Post-Open Source

https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html

by luu • 6 years ago

88 76 6 years ago

Some very thoughtful points. Also echoed in "Working in Public" by Nadia Eghbal

mathnmusic• 6 years ago

Most attempts to "fix open-source funding" - such as GitHub sponsors or OpenCollective are misguided. Bulk of the value of FOSS is being taken by corporates, not individuals. So expecting individuals to support the creation/maintenance of FOSS is futile. And corporates are RoI-driven. Charity will only go so far.

zelphirkalt• 6 years ago

i’d say free software died a while ago, and open source went horribly right.

It's rather the opposite. It's a slow grind, but slowly more free software is at the basis of things, due to its license nature and it growing more mature. At the same time I think the failure of open source software (if you can call it that ) was predictable and predicted long ago.

I am not sure you can call it a failure of open source, if open source never made sure, that some ideals are followed when using open source software. Perhaps we can talk about ideals and ideas in people's heads and what they thought open source was.

smartmic• 6 years ago

I would go one step further and say that among the mentioned post-open source alternatives, free licenses are the most mature, legally sound and promising candidates to fight corporate exploitation of developers.

electricant2• 6 years ago

Very good points. Made me rethink about the whole GPL licensing model. It may be worth considering the WTFPL license and or the JSON license in the near future.

JoshTriplett3• 6 years ago

One of the few popular pieces of software affected by the JSON license finally managed to eliminate it: http://mikepennisi.com/blog/2020/jshint-watching-the-ship-si...

I sincerely hope no new project ever uses that license.

cmroanirgo• 6 years ago

Thanks for the link. I'd not quite understood the nuanced rejection of JSON. That "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" equates to how...

Legally-conscious objectors aren’t betraying their own dastardly motivations; they’re refusing to enter into an ambiguous contract. Put differently: they’re not saying, “I’m an evildoer,” they’re saying, “I don’t understand what you want.”

ndesaulniers3• 6 years ago

I'm personally a fan of beerware.

scruffyherder3• 6 years ago

postcardware is nice too.

JoshTriplett3• 6 years ago

The article seems to gloss right past Free Software and copyleft licenses based on the claim that some copyleft licenses like GPLv3 aren't widespread because companies don't like and won't use them, then proceeds to opine on what license terms best annoy companies (profanity, ambiguity, lack of licensing, etc). And yet there's no consideration given to actually using copyleft licenses like GPLv3 or GPLv2, just the repeated assertion of the death of "Free Software".

If a copyleft license is sufficiently strong that some people don't want to use it under those terms, some subset of those people may be willing to pay for an alternate license. (The set of people who wouldn't pay for an alternative to a copyleft license seem even less likely to consider any completely non-standard incompatible-with-the-universe license.) If you want to use a license that may potentially lose you a few over-cautious corporate users, but which protects a community of users and the possibility of revenue, a copyleft license like GPLv3 or GPLv2 may make sense.

Many of the people using permissive licenses don't work for companies, or otherwise don't have anything that might block them from using a copyleft license. Many people seem to worry about using a copyleft license because it might mean some people can't or won't use the software. I've even seen companies who would actually benefit from a copyleft license just not-think about the possibility of using one because they have a vague impression that Apache or MIT is what they should use. It wasn't that they considered and dismissed copyleft; they just didn't even think about the possibility and weigh it as a potential option.

(Also, last time I saw a survey of licenses on popular software repositories, GPLv3 was about as popular as GPLv2. LLVM vs GCC is a relevant and memorable problem, but those two projects hardly represent the whole landscape of software licensing. LLVM also gained popularity for reasons beyond just licensing, such as recognizing the value of extensibility and providing compiler framework libraries, much sooner than GCC did.)

I'm not going to say "use copyleft for everything!", and there are good reasons to use permissive licenses (such as propagating standards or releasing tiny projects). But next time you're releasing a project, give it some actual consideration. If you want to release something under a permissive license, and that's a deliberate decision, by all means do so; but don't just do so "by default" without thinking about it, and without thinking whether the permissive-by-default culture is actually in your best interests.

