Preserve software freedom for individuals and small business, the folks we really should be helping, rather than the richest corporations in the world. Provide individuals and small business the right to use, redistribute, and modify, and to get paid for their modifications!; publish all source code.
Require payment from deep-pockets entities (over USD$5 Million revenue in a year), companies that include the software in a paid-for product, and companies that wish to keep modifications private.
This is class-collaborationism, and will not find a home among the free software community. “Open Source” was always about throwing out the ethics of the free software movement in favor of trying to make money, but it was at least compatible with with free software in the technical and legal sense. This isn’t, and as a result despite all the overtures towards “individuals” the only groups this project will ever help are
Those trying to make money off of others’ work without paying them for that work
Big businesses trying to freewash in their marketing
In other words, companies publishing software under this license aren’t fundamentally different from companies going source-available like they’ve been doing for decades. Individuals not trying to monetize the distribution of their software are still better off going for AGPLv3, because you get the ability to screw over big businesses without preventing the large free software community from using your work. Companies publishing under this post-open license, meanwhile, are screwing over big businesses and the free software community, which might be the point of this exercise.
Medium-sized to large businesses who want to publish their source code as an olive branch to developers while still preventing their competitors from re-using their work should also be publishing their code under AGPLv3. Either you’re in the business of making money while releasing the output of the labor you’re paying for to the community or you aren’t; half-assing it in either direction (which “open source” was also a victim of doing, for commercialized entities anyway) really puts you in the”aren’t” camp but in a way that’ll eventually piss off even more people than if you just went fully proprietary.
It sounds like you’re reading this in a somewhat uncharitable way.
[this will help] Those trying to make money off of others’ work without paying them for that work
One of the stated goals is:
Pay developers fairly for their work. Make it possible for an individual developer to stay at home and code all day, and make their living that way.
Emphasis mine. To me this sounds like an honest attempt at fixing the freeloading problem where big businesses strip-mine the free and open source community. Unfortunately, you’re also right that these communities are unlikely to be persuaded (especially the die hard free software folks), so the problem will persist, and big businesses will simply avoid post-open software (just like they avoid (A)GPL) because there’s plenty of actual free and open source software to take from.
half-assing it in either direction (which “open source” was also a victim of doing, for commercialized entities anyway) really puts you in the”aren’t” camp but in a way that’ll eventually piss off even more people than if you just went fully proprietary.
That’s certainly true. We’ve seen that with all the “open core” and business source license stuff.
It’s sad really, because it would deny all users all of the benefits of having source available, even in commercial products. I think there’s definitely space for a middle ground where you could have a thriving ecosystem of homegrown patches, tweaks and third-party contractors (and of course auditability, which means a company has to play fair) but without “open-washing” or other such practices where the software ends locked up and benefiting only some faceless megacorp without any of their improvements making it back into the community.
Bruce Perens I will see you in Avici hell and I’ll wave at you from King Yama’s throne. This is the same scam he tried to pull with the original Open Source - create a problem, create a solution, create a licensing cartel that’s the only authorised distributor of the solution. When he and ESR tried it with so-called Open Source, they harmed Free Software intentionally to try and create a competitor that got paid to certify licenses as Open Source or not, but they couldn’t get the trademark and the scam just created the OSS licensing hellscape he see today. “Post-Open” is more trademark-able, so I’m sure the same scam is in the works. I can’t wait to see the havoc this’ll wreak on the open society.
I first heard of Bruce Perens about 20 years ago when my publisher was going to put his name on a line of books. He seemed like someone who’d done some useful things for Debian years ago but since then had mostly been trying to cash in on his reputation, rather than build anything of value. It’s now 20 years later and I can’t think of a single thing he’s done since other than try to stand near people building interesting things so that people associate him with them.
There are folks like Linus, RMS, and so on who I may disagree with, but who have solid credentials as people who have built lasting things that a lot of people use and value. And then there are folks like ESR and Bruce Perens who were definitely somewhere nearby at the time. The latter tend to give more talks because they don’t have anything better to do.
Because the license attempts to handle very many problems that have arisen with Open Source licensing, it’s big. It’s approaching the size of AGPL3
I’m a developer/scientist not a lawyer. I don’t want to ask a lawyer each time I use some software or contribute to a project. Not for my work and specially not when I contribute as a hobbyist.
This is one of the reasons I tend to avoid contributing to projects under GPL variants. I can do whatever I want with my code but I have to talk to a lawyer to understand what I can do with my code merged with the other project. With permissively licensed projects, I can do whatever I want with my code, so can anyone else, and I can do whatever I want with other contributors’ code (except claim I wrote it or sue them if it’s buggy).
Compliance simplicity: once a year, paid users account for their software use and revenue, and pay a small portion (we’re considering 1%) of it for all Post-Open software, not just one program. Then compliance is over until next year.
