Is Free And Open Source Software The Best We Can Do?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
- We've been with both Open Source and Free Software for over 25 years and much longer in the case of Free Software and as can been seen from the modern software landscape companies are abusing these systems so is it possible that something better can be done.
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Let's not go the way of music rights payments. That hasn't worked out well for anyone other than the distribution organisations.
I do agree that free software & especially open source has failed in some sense, but to fix it would require more.... social and political change than any single licence would be able to fix.
That's one way to put it👀
Not to mention a LOT of money and infrastructure.
ah yes,
nothing to see here
what are you looking for anyway?
is it...
c o m m u n i s m.
I think that goes both ways.
Devs need to not expect to be paid more than the hours it takes them to create and sustain the project. If they demand equity or % of sales from every company that uses their software those companies should expect the dev to pay everyone who's ever contributed to their ability to make money.
On the other hand companies that are able should collectively cover the wages of devs they depend on who need the payment. Of course that's fighting human nature (see: tragedy of the commons) so it'll have to be backed by licensing but I think it can be done without abandoning FOSS.
A possibly least-bad solution:
Devs self-report hours with each commit using a less permissive license (can even be All Rights Reserved) which is changed to a permissive one when those hours are paid for (or paid in advance) by donation. Obviously this is easy to game but that gaming is out in the open because it's FOSS so there's reputational cost, companies will be more flexible with devs leading the direction because shared dev costs are cheap and with financial incentives comes competition.
As for trickling donations down the dependency tree, I think it should be the responsibility of devs using this donation system to trickle down some of it to pay off the hours of devs who need the help and helped make their project a reality.
Free software has been a massive success in areas of high interest common infrastructure. It's also been a massive failure outside of that. So much free software has been free only due to the altruism of it's author, very often a single author who does almost everything, and has a job outside of that which necessarily results in said software being a secondary priority even for the author. It should be no surprise that as a result of that we are laden with abandonware and software which is functional, but not polished. Common infrastructure, the OS and core applications that go into a distribution matters a lot, and I would be nearly as dogmatic about the need of this being Free as Stallman, for all the reasons he points out. Stallman IS right on his core philosophy, he's just wrong about the scope of where it matters. We need to be able to trust and modify our computers as we see fit. Everyone has an interest in this, and the vast majority of work on the kernel for example is done by developers supported by large companies.
The vast majority of software however is special interest and cannot exist as community developed software. Gaming as free software is effectively a total failure for example. Same with almost all industry software, is an oral surgery application that does scheduling and insurance claims going to be GPL? Hell no, who would hate themselves enough to make something like that for free? Nor does it matter, effectively at all.
Free software + commercial addons have been a successful model for many companies. And free software compatible licensing like bsd & apache have been successful as well in many common infrastructure settings.
However I think when it comes to esoteric, niche / industry specific software we shouldn't be dogmatic about open licensing, it can genuinely be harmful to a project/company's survival and success.
What I like about open source software is the fact that someone dedicated enough could port software to work on other machines.
Open source software is what really makes new ISAs like RISC-V viable to begin with. Without Linux, BSD and the open source ecosystem, RISC-V would be useless as what good is an ISA without software to run on it.
Contracts will have problems as well. When you have a behemoth like IBM, who can keep things in courts even with appeals, hire the top lawyers etc. We talked about this a lot in the 2000s with SCO, SCO becoming SCO Group, Novell buying SuSE and the collapse of many large Nix corps like SGi. I remember when IBM bought Red Hat and we warned they would restrict things and no one listened.
A copyright licence is a contract, the courts do not see them as different.
@@EwanMarshall Not true. A contract is between two or more bodies, private, public or state. A copyright license is a protection guaranteed by the government that protects a concept from theft by declaring you are the owner of said concept. The court does not see them as the same.
@@gpturismoNo, the licence itself is a contract between you and the copyright holder. You agree to the terms to use the copyrighted material, the other party provides the copyrighted material.
All the elements of a contract are met, there is an agreement here, and there is consideration by both parties. It is a contract of adhesion potentially, but this is not always true, when someone like Netflix is contracting with Warner Bro's to licence for redistribution via streaming.
The rights being bought and sold are protections given by the government, but that goes for the rights to own land too. The rights in having an easement on land. The mineral rights to dig in the land. The difference their we are talking "real property" rights rather than "intellectual property" rights. Still property rights, still can have contracts to transfer them away partly or fully.
I'm not loving the "post open" barrier to entry. Most of these like minded thinkers are considering "people at home" vs "huge corporations with tons of money". I have a small company that builds and provides software - and like all modern software companies, 90% of the code we distribute is open source. My company employs 4 people (including myself) and we don't have money or time to spare - if a software component we want to use has a license that requires us to jump through hoops such as compliance monitoring - we can't do that so we'll find something else.
I'm not opposed to software you have to pay for, as long as:
- The cost is a one-time fee for a perpetual, irrevokable license
- Updates can be paid as long as the versions you have access to remain supported
- You have access to the source code of all versions covered by the license
- No DRM, no license codes, etc. The software must assume it's licensed.
- If you're not making money from it, you don't have to pay
Probably missed a couple of things. I'm fine with paying for software, but if I buy sofware, I want to own it. Basically, the WinRAR model.
EDIT: Don't read my list of points as a list of requirements to nitpick. I recognize the wording is flawed (particularly point 2). So I ask: please don't point out loopholes. There are a lot of them. What I would prefer to see discussed are alternative wordings that better represent the underlying idea and/or the underlying idea itself.
I wonder how many unpaid developers have their work in any one distribution. Given a fair return for the use of their software, how much money would that amount to monthly/annually?