Thev00d00• 6 years ago

The lack of capitals at the start of sentences....

mosselman• 6 years ago

Either you are against capitalism or you aren't.

Juliate• 6 years ago

Actually, in the light of this, I wonder if the whole piece is not satire now.

Ciantic• 6 years ago

Yes. I think I haven't noticed such a long form writing style before. I bet it's intentional.

What makes it really difficult for me is my eyes can't seem to anchor anywhere when I read. It's like reading a big phrase, or like speaking without taking a breath.

Semaphor• 6 years ago

In addition you have to look closely to see if there’s a . or , to know if it’s a new sentence or not. Horrible UX.

GistNoesis• 6 years ago

I have developed an experimental browser extension which helps reading. It colors sentences into alternating colors. It also colorizes the grammatical structure.

For this article where Capitalization was missing, it only worked when using the neural network parser :) which sadly isn't fast enough :( if you don't have a decent GPU.

Chrome : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colorify/pipnfjhpb... Firefox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/colorify/

dang• 6 years ago

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ndesaulniers3• 6 years ago

the linux kernel, along with a lot more stuff, declared it was sticking with the GPLv2 and not moving to the GPLv3. when your movement says “here is the new version of The Right Way To Do Things” and several of your largest adherents say “nah fuck you we’re going with the old version” that is not a good sign.

Some public comments Linus has made about the choice to stick with GPLv2 over GPLv3: https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU.

and also most of the people using Linux right now are using it by accident, distributed as ChromeOS or Android

Also, those kernels are now built with LLVM. https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ (not all devices in existence, but all new ones for the past few releases of both distros and many old chromebooks that received recent kernel upgrades).

de_watcher• 6 years ago

Well, they've noticed how GPL is bad for their EEE strategy, so they've grasped the first occasion to fight it: can't do much with the code that is GPLv2, but can hinder the license update.

AstralStorm4• 6 years ago

Not exactly. GPLv3 has serious problems with proprietary hardware. As stated, it would prevent current GPU drivers and many current network device drivers from being possible to use, due to irreplaceable closed source binary blobs and on device cryptographic authentication of said binary blobs.

Which is essentially the same as tivoization...

Immediately nvidia-driver and radeon drivers would be illegal.

ndesaulniers3• 6 years ago

Well, they've noticed how GPL is bad for their EEE strategy, so they've grasped the first occasion to fight it: can't do much with the code that is GPLv2, but can hinder the license update.

Can you describe "their EEE strategy" in more detail?

What license update? And hinder it how?

detaro2• 6 years ago

Who's "they" that have hindered the Linux license update?

AshamedCaptain• 6 years ago

Ironically Mozilla is rather more of the "corporate friendly open source" than anything else, making this look like pure clickbait.

AstralStorm4• 6 years ago

I don't agree with characterization of Mozilla seeking profit over impact.

It's literally being destroyed by Chrome and Chromium derived browsers, with Google now in almost the same position as Microsoft used to be, and Firefox market share falling to single digits. They can barely fund operations because of that.

It seems that FOSS ran by a small foundation cannot compete with open source ran by one of the biggest corporations in the world. Which has nothing to do with it being free software or not.

amadeuspagel• 6 years ago

Don't even know where to start here. First of all, another fight about Free Software and Open Source. The licenses are the same. There's no point in arguing about why people put code under those licenses, whether because of freedom or practical reasons. For most people it's probably both.

Why is open source dead? Because mozilla layed of a bunch of people? If only their code where open source, so that everyone else could keep working on the projects they were working on. Because github makes money? And is closed source? The writing about that is particularly revealing. "if they believed open source was in principle better, they’d be open source themselves." See, there are two alternatives: Either they really believe in open source, or they see open source is something suckers do that they profit from. But in fact github open sourced plenty of important code, like the ruby git library. Thanks. Maybe it's not a dichotomy, not something that you "really believe in" or not?

