Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

codeberg.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#21

Post by lolinder »

bsnnkv wrote: post #20
lolinder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you need to distinguish individuals from corporations in order to advance human freedom. You can make the licenses such that any corporation that uses them to provide services to users must provide the users with required freedoms. If businesses can make money while respecting those terms, all the better! The same goes for the internal use loophole: the corporation should be required to provide its inte…

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

And the GPLs have done an extremely good job of advancing user freedom, with a few very small asterisks.

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#22

Post by tedivm »

The Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) is a slap in the face to anyone who has been part of the open source community. Allowing companies to redefine "Open" to allow closed components is a complete betrayal of everything the OSI should stand for, and it was done purely so large companies can pretend their closed models are open.

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#23

Post by bsnnkv »

lolinder wrote: post #21
bsnnkv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

And the GPLs have done an extremely good job of advancing user freedom, with a few very small asterisks.

> sucked up in corporate interests

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#24

Post by fermigier »

remon wrote: post #2

Honest question; what does OSI actually do? I am involved with a number of OS projects and not once has OSI come up in any context, be it compliance, governance, education and so on.

Start with https://opensource.org/about

In more concrete terms: they're the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD), which is a rather explicit, but still subject to interpretation, list of criteria to decide if a particular software license is, or is not, "really Open Source". This is very important in the context of "Open Source washing" that is still a thing, and was even more important a decade or two ago, when there was a Cambrian explosion of licenses which claimed to be Open Source.

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#25

Post by tokai »

bsnnkv wrote: post #9
lolinder wrote: post #8

As a reminder, the OSI was formed as a corporate-friendly foil to Stallman's FSF. This is how the OSI once described its own history on its website: > The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about…

> The GPL and AGPL are some of the only licenses not to get totally sucked up in corporate interests Neither of these licenses address the gigantic "internal use" loophole FSF is also just as dogmatic as OSI in it's refusal to distinguish corporations from individuals

It would have made for a better discussion if you had stated openly that you are into some fringe self-made anti-org software license. That would have made it clear what you actually want to discuss.

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#26

Post by pabs3 »

bsnnkv wrote: post #9
lolinder wrote: post #8

As a reminder, the OSI was formed as a corporate-friendly foil to Stallman's FSF. This is how the OSI once described its own history on its website: > The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about…

> The GPL and AGPL are some of the only licenses not to get totally sucked up in corporate interests Neither of these licenses address the gigantic "internal use" loophole FSF is also just as dogmatic as OSI in it's refusal to distinguish corporations from individuals

Is there a license that does address that loophole?

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#27

Post by olalonde »

tedivm wrote: post #22

The Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) is a slap in the face to anyone who has been part of the open source community. Allowing companies to redefine "Open" to allow closed components is a complete betrayal of everything the OSI should stand for, and it was done purely so large companies can pretend their closed models are open.

Where are you seeing that? I just read the definition and it doesn't seem to a allow closed components:

> An Open Source AI is an AI system made available under terms and in a way that grant the freedoms to:

> Use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission.

> Study how the system works and inspect its components.

> Modify the system for any purpose, including to change its output.

> Share the system for others to use with or without modifications, for any purpose.

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#28

Post by redwood »

tedivm wrote: post #22

The Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) is a slap in the face to anyone who has been part of the open source community. Allowing companies to redefine "Open" to allow closed components is a complete betrayal of everything the OSI should stand for, and it was done purely so large companies can pretend their closed models are open.

To be explicit I believe your concern is the fact that they are not requiring that the training data and training methodology they used to generate the open source model be made accessible so that anyone can essentially build the model themselves from raw ingredients right? In other words imagining for a moment that folks have access to the kind of compute necessary to do that. Right?

Nevertheless giving people a building block that they can do what they want with certainly seems like free as in freedom to me. So I personally sympathize with the OSI approach but in general I'm not a big on the zealotry around the open source community.

It's almost like we have a third category here: free as in freedom but you can't necessarily rebuild it yourself.

In practice I would argue that intellectual talent has always been a hidden part of this anyway and therefore we're being intellectually dishonest to imply that this hasn't always been a de facto reality even for traditional software.

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#29

Post by thomascountz »

ajb wrote: post #3
remon wrote: post #2

Honest question; what does OSI actually do? I am involved with a number of OS projects and not once has OSI come up in any context, be it compliance, governance, education and so on.

They own the trademark of "Open Source" and use it to exercise a right to define which licences are truly open source. Now, I guess they are becoming involved in the question of what it means for an AI model to be open source, hence the politicking Previously, if your project used one of the main OS licences you were good as far as they were concerned. They mainly existed to avoid lawyers coming up with licenses that…

They own the trademark "Open Souce Initiative," which they say you can use with no advanced written permission if you follow all specific guidelines, including:

> the use of the term “Open Source” is used solely in reference to software distributed under OSI Approved Licenses. [1]

So you can refer to any software as "Open Source," regardless of their definition. But, if you call a piece of software "Open Source" alongside the use of the Open Source Initiative's trademark, then you must also use their definition of "Open Source," unless you otherwise have written permission.

[1]: https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines

Re: Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

#30

Post by johannes1234321 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #19
remon wrote: post #2

Honest question; what does OSI actually do? I am involved with a number of OS projects and not once has OSI come up in any context, be it compliance, governance, education and so on.

They review licenses, and act as a sort of PR team for the Free Software movement. The whole point is to make Free Software not seem too scary to businesses.

In that context it is important to differentiate Free from Open Source software.

The OSI is specifically built with a different vision from the FSF.

Free software, shall always be free, with almsource and ideally all derived works.

Open Source wants the code to be spread and for that allows inclusion with commercial software. (i.e. Microsoft was able to take open source TCP/IP stacks from BSD (BSD License) and integrate with Windows 95. That wouldn't have worked with a GPL Free Software implementation. (Even LGPL)

The supporting argument there is: By allowing that Microsoft's implementation was fully compatible to the rest of the world instead of having "bugs" (purposely?) in their own implementation, which would limit interoperability.

The free software argument is that they now took the code and closed it, not giving users a freedom to review (verify) and fix themselves. Which allowed Windows to play in TCP world instead of being an outsider.

Post reply on HN