14 ms·

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

137 points by gnufx 3y ago

kiba 3y ago
I am generally not sure about forcing corporations to pay developers, but I am all for demonopolizing corporations have over their ability to make a profit off FOSS, if that makes sense.
cratermoon 3y ago
"I think that AI is always plagiarism," he [Bruce Perens] said
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  NYT seems to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    And a lot of people who’s work is stolen.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > ”I think that AI is always plagiarism," he says. "When you train the model, you're training the model with other people's copyrighted stuff.” This is certainly true of OpenAI and Google. But Adobe Firefly is trained on only on their own Adobe Stock images, licensed content, and public domain content.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    I just had a look at the Adobe stock licencing and royalty terms and I'm not 100% clear that they are bulletproof either. They certainly don't mention AI training in their terms (I guess they argue that this would fall under the "developing new features" part of the clause). It does seem however seem a significant change of the terms, as Adobe was essentially paying contributors based on their downloads (i.e. how often their work was used), but the whole AI model is they use the work to not having to pay the contributors anymore.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    I think this entire thing is nonsensical in the first place. Plagiarism is not related to copyright at all, it's related to credit and attribution. I can plagiarise something in the public domain, for example: Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to [NAME] Happy birthday to you! (Written by me.) In any case, I heavily disagree with Bruce. The whole point of the free culture movement is reusing and remixing previous works, and AI is the ultimate remixer. Why Software Should Be Free made a case against copyright as well. It's quite disappointing to see open source miss the point of free software once again.
    - pests 3y ago
      Free culture remixing and reusing is fine with me, when it's done creatively by people. When a company systematically automates and productizes the concept it becomes an issue. I don't mind if another artist paints with my brush... I wouldn't like a factory set up producing works with my brush en masse.
    - Xelynega 3y ago
      > Plagiarism is not related to copyright at all. The whole point of the free culture movement is reusing and remixing previous works. I can plagiarize something in the public domain I'd half-agree, but I don't think "breaking copyright" matters to the question of "is LXM 'AI' plagiarism?". Like you say you can plagiarize without braking copyright(for cases where the copyright allows usage without attribution such as with public domain), and it's also possible to break copyright without plagiarism(e.x. redistributing with attribution when you don't have the license). But I think this is irrelevant to the point being made. LXM's need to take in a large amount of data, and then the outputs are attributed to the "model" rather than the originators of the material. Since most of the content being digested by LXMs is not public domain that's where copyright gets twisted up with it, since for the majority of LLM training data 'plagiarism' and 'breaking copyright' come from the same act of redistributing/using without attribution(and since the "LXM" is considered to have created the data by most people the 'plagiarism' comes in).
      - CaptainFever 3y ago
  - QuantumG 3y ago
    This is just a batshit insane thing for a person who supposedly promotes the creative commons to say. Plagiarism isn't learning how to write articles like the NYT or how to write code like Linus or RMS. That's still the case if I program my computer to do it.
    - Xelynega 3y ago
      I think it makes sense. Plagiarism is literally taking someones work/ideas and passing them off as my own. If I were to read 100 NYT articles(one of which is about some event) and then write my own article afterwards that uses similar details of the event or is laid out in similar ways, that's plagiarism. When you program a machine to do the same thing but 1000x more efficient, it's still plagiarism.
      - QuantumG 3y ago
        Outside an academic setting plagiarism is just called "thought".
- FergusArgyll 3y ago
  At some point (maybe not yet) It's hard to say convincingly that what AI outputs is plagiarism but human output isn't. Not because AI is conscious or whatever, because it never outputs exactly what was in the training data and like humans combines everything they know to solve the issue in front of them
  - kiba 3y ago
    It sounds like we should just make all these AI open source and freely available to prevent any single individuals or corporations from monopolizing the profit off of it.
  - Xelynega 3y ago
    Can't the same argument be used to say "lossy compression is not plagiarism". If I encode a movie with H264 there is no way to get it to output "exactly what was in the training data" and I can argue that "like humans extract important information from large dumps of data, the algorithm does the same". I don't have any reservations about calling an H264 encoded video redistributed with the wrong attribution "plagiarism", so I don't see what's different about Large X Models that they deserve a special pass.
jrm4 3y ago
Love it. Time to keep moving. What I like (or at least what I read here) is the acknowledgement of Stallman and the GPL as generally a success, in terms of analyzing the lay of the land, setting up a particular legal framework and letting it do its thing -- noting that "its thing" was never complete and total open source domination (which is probably an impossible and silly goal) and instead just trying hard to ensure a baseline-slash-practicable idea.
ptx 3y ago
He laments that users "don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest", but wasn't this the point of Open Source as compared to Free Software, to refocus the messaging from the user's freedoms to the economic benefit for companies? 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.
- playingalong 3y ago
  > point of Open Source as compared to Free Software 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
  - gumby 3y ago
    …due to those corporate interests. 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.
    - zx8080 3y ago
      > when companies think there is money to be made. 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.
  - trelane 3y ago
    I think open source came first, though it wasn't thought of as such at the time. Sharing the source was just what some folks did. A company locking down the source to a printer was one if the reasons Stallmann decided to make the GPL. "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." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
ThrowawayR2 3y ago
If you'd like to see Bruce Perens' presentation from 2021 about post-open source licensing, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRl-it1-ruI&t=470s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRl-it1-ruI&t=470s . The title is misleading; the latter half of the video discusses licensing. The video was discussed on HN at the time at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961940.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
yu3zhou4 3y ago