So, 1% of all revenue? Depending on type of business this can be too big. For example, consider cars. Software is very small part of overall price of a car. Paying 1% of price of every sold car is stupid
Yeah I really do that the future spectrum of source-available software licensing looks more like the work of ~kemitchell and others (concise, readable terms drafted by expert lawyers) than whatever the heck this is (pedantic legalese drafted by non-lawyers)
Is this a serious non-Open Source effort or an elaborate way of criticizing non-Open Source licensing? Is the reference to the Julian calendar an actual mistake or a wink to the reader?
It’s probably a mistake. I assume he meant Gregorian.
But I’m sure the intended purpose is to specify the time period for the billions of people using different calendar systems, like say, half of Asia, where the Chinese New Year starts on the first new moon between Jan 21 and Feb 20.
Apportion payment to developers based on software use and the size of their contribution.
How is that size to be measured? LOC? Number of commits? Number of issues fixed (or reported?) words of documentation written? Some other metric left up to the whim of the project maintainer?
I watched one of his interviews & they are working on a system but it looks like it could be per-project flexibility to make sure designers, project management, documentation writers, can all get something fair.
Interesting, but I’m surprised so little is written about the licensing entity. I’d like to see it formed as a collective/coop of some sort, to ensure it can’t make decisions without the FOSS devs involved, and will disburse funds fairly.
Glad to see it mentions attribution-based economics (tho not under that name), and acknowledges how difficult that may be. Plus, it acknowledges how much of current FOSS value is a wealth transfer from devs to unicorns.
I’m not sure if Perens is the right person for this, but I’m intrigued, anyway.
My problem with a lot of the co-op-forward licenses like CSL is they define a bit too much how the structure of the organization should be which doesn’t really allow for other models. CSL (& PPL) specifies must worker-owned cooperative (section 4.e.). You have like the ACSL which (section 4) prohibits any entity in “law enforcement or military, or working for or under either” which goes out of scope not considering how many associations down the tree of clients this would go & doesn’t consider how even an anarchocommunist society would still need law enforcement & military. Commons Clause is in a direction that prevents others reselling but does that lead more in the direction of monopoly to the seller than the Commons? I don’t know, but it seems really hard to put any of these into practice even if some folks are trying to encode something that effectively means “disburse funds fairly”. I have seen a lot of co-ops still just opt for *GPL due to licenses being tested, common, & worded both less ambiguously + less strictly.
Post-Open is clearly worded as a draft for now so it will be interesting to see how it pans out once an actual lawyer weighs in & if it will better need the needs of alternative business structures.
These other licenses may be mistaken or unworkable given how they define their org, but I think being clear about the nature of the licensing entity is a prerequisite for success. I get that Post-Open is a draft, what I’m saying is that it’s not ready without a concrete implementation in mind. Post-Open may or may not fail, but not defining the nature of the licensing entity guarantees it WILL fail imo.
Side note about the ACSL:
even an anarchocommunist society would still need law enforcement
This runs deeply counter to most anarchist writers I’ve read, who tend to favor abolition of prison and police, restorative justice, and the elimination of economic bases for crime. If you believe they’re wrong, that’s fine, but I don’t think there’s any major anarchists out there saying they’ll still need police.
Also, the AC in ACSL stands for “anti-capitalist”, not anarcho-communist”, btw.
This is why I am not a lawyer since to me you still have rules (e.g. laws) regardless of the society & those rules have to be enforced somehow which you could consider “law enforcement” even if it isn’t funded, acts, or protects the class that law enforcment does under non-anarchic societies. It would be better if the license better defined these terms like other licences do, but the longer the license, the more folks say it is too wordy. Regardless you will likely need to cooperate in some fashion with a nearby law enforcement option as a part of your local system just on practical terms of ‘we live in a society’. Is hiring a militia working with a military? Even still, not all military, etc. jobs are necessarily about something that isn’t publicly useful like taking a contract to build the next Internet or GPS that has application for everyone. It seems like a myopic take to cut out all association whole cloth.
Well… if you willfully cripple someone in your anarchist hometown, and the whole town shuns you, are the town residents law enforcement? You can say yes, but that really broadens the definition of law enforcement, past the point where I would consider it a useful one, personally.
(Also, I said nothing about militias, only LE. Quite obviously, there were anarchist militias taking up arms against Franco and the fascists in the Spanish civil war.)
If we take a step back, remember that these licenses are built for our current societies. Under a different society, with different attitudes to economics, law, art, copyright, etc. it’s not only unclear if current licenses would be desirable, but it’s also unclear if they’d even be applicable. I don’t really see the theoretical existence of a future anarchist/communist/etc society as an obstacle to using these licenses currently.
Whether these licenses are useful or enforceable under our current society is another matter. One of the few things I agree with RMS on is that bad actors will ignore the license prohibitions, though unlike him, I’m not convinced the answer is to just accept it.