Problem 1: If you have the source, someone will make a fork for free.
@@talkysassis Well, anyone can make illegal forks anyway.
@@talkysassis Louis Rossmann's app Grayjay is open source but he still sells licenses. He stated in his video on the subject that if someone is so determined to not pay that they fork it and take the monetization code out of it, he's fine with it.
@@talkysassis that would be illegal 👍🏻
I believe IBM is violating the GPL, but we need someone with very deep pockets to take IBM to court and hang on through all the appeals.
Free software is also designed to be friendly to corporate interest, they just want corporations to use foss software
The arguments that apply to companies paying their way in a "post-open" architecture also applies to individuals and non-profits. I know there is a desire in some quarters to monetise free and open source software beyond voluntary donations. And that doesn't just apply to software, it's just as applicable to TH-cam content too. The problem is, there isn't an infinite money supply for creators from consumers and charging individuals and non-profits as well as corporations for everything that provides value to them is going to get very expensive, very quickly.
This would just be another cost center for the for-profit ventures that utilize the software. The cost should be small but proportional to the value that it adds. If a company can not turn a profit when required to pay for this stuff, the free market says that they ought not to exist.
@@Mark-kt5mh Well then say goodbye to every social media
@@LabiaLicker That might be a boon with how trash its gotten
@@Alpha-kt4yl yeah I agree, nothing of value would be lost. I would probably still miss youtube though.
@@LabiaLicker sure social media margins might not be amazing but they'd be enough to pay for the software used, and if they don't want to pay reasonable rates, they're free to hire developers and write their own replacements. It's my opinion that this license change should only apply to new software or new major versions of existing software (with clear notice of the change of license and the option not to upgrade).
So, in short, he wants... non-profit software companies... Okay...
When you are reading articles, please highlight the line of the paragraph you are reading or something. I find myself getting lost in what you are reading multiple times in each video you read articles. Thanks! Love your content.
For example, 15:37
A license that is hard copy-left by default and looks closer to today's FOSS licenses for paying customers could be a natural way to distinguish between corporations and other types of users
The open source community is slowly but surely working out what a job is.
The same can't be said for you when it comes to understanding what jobs ACTUALLY are
"We'll refuse to do business with you if you leak our patches, even though you have every right to do so" sounds like a GPL violation already, at least in spirit. The code was contributed under the assumption that GPL would "lock it open". Hell, it feels even more of a violation than, say, what TiVo was doing that sparked RMS to push for a GPLv3.
Unfortunately I don't think we're going to be able to get away with a GPLv4 to make this explicitly a license violation. We couldn't even get everyone to go from GPLv2 to v3, because strengthening the copyleft even a little *is* ultimately changing the deal (which is why Linus Torvalds didn't want Linux to be under GPLv3 terms). Maybe in an alternate world where OpenWatcom was accepted as a Free license and actually got usage...
"Post-open" sounds like just reinventing proprietary software with extra steps. A core property of FOSS is that software doesn't have strings attached back to its authors. RMS may be a creepy asshole, but I don't have a sudden and pressing need to rip out the GNU userland in Ubuntu and replace it with BSD ports just to have less contact with RMS. I can just fork GNU - and people *actually did this* to escape Stallman's little software development cult with things like EGCS. If RMS was somehow a "post-open" guy, then you'd at the very least need to continue giving RMS money forever.
What Bruce sounds like he actually wants is social copyright. Problem is, you can't build this on the existing individual copyright system. You need a trustworthy agency - i.e. a government - to go and count up everyone's net production and consumption of software and then redistribute wealth through taxes. That's a pain in the ass to do, which is why we don't actually have social copyright yet. Emulating that with individual copyright is a recipe for disaster - like, imagine "every Git pull request turns into a funding battle" kinds of drama. Forks would become an accounting disaster, if not outright impossible; and it'd be *really easy* for one or two insiders to just walk out of the scheme and turn it into normal proprietary software.
Did the creator of this idea contemplate who is going to enforce this mechanism?
It is easy to dream up abstract systems... a-whole-nother thing to dream one up that drops into the legal systems we already have.
This sounds like a scheme a developer thought up....to make sure they got paid.... in some system where the money flowed to them by autopilot.
A developer can already fund themselves with normal business methods.
Amateurs reinventing stuff they are not trained in often does not work out well.
This is like lawyers trying to write code using law books for references.
Code written by lawyers is unlikely to work.
Law written by techies is unlikely to work.
I think the idea is to have an organisation like PRS.
PRS collects money for the use of copyrighted material like music.
Obviously there is a cost to collection. So long as the costs are small in percentage terms then OK.
Honestly, absolutely this. A big problem I have with a lot of techies is they think they can engineer their way through this stuff the exact same way they write code, but they are such insanely different skills, and then the unobserved sociology of it all is not even anywhere in their minds either.
An organization that transparently collects from the corporations to then fairly distribute benefits to the developers, and nothing else, would essentially be an ideal socialist government...and we've seen how impossibly hard it is to implement such an entity in real life. It's something to hope for, but incredibly unlikely to be achieved in any significant manner.
We have something that the soviets never had: massively parallel computers.
I suggest you check Paul Cockshott and his work, he's a retired software engineer who's dwelled in the subject at depth
Of course, I should also mention that modern companies also do planning, on a scale comparable to some soviet republics. You should check out the "People's Republic of Wallmart" book
@@mek101whatif7 More computers does not solve the socialist calculation problem. In fact, it is impossible to solve because value is subjective and stated preferences are independent of revealed preferences. Every company plans, but large companies run into diseconomies of scale. There is in fact a limit to how large companies can get, at least until better management and organizational techniques are developed.
