Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are? [LWN.net]

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 4, 2024 17:14 UTC (Mon) by excors (subscriber, #95769)
In reply to: Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are? by kleptog
Parent article: OSI board AMA at All Things Open

An old LWN article quotes and summarises the relevant bits of the licence: https://lwn.net/Articles/797065/

> The intent of all this language is relatively straightforward: if you are a user of an application (perhaps hosted on the net somewhere), you have the right to extract your data from that application to use with your own modified version of the code. Control of data is not to be used to lock users into a de-facto proprietary system.

From that article plus the Register one and some mailing list posts, it sounds like Bruce Perens didn't mind that specific licence's requirements, but he did mind the general idea of Open Source licences imposing requirements on data, largely because it makes the licences much trickier to comply with ("It's a good goal but it means you now need to have a lawyer to understand the license and to respond to your users"), and Open Source ought to be made simpler instead. He thought data restrictions should be completely out of scope for Open Source, and the OSI should reject CAL on that basis.

The OSI didn't have an existing policy on that, so it sounds like his arguments about field-of-use restrictions were stretching to find a technical justification within the OSD to reject it. And then he got increasingly frustrated when people didn't agree with him about the proposed policy or about that interpretation of the OSD, until he ended up quitting the OSI and accusing the board of conspiracy.

Incidentally, since at least 2020 he's been talking about what is now Post-Open (https://postopen.org/), apparently with the intent of supplanting Open Source by having a large number of software projects under a single new zero-cost licence for individuals and small businesses, and a second licence for larger businesses which requires royalties of 1% of the business's entire revenue paid to the Post-Open organisation. That organisation will subtract operating costs then divide the rest amongst individual developers (or their employers) in proportion to how widely each project is used and the number of lines of code each developer has written in the projects' Git repositories.

The goal is to make it simple for companies to comply - they don't have to spend any effort working out exactly which projects they use and how to follow all their different licences or pay for multiple support contracts etc, they just make a single payment to one organisation and that covers all their software - while also making them fund maintenance of the projects they rely on. Which doesn't sound like a bad goal in general, but his specific approach seems, uh, questionable. And I guess it's unsurprising he fell out with the OSI when his ideas are so radically different to Open Source.

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Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 5, 2024 12:58 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> and a second licence for larger businesses which requires royalties of 1% of the business's entire revenue paid to the Post-Open organisation.

So a large business that has nothing to do with the software industry will end up paying far more than a "small" software house, in return for much less benefit ... and depending on the definition of "revenue" a licence may well be out of reach for companies in low-margin businesses ...

That doesn't sound a sensible business model at all. "Idealism, meet reality! Score, reality 1 idealism nil".

Cheers,
Wol

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:40 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not sure I'd give Bruce Perens' idealism a score of 'nil'. Pretty sure he's put a few points on the board over the ~~years~~decades.

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:59 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not saying I disagree with his idealism. I just think - in this particular instance - it won't work. Businesses are as assorted as people, and while it would work for some, I don't think it would work for most.

Cheers,
Wol

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 17:32 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

He accepts it won't work for some companies:

> We also have some non-goals:
> * Don’t worry about when or if today’s giant companies will join Post Open. The answer to "When will IBM come on board" may well be "never", because for such a large company, participation would mean a new USD$60 Million dollar per year fee (1% of USD$6 Billion). Instead, attract small and new companies with a free license, and grow them into paid license customers.
(https://postopen.org/how-post-open-works/)

...but I think those numbers are wrong - IBM's annual revenue is more like $60B, so the fee would be $600M per year. ($6B is IBM's recent annual net income, or their quarterly revenue from "software" alone (excluding "consulting", "infrastructure", etc))

And IBM isn't even a very big company by revenue (219th according to https://fortune.com/ranking/global500/ - the top companies are 10x higher), and it gets a higher proportion of its value from open source software than most companies, and it has reasonably decent net profit margins (~10%, compared to e.g Walmart's 2% which is typical for the grocery industry, meaning this fee would be half of Walmart's entire profits), so IBM is one of the better cases for this licence.

I think the non-goal is effectively excluding all companies in low-profit-margin industries, and most large-ish companies in high-profit-margin industries, and any small/medium company which hopes to either grow into a large-ish company or be acquired by one. So I find it hard to imagine _any_ company would ever agree to this. And without buy-in from companies totalling probably billions of dollars in revenue, there won't be enough money to fund the project.

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:34 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (2 responses)

And I guess it's unsurprising [Bruce Perens] fell out with the OSI when his ideas are so radically different to Open Source.

This feels like an odd take. Are you familiar with the history of the Open Source Initiative and its Open Source Definition?

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 16:16 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, but evidently his views have changed after decades of experience, since he now says Open Source has failed. I think his main arguments are: Open Source's most significant achievement has been to create wealth for proprietary software companies like Google and IBM. There are very few successful Open Source projects for regular users. Critical infrastructure is severely underfunded. Licence violation is widespread and enforcement is almost nonexistent. And there is no workable solution to those issues within the Open Source paradigm. So he's working on a new paradigm, which he has explicitly called "a radical idea". (I'm basing this on https://postopen.org/ and some interviews and talks he's given.)

I have the impression that the wider Open Source community wouldn't fundamentally disagree with those problems he highlights, but the little discussion I've been able to find about his proposed solution has a lot of criticism and almost no support. Most people seem happy to bumble along with Open Source as it is now despite its problems, with perhaps a few incremental changes, while he's trying to shake things up, so it's unsurprising when that causes friction.

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 17:27 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Licence violation is widespread and enforcement is almost nonexistent.

That's only a problem for copyleft "Free Software". It's nearly impossible to violate (therefore there is little need to "enforce") the "permissive" licenses that the "Open Source" movement embraced.

(Congratulations; once again, Stallman's predictions have been shown to be accurate....)