Have FOSS licenses outlived their usefulness? Bruce looks at what might come next in the world of free and open source software.

  • ertai@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    “Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company’s systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.”
    - Open source leader gets redpilled on permissive licenses.

    > publishes work under a permissive license which explicitly allows converting it into proprietary software without giving any work back to the original developer.
    > Big corporation does just that
    > open source guy complains about big corporation and says “FOSS licenses have outlived their purpose”

    Duh! That’s why Richard Stallman created the GPL from the start and advocates anyone who wants to further the goal of freedom to use copyleft!

    Had everyone used strong copyleft like AGPL or GPLv3+ instead of cuck licenses and the game would be MUCH different with corporations grabing work gratis from open source devs.

    This is not an issue with free (as in freedom) software licenses, it is the issue of open source. Open source tries to give freedom to users without ever speaking about freedom, instead marketing the move to open source as a technical advantage. This, as Perens says in the above quote, has not resulted in more freedom for the user. Richard Stallman has been saying for many years that this approach will not work - see the essay “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software” (can be found in Free Software, Free Society, Selected Essays of Richard M.Stallman and probably on gnu.org).