this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
67 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17782 readers
3 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm obviously a nobody in the field, but (since the mid-'90s) I've always seen two issues, here. First, there's the general problem of not thinking of a public license as a kind of contract, where you get, because you give. If the community started thinking about copyleft or similar ideas as payment or contractual obligations for the use of the software, rather than "restrictions" or "a virus," we'd probably see a rapid change in behavior, in enforcement or license-writing, if not compliance. ...Except that, second, there's the specific problem that the FSF has always ignored warnings until it was too late and a company went out of their way to offend them. For as long as I've watched the Free Software community, people asked what would happen if you embedded gcc on an appliance or served it up on the web, and those people essentially got a response of "the big guy only cares about code that he runs locally, so it's fine." And then a company did the thing, forcing them to gasp at the entirely-foreseen problem and issue a new license a decade too late to help. Which I guess is all to say that Perens is probably on the right track, and I wish that we had more people looking at these problems more frequently. I still vaguely remember the Copyleft Next project, but that (clearly) went nowhere.