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France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

social.numerique.gouv.fr

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Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#201

Post by vinceguidry »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #199
vinceguidry wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. We should recognize this sentiment as actively fascist. Safety from who? Law enforcement targeting who?

There is nothing fascist there. That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of…

You're only outing yourself more and more.

> If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.

Oh please. The French are doing far better than we (the US) are. Precisely because their electorate has made their aristocracy rightly fearful of them. Chopping off their heads tends to do that.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#202

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

cyberax wrote: post #200
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago. I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office. The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environme…

Now look at Outlook. Or Skype. And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.

> And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.

No, it did not.

I worked through that. Someone had to be in charge of the master version of all documents and ensure modifications were properly merged and not done simultaneously. Getting to the final version of anything was deeply annoying.

Now everyone can just work on the shared document. You see modifications as they happen. Office intelligently locks what needs to be locked. It just works. I can't tell you how much time this feature alone saves me.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#203

Post by sunshine-o »

immibis wrote: post #198
sunshine-o wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I believe the Eclipse Foundation and others lobbied for that. But here is the problem: if you now have a small business selling service around free software you are now facing the full wrath of the regulation and legal risk. In the end only IBM, RedHat, Microsoft and big companies have the strength and the resources to monetize open source it but smaller actors don't. And it is becoming very difficult and risky…

Is there a specific risk you're worried about, or just the general risk of doing something wrong that's inherent to all business and is typically mitigated by insurance and by using a limited liability company?

So insurance did not offer much before the CRA. They will probably develop this market but it is gonna cost a lot probably and will be complex and imperfect.

Of course an LLC ultimately protect you but you have just multiplied by 10 or 100 the risk of blowing up your livelihood and the one of your employees.

Those regulations are just a nightmare, with "no-fault" liability, a simplified the burden of proof for the claimant, and are just very difficult to decrypt or applied to real world situations in an evolving landscape.

So unless you are big and have legal resources to work on it people are probably not gonna bother or give up.

Anyway your costs and risks have exploded and you are still competing with let's say Microsoft Azure.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#204

Post by fsflover »

ryanmentor wrote: post #35
fdefitte wrote: post #25

This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies

Free and Open Technology for a Free and Open Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software%2C_Free_Society

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#205

Post by BlueTemplar »

sunshine-o wrote: post #131
robert_foss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree with any part of this take, other than postmarketOS having a bit more money would be nice.

Which part? While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades: - Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity) - Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0]) - the Cloud - IoT The FSF was actually pretty good at…

Yeah, so hopefully the EU (including France) will freak out about "fake open source" (building for iOS or Android, using Github...) too.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#206

Post by BlueTemplar »

andy99 wrote: post #3

Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.

Related :

https://elevenfreedoms.org/

> The traditional Four Freedoms of free software are no longer enough. Software and the world it exists in have changed in the decades since the free software movement began. Free software faces new threats, and free AI software is especially in danger.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#207

Post by immibis »

sunshine-o wrote: post #203
immibis wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific risk you're worried about, or just the general risk of doing something wrong that's inherent to all business and is typically mitigated by insurance and by using a limited liability company?

So insurance did not offer much before the CRA. They will probably develop this market but it is gonna cost a lot probably and will be complex and imperfect. Of course an LLC ultimately protect you but you have just multiplied by 10 or 100 the risk of blowing up your livelihood and the one of your employees. Those regulations are just a nightmare, with "no-fault" liability, a simplified the burden of proof for the cl…

Have you talked to an insurer? Business insurance requires a customized quote.

You didn't really answer the question. Do you have a specific risk in mind, or are you only worried about the risk of a random fuckup which all businesses face?

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#208

Post by GuB-42 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #139
idoubtit wrote: post #34

This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception. Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-mi…

Typical French reaction to anything positive. Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves. It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.

It is just how we express ourselves. We French are known internationally for complaining a lot, we know it and we even joke about it.

It doesn't mean that nothing gets done (and when it doesn't, it is not usually the reason). We are just not overly enthusiastic about it like Americans tend to be.

A way to see things is that in America, a 5/5 comment is great, 4/5 is acceptable, and anything less is crap. In France, 1/5 is crap, 2/5 is acceptable, and anything more is great. You just have to adjust your scale.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#209

Post by immibis »

jraph wrote: post #189
immibis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't hold. FSF declined to make a statement either way - citing the fact that very little software uses this license and it all has xGPL alternatives, so there's no urgent need to make an official decision. Debian didn't call it free or unfree, but rather decided not to include SSPL software in their distribution, which is an orthogonal issue, due to it having a higher risk of being incompatible with all the…

I found the points in your last comment to be true. I still think you'd need to back the fact OSI rejected SSPL for commercial concerns of its members a bit more. Even if nobody else has formally rejected SSPL on convincing grounds, major parts of the free software ecosystem distrusts it and OSI is not that special in this. I found nobody making the case that SSPL is a free software license. Nobody likes it except mo…

Distrust is different from non-free. SSPL happens to be a free software license - that is a fact - which many people dislike - that is also a fact. The latter fact doesn't invalidate the former fact.

The incompatibility between *GPL and SSPL is a very good reason to dislike SSPL. I don't like it either, but I still think it's open source. Perhaps SSPL version 2 could be written to require that the source code for other parts of the service could be released under some particular set of licenses, which would make it much more compatible.

> OSI is not that special in this.

OSI is special because it's taken as an authority on what the term "open source" means, and it's special because it has actually written an official press release full of actual bullshit in order to justify its objectively wrong statement, while still claiming to be an authority and still being seen as one.

> I still think you'd need to back ... a bit more.

No competent capitalist entity will ever say outright "we lie for profit." It always has to be inferred from their actions. Look at what happened to Ratner's jewellery chain. If you outright say what everyone already knows, you can still get punished for breaking the suspension of disbelief. Same thing when Musk did the salute.

We can see that a capitalist entity did something which looks stupid on the face of it, but obviously advances its business interests. We conclude that either the board of directors were infected by brainworms, or they are advancing their business interests. The latter is much more likely. Burning social capital to gain financial capital is a tried and tested strategy.

https://opensource.org/sponsors

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#210

Post by jraph »

immibis wrote: post #209
jraph wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the points in your last comment to be true. I still think you'd need to back the fact OSI rejected SSPL for commercial concerns of its members a bit more. Even if nobody else has formally rejected SSPL on convincing grounds, major parts of the free software ecosystem distrusts it and OSI is not that special in this. I found nobody making the case that SSPL is a free software license. Nobody likes it except mo…

Distrust is different from non-free. SSPL happens to be a free software license - that is a fact - which many people dislike - that is also a fact. The latter fact doesn't invalidate the former fact. The incompatibility between *GPL and SSPL is a very good reason to dislike SSPL. I don't like it either, but I still think it's open source. Perhaps SSPL version 2 could be written to require that the source code for oth…

> SSPL happens to be a free software license - that is a fact

Says who? I assume you have irrefutable evidence for this since you are stating this with such confidence?

It would be some major development in the SSPL case.

> No competent capitalist entity will ever say

As much as I don't like them, you need to back something you claimed. Until you do, it's just beautiful theory.

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