It's possible today, both on desktop and on a smartphone, to run a fully open source OS. That's a huge victory by itself, and also makes those still using closed systems freer by putting a limit on what the corportaions running them can get away with.

The author dismisses any kind of open source that isn't on a sacred crusade against closed source software as corporate friendly, lacking idealism. But I think that even if there are several closed systems based on open source competing (like a lot of closed source browsers based on an open source rendering engine) that's much better then having just one closed source browser.

So yes, open source really does make people more free, partly by making it possible for dedicated people to run a fully open source system and browser, partly by increasing competition.

AstralStorm4• 6 years ago

It is not possible to run an open source OS for a broader definition of OS on almost any hardware out there.

You can run parts of an open source kernel and maybe open source user space. But forget about fully open drivers (binary blobs rule), especially remember resident platform blobs like Intel ME. The remaining exceptions are librem and some hacked thinkpads or chromebooks equipped with coreboot.

And let's not ignore the fact that most cellphones are locked up or have hardware without sane drivers, only ones provided in binary form. Not to mention the kernel running on the DSP to handle modem. Or other things.

Even higher level, just Android, try running its applications without Google proprietary services. While there is a reverse engineered version, it always plays catch up...

fartcannon• 6 years ago

Lineage OS works like a charm without google play services. I haven't used those services in years.

em-bee• 6 years ago

f-droid has enough apps to run a fully featured phone without any google services.

/e/ (e.foundation) delivers a polished google free experience that anyone can use.

so yes, it's possible.

R0b0t1• 6 years ago

Don't buy Librem's marketing: the Intel ME portions are still there, they are just harder to see. They could still be exploited.

jrm4• 6 years ago

Absolutely right. "Major setback" is incredibly removed from "dead." If you want to know what "dead" looks like, you can get a decent idea from classic cable TV, or perhaps the pre-Internet Microsoft monoculture -- where nearly no one even thinks to ask the question; e.g. If I want my own TV station, tons of lobbying, or if I want a program people use, you have to do it Microsofts way or no way at all.

taatparya2• 6 years ago

Can't the use be limited to companies or individuals with income / revenue less than a certain amount, say USD one million, directly and / or indirectly.

bad_user• 6 years ago

"around the same time, free software organizations were starting to successfully sue companies who were using free software but not complying with the license. so big companies, like Apple, saw new restrictions coming in at the same time as more aggressive enforcement, and said “well shit, we want to base our software on these handy convenient tools like GCC but we can’t use GPLv3 software while keeping our hardware and software as locked together as we’d like.” so they started pouring money into a new C compiler, LLVM, that was instead open source."

This is only half the story.

The other half is that GCC is a monolithic app, built in a style that makes it hard to contribute to. GCC was (maybe it still is), ironically, defective by design in order to force companies to extend GCC, instead of building plugins that could be distributed as proprietary.

Either way, LLVM's license is still Free Software, still Open Source. And LLVM's permissive license is actually proof that you don't necessarily need a copyleft license to get companies to contribute. And we've got a whole ecosystem of such projects built with permissive licenses, hello BSD/OS.

Free Software and Open Source never meant just copyleft. That's a misconception.

---

"what really killed free software? ... in a word, capitalism."

It's funny that the author says that, because it is capitalism that enabled Free Software to exist in the first place.

Copyleft wouldn't be possible without the existing copyright law.

Also the biggest contributors to FOSS projects have been companies. Not individuals in their spare time, not the state, but companies motivated by profit. Just like how technological innovations are often driven by companies motivated by profit. And yes, we could have a discussion about perverse incentives, and how we could avoid that.