The thing that makes creating a Socialist government "impossibly hard" is US imperialism, not something inherent to the task
@@filipDcve You're simply wrong, how many people have to starve for you to accept that socialism (particularly marxism) is an evil ideology? It is sad to me when people are socialists because it is not only poisonous to society, but to the socialists themselves. It is an ideology fundamentally driven by envy for others. You seek to justify this envy by rationalizing why the people who have more than you don't actually deserve it and must have stolen it. This is so you are justified in stealing from them. There are some people who gain their wealth through illicit means, politicians and the politically well connected. People who participate in markets as producers and consumers aren't stealing from anyone, they're peacefully cooperating for mutual benefit. You see this as theft somehow, but the justification doesn't hold up. LTV is wrong, and obviously so. It is the economic equivalent of following the geocentric model. If you're interested in actually understanding economics, I'd recommend "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.
Nice food for thought...
I think a clause against abuse or over-use would be fitting.
(no reselling the original, No using it in software for 5 billion customers without donating/helping out, etc)
Any new game in town would have to contend with the mountain of software that now exists under the existing paradigms. Unlike proprietary software that can just get killed off by whoever owns it, Free Software and Open Source Software as concepts are designed to endure and snowball. That is a good thing in the general case, but of course it makes patching holes in the licensing model quite hard, one such example being GPLv3.
Brodie, you've gotten so much better at content creation. I wasn't a big fan of your earlier work, but you've gotten so much more comfortable in front of the camera.
IBM/RHEL is one of the worst to go after. They may not be monetarily supporting many projects, but they hire so many open source developers, that they are the single most influential entity behind the Linux desktop. Yeah, they extract some value as well, but they generate a ton of value for the community, too.
If developers want to get paid for their work, then they need to also start treating the users who pay like they are paying customers. It's not a voluntary donation anymore, it's a transaction with strings attached, and they aren't' just a volunteer anymore.
How LICENSES Proliferate
Situation:
There are 14 competing licenses.
Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal license that covers everyone's use cases.
Ponytail: Yeah!
Soon:
Situation: There are 15 competing licenses.
I don't think any license used by open source projects, or any they could come up with, is enforceable in court without an army of lawyers.
New legislation and international treaties will be needed to keep companies from pulling an IBM.
For a real change the states need to intervene creating policies to compensate the authors of FOSS when that software is used in companies.
I find it funny in that Perens advocates that credit is the most important attribute behind contributing to Free Software. Creating a new license that adds a paywall to Free Software doesn't make sense because the rights holder can always sell his GPL licensed software under a different license. I believe ESR covers these points well in his writings -- I think it was "The Magic Cauldron". In a Free Market, everyone pays what both parties agree to for a price and if software is published without monetary exchange, the author ultimately has the credit to his work. I think that Richard Stallman would object against licenses that limit freedom. And such licenses would otherwise curtail free market principles which would work against Free Software.
1. A licence is a contract as far as law goes, this includes GPL, it is a set of terms that form an agreement, if you want to be using my code you agree to the following terms.
2. GPL does not allow Redhat/IBM to stop someone else redistributing the code. Punishing people for doing so to make a compatible distro could be ruled a violation of GPL. Problem is, someone needs to take it to court and it will be a fight between the GPL contract and the subscriber contract they have when they sell RHEL. I have a feeling a good lawyer can argue it well enough for the judge to at least say that Redhat can no restrict anyone re-releasing anything that is GPL. Under US law we need a case or controversy, which basically means someone who is willing to take it to court has been punished by redhat for such distribution. Who has the money and wants to take the risk?
Given Bruce Perens is under a misconception on the legal side here.
Plagiarism is not illegal, and search engines are plagiarism too then.
I agree we have some issues, copyright has a load of them. But starting with misconceptions is not a good position to be in.
tux on microphone + t-shirt print = tux bodybuilder
My thoughts: I'm worried ho this works internationally, as software is produced and used worldwide, but there's many hardships transferring money internationally. There's taxes, import/export regulations and all that. Should this organization be based in the US and subject to US law? And there's the issue of how much small companies should pay or if they don't where do we draw a the limit? Should small companies in poor countries pay? And should the US get taxes from those payments?
The reason most FOSS is not written in the MIT license and they choose the GPL is because the first one can and will be abused by businesses. OSI you mentioned actually undermined the GPL, OSI was founded exactly to do this dirty work against the FSF and against FOSS, or better, to undermine it in a way so that businesses can steal everything at no cost for massive profit. As for Redhat, their model was their customers would get all first, but they would release all improvements they had done under a community distro of the same name. They changed this later to Fedora, which would be a violation of the GPL, but most people didn't really wanna attack the business who actually contributed almost all their work back to Linux. I don't know whether things have changed since back then. What Perens suggests is obviously a good thing, taking away the free meals and the abuse from businesses, but at the same time, maintaining all the guaranteed freedoms for both developers and end users. Also, yeah, if your business is based on open source and you profit from it, why not give some of it back to the developers of those projects you profit from? There is nothing wrong with this kind of thinking. On the other hand, one of the reasons businesses "loved" so much open source was exactly because they could use it for free, and it's like having a ton of employers working for them for free. So yeah, they are going to try and fight this. Bare in mind that the FSF who created the GPL, never said that devs shouldn't get paid. They only wanted to guarantee the freedoms of that software. And what happened? They were fought, they were undermined, in all sorts of ways, so that businesses not only use software for free, but so they can actually steal from it, as in use parts of FOSS in close sourced projects. And ofcourse massively profit from all that, and other peoples' work. They infiltrated and undermined FOSS so much, that they made it look like a joke if you even mentioned the FSF or if you even called Linux as GNU/Linux, as if all the work the FSF had done was not important. And yeah, Linus himself didn't do or say much about this really, not sure if he was just being diplomatic or what. The OSI started promoting all that open source deal, "let's just call it open source, forget about that free part". The OSI. These people were a bunch of suits and ties, they had done no work or contributions to FOSS whatsoever, nothing at all, unlike the FSF, and then suddenly you see these folks out of nowhere, becoming self proclaimed open source managers, all while mocking the FSF. I don't see how anything better can be done, if people are not careful in not tolerating those kind of intrusions and undermining like the OSI did. Yet, even yourself you mention them as if they somehow did something good for Linux. They did nothing. OSI was like a group of bankers who saw opportunity to steal and profit and did so. And as long as people comply with the bankers and don't fight, this can happen again no matter what changes anyone proposes. I might start listening to what you have to say about this if I see you defending and supporting the FSF.
