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.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which in June, under IBM’s ownership, stopped making its source code available as required under the GPL.
Pointing to popular applications from Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Perens says: "A lot of the software is oriented toward the customer being the product – they’re certainly surveilled a great deal, and in some cases are actually abused.
The reason that doesn’t often happen today, says Perens, is that open source developers tend to write code for themselves and those who are similarly adept with technology.
Perens acknowledges that a lot of stumbling blocks need to be overcome, like finding an acceptable entity to handle the measurements and distribution of funds.
Asked whether the adoption of non-Open Source licenses, by the likes of HashiCorp, Elastic, Neo4j, and MongoDB, represent a viable way forward, Perens says new thinking is needed.
Perens doesn’t think the AGPL or various non-Open Source licenses focus on the right issue in the context of cloud companies.
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