But I was born in communism, I know how not living in capitalism is actually like, and unless people can suggest actual solutions, instead of a rant inspired by Marx & friends, we've got nothing to talk about. I wish articles with such bad takes would start with the conclusion, so I wouldn't waste my time.

scruffyherder3• 6 years ago

A corporation started the Mozilla project that they are fawning over. Another corporation bought them out, and released the source.

This is more twenty-something edgelord 'life isn't fair' communist who clearly has never lived, or known anyone who lives(d) under communisim.

csb6• 6 years ago

capitalism that enabled Free Software to exist in the first place.

No, it did not. If you knew the history of FOSS, then you would know that for several decades, every major tech company strongly opposed it and was terrified of it. GNU and Linux were started by programmers and academics who wanted to work on software with other people and share the benefits in the open. They were not started by individuals interested in making a profit or getting an IPO. FOSS was not started by entrepreneurs or any company; it was a cooperative, not a competitive, effort by people who wanted something better and who realized that cooperation/sharing work would be helpful in that goal. You could say their goal was to communally create software ;)

Copyleft wouldn't be possible without the existing copyright law.

True, but you are not digging into the core issue here. If there was no capitalism (i.e. no companies seeking to maximize profits/valuation), why would there need to be copyright law in its present form? Copyright law exists because companies want to minimize costs, thus leading to incentives to steal other people’s IP for their own ends. Copyleft is a solution within this system; if no profit motive existed, then there would be no need for all of this defensive licensing.

Also the biggest contributors to FOSS projects have been companies

As stated before, not for the first couple decades of FOSS. Do you know anything about Microsoft’s historical relationship/commentary about Linux? In the immediate present, your statement is true. That’s why it is described in the article. This is the problem. Corporations have co-opted the FOSS movement and used it to build closed source projects/SaaS products that they alone control and benefit from. The goal of free software was co-opted into free software on unfree platforms (e.g. AWS).

But I was born in communism, I know how not living in capitalism is actually like

This is a classic false dichotomy. There are more options than simply capitalism and the 20th century implementations of communism. Even if you reject all forms of communism, communism != !capitalism. That is why ‘anti-capitalism’ is a separate word. Capitalism can be critiqued or replaced; it is not inevitable or unchangeable.

DoctorNick2• 6 years ago

Either way, LLVM's license is still Free Software, still Open Source. And LLVM's permissive license is actually proof that you don't necessarily need a copyleft license to get companies to contribute. And we've got a whole ecosystem of such projects built with permissive licenses, hello BSD/OS.

It's also enables proprietary extensions, easily enabling companies to make compilers for their proprietary languages, see CUDA. That seems pretty contrary to the mission of free software.

Also, just curious, how many patches have FreeBSD and co. actually received back from Sony and Apple in the past few years? They still seem to be struggling to add features to the point of begging for 802.11ac support.

warpech2• 6 years ago

Maybe you'll downvote, but I'll be that guy: It's very hard to read a text that is written in all lowercase. I don't understand why the author would choose to do that.

The topic of this article is very close to me but the style of writing makes it too hard to read.

hoseja• 6 years ago

Ethics are only evolutionarily sound if cooperation among agents increases fitness. Since corporations seemingly do not need to cooperate, ethics indeed are harmful to their chances of proliferation.

snvzz• 6 years ago

It's silly how the article idolizes Free Software and the 4 freedoms.

If only if they looked at OSI's open source definition, they would have realized the same 4 freedoms are held in it.

shock2• 6 years ago

only programmers care if they have access to the source code, and most people aren’t programmers. and i am a programmer, and i don’t give a shit.

What a horribly short sighted view...

What happens when the company stops developing the software for your device?

inglor_cz2• 6 years ago

Depends on the device...

