exist to prevent companies from using libre software to create proprietary software.
The point I was making is that there needs to be a penalty for GPL violations. Small businesses can avoid the penalty by abiding by the agreement.
Doesn’t make sense at all.
I keep seeing Redhat used an example, but they contribute a HUGE amount a source code and projects… Pipewire, systemd, rpm, DBUS and even the main XML addon for VSCode, etc.
I don’t think people realise how much poop linux would be swimming in if they went bankrupt…
Redhat are literally one of the big reasons why Linux is so seamless these days, and they’re solving a lot of the big problems. And from my understanding, they still contribute the code seperately anyway.
That being said, I agree money needs to go towards developers. However, a lot of them end up hired at major companies. And I don’t think this is the way to approach it
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”.
business source license
This is nonsense, Business source is not a free license. It is useless to try to invent new and clever licenses if they don’t even follow the basic standards for Free software. The solution to helping hackers/devs in their work is not to suddenly reinvent proprietary licenses.
You might be discouraged to know that CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 is a non-free/proprietary license since it restricts commercial use.
There is no crude “fucking over.” Creating software is a difficult task, and creating software that respects the user’s freedom means giving up the temptation to use your abilities for harm and personal benefit.
This is exciting! He’s come up with an economic principle where entities engage in an equitable exchange of goods for money where the consumer of the good pays for the value they receive. This could really change everything! I wonder what they’ll call it?
