14 ms·

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

by 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
phkahler 3y ago
Agreed. And if BP really wants to change this, he needs to focus on Free Software as a starting point, not Open Source. He complains about RedHat/IBM circumventing the GPL but completely missing the fact that the "more permissive" open source licenses actually condone such behavior. They would even allow IBM to not provide source to their own customers, nevermind prohibiting redistribution. IMHO the biggest threat to Free Software is the proliferation of open source software. And so the biggest threat to all the open source users/lovers is their own lack of a meaningful philosophy on licensing.
- dllthomas 3y ago
  > the fact that the "more permissive" open source licenses actually condone such behavior The permissive Free Software licenses do the same, being the same licenses.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    I'd guess this is meant to be a contrast between the GPL and licenses like MIT?
    - dllthomas 3y ago
      Yeah, definitely. I just think it's worth noting that both organizations approve of basically the same list of licenses, and that even the FSF occasionally recommends using a permissive license depending on circumstance.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  I do not understand bruces concern, maybe someone can make it clear to me. The source IS made available to software. The license clearly says you must make it availble in the same method you get the binaries, which is what is happening here. What "circumvention" is going on ?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The GPL also guarantees the right to redistribute the software and sources you received. This is the part that IBM/RedHat are essentially circumventing, by canceling your access to new patches and versions of RHEL if you chose to exercise this right. This may be legal, but it certainly goes against the intent and spirit of the GPL, as Stallman himself has said.
api 3y ago
“Open source” is free labor for SaaS companies, while the insistence on liberal free (as in beer) licenses makes it almost impossible to build a software business in any other way by flooding the market. SaaS is the least free model for software. You have no privacy, no control, and in most cases can’t even export your data. Thus open source actually minimizes freedom in practice, at least for everyone other than developers.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Exactly! FOSS has been the unwitting enabler behind locking people down in giant SaaS silos.
  - api 3y ago
    I’ve seen this for years but so far it’s been hard to get others to see it. It requires holistic “systems thinking.” You have to go beyond the letter and the intent of the license or the open source movement and look at the overall effect it has on the incentive structure of the market. It’s extremely common for well intentioned policies and movements to have perverse effects that aren’t anticipated because the effect emerges from the whole system rather than from any single part in isolation. The effect of a thing is pretty much unrelated to its intent, hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The root problem is that humans are awful at understanding how a policy will manifest when embedded in a complex system. I think this is also why every attempt at central planning a whole society ultimately fails.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      I'm not convinced. The moment software could be released half baked, then patched later, the door for subscription pricing was open. Then the browser growing into an application platform moved things onto the server where it was easier to update things. FOSS may have accelerated things slightly, yet the mediocre quality and incompleteness held back its impact for a long time. Server side those deficiencies were less visible and could be addressed more gradually. Ultimately I think SAAS was inevitable as everything shifted online. Now even single-player, closed source games require an Internet connection.
candiddevmike 3y ago
IMO, the SSPL solves this. If you only use/develop FOSS stuff as RMS intended, you can use SSPL without an issue. Don't use or develop FOSS everywhere? Pay for a separate license. It's unfortunate that OSI and friends are OK with the AGPL but not the SSPL, and IMO shows that they think the status quo is OK when clearly it's sustainable for FOSS creators.
- trelane 3y ago
  Given that dual licensing has been a thing for a long time, what problem does SSPL solve, and how does it do so such that GPL does not?
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    SSPL has more teeth and less workarounds than the regular GPL/AGPL and forces more dual licensing conversations.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > If you only use/develop FOSS stuff as RMS intended, you can use SSPL without an issue. No, because "FOSS stuff as RMS intended" explicitly excludes the SSPL.
- jwitthuhn 3y ago
  The SSPL is notable in that it effectively forbids hosting the software to be used by other people. To comply you must provide 'the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service' A plain reading of this means that for a standard web app you would need to release not just the application code, but also code for the web server you are using, the os you are using, its drivers, device firmware, the os/firmware for your routers, your deployment stack, and probably more I'm missing. You better not trigger a deployment from a Windows computer using Chrome! Even if I'm using open-source stuff for all of that it would need to have licenses compatible with SSPL such that I can relicense and release them all under the SSPL. I believe GPL is incompatible so that counts out most software I would use to host a webapp. To me it seems like a fundamentally unreasonable license because for all practical purposes it is entirely impossible to comply with section 13.
oooyay 3y ago
Yeah, I struggle with this conceptually. Projects like Kubernetes cannot be developed without corporations investing their engineers time. For that, they want a say in direction - maybe more fairly put, they want their problems and objectives on the table whether it benefits the project or not. Just reading the top 10 contributors to Kubernetes: - Google - Microsoft - AWS - Databricks Most all of these companies have at one point or another coopted a project, sucked its life blood dry for their own means, and abandoned it. It's a weird, toxic relationship that we accept as normal because some projects can't do without corporate engineer time and money. FOSS is kind of a different ballgame though. When I think of FOSS I think of my AppStore on PopOS; the apps there are sophisticated and useable, but if I'm being honest they're rarely "the best" at what they do. There's never been a FOSS CAD software that rivals proprietary alternatives, the email clients are lackluster at best, even IRC tends to take a back seat. That isn't to say the apps are bad, they're just not going to be "the best" usually. Ideally we'd have a single license that encourages corporate use, adoption, and contribution but doesn't encourage them to coopt a project by injecting their engineers and interests into the management of said projects. Ideally there'd be a way for corporate interests to make money reselling software while also paying back, in proportion, to the project. That all seems like a very complicated balancing act.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > the email clients are lackluster at best To be fair, "lackluster at best" describes every email client ever made, proprietary or otherwise (though proprietary ones are better at hiding this under a shiny veneer). Meanwhile, Kubernetes is probably a bad example, because nobody but large companies need Kubernetes, in the same way that we do not lament that people cannot build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in their garage.