For a quick overview: https://postopen.org/
This seems to be the headline:
This is class-collaborationism, and will not find a home among the free software community. “Open Source” was always about throwing out the ethics of the free software movement in favor of trying to make money, but it was at least compatible with with free software in the technical and legal sense. This isn’t, and as a result despite all the overtures towards “individuals” the only groups this project will ever help are
In other words, companies publishing software under this license aren’t fundamentally different from companies going source-available like they’ve been doing for decades. Individuals not trying to monetize the distribution of their software are still better off going for AGPLv3, because you get the ability to screw over big businesses without preventing the large free software community from using your work. Companies publishing under this post-open license, meanwhile, are screwing over big businesses and the free software community, which might be the point of this exercise.
Medium-sized to large businesses who want to publish their source code as an olive branch to developers while still preventing their competitors from re-using their work should also be publishing their code under AGPLv3. Either you’re in the business of making money while releasing the output of the labor you’re paying for to the community or you aren’t; half-assing it in either direction (which “open source” was also a victim of doing, for commercialized entities anyway) really puts you in the”aren’t” camp but in a way that’ll eventually piss off even more people than if you just went fully proprietary.
It sounds like you’re reading this in a somewhat uncharitable way.
One of the stated goals is:
Emphasis mine. To me this sounds like an honest attempt at fixing the freeloading problem where big businesses strip-mine the free and open source community. Unfortunately, you’re also right that these communities are unlikely to be persuaded (especially the die hard free software folks), so the problem will persist, and big businesses will simply avoid post-open software (just like they avoid (A)GPL) because there’s plenty of actual free and open source software to take from.
That’s certainly true. We’ve seen that with all the “open core” and business source license stuff.
It’s sad really, because it would deny all users all of the benefits of having source available, even in commercial products. I think there’s definitely space for a middle ground where you could have a thriving ecosystem of homegrown patches, tweaks and third-party contractors (and of course auditability, which means a company has to play fair) but without “open-washing” or other such practices where the software ends locked up and benefiting only some faceless megacorp without any of their improvements making it back into the community.
Bruce Perens I will see you in Avici hell and I’ll wave at you from King Yama’s throne. This is the same scam he tried to pull with the original Open Source - create a problem, create a solution, create a licensing cartel that’s the only authorised distributor of the solution. When he and ESR tried it with so-called Open Source, they harmed Free Software intentionally to try and create a competitor that got paid to certify licenses as Open Source or not, but they couldn’t get the trademark and the scam just created the OSS licensing hellscape he see today. “Post-Open” is more trademark-able, so I’m sure the same scam is in the works. I can’t wait to see the havoc this’ll wreak on the open society.
I first heard of Bruce Perens about 20 years ago when my publisher was going to put his name on a line of books. He seemed like someone who’d done some useful things for Debian years ago but since then had mostly been trying to cash in on his reputation, rather than build anything of value. It’s now 20 years later and I can’t think of a single thing he’s done since other than try to stand near people building interesting things so that people associate him with them.
There are folks like Linus, RMS, and so on who I may disagree with, but who have solid credentials as people who have built lasting things that a lot of people use and value. And then there are folks like ESR and Bruce Perens who were definitely somewhere nearby at the time. The latter tend to give more talks because they don’t have anything better to do.
Yeah, famous “I’m with those guys” picture. :)
https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/wp-content/images/ep013.jpg
I agree with most of this, but I strongly disagree that he created our current problems with FOSS. Trying to exploit it, maybe, created, no.
I’m a developer/scientist not a lawyer. I don’t want to ask a lawyer each time I use some software or contribute to a project. Not for my work and specially not when I contribute as a hobbyist.
This is one of the reasons I tend to avoid contributing to projects under GPL variants. I can do whatever I want with my code but I have to talk to a lawyer to understand what I can do with my code merged with the other project. With permissively licensed projects, I can do whatever I want with my code, so can anyone else, and I can do whatever I want with other contributors’ code (except claim I wrote it or sue them if it’s buggy).
https://postopen.org/ says:
So, 1% of all revenue? Depending on type of business this can be too big. For example, consider cars. Software is very small part of overall price of a car. Paying 1% of price of every sold car is stupid
Agreeing with the general sentiment, but word on the street is that the software cost of cars is surging massively.
https://polyformproject.org - from what I see similar licenses, but much shorter (and written by lawyers according to their webpage).
Yeah I really do that the future spectrum of source-available software licensing looks more like the work of ~kemitchell and others (concise, readable terms drafted by expert lawyers) than whatever the heck this is (pedantic legalese drafted by non-lawyers)
Is this a serious non-Open Source effort or an elaborate way of criticizing non-Open Source licensing? Is the reference to the Julian calendar an actual mistake or a wink to the reader?