I’ve built and already shat down a platform (a marketplace) that solves this exactly: https://github.com/poss-market https://github.com/poss-market > define the corporate relationship with developers to ensure companies paid a fair amount for the benefits they receive. It would remain free for individuals and non-profit, and would entail just one license If anyone is interested in helping out with business side of the project, please reach out jed@poss.market
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Please don't call your thing "open source" when it's so obviously not in compliance with the OSD.
araes 3y ago
Generally agree with the interview subject's topic, although obviously don't know the specifics (which is pretty much where all legalese really matters). However, been having similar thoughts lately with GitHub. I see people who appear to be supporting an entire subtopic of the Linux, Android, or iOS ecosystem, and there's ... $50 / month? It was really weird personally, cause I think somewhere I thought those people got paid. And then instead its "wait, you're rewriting all of Google's examples for them? So they actually work?" And unfortunately, I find myself guilty of this, because they're such unusable junk. For anybody who's ever had to implement In-App Billing on the Play Store from scratch with an example that doesn't work, we can totally be friends.
gavinhoward 3y ago
I am literally going to publish a blog post on my own vision of the future of Open Source tonight. He has some things right, but others are not.
- pierat 3y ago
  Sure your name isn't drew? Cause that's the exact crap he did with the open source hardware/company and Prusa just the other day.
  - gavinhoward 3y ago
    You got me! Actually, his post was one of the two that catalyzed mine.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
I think the fundamental issue is that free software and open software are enablers but not products. Free software and open software reducing your costs in making products that make money. Be they services (a la Google/Facebook), hardware, operating systems (a la Apple and Darwin), or books (a la OReilly), or consulting (a la IBM). Open source itself doesn't make money. So if you can open source and reduce your maintenance costs of something that is required for your product but not really a differentiator it is a win. If you try to make money from open source itself, either you will fail, or else you will end up either de-facto abandoning open source, or else doing shady legal things to get around it (see the example of Red Hat/IBM in the article).
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  News to me. I've been making a living from a GPL'ed project since 2009. It currently generates about $240k/year.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    I am just going to comment that this is so awesome, and i so wish i had something like it going on.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
    I bet you are not really selling the product. You are probably selling support and consultancy. Basically, you are consulting for the company to solve an issue, and the open source is an enabler. And $240k/year is what they pay an individual contributor. You are basically being paid for your time and expertise and not really for your product.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      We do not sell support and consultancy. Source code is freely available. We sell ready-to-run binaries, almost entirely to individual end users (desktop application).
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
_bramses 3y ago
I really appreciate how Bruce is approaching the reality of how the idea of open source played out against how technology has found itself used in the real world. I'm optimistic for a future where open source is less of a religion or a marketing angle [1], and more beneficial for those who share their knowledge for the world to use and receive fair compensation. [1] - https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-39/ https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-39/
- gumballindie 3y ago
  If anything it would appear that compensation for sharing software, and knowledge, is threatened by those in ai whose only way to monetise is leveraging free labor. One way to prevent that is to make such property more scarce. People are already pulling the plug on sharing knowledge due to it.
- layer8 3y ago
  Given the AI copyright debate also currently on the front page, I’m a bit less optimistic. We might end up with a lot of software not using open source directly, but having AI rewrite a roughly similar version just different enough to barely not count as plagiarism.
gtsop 3y ago
> Our licences aren't working anymore Lol, ok, maybe they are not working for you and some non- negligible amount of people, but this should not be generalized neither as "our" licences nor as "not working anymore". There are plenty of software I use for which GPLv3 works like a charm. E.g I loved how Apple ditched bash as the default shell because of GPL.[1] [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250729585?sortBy=best https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250729585?sortBy=best
- fourthark 3y ago
  Isn't that an instance of the license not working?
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    no, it's an instance of the license doing exactly what it says it does.
  - ric2b 3y ago
    It is working great, Apple doesn't want to provide freedom to their users so they don't get to leech off of GPL software.
jasoneckert 3y ago
I like the idea that our open source approach must evolve. However, I'm not entirely convinced that moving to a contract approach is the way to do this - after all, one of the largest reasons that open source proliferated these past few decades is that it offered a range of both copyleft licenses like the GPL that promoted freedom first and foremost, as well as a wide range of permissive licenses like MIT that promoted code adoption in other (possibly commercial) projects. Thus, a contract approach would likely require a wide range of complex contract types, and this may dissuade adoption.
kazinator 3y ago
Red Hat has not fucking stopped making its source available. It's making it difficult for non-customers to get the source, and that is within their right. The GPL family of licenses do not state that (1) you're obliged to redistribute anything to anyone; or that (2) if you redistribute binaries to Party A, you're obliged to redistribute sources to Party B (let alone the entire public). Red Hat's behavior is not any kind of loophole in FOSS licensing that's worth worrying about. It's just a shenanigan they are pulling because they think it will help them stay paid. The loopholes worth fussing about are SaaS (peple having absolutely no control over the software because they are using someone else's installation remotely) and tivoization (locked down hardware preventing users from exercising their rights in regard to the FOSS operating system it runs)
- neuromanser 3y ago
