this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.

He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they'd fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that's usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.

It's an interesting concept, but I don't really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.

What are your thoughts on it?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Don't kid yourselves, regardless of all your ideals open source only works because it's free from a monetary perspective.

Companies work on patches to Linux or other software because it primarily benefits themselves, and they only use Linux because it's free. Companies create hardware on Linux because it's free. They can manufacturer cheap devices and people will buy them because they were low cost primarily because of the use of FOSS software.

Nearly all of FOSS is funded by corporations whether you like it or not, for the reasons you want to hear or not. The only thing that drives people is money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The FOSS contributions from companies mentioned is only at the kernel level. And a lot that use the kernel, but with proprietary blobs for their hardware. I suspect that is because kernel/embedded development is hard and costly.

Most of the dominate OSes people use, with the exception of Windows, is based on an FOSS kernel, with then the layers above and applications being proprietary.

These software systems are being used to lock people in to the specific platforms and perform user hostile behavior. So while having the kernel be FOSS, it doesn’t result in user freedoms imagined by FOSS, it just companies reducing their costs.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

what an idiot. the eval process is funny stupid and costly. the consequences will be companies both avoiding to use foss and also be less secure for using closed source. and then there is ai. code written with ai is not copyright-able and i bet anyone will prefer ai dumb code over costly foss code. may that dev rott in hell for this egomaniac idea of a free world.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

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.


The original article contains 1,837 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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