- sidlls 3y ago
  FOSS offerings are almost always worse than their commercial competitors because of one obvious thing: people (that includes software engineers) need to eat and have shelter, and for 99.9% of us that means working for a living. Companies pay people to work on products that other people buy, ideally at a profit for the company. FOSS creators are rarely compensated meaningfully compared to the effort put in. The natural consequence of this is that most good engineers are not going to put much, if any, time in developing FOSS applications. The natural consequence of that is that these offerings aren't going to be as good.
kazinator 3y ago
The freedoms we promote require users to run locally installed software, which people are no longer able to do for important applications.
- apantel 3y ago
  Yeah this is the elephant in the room. Running a powerful, centralized web service that gets accessed by many users on many different clients with everything synchronized and patched and updated in one place is such a better model than self-hosted for so many software use cases. Edit: simplified.
  - mpol 3y ago
    And then the service stops, for business reasons, and the user is left holding the bag. This is very much the opposite of the spirit of free software. It's a feudal system.
  - zx8080 3y ago
    Sure if not taking privacy ("is my data being sold to competitors and anyone who pays? Will it leak to the web?") and strategic vision ("will this critical dependency be shutdown tomorrow") into consideration. Other than that it's cool, sure.
- ric2b 3y ago
  No it doesn't, that's what the AGPL is for.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the Affero changes to the GPL render it a nonfree license. Free software licenses all have one thing in common: they speak only to redistribution, not to use. To use a free program, you only have to agree to the disclaimer (that if something goes wrong, it is at your own risk). AGPL prohibits you from running a modified version of the program, if its functionality is publicly accessible, unless you release the modifications. That makes it an EULA. No free software license requires you to release your modifications if the program is not redistributed. The problem of siloed saas applications infringing on user freedoms cannot be attacked using copyright, without resorting to non-free licensing, which is an unacceptable. Note that not everyone agrees that the GPL is a free license, in the first place. Software is maximally free if you can do anything with it you want, including incorporating it into proprietary software. Many FOSS developers skip copyleft licenses and use MIT, BSD and such, myself included. I can swallow the idea that GPLed software is free, but AGPL is out of the question.
nparafe 3y ago
> is that 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. This most certainly wouldn't have happened if "open source realism" didn't stood against free software "utopian" idealists. I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it? Lastly, isn't redhat an enthusiastic supporter of open source ? The domain https://opensource.com/ https://opensource.com/ is literally copyrighted and supported by redhat...
- trelane 3y ago
  > I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it? I don't understand your point here. Could you please make it again, more directly?
  - aragilar 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens is the interviewee. He helped create OSI, which pushed Open Source (vs Free Software).
  - nparafe 3y ago
    Open source supporters were celebrating Google's use of the Linux kernel in Android, hoping that this would promote it's usage. Android is now a Frankenstein spyware monster that uses mostly proprietary software.
    - trelane 3y ago
      > Android is now a Frankenstein spyware monster that uses mostly proprietary software. Which android are you referring to? The table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distrib... may help you. I don't think that, say, Lineage or Calyx share the same privacy concerns as Google's android variant, or the myriad vendors' proprietary forks. Of course, if most of Android were GPL instead of Apache, the lockin wouldn't be possible. If you're referring to locked bootloaders and not being able to use the GPL kernel due to that, that was a defect in GPLv2 that was fixed in GPLv3 (that and software patents). TiVo was the one that induced that change, and the term was "tivoization."
em-bee 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 true, but to anyone who paid attention at the time, bruce perens already pointed out this problem only one year after announcing the open source initiative: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html so not only is this problem not new, but also at least bruce perens has been aware of it all this time. but what is happening today probably would have happened without the promotion of open source as well. so i agree, that it is time to act. GPLv4 anyone?
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  >GPLv4 anyone? The AGPL?
  - em-bee 3y ago
    the agpl does not go far enough. that is being addressed in the article.
User23 3y ago
Yep. To my read this is Open Source(tm) getting exactly what they said they wanted.
emodendroket 3y ago
It's not just scrubbed from the messaging: the actual goals are rather different. Stallman and the FSF were somewhere between indifferent to openly hostile to the goals of businesses while the "open source" wing was very much interested in making money and collaborating with others who wanted to make money.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > Stallman and the FSF were somewhere between indifferent to openly hostile to the goals of businesses How do you figure? They very explicitly permit commercial use and even selling of Free Software.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    Because when people ask them questions like “but how can my business operate with the strictures placed on them by your extreme vision of software rights?” his response is “too bad.”