  It's correct that the GPL does not require RH to distribute the source code to anyone but their customers. That's not the issue though! The issue is that if I, as a RH customer, execute the rights given to me by RH via the GPL and pass the sources to a third party, RH will terminate my customer contract. The license does not proscribe this in letter but it seems to go against its spirit.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    Although RH terminates the contract, they cannot stop you from using and redistributing what you got out of them, or even creating your own fork of RH. They don't want to pay their engineers to work on Red Hat only to have some free forks follow the work, so they came up with the idea of eliminating and likely blacklisting customers who look like are there just to pick up changes for a fork. Red Hat should be applauded for trying to find a business model which is compatible with copyleft, yet prevents freeloading. Stallman never wanted to create a license that was anti-business, that's why this kind of thing is possible. A license which says you cannot drop or blacklist customers for any reason wouldn't be a free license. There is an abundance of distros out there; anyone who doesn't like Red Hat for any reason can easily use something else. It will be interesting to see whether Red Hat's ploy works out in the long run. Will it help grow their business, or will it turn out to be detrimental due to a backlash effect. Obviously, some people don't like it; it's a question of are there enough of them to matter. There is also the question of whether a free fork of Red Hat that people can develop and test with without becoming paying Red Hat customers really is bad for Red Hat (as they are obviously convinced) or whether it is actually good.
contingencies 3y ago
Interesting problem domain, though the skeptic might suggest that any proposed global amendment to social contract at the intersection of technology, commerce and existing multi-jurisdiction legal systems is going to be a "hard sell" with minor traction at best. It seems the majority of technology's social influence appears to be heavily clustered toward the early phase of either abject redefinition of existing domains (eg. mass manufacturing) or the introduction of completely novel domains (eg. internet). Once popularity is achieved you tend to see a social norm forming around the new technology and old hierarchies and interests reasserted. We've seen this, for example, with industries such as advertising, media conglomerates and banking surviving the internet. Given this broad pattern, perhaps a more appropriate pathway to explore if seeking globally significant structural evolution in the social contract might be retaking direct ownership of hardware and services. Some potentially aligned contemporary parallel macro-opportunities include the growing devolution of tertiary education (ie. potential for public uptake of a parallel pedagogical pathways leading to increased youth involvement), greatly reduced custom hardware fabrication costs, affordable non-cellular wireless hardware (wifi mesh/LoRa), existing open courseware, increasing global recognition of the urgency and severity of trans-national environmental challenges, and the dangling UBI social question. But while the engaged learner clearly benefits from openness and information (at least until they encounter commerce), and a business might be said to enjoy access to a pool of better educated employees and reduced operating costs, ultimately corporate position in most markets depends upon the maintenance of an edge which is historically based on either trade secrets or government-mandated monopoly (patent law) neither of which are particularly applicable to software or business methods and thus the open source movement. This would appear to be the unresolved dichotomous core of the issue.
throw7 3y ago
First, Parens was a part of "OSI" and their point was to make "free software" amenable to business. It's just a bit much on the nose to now see him annoyed at the results. I don't know anything on "post-open", but some of the article sounds like he wants something like what ASCAP is to the music industry. About redhat... the moment redhat went "enterprise" with RHEL is the point when they stopped being publicly friendly with their "enterprise" patches (remember when patches in the srpm became obfuscated... pepperidge farms remembers) and servers.
ranger_danger 3y ago
I think the biggest problem is that the vast majority of people in the world simply don't care one bit about open source.
ranger_danger 3y ago
How is this new license going to be enforced by people without money, power and/or lawyers? Otherwise nothing is solved IMO. I know several corporations that actively violate the GPL license of "poor" people's projects that have no money or desire to litigate, so they get away with it.
- wmf 3y ago
  Some people will comply which will give the developers enough money to hire lawyers.
- Xelynega 3y ago
  I'm in this picture and I don't like it. Hours of trying to convince management that it's actually not OK to release a product that's completely built on open source software without even attaching an open source license/acknowledgement to it.
- ric2b 3y ago
  The FSF will sue companies on your behalf and has done so in the past. Companies pirating GPL software should be aware that no matter how small the developer they are opening themselves to a slamdunk court case.
  - ranger_danger 3y ago
    They (along with the SFC, EFF and others) will only ever do so if you sign all copyright over to them, AND they have to want to help you specifically in the first place. I know many projects that have tried to go to them and were all told to pound sand. It's not a slam-dunk case if you can't afford or aren't interested to litigate in the first place, which is many of such projects.
leotravis10 3y ago
This from Melody Horn back in 2020 is a great companion piece to this. https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm... https://web.archive.org/web/20231215222059/https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231215222059/https://www.borin... They both echoed that we need to be prepared for such environment and they have some good points.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Wait, Bruce Perens is still alive??? I thought he laughed himself to death reading Eric S Raymond's blog! https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/7 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/7 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html
andy99 3y ago
I want my worst enemies to be able to use my open source code against me and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business. When I want to write code with different restrictions, I do that and I don't call it open source. If people want to create and promote their own utopian models that's their business. Personally I'd want nothing to do with that, and it definitely should not be called open source, just like any restrictive license. On another note, a transaction is a meeting of the minds. When most people release open source software they want nothing in return and are owed nothing. That's how I feel about it. People who think they are owed something are like beggars who do miming or some such in the street and call it work. Nobody asked for it, some find it interesting and you might be able to guilt someone into paying but they didn't hire you and don't owe you anything. You can just not do it, it's only a job if you're explicitly hired.
- kriro9jdjfif 3y ago
  The act of defining limits on language associations is putting obligations on others. No one cares to help you define or realize your semantic utopia either. Language associations will always be mutable; that’s my utopia. You can pound sand trying to demand others speech be constrained by your sensibilities. Exist in a religious-like state of biology where your mental model is essential, some kind of immutable linked list? No thanks. Edit: note I made the same argument in different language. So much for the OPs premise holding water. People do care how others label things and the aggregate will make OP beholden to that. Good luck living your bespoke utopia OP.
