The Free Software Definition mentions "user" 22 times and "freedom" 79 times, whereas the Open Source Definition has zero occurrences of these terms. It doesn't seem surprising that the user freedom message isn't getting through if you completely scrub it from the messaging.
While what we know now is that Free came first and indeed Open Source was a different "offering" with a different focus, a response to it...
... I must admit I have heard and actually started to love Open Source several years before even hearing of Free Software
I am a big fan of capitalism but it does have a tendency to drive out human discourse, as in this case, when companies think there is money to be made.
IMHO the biggest threat to Free Software is the proliferation of open source software. And so the biggest threat to all the open source users/lovers is their own lack of a meaningful philosophy on licensing.
SaaS is the least free model for software. You have no privacy, no control, and in most cases can’t even export your data.
Thus open source actually minimizes freedom in practice, at least for everyone other than developers.
- Microsoft
- AWS
- Databricks
Most all of these companies have at one point or another coopted a project, sucked its life blood dry for their own means, and abandoned it. It's a weird, toxic relationship that we accept as normal because some projects can't do without corporate engineer time and money.
FOSS is kind of a different ballgame though. When I think of FOSS I think of my AppStore on PopOS; the apps there are sophisticated and useable, but if I'm being honest they're rarely "the best" at what they do. There's never been a FOSS CAD software that rivals proprietary alternatives, the email clients are lackluster at best, even IRC tends to take a back seat. That isn't to say the apps are bad, they're just not going to be "the best" usually.
Ideally we'd have a single license that encourages corporate use, adoption, and contribution but doesn't encourage them to coopt a project by injecting their engineers and interests into the management of said projects. Ideally there'd be a way for corporate interests to make money reselling software while also paying back, in proportion, to the project. That all seems like a very complicated balancing act.
This most certainly wouldn't have happened if "open source realism" didn't stood against free software "utopian" idealists. I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it?
Lastly, isn't redhat an enthusiastic supporter of open source ? The domain https://opensource.com/ is literally copyrighted and supported by redhat...
I don't understand your point here. Could you please make it again, more directly?
"I noticed this because I had the good fortune in the 1970's to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. Now, this community could trace its ancestry essentially back to the beginning of computing."
[...]
"And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software [for the broken printer]. So I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer source code?" And he said "No, I promised not to give you a copy." [Laughter] I was stunned. I was so -- I was angry, and I had no idea how I could do justice to it. All I could think of was to turn around on my heel and walk out of his room. Maybe I slammed the door. [Laughter] And I thought about it later on, because I realized that I was seeing not just an isolated jerk, but a social phenomenon that was important and affected a lot of people."
It’s extremely common for well intentioned policies and movements to have perverse effects that aren’t anticipated because the effect emerges from the whole system rather than from any single part in isolation.
The effect of a thing is pretty much unrelated to its intent, hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The root problem is that humans are awful at understanding how a policy will manifest when embedded in a complex system.
I think this is also why every attempt at central planning a whole society ultimately fails.
Edit: simplified.
true, but to anyone who paid attention at the time, bruce perens already pointed out this problem only one year after announcing the open source initiative: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html
so not only is this problem not new, but also at least bruce perens has been aware of it all this time.
but what is happening today probably would have happened without the promotion of open source as well. so i agree, that it is time to act. GPLv4 anyone?
FOSS may have accelerated things slightly, yet the mediocre quality and incompleteness held back its impact for a long time. Server side those deficiencies were less visible and could be addressed more gradually. Ultimately I think SAAS was inevitable as everything shifted online. Now even single-player, closed source games require an Internet connection.
This is very much the opposite of the spirit of free software. It's a feudal system.
No, because "FOSS stuff as RMS intended" explicitly excludes the SSPL.
Meaning "always when there's business to make"? Because when there's no money to make it's not business (and not about capitalism) anymore.
Other than that it's cool, sure.
To be fair, "lackluster at best" describes every email client ever made, proprietary or otherwise (though proprietary ones are better at hiding this under a shiny veneer).
Meanwhile, Kubernetes is probably a bad example, because nobody but large companies need Kubernetes, in the same way that we do not lament that people cannot build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in their garage.
The permissive Free Software licenses do the same, being the same licenses.
To comply you must provide 'the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service'
A plain reading of this means that for a standard web app you would need to release not just the application code, but also code for the web server you are using, the os you are using, its drivers, device firmware, the os/firmware for your routers, your deployment stack, and probably more I'm missing. You better not trigger a deployment from a Windows computer using Chrome!
Even if I'm using open-source stuff for all of that it would need to have licenses compatible with SSPL such that I can relicense and release them all under the SSPL. I believe GPL is incompatible so that counts out most software I would use to host a webapp.
To me it seems like a fundamentally unreasonable license because for all practical purposes it is entirely impossible to comply with section 13.
The source IS made available to software. The license clearly says you must make it availble in the same method you get the binaries, which is what is happening here.
What "circumvention" is going on ?
I'm sure you know this, but to be clear for readers: almost all free software licenses are also open source licenses and vice versa.
