cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/51038205
What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author’s response to most concerns regarding open source?
…or non-profit… But I agree…
If it’s non profit AND not open source, it seems a bit shady, doesn’t it?
Maybe, but not necessarily. You see, there could be plenty of reasons to protect ones code…
Like backdoors, Lax security, technical debt, etc
Thanks for that pessimistic comment.
I don’t know what could be the reason for a non-profit to not open-source the code of a publicly available tool/product, except to hide or keep their property
Is that not a good reason, if you are trying to help people, and competitors likely would damage that mission? There’s a thousand possible reasons, and I really wonder why you can’t imagine any of them…
Because if you care about user you should be at least transparent to them, in your example you could make your codebase open-source with a license restricting it for commercial uses
You can’t. Blocking commercial use stops a licence being open source. If you don’t want commercial competition, then you need copyleft, so anyone using your code has to share their modifications with whoever they give binaries to. If they end up using your code to make a better product, then it’ll have to be open source, too, and you can incorporate the improvements back into your version.
Maybe I’m wrong but they are many type of “open-source” licenses, sure they do not respect the GNU Open Source but they are pretty reasonable and I think that it exists license that do not allow you to use it for commercial uses
EDIT : my bad, I’ve seen that making the commercial uses forbidden is no more open source license but CC-NC so you’re right :)
Somewhat tangential hot take: I REALLY think the scope of free as in beer use of open source projects should be limited to personal and small scale business use only (when the business makes below a certain yearly revenue). It’s infuriating how the biggest tech companies openly use open source software as the base of their products while giving NOTHING in return to those open source projects, and in fact only bash them when they show the least bit of resistance to whatever evil profit driven change they demand the project make. If you’re making billions in revenue using open source software which has saved you R&D money, why shouldn’t the open source project itself be entitled to even half a percent of that which will more than cover all their development costs? I’m so sick of companies seeing open source as free outsourced labour they can exploit. There are also existing licenses that only allow free as in beer use of the software if it’s for personal use or in a worker co-op, which I think is also an interesting approach worth considering.
Alternatively, I think we should seriously explore even more copyleft licenses than AGPL. I think it was either Elastic Search or MongoDB that tried to implement a license requiring every software that depends on the open source version of their software be open source as well? Everyone, including the OSF bashed that decision when it came out, and as far as I know there were indeed a lot of problems with how that license was written, but people also denounced the very concept of going beyond AGPL which I don’t get.
I would like to see a commonly used “Not Free For Corporations” license. Something a bit like the GPL; this is my copyrighted code, I’m offering the source code for others to examine, use, modify, redistribute, if you redistribute it it must have these same license terms. I would add it is free of charge for personal, educational, and small business commercial use, it is available on a per instance subscription basis for corporations. My work may not be used for the profit of shareholders unless I get a hefty piece of that pie.
The open source movement was corporations trying to have their cake and eat it too with the things the free software movement had done. That means organisations calling attention to open source without mentioning free software will always push against copyleft as their goal is to get free labour and testing for things megacorporations use while reserving the right to take future development private.
Can we do the same with taxes? I won’t fund any projects that aren’t license appropriately
Public Money? Public Code! https://publiccode.eu/en/
Open source isn’t good enough, I want my software to use a strong copyleft license with no ability to relicense via a CLA (CLAs that don’t grant the ability to relicense software are rare, but acceptable). AGPL for servers, GPL for local software, LGPL for libraries when possible, and Apache, MIT, or BSD ONLY when LGPL doesn’t make sense.
FLOSS
I see no reason not to use AGPL for all software too
It’s not clear that the AGPL is enforceable in lots of countries, so the GPL is safer if you don’t need the extra restrictions.
Interesting, this is the first time I’ve heard this. Do you have any links to read more about it?
I agree.
Even more broadly, politically - copyleft in general is very unpopular with people, even amongst leftists and self-identified communists who you’d think would be all about that since y’know, good of the commons and the fact that communist states literally didn’t give a fuck about copyright and the literature seeing it transparently as another government method of enforcing corporate power, especially apparent today when it comes to pharmaceuticals snd the fact that capitalism needs this intellectual property monopoly as an added incentive for R&D is an issue with capitalism’s broken incentive structures, not cost of it.
Few people seem to understand the power of intellectual property, and various critics of corporate technology either omit mentioning or openly defend intellectual property, despite corporations having monopolies being the reason enshittification is such a phenomenon in the first place.
It seems like a lot of arguments about the role of technology in society instead boil down to more-stuffism vs. less-stuffism, usually based on emotionally charged preference for modern aesthetics or how much they believe the noble savage/appeal to nature fallacies.
When it comes to AI for instance, anyone reasonable can see that if it’s open sourced for everyone to use then it’s just a simple common good like a public library, use it (responsibly) and there’s no issue.
Closed source private models in use by corporations suck up the environment (which belongs to everyone) and use the capital they steal from wage workers who actually produce the things they sell to give themselves leverage over said consumers/workers and other corporations, and this is not fair to the 99%.
Picture a world where AI is good enough to where it actually provides value to use it in a good chunk of jobs, and the best AI is corporate and closed source, and they just enshittified it and jacked up the prices, but if you want to get a job, you better know how to use it well. It would mean that corpo has an enormous power over your life now and you got little choice but to pony up, and they can raise prices whenever they want and snowball that capital into more and more.
