“Open source” is not broken

FOSS is the victim in a way, but that means it must defend itself. OSI needs to get off their asses and acknowledge the problem and work with the community to develop licenses that limit SaaSification and other forms of appropriation in a way that is compatible with the principles of open source and lacks the optics (FUD) problems of the GPL approach.

I’m not holding my breath since the OSI is funded almost entirely by huge companies that are quite happy with all the free labor they are exploiting. So far the OSI has plugged it’s ears and pretended everything is fine, and OSS zealots attack the character of any lowly developer who isn’t happy providing uncompensated labor to surveillance capitalist behemoths.

I don’t see FOSS surviving another generation if this doesn’t happen, or at least not in a form that isn’t weaponized to herd everyone into proprietary cloud environments.

> boast of their “innovation” and “growth” without … contributing

… from corporations that don’t bat an eye at donating billions to (often dubious) “social” organizations - often ones that criticize them anyway.

There's another option -- those seeking to SaaSify F/OSS can support/partner the software they use. Sustainable hosting isn't something that larger corporations are into, but the right companies can do it, and as companies that have this mindset/condition built in (best if in writing, of course) grow, F/OSS becomes more sustainable by default. All it takes is a reasonable % of revenue contribution to the F/OSS powering your stack. I think the range should be 20% to 50%[0], but even if it was 10%, imagine if open source projects that power even small to mid size tech companies in the world received 10% (or even 3%) of the revenue being collected?

The problem of getting the money down to F/OSS that powers inner machinery (libraries, frameworks, etc) is a bit tougher, but I think that could work out easily by doing a general % of revenue and deciding allocation. For example even if you do a 1% allocation to libraries in particular, as libraries are reused much more easily, at scale library authors will do quite well.

Maybe a license that asks for a % of revenue is an easier static goal but I'm optimistic enough to think that the partnership approach could work.

[0]: https://nimbusws.com/#sustainability

Its probably time for the next generation of open source licensing to make the code not usable for profit making purposes, thus ensuring open source is either funded by the companies that use it or forms its own separate community away from corporations.

This would be solved if people were educated on dual-licensing - no new license needs to exist if you go GPL and have a paid commercial license.