- echelon 3y ago
  > I want my worst enemies to be able to use my open source code against me and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business. Even when it's the ten trillion dollar combined market cap of FAANG (or whatever we call them now)? Because that's not open source. That's free labor suicide.
  - shikon7 3y ago
    Even then, either you discriminate, or you don’t. And they’re not really the worst one could think of, as FAANG thenselves contribute a lot to open source software.
sgbeal 3y ago
> Free Software, Perens explains, is now 50 years old and the first announcement of Open Source occurred 30 years ago. That is what one may fairly call an "Alternate Fact". The term "Open Source" is well-documented to have been coined in early 1998 (not quite 26 years ago).
prepend 3y ago
> He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they'd fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that's usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts. This seems horrible due to its complexity and poor filter for who contributes. I’d rather just buy software licenses from Microsoft et al and let the corporate governance guide projects from whatever this new madness is. It’s funny because commercial software exists. Projects are free to sell and customers free to buy. We don’t need some new subscription type. Just sell software and stop trying to get cool kid points. Of course redhat/ibm sucks for how they’ve misused open source, but that’s a separate issue.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  The irony being without the likes of IBM and Red-Hat, Linux would be another Minix.
ngcc_hk 3y ago
The pure philosophy of free software is socialist like. Or communist if you want to say. It has its role if you buy it. But the creative people might want a different take. Hence gpl 3.0 is so hard to get adopted even if you are on the free software camp. It goes quite far to some. Somehow we have to find a way to be market as well. Not pure market. But somehow a mix. This mix takes time as the whole idea of open/free source is new approach vs patent/copyright (general even open/free is a kind of copyright or copy left)/secret or abandon/share/public. Need a mix model.
Eridrus 3y ago
A few disjointed thoughts about the article/OSS: I feel like the motivations are at odds with the suggestion. If the problem you want to solve is that consumer software is not open source, charging companies to use it isn't going to change anything. == Open Source as a movement has failed IMO for the economic reasons always mentioned, but what we have actually produced is a software commons where individuals and companies cooperate on the production of infrastructure and release it to everyone for free. On the face of it this is obviously great, but I do wonder if this reduces the amount of software actually being produced since competing with free is very hard. We all know developers are an incredibly difficult market to sell to, and I wonder if open source contributes to this. OSS companies seem to be abandoning their OSS roots because it turns out competitors copying your work is a real concern once you hit maturity. To me, this is actually the biggest question to solve for OSS: how can we use Capitalism's ability to accrue resources to useful products to produce the optimal amount of software. == OSS has also dramatically improved trust in random code since we're getting source and not binary blobs. Getting software utilities from the 90s was/remains sketchy since you actually have very little confidence in what you are getting. It's not perfect, but software that gets built from CI or from a distro in the open is far more trustworthy.
tensor 3y ago
The parts of this complaining about the usability of open source software are filled with such irony. I don’t think paying developers is going to help this particular problem. For starters, we can stop referring to non developers as “common people”. Many are experts, including technical experts, in other areas. Second, to make software with great usability, we need to pay some of those other experts to help. Designers, user researchers, and also the users of software of a given domain. None of that has anything to do with software licenses.
zubairq 3y ago
Former red hat employee and open source developer myself. I am working on a system where the whole design requires the code to be open, so eliminates a lot of bad actors by default. I think the current model of relying on licenses to enforce open source software is subject to interpretation by humans and hard to enforce.
- alberth 3y ago
  When you say “open”, do you mean Public Domain? SQLite has found that to be quite effective. https://sqlite.org/copyright.html https://sqlite.org/copyright.html
  - zubairq 3y ago
    Good point, and the answer is "I'm not sure". I've made a system where code is published by default with all apps and components released, so the only way to hide code would be to obfuscate the code. I'm not even sure how this would fit into existing licenses/copyright law
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
"First of all, our licenses aren't working anymore," They never worked.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
A couple of thoughts 1. The "hard" position - if you don't want "permissive" don't release it as open source is very "hard" and it does fly against what is a clear and growing view that whatever open source "truly" means, it's not supposed to mean exploitation of others work for free by large corporate entities. (who weirdly also are involved in finding a lot of development) 2. The "soft" position (this builds a community, which is the major benefit) also ends up allowing for exploitation. 3. the term "exploitation" is biased in the debate and shows where I sit. But using others work without payment and with no clear intention of keeping to the intention of the license they provided seems a good choice. FOSS found a loophole in the law and made a whole new means of making the law support community and individual rights - that the payment you make to me is to forward restrict your rights. If you can get out of that obligation have I had any payment? 4. There are two options going forward if we want to put that obligation back / create the utopia we are vaguely dreaming of - Force a chnage in the interpretation of the current license - something like GPLv2 really means GPLv3. - chnage the license (going forward) - ie GPLv4000 But both are fraught with problems. In the end we are looking for a non-governmental solution to a problem that governments are clearly designed for - reallocating wealth according to human and social notions of fairness and / or most appropriate use of resources when the market fails to do it. We pay scientists who will mostly release open source work, the question then becomes why not coders and then which coders. That does not seem a good solution - so perhaps it's government action to re-open the market in FOSS?
countWSS 3y ago
Companies also use Contributor License Agreements and similar legalese(ToS/User Agreement/Company Code of Conduct) to confine their "open source" code into some semi-commercial/proprietary components and "public components": the code is nominally open, but dealing with it requires accepting the terms of the company hosting it. Even companies doing it in the open, on Github have the guts to claim they're champions of open source.