I think the reason in this instance is that a lot of artists are bourgeoisie themselves and they understand that. They may be progressive as a personality strait/gimmick/style and talk about “empathy” but they understand the material reality of things.
They had the opportunities and the room for failure necessary to go into such a high risk field, and their ultimate form of commercial success is essentially using that privilege to create intellectual property they could make money from, hence the “concerns” over “style theft” and moralist fearmongering over vaguely defined concepts like “soulless”, which is usually as arbitrary as “white” for racists (not implying equivalence here).
I find generally that a lot of the anti-AI viewpoints are simple self-serving veils of bourgeoisie who’s capital is threatened, no different from the culture war fearmongering about vaping, a dying grasp of the tobacco companies of old threatened by shenzen gadget slop factories.
The material reality is that digital goods are effectively infinite, copying an image isn’t a crime nevermind copying a style or some such, it is transparently absurd to imply otherwise.
in a reality where you’re forced to trade your labor for life’s basic necessities; it makes sense that artists and any other creators would defend intellectual property since it’s the main means for most to feed and house themselves.
Yeah it does, I didn’t say it doesn’t, just like it makes sense for other bourgeoisie like the tech billionaires to defend low taxes and low regulations, it’s class war where classes act in their material self-interest, as they should.
In many European countries you can live very good off the government.
You don’t have to earn money.
ymmv depending on the country; last i checked, the ones in the uk aren’t having much a great time.
According to the internet no british has a good time in England …
Unpopular opinion around here, but I feel that there is a place for IP in the world. Yes, it is a flawed system that is abused by corpos, but it is also a system that can and does protect the work of the little guy. Copyleft has a place, FOSS has a place, and copyright, needs reformed.
DMCA should never have been signed into law the way it was. It limited “free use” way too much and is now being weaponized by police to shirk accountability. Corporations abuse it by buying up technology which would compete with them and burying it. Etc.
My fix:
- Repeal DMCA. Full stop.
- Place a requirement on patant/IP purchases that they have to be a material component of a product brought to market within 5 years of purchase else the ownership of the patant/IP reverts to its original creator with no recompense to the purchaser.
- No transfer of ownership of purchased IP can be made without informing the original creator and giving a reasonable period for them to object. If they object, they must have the right to file the complaint in court to reassert ownership, which may involve reasonable recompense as decided by the court. Also, all clauses in current contracts related to transfer of ownership become void and unenforceable.
- Any purchases made of patants or technical IP must be commensurate with the market cap of the highest level owner in the subsidiary chain. Nestlè does not get to buy the design for a new water filtration under some barely visible water brand to pretend like they cannot afford to pay what it is worth.
- Not specific, but still relevant, to patant/IP situations: Forced arbitration becomes illegal and unenforceable. Everyone has the right to demand their case go before, and be adjudicated by, an impartial and uninvolved judge.
I have had other reforms, but they are not coming to mind currently. I know it is all a very unpopular opinion around here, but I am personally an independent developer and I want my tools and the code I designed to be used for the purposes I have designed them for, and I don’t want someone lifting algorithms I invented and not giving credit or licensing it from me. I am one man who has a family that he struggles to feed, and I recognize that the copyright and patant protections are, ostensibly, there to protect my work as well.
Copyright in general should be strictly limited to an extremely short time, like maybe 1-5 years. After that others should be allowed to use and expand on it unless you release a new work that expands on it yourself. Trademarks eliminate the confusion about who published it and if you aren’t actively using the content, it should be given to society to benefit everyone. This would promote progress and competition. Extended copyright, especially, is only useful for people and companies who don’t want to be productive and just get paid for one thing their ancestors/predecessors did ages ago. The original design for copyright said exactly this would happen.
I would go with the patent term of 20 years. That’s enough time to monetize your creation, and then it’s in the public domain. Copyright being over a hundred years is essentially an end-run around the contract.
Indeed. I agree with everything you said here.
Most of my quandary stems from patants at this point I guess. Copyright reform advocates are plentiful, but patant reform is much more rarely mentioned and IMHO is a bigger issue for progress and development of society. The anticompetitive practice of purchasing patants so you can bury them gets deep under my skin. There are so many things that have been invented, problems that have been solved, potential progress that has had the first steps made, that was squelched because some person/company with more money than civic duty realized that it would negatively affect their revenue stream. And instead of developing the idea and incorporating it to make their own products better, they just hide if in a vault somewhere.
That all said, I cannot describe how happy I was when I heard of some rogue patant whore activists out there coming up with ideas for enshittification and patanting them so corpos cannot use those specific methods to enshittify our world more. I wish I had been able to patant the SaaS architecture when I graduated HS in 2003. Maybe the world would be a much better place.
“IP is good, actually” shouldn’t be a hot take. Those are the laws that licensing is built on.
The fact it is a hot take here is literally the topic of this post.
Get the fuck out
Yes, and this should mean financially supporting it. Just using it does not equate to supporting, and usually telling windows friends that you use arch btw and so should they does not equate either.
No. Not just open source. But Free (as in freedom). GPL & AGPL
