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

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:34 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
In reply to: Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are? by excors
Parent article: OSI board AMA at All Things Open

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?

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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....)