Symbian^3 was moved to a free and open licence (Eclipse Public License) for some time. The ecosystem died anyway.

shock2• 6 years ago

Yes, but as a programmer if you had the source code and the inclination you could still make modifications to suit your needs.

arcatech• 6 years ago

Most people's answer: buy a new device.

rpdillon• 6 years ago

Yeah, this was really shocking to me. I routinely use the source code of software I rely on to identify and fix issues in how I'm using it. For my day job, I use an "open core" product, and I encounetered a serious performance issue in mid-August, so I dove into the source to debug, until I found the issue was in one of the closed modules it used. In my discussion with support, I mentioned this, and they confirmed: yeah, if it were open, you could debug it, but it's not, so you have to go through us. The idea that no one cares if software is open source or not seems wildly inaccurate through that lens.

hardwaresofton• 6 years ago

F/OSS isn't dead. Capitalism does consume almost everything it touches, and you should have seen it coming.

The easy fix is to start using the F in F/OSS more (AGPL, etc), and force anyone who wants to use and extend your software for commercial use to pay up. Take that money, and invest it back in F/OSS software if you want -- use it to buy treats for your dog if you want. If you want wider reach and use for your software (which in a sense is even more "free" for some meaning of the word), then use the GPLv2/MIT license or other such permissive licenses.

The hard fix is trying to win over hearts and minds when it comes to OSS-washing and the marketing pushes/strategies companies employ these days to get people to write/maintain their software for them. The problem here is that some people are absolutely fine with the current situation -- many get absurdly cheap (essentially free) meaningfully complex software even if it's basically shareware from corporations, and are fine with that. Many also are fine creating software that is permissively licensed because people write software for all sorts of reasons, fame and recognition being one.

It does make me glad to see this narrative coming up on HN though -- the corporatization of OSS has been happening for a long time now and needs more attention drawn to it. Every company has a right to try to make money with software, but some are more well-intentioned than others (and they usually suffer from a harder route to market viability).

TaylorAlexander• 6 years ago

The hacker news crowd isn’t too friendly to leftist content but I wanted to say I appreciate this article. It all makes sense to me and it gives me something to think about. I agree that licenses can not be used to force good behavior and we need to focus on changing norms. I choose licenses like CC0 for my work and focus on how to survive regardless of what big companies may do with the code. It’s tough to navigate but I think successfully doing open source is worth the experimentation.

dusted• 6 years ago

Every time X has more users than Y, Y is declared dead, no matter if Y has as many or more users as always..

ece3• 6 years ago

I think the author made some good points worth thinking about, but I would somewhat disagree with the conclusion. Some of the bigger FOSS projects left out of the write-up would be Chromium which is BSD+others, and Java is GPL, so it shouldn't be surprising that corporations figured out which license would help them the most and went with that. Likewise, I think people should pick the right license for the job (Something along the lines of BSD/Apache for a system lib, and GPL for user-facing software), and experimentation in this area can only be good. License zero, ethical source, Tidelift, and some license/project proliferation with POSS all seem like they're going in different directions if anywhere, which might also make sense as there is more branching out of FOSS in general.

FWIW, I think the 4 freedoms reinforce what end users want, or maybe used to want: compatibility and interoperability. The big companies somehow managed to convince users against having those two things in the name of a few conveniences as the author himself pointed out. Gatekeepers can only be stopped if users reject them, and the GPL isn't so bad a tool for doing exactly that.

ece3• 6 years ago

I should've used the correct (or neutral) pronoun in the second last sentence: herself.

ece3• 6 years ago

To add something else, POSS focusing on developers (Tidelift, L0) instead of just user freedoms, seems completely the right thing to be doing.

jacknews• 6 years ago

To me, the intent of open-source, free, whatever, is simply that "my computer should do my bidding, not someone else's".

In the last couple of weeks I've installed an OS X machine, and a couple of windows machines, both of which insisted I provide phone numbers, emails, or credit cards in order to install just the basic OS.

Linux is already a clear win for privacy and the principle that my computer is, my computer, not a client terminal to a corporate "ecosystem" (with "users" obviously being the plants, or at best, herbivores).

bitwize6• 6 years ago

Open source is hosed because a bare license is revocable at any time by the licensor. If your business depends on an NPM library written by some schlub on the internet, and that schlub decides they don't like you, then they can revoke your license and sue for copyright infringement, not to mention preventing you from operating legally as long as you depend on their software.