Bruce is author of open source definition. So, no, this is not joke. Please, write to him to provided email and tell about mistake
It’s probably a mistake. I assume he meant Gregorian.
But I’m sure the intended purpose is to specify the time period for the billions of people using different calendar systems, like say, half of Asia, where the Chinese New Year starts on the first new moon between Jan 21 and Feb 20.
This has been under way for some time, Bruce did a talk at DebConf 2020 about the ideas of this license: https://debconf20.debconf.org/talks/10-what-comes-after-open-source/
How is that size to be measured? LOC? Number of commits? Number of issues fixed (or reported?) words of documentation written? Some other metric left up to the whim of the project maintainer?
The Attribution-Based Economics people have taken a stab at some initial guidelines: https://drym.org/attribution-based-economics-for-open-source/
I watched one of his interviews & they are working on a system but it looks like it could be per-project flexibility to make sure designers, project management, documentation writers, can all get something fair.
Interesting, but I’m surprised so little is written about the licensing entity. I’d like to see it formed as a collective/coop of some sort, to ensure it can’t make decisions without the FOSS devs involved, and will disburse funds fairly.
Glad to see it mentions attribution-based economics (tho not under that name), and acknowledges how difficult that may be. Plus, it acknowledges how much of current FOSS value is a wealth transfer from devs to unicorns.
I’m not sure if Perens is the right person for this, but I’m intrigued, anyway.
My problem with a lot of the co-op-forward licenses like CSL is they define a bit too much how the structure of the organization should be which doesn’t really allow for other models. CSL (& PPL) specifies must worker-owned cooperative (section 4.e.). You have like the ACSL which (section 4) prohibits any entity in “law enforcement or military, or working for or under either” which goes out of scope not considering how many associations down the tree of clients this would go & doesn’t consider how even an anarchocommunist society would still need law enforcement & military. Commons Clause is in a direction that prevents others reselling but does that lead more in the direction of monopoly to the seller than the Commons? I don’t know, but it seems really hard to put any of these into practice even if some folks are trying to encode something that effectively means “disburse funds fairly”. I have seen a lot of co-ops still just opt for *GPL due to licenses being tested, common, & worded both less ambiguously + less strictly.
Post-Open is clearly worded as a draft for now so it will be interesting to see how it pans out once an actual lawyer weighs in & if it will better need the needs of alternative business structures.
These other licenses may be mistaken or unworkable given how they define their org, but I think being clear about the nature of the licensing entity is a prerequisite for success. I get that Post-Open is a draft, what I’m saying is that it’s not ready without a concrete implementation in mind. Post-Open may or may not fail, but not defining the nature of the licensing entity guarantees it WILL fail imo.
Side note about the ACSL:
This runs deeply counter to most anarchist writers I’ve read, who tend to favor abolition of prison and police, restorative justice, and the elimination of economic bases for crime. If you believe they’re wrong, that’s fine, but I don’t think there’s any major anarchists out there saying they’ll still need police.
Also, the AC in ACSL stands for “anti-capitalist”, not anarcho-communist”, btw.
I knew what both ACs stoods for independently.
This is why I am not a lawyer since to me you still have rules (e.g. laws) regardless of the society & those rules have to be enforced somehow which you could consider “law enforcement” even if it isn’t funded, acts, or protects the class that law enforcment does under non-anarchic societies. It would be better if the license better defined these terms like other licences do, but the longer the license, the more folks say it is too wordy. Regardless you will likely need to cooperate in some fashion with a nearby law enforcement option as a part of your local system just on practical terms of ‘we live in a society’. Is hiring a militia working with a military? Even still, not all military, etc. jobs are necessarily about something that isn’t publicly useful like taking a contract to build the next Internet or GPS that has application for everyone. It seems like a myopic take to cut out all association whole cloth.
Well… if you willfully cripple someone in your anarchist hometown, and the whole town shuns you, are the town residents law enforcement? You can say yes, but that really broadens the definition of law enforcement, past the point where I would consider it a useful one, personally.
(Also, I said nothing about militias, only LE. Quite obviously, there were anarchist militias taking up arms against Franco and the fascists in the Spanish civil war.)
If we take a step back, remember that these licenses are built for our current societies. Under a different society, with different attitudes to economics, law, art, copyright, etc. it’s not only unclear if current licenses would be desirable, but it’s also unclear if they’d even be applicable. I don’t really see the theoretical existence of a future anarchist/communist/etc society as an obstacle to using these licenses currently.
Whether these licenses are useful or enforceable under our current society is another matter. One of the few things I agree with RMS on is that bad actors will ignore the license prohibitions, though unlike him, I’m not convinced the answer is to just accept it.
This sounds like the collecting society approach I’ve previously advocated for. I’m glad someone is trying this.