by ptx 3y ago

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

phkahler 3y ago

Agreed. And if BP really wants to change this, he needs to focus on Free Software as a starting point, not Open Source. He complains about RedHat/IBM circumventing the GPL but completely missing the fact that the "more permissive" open source licenses actually condone such behavior. They would even allow IBM to not provide source to their own customers, nevermind prohibiting redistribution. IMHO the biggest threat to Free Software is the proliferation of open source software. And so the biggest threat to all the open source users/lovers is their own lack of a meaningful philosophy on licensing.

dllthomas 3y ago
> the fact that the "more permissive" open source licenses actually condone such behavior The permissive Free Software licenses do the same, being the same licenses.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  I'd guess this is meant to be a contrast between the GPL and licenses like MIT?
  - dllthomas 3y ago
    Yeah, definitely. I just think it's worth noting that both organizations approve of basically the same list of licenses, and that even the FSF occasionally recommends using a permissive license depending on circumstance.
worthless-trash 3y ago
I do not understand bruces concern, maybe someone can make it clear to me. The source IS made available to software. The license clearly says you must make it availble in the same method you get the binaries, which is what is happening here. What "circumvention" is going on ?
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The GPL also guarantees the right to redistribute the software and sources you received. This is the part that IBM/RedHat are essentially circumventing, by canceling your access to new patches and versions of RHEL if you chose to exercise this right. This may be legal, but it certainly goes against the intent and spirit of the GPL, as Stallman himself has said.

api 3y ago

“Open source” is free labor for SaaS companies, while the insistence on liberal free (as in beer) licenses makes it almost impossible to build a software business in any other way by flooding the market. SaaS is the least free model for software. You have no privacy, no control, and in most cases can’t even export your data. Thus open source actually minimizes freedom in practice, at least for everyone other than developers.