137 points by gnufx 3y ago

kiba 3y ago

I am generally not sure about forcing corporations to pay developers, but I am all for demonopolizing corporations have over their ability to make a profit off FOSS, if that makes sense.

cratermoon 3y ago

"I think that AI is always plagiarism," he [Bruce Perens] said

stronglikedan 3y ago
NYT seems to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941
- gumballindie 3y ago
  And a lot of people who’s work is stolen.
CharlesW 3y ago
> ”I think that AI is always plagiarism," he says. "When you train the model, you're training the model with other people's copyrighted stuff.” This is certainly true of OpenAI and Google. But Adobe Firefly is trained on only on their own Adobe Stock images, licensed content, and public domain content.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  I just had a look at the Adobe stock licencing and royalty terms and I'm not 100% clear that they are bulletproof either. They certainly don't mention AI training in their terms (I guess they argue that this would fall under the "developing new features" part of the clause). It does seem however seem a significant change of the terms, as Adobe was essentially paying contributors based on their downloads (i.e. how often their work was used), but the whole AI model is they use the work to not having to pay the contributors anymore.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  I think this entire thing is nonsensical in the first place. Plagiarism is not related to copyright at all, it's related to credit and attribution. I can plagiarise something in the public domain, for example: Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to [NAME] Happy birthday to you! (Written by me.) In any case, I heavily disagree with Bruce. The whole point of the free culture movement is reusing and remixing previous works, and AI is the ultimate remixer. Why Software Should Be Free made a case against copyright as well. It's quite disappointing to see open source miss the point of free software once again.
  - pests 3y ago
    Free culture remixing and reusing is fine with me, when it's done creatively by people. When a company systematically automates and productizes the concept it becomes an issue. I don't mind if another artist paints with my brush... I wouldn't like a factory set up producing works with my brush en masse.
  - Xelynega 3y ago
    > Plagiarism is not related to copyright at all. The whole point of the free culture movement is reusing and remixing previous works. I can plagiarize something in the public domain I'd half-agree, but I don't think "breaking copyright" matters to the question of "is LXM 'AI' plagiarism?". Like you say you can plagiarize without braking copyright(for cases where the copyright allows usage without attribution such as with public domain), and it's also possible to break copyright without plagiarism(e.x. redistributing with attribution when you don't have the license). But I think this is irrelevant to the point being made. LXM's need to take in a large amount of data, and then the outputs are attributed to the "model" rather than the originators of the material. Since most of the content being digested by LXMs is not public domain that's where copyright gets twisted up with it, since for the majority of LLM training data 'plagiarism' and 'breaking copyright' come from the same act of redistributing/using without attribution(and since the "LXM" is considered to have created the data by most people the 'plagiarism' comes in).
    - CaptainFever 3y ago
- QuantumG 3y ago
  This is just a batshit insane thing for a person who supposedly promotes the creative commons to say. Plagiarism isn't learning how to write articles like the NYT or how to write code like Linus or RMS. That's still the case if I program my computer to do it.
  - Xelynega 3y ago
    I think it makes sense. Plagiarism is literally taking someones work/ideas and passing them off as my own. If I were to read 100 NYT articles(one of which is about some event) and then write my own article afterwards that uses similar details of the event or is laid out in similar ways, that's plagiarism. When you program a machine to do the same thing but 1000x more efficient, it's still plagiarism.
    - QuantumG 3y ago
      Outside an academic setting plagiarism is just called "thought".
FergusArgyll 3y ago
At some point (maybe not yet) It's hard to say convincingly that what AI outputs is plagiarism but human output isn't. Not because AI is conscious or whatever, because it never outputs exactly what was in the training data and like humans combines everything they know to solve the issue in front of them
- kiba 3y ago
  It sounds like we should just make all these AI open source and freely available to prevent any single individuals or corporations from monopolizing the profit off of it.
- Xelynega 3y ago
  Can't the same argument be used to say "lossy compression is not plagiarism". If I encode a movie with H264 there is no way to get it to output "exactly what was in the training data" and I can argue that "like humans extract important information from large dumps of data, the algorithm does the same". I don't have any reservations about calling an H264 encoded video redistributed with the wrong attribution "plagiarism", so I don't see what's different about Large X Models that they deserve a special pass.

jrm4 3y ago

Love it. Time to keep moving. What I like (or at least what I read here) is the acknowledgement of Stallman and the GPL as generally a success, in terms of analyzing the lay of the land, setting up a particular legal framework and letting it do its thing -- noting that "its thing" was never complete and total open source domination (which is probably an impossible and silly goal) and instead just trying hard to ensure a baseline-slash-practicable idea.

ptx 3y ago

He laments that users "don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest", but wasn't this the point of Open Source as compared to Free Software, to refocus the messaging from the user's freedoms to the economic benefit for companies? 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.

playingalong 3y ago
> point of Open Source as compared to Free Software 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
- gumby 3y ago
  …due to those corporate interests. 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.
  - zx8080 3y ago
    > when companies think there is money to be made. 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.
- trelane 3y ago
  I think open source came first, though it wasn't thought of as such at the time. Sharing the source was just what some folks did. A company locking down the source to a printer was one if the reasons Stallmann decided to make the GPL. "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." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