Most FOSS is actually written in the MIT licence, it's by far the biggest licence in this space.
@@BrodieRobertson Would you please provide me a link of your source? Where exactly did you get this MIT is the biggest license? Also, if that's true, don't complain about businesses abusing open source then, as this would be asking for it.
@@StupidusMaximusTheFirst Github provides licence usage numbers, GPL usage is about 4x less
@@BrodieRobertson I guess I could argue most of it must be old software or not as commonly used at least and that the Linux ecosystem is at its majority GPL, and this GPL software is the one exploited by businesses. MIT license allows exploitation anyway, so you can't call it that. Although yeah, I guess i was wrong on this one, thanks for correcting me. You live and learn I guess. 🙂
@@StupidusMaximusTheFirst actually from what i understand GPL has been loosing popularity over time and most older software is written with a license of some version of GPL while much newer software is written with MIT license or similar
I think for this to become a viable idea, it would require governments to be involved in come capacity. The issue with that though, is governments are ALSO really bad a properly distributing funds.
governments will shut down everything or make everything basically spyware. Very BAD idea.
Not to mention a whole "tragedy of the commons" thing. If I'm Country A, why would I pay for development of software that also benefits Country B? And if I'm Country B, why should I follow Country A's lead when I can just ride for free?
@@pv2b I can see three options, roughly ordered by decreasing personal preference:
a) copyleft, must be capable of enforcing
b) copyright only outside borders, no copyright if bidirectional treaty, must be capable of enforcing
c) world conquest
'Most of the solutions focused on the movement of little green pieces of paper, which was strange because the little green pieces of paper weren't that unhappy to begin with.' (loosely quoted from memory)
We have tech, and we can operate it the way end users can't. Let's just build stuff, for ourselves. Paying rent? Space colonies. Food? Robots.
Corpos will find ways around the new standards much like pirates finds ways around the DRM corpos covet soooooo much
Hi Brodie, big fan here! What do you think of saying when you are no longer reading a quote? I saw some other youtubers says "Pause" or things like that when they are going to stop reading the quotation to add their own thoughts, I mostly "watch" you videos in audio form but for this one I watched the video and realized your commentary blended with the reading at times. Love your content, cheers!
There's a lot of benefits to making things FOSS and some projects are financially self-sustaining though I think it's largely a gift culture. There's big pros and cons to that but either way it depends on everyone having an abundance of necessities so there's time to gift. As economies decline I think it's just going to be necessity to increase financial sustainability of FOSS, ideally without throwing away most of the benefits.
if foss becomes the main norm of software we wouldnt just need projects being self-sustainable we would need projects being able to sustain their core developars which is in my opinon not going to happen for most projects specially those that mainly cater to individual users instead of enterprise sadly
i think a better solution for getting past the GPL's strict licensing is an EULA that terminates your access to other services if you decide to distribute the GPL-licensed code in a way that goes against IBM/RH's interests. upon agreeing to this, you're agreeing to the possibility they might find distributing the code in-whole alone is enough to terminate your access to future services.
this would keep open-source things _actually_ open-source, while maintaining a business-compatible agreement.
honestly I don't think much will come out of it, there already are innumerable morons who remake copylefted projects using bend-over licenses
One thing that came to my mind is a license (or should we call it a contract by now) that would require an entity that uses a free/open source project in proprietary software to publicly disclose/provide an information how much do they pay back the open source project, even if it's zero. I wonder if it would become a PR strategy to pay back those projects "something", or pay more than their competitors. In other words: if you use OSS/FOSS in proprietary projects you don't need to pay anything, but you must tell everybody around that it is what you're doing.
This might be a very naive perspective though. I can see a scenario where this thing wouldn't change anything and companies would happily report that they give $0 to 100 OSS projects they build their software on.
I would love see these companies pay all the people they have accumulated the data from rather than just the devs who made the software that made it possible for them to get it.
That may be a better and easier argument from a legal stand point.
But we all know none of this will go anywhere because of who has the money already.
Should devs be compensated for their work being used in AI models? Absolutely 100%
Bt this isn't going to amount to anything more than a singular payout at best. What happens when companies use that data in a generative adversarial network and produce a derivative model? The new model won't be based on anyone's data...
Legal reform needs to go deeper than just "redefining open source". The entire copyright system needs to be overhauled, because it's crumbling in the wake of AI, and not just for code, but all forms of content.
If you expend all the necessary resources, it's entirely possible you can train someone to reproduce the style of Picasso and commission them for a bit of art, or train someone to produce code that emulates a certain style (even easier because code has style guides / compilers).
Well if a person can do that, why do we take such offense when AI does it?