kazinator 3y ago
Exactly! FOSS has been the unwitting enabler behind locking people down in giant SaaS silos.
- api 3y ago
  I’ve seen this for years but so far it’s been hard to get others to see it. It requires holistic “systems thinking.” You have to go beyond the letter and the intent of the license or the open source movement and look at the overall effect it has on the incentive structure of the market. It’s extremely common for well intentioned policies and movements to have perverse effects that aren’t anticipated because the effect emerges from the whole system rather than from any single part in isolation. The effect of a thing is pretty much unrelated to its intent, hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The root problem is that humans are awful at understanding how a policy will manifest when embedded in a complex system. I think this is also why every attempt at central planning a whole society ultimately fails.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    I'm not convinced. The moment software could be released half baked, then patched later, the door for subscription pricing was open. Then the browser growing into an application platform moved things onto the server where it was easier to update things. FOSS may have accelerated things slightly, yet the mediocre quality and incompleteness held back its impact for a long time. Server side those deficiencies were less visible and could be addressed more gradually. Ultimately I think SAAS was inevitable as everything shifted online. Now even single-player, closed source games require an Internet connection.

candiddevmike 3y ago

IMO, the SSPL solves this. If you only use/develop FOSS stuff as RMS intended, you can use SSPL without an issue. Don't use or develop FOSS everywhere? Pay for a separate license. It's unfortunate that OSI and friends are OK with the AGPL but not the SSPL, and IMO shows that they think the status quo is OK when clearly it's sustainable for FOSS creators.

trelane 3y ago
Given that dual licensing has been a thing for a long time, what problem does SSPL solve, and how does it do so such that GPL does not?
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  SSPL has more teeth and less workarounds than the regular GPL/AGPL and forces more dual licensing conversations.
josephcsible 3y ago
> If you only use/develop FOSS stuff as RMS intended, you can use SSPL without an issue. No, because "FOSS stuff as RMS intended" explicitly excludes the SSPL.
jwitthuhn 3y ago
The SSPL is notable in that it effectively forbids hosting the software to be used by other people. To comply you must provide 'the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service' A plain reading of this means that for a standard web app you would need to release not just the application code, but also code for the web server you are using, the os you are using, its drivers, device firmware, the os/firmware for your routers, your deployment stack, and probably more I'm missing. You better not trigger a deployment from a Windows computer using Chrome! Even if I'm using open-source stuff for all of that it would need to have licenses compatible with SSPL such that I can relicense and release them all under the SSPL. I believe GPL is incompatible so that counts out most software I would use to host a webapp. To me it seems like a fundamentally unreasonable license because for all practical purposes it is entirely impossible to comply with section 13.

oooyay 3y ago

Yeah, I struggle with this conceptually. Projects like Kubernetes cannot be developed without corporations investing their engineers time. For that, they want a say in direction - maybe more fairly put, they want their problems and objectives on the table whether it benefits the project or not. Just reading the top 10 contributors to Kubernetes: - Google - Microsoft - AWS - Databricks Most all of these companies have at one point or another coopted a project, sucked its life blood dry for their own means, and abandoned it. It's a weird, toxic relationship that we accept as normal because some projects can't do without corporate engineer time and money. FOSS is kind of a different ballgame though. When I think of FOSS I think of my AppStore on PopOS; the apps there are sophisticated and useable, but if I'm being honest they're rarely "the best" at what they do. There's never been a FOSS CAD software that rivals proprietary alternatives, the email clients are lackluster at best, even IRC tends to take a back seat. That isn't to say the apps are bad, they're just not going to be "the best" usually. Ideally we'd have a single license that encourages corporate use, adoption, and contribution but doesn't encourage them to coopt a project by injecting their engineers and interests into the management of said projects. Ideally there'd be a way for corporate interests to make money reselling software while also paying back, in proportion, to the project. That all seems like a very complicated balancing act.

kibwen 3y ago
> the email clients are lackluster at best To be fair, "lackluster at best" describes every email client ever made, proprietary or otherwise (though proprietary ones are better at hiding this under a shiny veneer). Meanwhile, Kubernetes is probably a bad example, because nobody but large companies need Kubernetes, in the same way that we do not lament that people cannot build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in their garage.
sidlls 3y ago
FOSS offerings are almost always worse than their commercial competitors because of one obvious thing: people (that includes software engineers) need to eat and have shelter, and for 99.9% of us that means working for a living. Companies pay people to work on products that other people buy, ideally at a profit for the company. FOSS creators are rarely compensated meaningfully compared to the effort put in. The natural consequence of this is that most good engineers are not going to put much, if any, time in developing FOSS applications. The natural consequence of that is that these offerings aren't going to be as good.