ThrowawayR2 3y ago

If you'd like to see Bruce Perens' presentation from 2021 about post-open source licensing, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRl-it1-ruI&t=470s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRl-it1-ruI&t=470s . The title is misleading; the latter half of the video discusses licensing. The video was discussed on HN at the time at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961940.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

yu3zhou4 3y ago

I’ve built and already shat down a platform (a marketplace) that solves this exactly: https://github.com/poss-market https://github.com/poss-market > define the corporate relationship with developers to ensure companies paid a fair amount for the benefits they receive. It would remain free for individuals and non-profit, and would entail just one license If anyone is interested in helping out with business side of the project, please reach out jed@poss.market

josephcsible 3y ago
Please don't call your thing "open source" when it's so obviously not in compliance with the OSD.

araes 3y ago

Generally agree with the interview subject's topic, although obviously don't know the specifics (which is pretty much where all legalese really matters). However, been having similar thoughts lately with GitHub. I see people who appear to be supporting an entire subtopic of the Linux, Android, or iOS ecosystem, and there's ... $50 / month? It was really weird personally, cause I think somewhere I thought those people got paid. And then instead its "wait, you're rewriting all of Google's examples for them? So they actually work?" And unfortunately, I find myself guilty of this, because they're such unusable junk. For anybody who's ever had to implement In-App Billing on the Play Store from scratch with an example that doesn't work, we can totally be friends.

gavinhoward 3y ago

I am literally going to publish a blog post on my own vision of the future of Open Source tonight. He has some things right, but others are not.

pierat 3y ago
Sure your name isn't drew? Cause that's the exact crap he did with the open source hardware/company and Prusa just the other day.
- gavinhoward 3y ago
  You got me! Actually, his post was one of the two that catalyzed mine.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

I think the fundamental issue is that free software and open software are enablers but not products. Free software and open software reducing your costs in making products that make money. Be they services (a la Google/Facebook), hardware, operating systems (a la Apple and Darwin), or books (a la OReilly), or consulting (a la IBM). Open source itself doesn't make money. So if you can open source and reduce your maintenance costs of something that is required for your product but not really a differentiator it is a win. If you try to make money from open source itself, either you will fail, or else you will end up either de-facto abandoning open source, or else doing shady legal things to get around it (see the example of Red Hat/IBM in the article).

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
News to me. I've been making a living from a GPL'ed project since 2009. It currently generates about $240k/year.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  I am just going to comment that this is so awesome, and i so wish i had something like it going on.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  I bet you are not really selling the product. You are probably selling support and consultancy. Basically, you are consulting for the company to solve an issue, and the open source is an enabler. And $240k/year is what they pay an individual contributor. You are basically being paid for your time and expertise and not really for your product.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    We do not sell support and consultancy. Source code is freely available. We sell ready-to-run binaries, almost entirely to individual end users (desktop application).
  - chrismorgan 3y ago

_bramses 3y ago

I really appreciate how Bruce is approaching the reality of how the idea of open source played out against how technology has found itself used in the real world. I'm optimistic for a future where open source is less of a religion or a marketing angle [1], and more beneficial for those who share their knowledge for the world to use and receive fair compensation. [1] - https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-39/ https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-39/

gumballindie 3y ago
If anything it would appear that compensation for sharing software, and knowledge, is threatened by those in ai whose only way to monetise is leveraging free labor. One way to prevent that is to make such property more scarce. People are already pulling the plug on sharing knowledge due to it.
layer8 3y ago
Given the AI copyright debate also currently on the front page, I’m a bit less optimistic. We might end up with a lot of software not using open source directly, but having AI rewrite a roughly similar version just different enough to barely not count as plagiarism.

gtsop 3y ago

> Our licences aren't working anymore Lol, ok, maybe they are not working for you and some non- negligible amount of people, but this should not be generalized neither as "our" licences nor as "not working anymore". There are plenty of software I use for which GPLv3 works like a charm. E.g I loved how Apple ditched bash as the default shell because of GPL.[1] [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250729585?sortBy=best https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250729585?sortBy=best

fourthark 3y ago
Isn't that an instance of the license not working?
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  no, it's an instance of the license doing exactly what it says it does.
- ric2b 3y ago
  It is working great, Apple doesn't want to provide freedom to their users so they don't get to leech off of GPL software.

jasoneckert 3y ago

I like the idea that our open source approach must evolve. However, I'm not entirely convinced that moving to a contract approach is the way to do this - after all, one of the largest reasons that open source proliferated these past few decades is that it offered a range of both copyleft licenses like the GPL that promoted freedom first and foremost, as well as a wide range of permissive licenses like MIT that promoted code adoption in other (possibly commercial) projects. Thus, a contract approach would likely require a wide range of complex contract types, and this may dissuade adoption.

kazinator 3y ago

Red Hat has not fucking stopped making its source available. It's making it difficult for non-customers to get the source, and that is within their right. The GPL family of licenses do not state that (1) you're obliged to redistribute anything to anyone; or that (2) if you redistribute binaries to Party A, you're obliged to redistribute sources to Party B (let alone the entire public). Red Hat's behavior is not any kind of loophole in FOSS licensing that's worth worrying about. It's just a shenanigan they are pulling because they think it will help them stay paid. The loopholes worth fussing about are SaaS (peple having absolutely no control over the software because they are using someone else's installation remotely) and tivoization (locked down hardware preventing users from exercising their rights in regard to the FOSS operating system it runs)