Other than being a blow to humanities ego, it's because the speed, lack of effort, and near guaranteed results (from models that have been trained well) *de-values* whatever is being produced from a capitalist perspective i.e. more abundance = lower unit cost (supply demand).
To retain value, developers, are going to have to adopt more of a curative / overseer role.
That is, rather than being a purely creative role (artistic), code development with AI will lean more heavily on being editorial in nature. This is no less important, particularly for critical systems (e.g. flight controls, banking systems, traffic controllers, etc), but in terms of capitalist business it means company reputation and motivation (branding) will become important in society again (i.e. who is doing curating?).
Again going back to the tech revolutions of old, many companies today can either produce or procure digital hardware. Most people still only buy from a handful of "trusted brands" (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oppo, MSI, ASUS, etc). Whether people have the intelligence / skill to make the call about how trustworthy they are? Different question. But that's how it is at the moment for hardware, and i believe that's going to be how software moves forward with AI.
The reason why it stops being open by the time it ends with the end users is because the end user isn't a dev and as such doesn't care about the 4 freedoms.
If they just wanted to grant people rights, they could have used a public domain license.
I like open source software because it allows anyone to use it, modify it, etc. Though it does have it's downsides, like as you mentioned, things being very developer focused. The proposed alternative/solution seems good, but I'm scared that one of the parts I love the most of open source will be gone if we switch to it.
(Anyone being able to reuse the open source thing for no cost. Yes this means that the developers don't get paid unless someone donates, but it means that people with little money, people new to programming and tech, etc, can just use it, and bring new value to others more easily.)
"AI is plagiarism because it is trained on other people's software"
You just described every programmer that exists.
People treat humans learning differently because they're humans
You don't even need to treat it as non-human for this argument to fall apart. If you've read the code to some software and then write something very similar, that can sometimes be a license violation (hence the need for clean room reverse engineering). So if "AI" is like a human that has read all code available online, the licensing of any "new" code it writes is of highly dubious nature if you apply the same standard.
We all should compile everything from source ourselves. We shouldn't expect anyone to publish compiled binaries and we shouldn't be paying for anything. If all of us stop paying for software then there would be no way for companies to make money.
I'm a newbie btw.
As a Mutualist, I don't like corporations, I much prefer cooperatives for many of the same reasons I prefer open source.
I love Bruce, but there's no shot. The irony of the lone maintainer is that if they quit and work needs to be done, a fork run by the corporations will happen. If they decide to fork it privately, we lose the commons. It may suck sometimes, but I maintain open software because I want people to be able to be able to use it without paying, not because I want to make money. Maintainers stop maintaining all the time. The bigger problem we have is supply chain management. When a maintainer leaves and hands it off to someone else, we don't know they are well meaning (insert reference to xz)
Iirc it was in A Political History of X by Keith Packard in which Packard admitted that they should have listened to Stallman.
tbh my dream licence would be : fully open, any modification of it needs to have its source code released under the same licence, and unless you are an individual, a non-profit, or a small corporate entity (for example, one town bakery or something like that), then you have no need to pay, and otherwise, will be required to do so, depending on the terms set by the maintainers
though most of that is probably very hard to make work in legal wording, so eh
Isn't that just a dual license? You could create that pretty easily with a creative commons license with a noncommercial and commercial license.
mistake at 7:48 the biggest license is apache altough the point still stands
Is it Apache? All the data I can find indicates that MIT usage is more than double Apache
I hope there will be something better after humans
What do you think of the solution of Authentik ?:
"There is a third path though, which is the route we eventually took with Authentik Security, the company we were building on top of the project. We incorporated as a public benefit company, which means that we are legally bound by the terms in the OCV Public Benefit Company Charter. This includes commitments to keeping open source products open source, and ensuring the majority of new features added in a calendar year are made available under an open source license. Being a public benefit company means we are still held accountable, just through a different mechanism than the license."
When you train your brain you're training the brain on other people's copyrighted stuff
I'm totally fine with business using FOSS. But not for free. Software should be* free and accessible for everyone, but if you lucrate economically from the work of someone else, it's only logical you retribute that person/s accordingly.
Don't do charity for millionaires. Use your head.
If you prefer proprietary closed source software, there are a lot options now ;-)
The open source developers should be paid for their work. The more people can work on quality FLOSS full time the better! However, depending on how the mandatory payment from for-profit companies is handled, it may backfire. Let's the criteria is "makes any profit" and if you have to register with an organization and monthly reports on that software usage. That would punish smaller companies while the giants would not care. Also if someone was provided some service using post-open software "as a hobby" then there will be a extra barrier for them going commercial and getting payed.
We users that do not contribute also fall in the same spot as developers that use it and not pay for it. Rather they sell a product built on it or not.
I have never contributed, so I have never paid for anything either is basically what I mean, so in the terms of how he said it makes me feel like I fall into that also. (Which I think is right)
Hopefully the end of Intellectual Poverty alltogether. Sharing is good, being able to freely reverse engineer anything openly and do what you want even with what we call "proprietary software" today is even better.
I presume you mean intellectual property. If that were to end then no way to enforce a payment while keeping the source code open but you could make a contract with people before you hand out the source code to them.
Without intellectual property, the entire world would be turned upside down, for sure, but it would be a better world nonetheless
@@victornecromancerthe closer we get to agi/asi the more Intellectual property will be meaningless.
@@AndersHass Exactly. Authors would make little on their first book (mostly same as now, publishers don't pay out authors well when they aren't proven) and then push people to patreon or pre-orders to fund the next on the book side.
For software, bundling support in with the model would work sometimes too, you wrote it, you're probably in best position to support it or customize it for clients.
There are certainly concerns to be had over some big expensive things like several hundred million dollar films and pharmaceuticals, but the incentives in place now make both worse in many ways.
