Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address.

“First of all, our licenses aren’t working anymore,” he said. “We’ve had enough time that businesses have found all of the loopholes and thus we need to do something new. The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That’s RHEL.”

Another straw burdening the Open Source camel, Perens writes, “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. The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.”

Post-Open, as he describes it, is a bit more involved than Open Source. It would 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.

Whether it can or not, Perens argues that the GPL isn’t enough. “The GPL is designed not as a contract but as a license. What Richard Stallman was thinking was he didn’t want to take away anyone’s rights. He only wanted to grant rights. So it’s not a contract. It’s a license. Well, we can’t do that anymore. We need enforceable contract terms.”

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    Reverse-engineering. Binary patches. Basically a free-for-all for anyone who owns a legal copy of a thing.

    Please be advised I won’t give two shits about any hair-splitting over the word “owns.”

          • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Sorry, it just sounds like it was leading to some “ah-HA!” reversal, being so brief and general in response to normative statements about a complex topic.

            Removing DRM is generally somewhere between outright illegal and getting attacked by flesh-eating lawyers.

            Blizzard killed an independent Warcraft / Starcraft server called BNetD.

            Nintendo’s whole attitude toward emulation is infuriating nonsense pushing for digital art to slowly rot.