neuromanser 3y ago
It's correct that the GPL does not require RH to distribute the source code to anyone but their customers. That's not the issue though! The issue is that if I, as a RH customer, execute the rights given to me by RH via the GPL and pass the sources to a third party, RH will terminate my customer contract. The license does not proscribe this in letter but it seems to go against its spirit.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Although RH terminates the contract, they cannot stop you from using and redistributing what you got out of them, or even creating your own fork of RH. They don't want to pay their engineers to work on Red Hat only to have some free forks follow the work, so they came up with the idea of eliminating and likely blacklisting customers who look like are there just to pick up changes for a fork. Red Hat should be applauded for trying to find a business model which is compatible with copyleft, yet prevents freeloading. Stallman never wanted to create a license that was anti-business, that's why this kind of thing is possible. A license which says you cannot drop or blacklist customers for any reason wouldn't be a free license. There is an abundance of distros out there; anyone who doesn't like Red Hat for any reason can easily use something else. It will be interesting to see whether Red Hat's ploy works out in the long run. Will it help grow their business, or will it turn out to be detrimental due to a backlash effect. Obviously, some people don't like it; it's a question of are there enough of them to matter. There is also the question of whether a free fork of Red Hat that people can develop and test with without becoming paying Red Hat customers really is bad for Red Hat (as they are obviously convinced) or whether it is actually good.

contingencies 3y ago

Interesting problem domain, though the skeptic might suggest that any proposed global amendment to social contract at the intersection of technology, commerce and existing multi-jurisdiction legal systems is going to be a "hard sell" with minor traction at best. It seems the majority of technology's social influence appears to be heavily clustered toward the early phase of either abject redefinition of existing domains (eg. mass manufacturing) or the introduction of completely novel domains (eg. internet). Once popularity is achieved you tend to see a social norm forming around the new technology and old hierarchies and interests reasserted. We've seen this, for example, with industries such as advertising, media conglomerates and banking surviving the internet. Given this broad pattern, perhaps a more appropriate pathway to explore if seeking globally significant structural evolution in the social contract might be retaking direct ownership of hardware and services. Some potentially aligned contemporary parallel macro-opportunities include the growing devolution of tertiary education (ie. potential for public uptake of a parallel pedagogical pathways leading to increased youth involvement), greatly reduced custom hardware fabrication costs, affordable non-cellular wireless hardware (wifi mesh/LoRa), existing open courseware, increasing global recognition of the urgency and severity of trans-national environmental challenges, and the dangling UBI social question. But while the engaged learner clearly benefits from openness and information (at least until they encounter commerce), and a business might be said to enjoy access to a pool of better educated employees and reduced operating costs, ultimately corporate position in most markets depends upon the maintenance of an edge which is historically based on either trade secrets or government-mandated monopoly (patent law) neither of which are particularly applicable to software or business methods and thus the open source movement. This would appear to be the unresolved dichotomous core of the issue.

throw7 3y ago

First, Parens was a part of "OSI" and their point was to make "free software" amenable to business. It's just a bit much on the nose to now see him annoyed at the results. I don't know anything on "post-open", but some of the article sounds like he wants something like what ASCAP is to the music industry. About redhat... the moment redhat went "enterprise" with RHEL is the point when they stopped being publicly friendly with their "enterprise" patches (remember when patches in the srpm became obfuscated... pepperidge farms remembers) and servers.

ranger_danger 3y ago

I think the biggest problem is that the vast majority of people in the world simply don't care one bit about open source.

ranger_danger 3y ago

How is this new license going to be enforced by people without money, power and/or lawyers? Otherwise nothing is solved IMO. I know several corporations that actively violate the GPL license of "poor" people's projects that have no money or desire to litigate, so they get away with it.

wmf 3y ago
Some people will comply which will give the developers enough money to hire lawyers.
Xelynega 3y ago
I'm in this picture and I don't like it. Hours of trying to convince management that it's actually not OK to release a product that's completely built on open source software without even attaching an open source license/acknowledgement to it.
ric2b 3y ago
The FSF will sue companies on your behalf and has done so in the past. Companies pirating GPL software should be aware that no matter how small the developer they are opening themselves to a slamdunk court case.
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  They (along with the SFC, EFF and others) will only ever do so if you sign all copyright over to them, AND they have to want to help you specifically in the first place. I know many projects that have tried to go to them and were all told to pound sand. It's not a slam-dunk case if you can't afford or aren't interested to litigate in the first place, which is many of such projects.

leotravis10 3y ago

This from Melody Horn back in 2020 is a great companion piece to this. https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm... https://web.archive.org/web/20231215222059/https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231215222059/https://www.borin... They both echoed that we need to be prepared for such environment and they have some good points.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Wait, Bruce Perens is still alive??? I thought he laughed himself to death reading Eric S Raymond's blog! https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/7 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/7 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html

andy99 3y ago

I want my worst enemies to be able to use my open source code against me and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business. When I want to write code with different restrictions, I do that and I don't call it open source. If people want to create and promote their own utopian models that's their business. Personally I'd want nothing to do with that, and it definitely should not be called open source, just like any restrictive license. On another note, a transaction is a meeting of the minds. When most people release open source software they want nothing in return and are owed nothing. That's how I feel about it. People who think they are owed something are like beggars who do miming or some such in the street and call it work. Nobody asked for it, some find it interesting and you might be able to guilt someone into paying but they didn't hire you and don't owe you anything. You can just not do it, it's only a job if you're explicitly hired.

kriro9jdjfif 3y ago
The act of defining limits on language associations is putting obligations on others. No one cares to help you define or realize your semantic utopia either. Language associations will always be mutable; that’s my utopia. You can pound sand trying to demand others speech be constrained by your sensibilities. Exist in a religious-like state of biology where your mental model is essential, some kind of immutable linked list? No thanks. Edit: note I made the same argument in different language. So much for the OPs premise holding water. People do care how others label things and the aggregate will make OP beholden to that. Good luck living your bespoke utopia OP.
echelon 3y ago
> I want my worst enemies to be able to use my open source code against me and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business. Even when it's the ten trillion dollar combined market cap of FAANG (or whatever we call them now)? Because that's not open source. That's free labor suicide.
- shikon7 3y ago
  Even then, either you discriminate, or you don’t. And they’re not really the worst one could think of, as FAANG thenselves contribute a lot to open source software.