And Star Citizen exists, proving it's possible for at least a few things to get people to freely give quite a lot if people believe in the project enough, even while others call it a scam. (I don't use it as an example because I think it has turned out great, but just to illustrate even large amounts can be gathered from the crowd with the right incentives and motivation).
(Oh, and I use poverty because I think it's what IP actually does, impoverish relative to what everyone would have without it excepting the corporations. "property" is a propaganda term. Monopoly was the term used when copyright was created, for good reason. They thought it was necessary then, but they labeled it appropriately not trying to compare it to physical things that are scarce and rivalrous)
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Android Operating System, is in fact, Android, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Google+Android. It is not a free and open-source operating system unto itself, but rather another non-free closed-source Google Mobile Services and some random manufacturers bloatware added onto a once free and open source Android Project made useful by the Linux kernel.
I agree. This is an important issue in FOSS. Good video Brodie.
I think we should be going in the other direction. Limit copyright to 1 or 2 years. We will all be better off with contributions to society being freely shared and reused. No amount of legislation is going to stop AI models from sucking up all available information. Better to have a level playing field where everyone can play. Business models need to adapt.
Agree on the whole but do think 1 to 2 years is too short in so far as it would discourage companies working on said thing, but I'm hella down for copyright being based on abandonment or time limit of say 10-15 which ever comes first. You release a thing and then never do anything with it? Then in 2 years its commons. You release a thing and build a brand around it and actively keep developing your copyrighted works then fine you get 10-15 years of exclusivity. But this bullshit of 75 yerars after the death of the author thing is just ridiculous yeah
We are talking about software here. So, a developer has copyright for 2 years. In that time, his library has become integral in a couple popular platforms. So, the developer stops updating the software after 2 years. Brilliant!
@@TurtleKwitty Interesting ideas, I agree that there might be instances where there is benefit to society from longer copyrights but these need to be supported by data. Every analysis I've seen shows that most of the profit is made within the first 2 years. The following 93 years is mostly business people trying to extract value from work that they did not create.
@@donaldmickunas8552 Why would the developer stop if it is work they are giving away for free? In most cases open source software is written because the developer has a use for it. Maintenance ends when it is no longer useful not when copyright ends.
Maybe the real solution is just public domain everything
If I read wikipedia or learn to create art by studying professionals does that make my entire existence a work of plagiarism? Obviously not. The fact is, the images used to train something like Midjourney, are not in the model. That's kind of the whole point. This whole plagiarism argument is at best a road to nowhere, at worst a road to hell. Everything we humans do is derivative, are we going to pay a special class of creators who's work was used to train the models today forever despite their work not being what is produced? Are we going to make learning from freely given information illegal? What about future models who get trained at least in part from past models? There's no answer or logic to any of this reasoning. All this line of thinking can do is create an endless legal mire of self harm and privileged individuals who were able to see that process through to get undeserved payouts for the rest of their lives.
Stallman said multiple times: source free and open to its users. Red Hat is not violating anything neither spiritually nor legally. Stallman is communist in some sense, and people just have to accept, that community doesn't mean "everybody on the planet", and honestly, i think that people are just accustomed to GPL meaning free for everyone without anything behind it but the circumstances of current state of the things.
I remember bringing that up on that channel in the comments way before Red Hat did it. I just find that legit.
You have to acknowledge that's not the way most people see it
@@BrodieRobertsonAnd I do. I also do think that they are not right: "without anything behind it but the circumstances of current state of the things"
What do you use to record desktop/webcam? OBS has been broken for me for months, and for some people years. Is it because I have 1) an Nvidia gpu 2)Xorg instead of wayland?
I look at this issue not from the lens that companies are abusing the licenses and the licenses and/or foundations need to get better, but rather see it from the lens that companies, and by extension for the following are bad: capitalism, copyright, and greed. Every one of those screws over consumers in multiple ways, and a lot of the systems' cons are not even related to software but stuff like food, water, shelter, medicine, so on. If those systems were abolished and things were kept alwats open to the public (consumers and developers alike), this world and these movements would be much better off. Those systems are meant nowadays to benefit greedy people and are rooted in selfishness rather than giving. That's my take on the whole matter and has always been that way, but nothing will change for the better anytime soon, and will likely get worse before something snaps.
We'd be far better off if we actually did have capitalism. The problem is that governments have intervened far too much and grant monopolies that would otherwise be impossible to enforce. The status quo is not capitalism, it is much closer to fascism, which is a form of socialism. IP should be done away with as it is a state enforced monopoly.
The problem is that capitalism isn't so much a system as the absence of systems. You can no more "abolish" it than you can abolish darkness.
The only way to go from open source imo is open source code with good comments
As someone who uses open source software at my job to help with my job, nothing user facing, I’m too biased for this 😂
Yea there definitely needs to be a fix of some sort....what that is, I really don't know. Because AI and other corporate issues happening arent' solving the issues. There needs to be funding somewhere that isn't happening and not sure how we fix or replace these licenses to prevent this issue.
Privacy laws written for tech entities. Forbidding all forms of info sharing unless the customers had been made to be aware of all the data collection and a mandatory opt out system. In short: No more collecting any form of data by default :/. And the big tech entities better find another way to make money other than pushing targetting ads while still keeping the free software side open.
I think where I fall on this is that the RHEL forks arnt like CentOS, a free thing that's an unbadged version of someone's work. They are rebadged and Sold (as support contracts) as if they are their own works. I'd like to see a state where you need to at least add value to an open source project to be able to sell a rebrand. Otherwise how would any of the funds find their way back to the original creators?
