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What comes after open source

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: What comes after open source

#61

Post by 420codebro »

scoutt wrote: post #26
dwheeler wrote: post #5

"Projects could then submit for certification... who would do this certification, and how would they determine the criteria?" There's already something that takes a stab at this, the Linux Foundation's CII Best Practices badge: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/ If you run an OSS project, I encourage you to try to get a badge. Full disclosure: I lead the project. Hopefully it'll be of use anyway :-).

For hardware there is the Open Source Hardware Association ( https://www.oshwa.org ) and they have a certification program. It is an interesting fact the company where the first listed member of the board works for ( https://www.oshwa.org/about/board-members/ ).

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

Re: What comes after open source

#62

Post by sevensor »

steveklabnik wrote: post #23
sevensor wrote: post #18

I think the certification proposal basically comes back to licensing, if I read it right. "We'll extend you a license if you have the proper certificate." I have a hard time imagining a way of enforcing good behavior that doesn't hinge on restricting some parties' ability to use the software.

Yes, I tried to say that in the piece. Sorry if that wasn't clear! > I have a hard time imagining a way of enforcing good behavior that doesn't hinge on restricting some parties' ability to use the software. Absolutely, but I think this problem is inherent. There is no such thing as "no restrictions," so doing so is impossible.

Thanks for clarifying! I think I got hung up on the part where you were saying that licenses cannot give us the kind of community we want. (Which I agree with.) In my utopian fantasies, every software project has a constitution as well as a license, defining how the project is governed, who may participate, what participation looks like, what obligations you undertake by using the software, how the constitution itself may be changed, provisions for an afterlife if the project is abandoned.

Real-world voluntary organizations like grocery co-ops have long operated on this model, and some software projects, notably Debian, actually have constitutions. The Debian model, however, doesn't place any obligations on Debian's users, doesn't even acknowledge their existence. Their specific constitution has a lot of other weaknesses in terms of its ability to generalize, but the existence of the constitution seems like a very good idea.

Re: What comes after open source

#64

Post by dragonwriter »

steveklabnik wrote: post #22
alvalentini wrote: post #19

You know, sometimes I wonder if this whole conversation really isn't just meant for developers. I ask myself what is the sentiment across the larger population and realise no one really cares. They love free beers. They'd do anything not to pay 0.99 for an app, seeing that as an incredible amount of money to pay for something they expect nowadays to be free. There's a lot to unpack here and I don't think I am in the…

Thanks! I didn't get into it, but I do think that the user/developer distinction plays a part here. That is, one way to think about the Free Software/Open Source divide is that copyleft ensures freedoms for users at the expense of restricting developers, and permissive licenses ensure freedoms for developers at the expense of restricting users. As developers gained some power, we directed it towards helping ourselves…

> That is, one way to think about the Free Software/Open Source divide is that copyleft ensures freedoms for users at the expense of restricting developers, and permissive licenses ensure freedoms for developers at the expense of restricting users.

I think there are two errors there: one is conflating the Free Software / Open Source divide (which is less about licenses and more about consequentialist vs. deontological justification for desire for licenses with particular features) with the copyleft/permissive divide, and the other is conflating direct licensees with “developers” and indirect downstream licensees with “users”. (It's true that the GPLv3 contains specific protection for certain users qua users via the anti-TiVoization provisions, but that's not true of copyleft licenses generally.)

Re: What comes after open source

#66

Post by sanxiyn »

wrs wrote: post #57
steveklabnik wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I didn't get into it, but I do think that the user/developer distinction plays a part here. That is, one way to think about the Free Software/Open Source divide is that copyleft ensures freedoms for users at the expense of restricting developers, and permissive licenses ensure freedoms for developers at the expense of restricting users. As developers gained some power, we directed it towards helping ourselves…

Historically one of the controversies/confusions regarding the FSF’s ideology is that it ignores the distinction between developers and users. In the ur-hacker world RMS wanted to preserve, the users are developers. That’s why the right to make a derivative work is paramount (a freedom no non-developer can take advantage of), and why libre software is strongly skewed toward developer tools rather than viable “end-use…

> Traditionally the FSF advocate will say something here about end users hiring developers to modify software for them, but in reality that’s economically ridiculous.

Why is it ridiculous?

Re: What comes after open source

#67

Post by yarrel »

StavrosK wrote: post #29
homarp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creative-Commons-style license is usually not recommended for code https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... "We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available."

That's Creative Commons itself, by "Creative-Commons-style" I meant "something like, but not exactly CC itself".

If it's NC or ND-style it won't be a free software license.

Re: What comes after open source

#68

Post by platz »

est31 wrote: post #60

For me, FLOSS is mainly about the users, less about the projects themselves. I care more about the product, the piece of software that you can download, use and modify in any fashion you want. Most users of any popular piece of libre software don't contribute back, whether it's bug reports or patches. Even if it's targeted at developers, most don't do it. There is certainly value in community practices that encourage…

If if the users of software don't even know about FLOSS, then there is no incentive pushing companies to adopt.

If it's truly about the users, it has to come from users, not developers.

Re: What comes after open source

#69

Post by int_19h »

return0 wrote: post #40

Imagine asking to certify your completely open software that , e.g. prints 3d guns. Free also means free from gatekeepers

Any such scheme would require some objective rules for certification, not dissimilar to what OSI does with licenses really.

I doubt that a scheme that would take this sort of thing into account would be popular, for the same reasons why licenses that try to do that never became popular with the FOSS crowd.

Re: What comes after open source

#70

Post by dragonwriter »

wrs wrote: post #57
steveklabnik wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I didn't get into it, but I do think that the user/developer distinction plays a part here. That is, one way to think about the Free Software/Open Source divide is that copyleft ensures freedoms for users at the expense of restricting developers, and permissive licenses ensure freedoms for developers at the expense of restricting users. As developers gained some power, we directed it towards helping ourselves…

Historically one of the controversies/confusions regarding the FSF’s ideology is that it ignores the distinction between developers and users. In the ur-hacker world RMS wanted to preserve, the users are developers. That’s why the right to make a derivative work is paramount (a freedom no non-developer can take advantage of), and why libre software is strongly skewed toward developer tools rather than viable “end-use…

> That’s why the right to make a derivative work is paramount (a freedom no non-developer can take advantage of)

Non-developers take advantage of it by hiring a developer; it's essentially the right to take your software to be serviced by someone other than the seller.

> Traditionally the FSF advocate will say something here about end users hiring developers to modify software for them, but in reality that’s economically ridiculous.

It's perhaps ridiculous for non-wealthy individual end-users for software that isn't integral to a profit-making business, but it's quite common for major open source projects to see most of their contributions being from institutional end-users who have hired developers to address their own needs with the software.

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