kazinator 3y ago

The freedoms we promote require users to run locally installed software, which people are no longer able to do for important applications.

apantel 3y ago
Yeah this is the elephant in the room. Running a powerful, centralized web service that gets accessed by many users on many different clients with everything synchronized and patched and updated in one place is such a better model than self-hosted for so many software use cases. Edit: simplified.
- mpol 3y ago
  And then the service stops, for business reasons, and the user is left holding the bag. This is very much the opposite of the spirit of free software. It's a feudal system.
- zx8080 3y ago
  Sure if not taking privacy ("is my data being sold to competitors and anyone who pays? Will it leak to the web?") and strategic vision ("will this critical dependency be shutdown tomorrow") into consideration. Other than that it's cool, sure.
ric2b 3y ago
No it doesn't, that's what the AGPL is for.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the Affero changes to the GPL render it a nonfree license. Free software licenses all have one thing in common: they speak only to redistribution, not to use. To use a free program, you only have to agree to the disclaimer (that if something goes wrong, it is at your own risk). AGPL prohibits you from running a modified version of the program, if its functionality is publicly accessible, unless you release the modifications. That makes it an EULA. No free software license requires you to release your modifications if the program is not redistributed. The problem of siloed saas applications infringing on user freedoms cannot be attacked using copyright, without resorting to non-free licensing, which is an unacceptable. Note that not everyone agrees that the GPL is a free license, in the first place. Software is maximally free if you can do anything with it you want, including incorporating it into proprietary software. Many FOSS developers skip copyleft licenses and use MIT, BSD and such, myself included. I can swallow the idea that GPLed software is free, but AGPL is out of the question.

nparafe 3y ago

> is that 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. This most certainly wouldn't have happened if "open source realism" didn't stood against free software "utopian" idealists. I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it? Lastly, isn't redhat an enthusiastic supporter of open source ? The domain https://opensource.com/ https://opensource.com/ is literally copyrighted and supported by redhat...

trelane 3y ago
> I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it? I don't understand your point here. Could you please make it again, more directly?
- aragilar 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens is the interviewee. He helped create OSI, which pushed Open Source (vs Free Software).
- nparafe 3y ago
  Open source supporters were celebrating Google's use of the Linux kernel in Android, hoping that this would promote it's usage. Android is now a Frankenstein spyware monster that uses mostly proprietary software.
  - trelane 3y ago
    > Android is now a Frankenstein spyware monster that uses mostly proprietary software. Which android are you referring to? The table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distrib... may help you. I don't think that, say, Lineage or Calyx share the same privacy concerns as Google's android variant, or the myriad vendors' proprietary forks. Of course, if most of Android were GPL instead of Apache, the lockin wouldn't be possible. If you're referring to locked bootloaders and not being able to use the GPL kernel due to that, that was a defect in GPLv2 that was fixed in GPLv3 (that and software patents). TiVo was the one that induced that change, and the term was "tivoization."

em-bee 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 true, but to anyone who paid attention at the time, bruce perens already pointed out this problem only one year after announcing the open source initiative: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html so not only is this problem not new, but also at least bruce perens has been aware of it all this time. but what is happening today probably would have happened without the promotion of open source as well. so i agree, that it is time to act. GPLv4 anyone?

HideousKojima 3y ago
>GPLv4 anyone? The AGPL?
- em-bee 3y ago
  the agpl does not go far enough. that is being addressed in the article.

User23 3y ago

Yep. To my read this is Open Source(tm) getting exactly what they said they wanted.

emodendroket 3y ago

It's not just scrubbed from the messaging: the actual goals are rather different. Stallman and the FSF were somewhere between indifferent to openly hostile to the goals of businesses while the "open source" wing was very much interested in making money and collaborating with others who wanted to make money.

josephcsible 3y ago
> Stallman and the FSF were somewhere between indifferent to openly hostile to the goals of businesses How do you figure? They very explicitly permit commercial use and even selling of Free Software.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Because when people ask them questions like “but how can my business operate with the strictures placed on them by your extreme vision of software rights?” his response is “too bad.”