To play devil's advocate for a moment, if training AI on copyrighted information constitutes plagiarism, does training people using copyrighted information also constitute plagiarism? If I learn something from reading a publicly available copyrighted article online, then write my own article based on that information, is that automatically plagiarism? If the goal is ultimately to produce an artificial intelligence on par with human intelligence, at what point does the process by which that intelligence learns and creates turn from simple synthesis of copyrighted information, into the AI's own original creation. Nothing is truly original, all human creation is informed by the creations of other humans that came before. Why should AI be treated in a differently in that regard?
To be clear, if information on the internet is not available to a human without some form of payment or technical circumvention, I fully agree that AIs should not be trained on that information without properly licensing the content the same way a human should. But if content is freely available for a human to consume and learn from, shouldn't an AI be permitted to do the same?
We openly discrimate against AI because it's AI, human works are treated differently
Once AI thinks more like humans, we will be closer to asking whether human “research” and “experience” is plagiarism too, and then we have to ask if plagiarism is even real. As a supporter of marine content acquisition, I think it’s made up, but feel free to disagree.
if i say anything on the matter that's true from my heart I'd be swiftly gifted a medal made of lead
How can you call something so divisive "a community?"
The problem is that open source is socialism and it struggles to exist inside of a capitalist system. To explain that a little more socialism can be defined as the means of production belonging to all, and source code very much is the digital means of production. When you have something like OSS that is essentially about the betterment of knowledge and the human project, not only do the participants have to justify their existence in the economic system but see their work exploited for profits they will never see. I don't think you'll ever solve the issue trying to go after a part of those profits the way to fix it is to fix it for everyone, UBI, abolish rents, free healthcare, education, and assistance with disabilities. Imagine the amount of cool and useful code that would be produced in a yeah if you gave that to even a few thousand programmers today, let alone all the people that could be programmers but don't have the time or space in their life.
I like to think that Stallman advanced our mode of production by pure accident😂
I'm not smart enough to solve that problem too but creating yet another foundation to centralize things is definitely not the solution. Maybe some form of blockchain can be used in some way to that end. For instance, corporations that want to use the open source (libraries, APIs, whatever) should be permitted to do so only by buying some form of crypto currency owned by developers. The currency is generated by code commits to some hub by developers.
What I feel is that the MIT and the BSD licenses caused more harm than good to the FOSS community.
any time we talk about power (and money is power), the first question to ask is "how could this be exploited?"
in this case, the answer is easy: one could, possibly with insider help to accept commits, spam bogus commits to farm currency
the way to mitigate it would be to systematically reject minor commits but they are also kind of needed, typos in translations for example would never be fixed
not to say the whole idea creates a major incentive for actors to pass other's work as their own or accuse others of doing so
the problem is anything like it needs a lot of trustworthy, coordinated human reviewers to have any chance of working as planned, which means an org with at least tens of thousands of full-time code reviewers, a huge amount of lawyers, and internal review processes for its own reviewers -- the kind of stuff only states and megacorps can put together
that or compulsory "jury duty" for any user of the license, but having essentially a court system that isn't bound by any laws should raise some eyebrows
plagiarism is shared piracy, for just yourself it might have some use, but the moment you wanna use it to share and even make profit with it its always wrong
piracy in theory is also always wrong, but in the world we live in sometime its just nessecary, for example denuvo drm that reduce noticable your fps, while a cracked version gives you a objectivly better version. maybe im wrong, but I like to hear contructive critisism even more than saying it
I don't think license based compensation for developers is the right way to go at all. Even just figuring out your liability gives me a headache.
`npm install`, congrats you now owe 211 developers £n.
Then we have to consider the insanely vague "fair amount for the benefits they receive". How often have sysadmins run `ls` or `vim` when managing production systems that handle massive volumes of sales. Do `ls` and `vim` now have a claim to a percentage of profits? It's just going to mire the whole industry in lawsuits.
When will people distinguish between neural network and artificial intelligence.
When the AI developers do so
AI soydev ChatGPT API users cant distinguish
Great video
yay, shadowhammered again
And imo "AI = plagiarism" isn't inherently true. But whenever you have a machine-learning model that can overfit by "remembering" the input data, plagiarism is basically guaranteed to happen.
I'm not sure why this is so funny to me: FOSS is the product of a whole society as a community of programmers, and a bunch of private companies are appropriating such value for their own profit without giving back a dime.
Almost like there is an ideology that has proght up the exact same problem since the 1850's😂
Bruce is wasting brain juice trying to square a circle: just get rid of the private companies
Isn't SaaS the what follows free OSS? There is one obvious problem with SaaS, in that the source code must be kept hidden from its users, but otherwise, it as **a** solution to the problem that developers need to get paid for their troubles.
If it were possible to earn $ from your efforts, but still be able to publish the source code for others to inspect or improve upon, it would be better than Free Open Source, from which the authors have little/no hope of easily deriving income.
I propose a license agreement where the users are permitted to modify and re-publish the improved works only if they are themselves users of the software, **and** their re-published work is a meaningful improvement. However, I've no idea how "being users" and "meaningful" could be measured for the purpose of legally asserting copyright.
If I use X's software, but it's lacking, I should be able to fix it, and publish the improved version, and hope to make some money off of it (better mousetrap). It's sensible to close the "improvement" window to those who have a pure commercial interest, but have no interest in how well it works (for them).
So if you create something using this software do you own what you created from a marketing standpoint or do they take the lion's share?
Bruce Perens is doing the work Richard Stallman should be doing, and would be doing were he not caught up in his own mythology. :-/ He should swallow his pride and involve ESR as well, no matter what he thinks of ESR's politics.
