thinking about foss stuff, and I know I've groused about licensing stuff before, and how I feel like my only way out is to just Parity7 everything and fall into obscurity but...
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thinking about foss stuff, and I know I've groused about licensing stuff before, and how I feel like my only way out is to just Parity7 everything and fall into obscurity but...
...I think we need a different movement around open source, with new terminology, that clarifies the intent and opens doors to more pro-social behavior and capabilities (up to and including the potential for "ethical licensing").
I've been spitballing the terms Common Software and Community Software. The core idea is that things that count as Community/Common Software can't enter the realm of the proprietary (so, strong copyleft a-la AGPL and Parity, virality not necessary). What's the difference from "Free Software"? We get rid of "freedom zero", aka "the freedom to run software for any purpose". Common Software licenses may have Non-Commercial clauses, Anti-Particular-Industry clauses (such as anti-MIC stuff), etc.
I think "freedom zero" was a grave mistake. I get where it came from--a desire to remove discrimination--but what it resulted in was a hijacking of Free Software by the corporate "Open Source" wing to exploit an otherwise healthy community of people openly sharing their creations... for an enormous profit that we can't even quantify right now.
We need a strong return to copyleft, and we need to gather together and grow its existing ecosystem, away from the MIT/BSD poison that our world has turned towards.
Your thoughts are welcome on this. I want to have a conversation about this stuff and maybe eventually record all this in a longer-form blog post. If you know folks who have had similar thoughts please link them so we can chat, too.
UPDATE: I've sketched out an initial conclusion based on today's discussion over at https://toot.cat/@zkat/115852520380684438
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thinking about foss stuff, and I know I've groused about licensing stuff before, and how I feel like my only way out is to just Parity7 everything and fall into obscurity but...
...I think we need a different movement around open source, with new terminology, that clarifies the intent and opens doors to more pro-social behavior and capabilities (up to and including the potential for "ethical licensing").
I've been spitballing the terms Common Software and Community Software. The core idea is that things that count as Community/Common Software can't enter the realm of the proprietary (so, strong copyleft a-la AGPL and Parity, virality not necessary). What's the difference from "Free Software"? We get rid of "freedom zero", aka "the freedom to run software for any purpose". Common Software licenses may have Non-Commercial clauses, Anti-Particular-Industry clauses (such as anti-MIC stuff), etc.
I think "freedom zero" was a grave mistake. I get where it came from--a desire to remove discrimination--but what it resulted in was a hijacking of Free Software by the corporate "Open Source" wing to exploit an otherwise healthy community of people openly sharing their creations... for an enormous profit that we can't even quantify right now.
We need a strong return to copyleft, and we need to gather together and grow its existing ecosystem, away from the MIT/BSD poison that our world has turned towards.
Your thoughts are welcome on this. I want to have a conversation about this stuff and maybe eventually record all this in a longer-form blog post. If you know folks who have had similar thoughts please link them so we can chat, too.
UPDATE: I've sketched out an initial conclusion based on today's discussion over at https://toot.cat/@zkat/115852520380684438
@zkat This is good. This is the right kind of thing to do, and the right direction to take it. But I continue to think that licenses are the wrong tool, and the four freedoms are the wrong starting point.
I would start with ideas like the right to repair and the right to (not) associate.
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