The canonical examples are things like the BSD licenses.
See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatible...
> This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.
I think it would be clearer to say that the greatest threat to free software is the proliferation of non-copyleft free software which can be closed down if a company so wishes.
That's BS. First of all, companies have closed down GPL projects, because founding companies require copyright assignments on contributions.
Even the FSF does it, with the purpose of being able to change software to newer versions of the GPL, or to be able to sue for copyright infringement. And in the US at least, it's better if one entity is the copyright owner. But the issue remains thay the FSF could turn most of its GNU software proprietary.
The other reason for why it's BS is that it doesn't actually match reality. See LLVM vs GCC.
The biggest danger is companies releasing software with source-available, under proprietary licenses, using the Free Software / Open Source label for marketing purposes, diluting the meaning, which is otherwise well defined.
Like for example MongoDB and Elasticsearch, which grew due to being FOSS, then switched. And the license doesn't matter if the company has the right to switch, given they own the copyright.
I also predict this message will get "But Amazon" replies. Well, that's what FOSS is. Yes, it does grant Amazon the right to make money off your work. If you don't like it, then don't build FOSS, only to pull a bait and switch. FOSS is a terrible business model, because once a project is FOSS, it becomes part of the commons, and that's by design.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#free...
I remember rms saying that GPL software places no restrictions on how the software can be USED. It just means that the benefit goes to the users of the software.
Right, so one receives software 'as a customer', does Red Hat have a requirement to provide you with source code going forward for infinity at no cost ? I don't know what reasonable is here but I do think that there are limits, it turns out that both ALMA and rocky somehow both work around this, I wonder how ?
Btw, I just checked that I can get access to the source of every package with my redhat.com account, however I do have a 'free developer subscription' so maybe that gives me/them access. Looks like there is still ways to access source.
But the spirit of the GPL was very much to be able do what old CentOS did: copy the latest version of RHEL that you were given access to and distribute it to others.
Paying RedHat once shouldn't give access to all of the code they will forever release from now on. But, if you want to keep paying, RedHat should keep taking your money and giving you the new code. They should not punish you for exercising your GPL rights by refusing to do business with you.
And Rocky are doing things that very clearly go against RedHat's wishes and will likely be stopped further down the line. They are "exploiting" the fact that RHEL for containers is released publically, not through a developer subscription, and that of course they are forced to give you the source code if they delivered a container to you. I'm fully expecting RedHat to close this "loophole" down.
I believe Alma Linux has taken a different approach and is no longer promising bug-for-bug compatibility with the latest RHEL. They are planning to start maintaining the RHEL code themselves, and take new patches from RedHat's CentOS Stream to try to match RHEL as closely as possible, if I recall correctly.
There are several examples of OSS being best in class, it's just not the best in every class (yet, at least).
Which android are you referring to? The table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distrib... may help you.
I don't think that, say, Lineage or Calyx share the same privacy concerns as Google's android variant, or the myriad vendors' proprietary forks.
Of course, if most of Android were GPL instead of Apache, the lockin wouldn't be possible.
If you're referring to locked bootloaders and not being able to use the GPL kernel due to that, that was a defect in GPLv2 that was fixed in GPLv3 (that and software patents). TiVo was the one that induced that change, and the term was "tivoization."
This is a good point. CLAs are bad because they are designed to allow a license change. The only organisation I would be likely to contribute under a CLA is the FSF, but that's mainly because RMS is still there and I know he won't pull the rug.
How do you figure? They very explicitly permit commercial use and even selling of Free Software.
Free software licenses all have one thing in common: they speak only to redistribution, not to use. To use a free program, you only have to agree to the disclaimer (that if something goes wrong, it is at your own risk).
AGPL prohibits you from running a modified version of the program, if its functionality is publicly accessible, unless you release the modifications. That makes it an EULA.
No free software license requires you to release your modifications if the program is not redistributed.
The problem of siloed saas applications infringing on user freedoms cannot be attacked using copyright, without resorting to non-free licensing, which is an unacceptable.
Note that not everyone agrees that the GPL is a free license, in the first place. Software is maximally free if you can do anything with it you want, including incorporating it into proprietary software.
Many FOSS developers skip copyleft licenses and use MIT, BSD and such, myself included.
I can swallow the idea that GPLed software is free, but AGPL is out of the question.
Armin ronacher, also had some thoughts on this recently, via a license that converts to OSS. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/12/25/life-and-death-of-open-s...
From wikipedia: Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises
Maybe, but the GPL explicitly permits this by only requiring source to be distributed to those who receive the software.
If, instead, the GPL stated that source must be available to everybody when software is distributed to anyone, we maybe wouldn't have this RHEL situation? What would we lose if that were the case?
I think the main reason the requirement to publish the sources is limited to the person who receives the binary is simply practical. For one, there is basically no way to sue as a third party to a contract - even if the contract required you to publish all of your code openly, someone who didn't receive the binary can't really have standing to sue if you just don't publish it. Also, at the time the GPL was created, sending source code carried some measurable cost, so making it public would have been at least mildly expensive.