I'm also totally against anything that doesn't meet the Free Software four freedoms criteria. These are fundamental, and must not be violated.
At 11:26 what's being described has properties that almost sound like a union. Especially with the idea that what should be being proffered is a "contract", not a "license".
Unions are good, and open source is communism. Cry about it.
After Open Source comes closed source, after free software (the 4 freedoms) comes the software, that is locked down and does lock down the people.
This proposal is basically to break the 4 freedoms and it won't work. And won't be widely adopted.
The current situation, that we have now, that nobody is perfectly happy about - maybe the perfect balance in an imperfect world.
Companies are taking advantage of FOSS and people rant about it (myself included), but at the same time since they are very interested in this software - they also input invaluable resources into its development and the community benefits from that.
I don't think we should close the open source, on the contrary, I think we are beginning to win in a sense.
But they don't. The whole fucking issue here, is that companies don't guve back a dime
@@mek101whatif7 if it isn't for employees of some companies - a lot of FOSS projects would not be anywhere close, to where they are now, and would not have proper support (updates, fixes, etc).
See I don’t see ai as being stolen. If it’s on the internet it’s public
The best thing I think would be to restrict the use/distribution of the code for a while so that the developer can monetize without infringing the open/free spirit, and at the same time get rid of parasites such as proprietary companies, Oracle, or Rocky/Alma Linux style projects that are equally parasitic as the former.
nah, fuck that. MIT for life. Asking for creddit is fine, forcing you to distribute source code is ok-ish, discriminating against someone/something (in this case companies) is a bit no-no
@@anon8510 keep in mind that big corporations are few and far between. Most companies are fairly small, often run by a single person or a small team. They don't have millions to waste. All my stuff will always remain MIT (or similar), and if you don't like the true freedom then you can fuck right of just like I will when I see a "except" in a license.
@@anon8510 I think you missed my point. I was hating on licenses that have the stupid "It's free for personal use", "You have to pay if you make more than X", "You can't sell it", "you can't offer a managed/hosted version" (god I hate SSPL). There are the exact types of licenses that people are proposing to "solve" the monetization problem with foss. GPL has none of that. The source distribution is not that big of a deal because you usually can just isolate it in a way where you can just provide the upstream source without having to leak your own. Also, GPL doesn't discriminate, It doesn't matter if you're a big corpo or your average Joe, you both have equal rights and restrictions. I hate licenses that discriminate against a certain group (aka free for one but not the other). Free software should be equally free for everyone.
The distribution of funds sounds like a problem to solve with a blockchain based governance system 🤔
i completely agree with this stance
:)
6th
Second lol
5th
First lol
this looks like something between an actually great idea and the "now there's n+1 competing standards" meme.
After an open source software, you have an open stream software, then open river software, and finally open ocean software.
Then, with evaporation, which can take million of years it becomes open cloud software, aka AGPL, then open rain software and finally the cycle is complete
Open cloud software sounds like cloud-based open source software! And I think that kind of already exists?
Yeah, I've got an education in economics and the funding model he describes will result in a far more finite funding pool, and the bulk of that pool being moved to this theoretical entity, basically turning FOSS into a zero-sum game by trying to make companies engage with funding through a singular entry point. I guarantee it's going to result in a net reduction in funding across the board and drag corporations into funding and using a central set of tools approved for funding by said entity. He's basically making a decentralized corporation out of the concept of free software, one without programmer rights, and without technically "hiring" anyone, a "Web 3.0" Microsoft for Linux software. This is outright dystopian.
I think an interesting case is also Prusa with their 3D printers, which are a complete anomaly when it comes industries that design and manufacteur actual hardware.
Not only is their software stack completely open source (Marlin, PrusaSlicer), the entire hardware is as well. The founder and CEO even has a Open-Source-Hardware logo tattoo on his arm.
But they're in a rough spot now. Their competition is greatly benefiting from all the development they do and I'm not sure if their business model is that sustainable anymore. Most notabe is Bambu Lab, a Chinese manufacteurer that heavily uses software (and I'd argue general hardware improvements), which was funded by Prusa. I'm curious as to how they'll continue, I suspect they will be forced to introduce some kind of change to their licensing just to stay competetive and profitable. There's also a blog post "The state of open-source in 3D printing in 2023" from them about this topic, can recommend.
Prusa is also stepping way from the open source with their new extruder and from what I remember, only the i3 is open source, the XL isn't nor the mini. They also have a good SW stack to manage farms and farm automation
There honestly should be a license which straight up forbid any kind of profit organization to use the code or hardware under this license so that companies can make open source without having the competition freely benefiting from it by just copying what was made.
I mean, this kind of thing exist for design: you can't copy the design or any company's product like that, even if everybody can see how to product looks like, so why not applying it for code or hardware?
@@jlGenozzV Prusa does provide the 3D models for the printable parts of the XL and Mini. I've had a friend print a replacement for my mini cause I broke it during assembly.
The Prusa Mini actually has a github repo, the XL and Mk4 don't though.
And while I would obviously love for them to make everything open (or at least open for non commercial purposes), they aren't patenting the stuff so at least competition stays fair and I can expect for example third party nozzles for the nextruder, unlike with E3D Revo.
Creating this type of "post-open" organization is just asking to create a monster that'll create more problems than it solves. There's no reason to believe that this kind of single foundation or corporate entity that would compensate authors of post-open software would act in the interest of those authors if it reached critical mass. And also no reason to think developers wouldn't put up with it anyway because of a lack of options. People develop software for Apple platforms, Android, publish games on Steam, etc, even though the massive cuts those platforms take and the degree of control these platforms have on developer freedom.