It gets even worse if the "schlub" is an entity like Google -- and you appear on their radar and they decide you're a competitor.

CameronNemo2• 6 years ago

I have never heard of this phenomenon actually working.

Some Linux contributors threatened it after the CoC was instituted, but nothing came of it.

Do you have an example of somebody actually revoking copyright and successfully suing or settling?

bitwize6• 6 years ago

More like "one guy engaged in saber rattling and nobody listened", and he didn't even make any substantive Linux contributions.

This same guy actually did try revoking the license to his open source slot machine game from the GeekFeminism contributors, and the GF people were like "okay, yeah, sure, whatever, we promise not to touch your shitty game again".

So this remains untested in court.

But if you actually look at the relevant bits of contract law, you'll see... he actually has stopped-clock syndrome on this, and it really has dire consequences for how we do open source. At least in the USA, and admittedly, different views on copyrights and licensing prevail outside the USA, where much of the work on Linux is done.

frenchy• 6 years ago

Open source is hosed because a bare license is revocable at any time by the licensor.

I haven't the slightest clue what you're taking about. You can change your license on future versions, but you can't retroactively change the conditions of an offer that's already been accepted.

If you're talking about the ability to delete published packages from NPM, that's entirely unrelated to licensing.

CameronNemo2• 6 years ago

This is what is being referred to. I have never seen an actual case of it occurring, only threats.

https://lulz.com/linux-devs-threaten-killswitch-coc-controve...

bitwize6• 6 years ago

I haven't the slightest clue what you're taking about. You can change your license on future versions, but you can't retroactively change the conditions of an offer that's already been accepted.

Yes, you can.

In order to be a legally binding contract, three things are required: an offer, acceptance, and consideration. Consideration is the value gained by entrants into a contract.

In short, if you did not pay to license some piece of open source software, there is no consideration for the author of that software. Hence, the license attached to the software is NOT a contract binding on the author. It is a bare license -- simply the terms under which you are permitted to use the author's IP -- and the author is legally entitled to revoke it at any time.

You may not like it, and it has unfortunate implications for open source, but that's how contract law in common law jurisdictions like the USA works.

detaro2• 6 years ago

Since you seem to know a bit about this: When that question came up I've frequently seen references to https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/203, which puts multi-decade limits on that - why would that not apply?

tyingq• 6 years ago

I don't feel like extrapolating Mozilla's problems into a general problem with open source makes sense.

Mozilla is in an odd position, with most of their revenue coming from their largest competitor. I think that's pretty unique.

ace8154• 6 years ago

What about Creative Commons Zero (CC0)?

Its intention is to be an internationally-recognized license equivalent to public domain

jfax• 6 years ago

Author made the fatal mistake of thinking "access to source code" is the specific, concerted goal of Free software, not you know... software freedom. In a world of forced software updates, elusive and feared "algorithms", etc, it doesn't seem like a particularly "esoteric" goal to me.

frabbit• 6 years ago

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

bergstromm466• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing this link!

taatparya2• 6 years ago

Perhaps limiting use by companies or individuals with income less than one million dollars directly or indirectly would help.

warpech2• 6 years ago

The author added a human fart sound that plays when the visit comes from HN.

  // Hacker News is bad.
  if (document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")) {
      document.location = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fart.wav"
  }

If you don't want to have anything to do with the HN people, then who is your ally in tech?

DoctorNick2• 6 years ago

people who aren't self-absorbed enough to think that their preferred newssite is the center of all activity in their industry?

Wilem82• 6 years ago

Hate to break it to you, but the absolute majority of devs have no idea what HN is, or are interested in reading it.

fortran77• 6 years ago

I think this code-snippet belongs in "left-pad"

Post-Open Source

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