sgbeal 3y ago

> Free Software, Perens explains, is now 50 years old and the first announcement of Open Source occurred 30 years ago. That is what one may fairly call an "Alternate Fact". The term "Open Source" is well-documented to have been coined in early 1998 (not quite 26 years ago).

prepend 3y ago

> He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they'd fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that's usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts. This seems horrible due to its complexity and poor filter for who contributes. I’d rather just buy software licenses from Microsoft et al and let the corporate governance guide projects from whatever this new madness is. It’s funny because commercial software exists. Projects are free to sell and customers free to buy. We don’t need some new subscription type. Just sell software and stop trying to get cool kid points. Of course redhat/ibm sucks for how they’ve misused open source, but that’s a separate issue.

pjmlp 3y ago
The irony being without the likes of IBM and Red-Hat, Linux would be another Minix.

ngcc_hk 3y ago

The pure philosophy of free software is socialist like. Or communist if you want to say. It has its role if you buy it. But the creative people might want a different take. Hence gpl 3.0 is so hard to get adopted even if you are on the free software camp. It goes quite far to some. Somehow we have to find a way to be market as well. Not pure market. But somehow a mix. This mix takes time as the whole idea of open/free source is new approach vs patent/copyright (general even open/free is a kind of copyright or copy left)/secret or abandon/share/public. Need a mix model.

Eridrus 3y ago

A few disjointed thoughts about the article/OSS: I feel like the motivations are at odds with the suggestion. If the problem you want to solve is that consumer software is not open source, charging companies to use it isn't going to change anything. == Open Source as a movement has failed IMO for the economic reasons always mentioned, but what we have actually produced is a software commons where individuals and companies cooperate on the production of infrastructure and release it to everyone for free. On the face of it this is obviously great, but I do wonder if this reduces the amount of software actually being produced since competing with free is very hard. We all know developers are an incredibly difficult market to sell to, and I wonder if open source contributes to this. OSS companies seem to be abandoning their OSS roots because it turns out competitors copying your work is a real concern once you hit maturity. To me, this is actually the biggest question to solve for OSS: how can we use Capitalism's ability to accrue resources to useful products to produce the optimal amount of software. == OSS has also dramatically improved trust in random code since we're getting source and not binary blobs. Getting software utilities from the 90s was/remains sketchy since you actually have very little confidence in what you are getting. It's not perfect, but software that gets built from CI or from a distro in the open is far more trustworthy.

tensor 3y ago

The parts of this complaining about the usability of open source software are filled with such irony. I don’t think paying developers is going to help this particular problem. For starters, we can stop referring to non developers as “common people”. Many are experts, including technical experts, in other areas. Second, to make software with great usability, we need to pay some of those other experts to help. Designers, user researchers, and also the users of software of a given domain. None of that has anything to do with software licenses.

zubairq 3y ago

Former red hat employee and open source developer myself. I am working on a system where the whole design requires the code to be open, so eliminates a lot of bad actors by default. I think the current model of relying on licenses to enforce open source software is subject to interpretation by humans and hard to enforce.

alberth 3y ago
When you say “open”, do you mean Public Domain? SQLite has found that to be quite effective. https://sqlite.org/copyright.html https://sqlite.org/copyright.html
- zubairq 3y ago
  Good point, and the answer is "I'm not sure". I've made a system where code is published by default with all apps and components released, so the only way to hide code would be to obfuscate the code. I'm not even sure how this would fit into existing licenses/copyright law

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

"First of all, our licenses aren't working anymore," They never worked.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

A couple of thoughts 1. The "hard" position - if you don't want "permissive" don't release it as open source is very "hard" and it does fly against what is a clear and growing view that whatever open source "truly" means, it's not supposed to mean exploitation of others work for free by large corporate entities. (who weirdly also are involved in finding a lot of development) 2. The "soft" position (this builds a community, which is the major benefit) also ends up allowing for exploitation. 3. the term "exploitation" is biased in the debate and shows where I sit. But using others work without payment and with no clear intention of keeping to the intention of the license they provided seems a good choice. FOSS found a loophole in the law and made a whole new means of making the law support community and individual rights - that the payment you make to me is to forward restrict your rights. If you can get out of that obligation have I had any payment? 4. There are two options going forward if we want to put that obligation back / create the utopia we are vaguely dreaming of - Force a chnage in the interpretation of the current license - something like GPLv2 really means GPLv3. - chnage the license (going forward) - ie GPLv4000 But both are fraught with problems. In the end we are looking for a non-governmental solution to a problem that governments are clearly designed for - reallocating wealth according to human and social notions of fairness and / or most appropriate use of resources when the market fails to do it. We pay scientists who will mostly release open source work, the question then becomes why not coders and then which coders. That does not seem a good solution - so perhaps it's government action to re-open the market in FOSS?

countWSS 3y ago

Companies also use Contributor License Agreements and similar legalese(ToS/User Agreement/Company Code of Conduct) to confine their "open source" code into some semi-commercial/proprietary components and "public components": the code is nominally open, but dealing with it requires accepting the terms of the company hosting it. Even companies doing it in the open, on Github have the guts to claim they're champions of open source.