Tag Archives: free software

Does open source matter?

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Matt Asay’s article “The Open Source Licensing War is Over” has been making the rounds this week, as text and subtext. While his position is certainly spicy, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong. “It’s not that open source doesn’t matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed,” Asay writes. I think that’s true, and it’s our fault.

To the average person, and even to many developers, the freeness or openness of the software doesn’t matter. They want to be able to solve their problem in the easiest (and cheapest) way. Often that’s open source software. Sometimes it isn’t. But they’re not sitting there thinking about the societal impact of their software choices. They’re trying to get a job done.

Free and open source software (FOSS) advocates often tout the ethical benefits of FOSS. We talk about the “four essential freedoms“. And while those should matter to people, they often don’t. I’ve said before — and I still believe it — FOSS is not the end goal. Any time we end with “and thus: FOSS!”, we’re doing it wrong.

FOSS advocacy — and I suspect this is true of other advocacy efforts as well — tends to try to meet people where we want them to be. The problem, of course, is that people are not where we want them to be. They’re where they are. We have to meet them there, with language that resonates with them, addressing the problems they currently face instead of hypothetical future problems. This is all easier said than done, of course.

Open source licenses don’t matter — they’ve never mattered — except as an implementation detail for the goal we’re trying to achieve.

FOSS licenses permit, not restrict

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Last week, Matthew Wilson shared a very correct take on Twitter:

A few people in the mentions argued that the GPL is doing it wrong by his definition. This is incorrect. Copyleft licenses do not prevent the user from doing things, they ensure that subsequent users can do the same thing.

This may seem like a semantic argument, but there’s substance to it. All licenses (except those that amount to a public domain dedication) contain some conditions, minimal though they may be. It’s important to remember that the default is that you can do nothing with a work. Copyright is by definition a monopoly on a work.The entire point of free and open source software licenses is to tell you what you can do, because the default position is that you can’t.

One of the most annoying things about license wars is the argument that one category of license is somehow more free than another. That’s dumb. Both copyleft and permissive licenses promote freedom, just from different perspectives. Permissive licenses give the next person in line the freedom to do (essentially) whatever they want. Copyleft licenses preserve freedoms for all subsequent users, no matter how many hands the work passes through. There are plenty of philosophical and practical reasons you might choose one class of license over the other (I tend to prefer copyleft licenses, myself), but it’s wrong to paint one or the other as anti-freedom.

Getting back to Matthew’s point, there has been a fair amount of license weaponization in the last few years. By this I mean the use of a license to try to exclude a certain class of user. Some of this I’m sympathetic to (e.g. the “ethical source” movement), some of this I’m not (e.g. the various “you can do what you want, just don’t make a successful software-as-a-service offering” licenses that have popped up). In both cases, I think copyright is the wrong mechanism for achieving the goals.

Excluding classes of users is antithetical to ideals free software and open source. That may be okay. As I’ve written, free software is not the end goal. But if you’re going to claim to be open source, you should act open source.

The FSF does not represent my views

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Earlier this week, Richard Stallman announced that he was rejoining the board of the Free Software Foundation. You may recall that he resigned as president and board member in 2019 after making unacceptable remarks about the sexual assault of a minor. This was not the first instance of unacceptable behavior. The FSF made no real changes to address the issue and now has welcomed Stallman back.

I’m thankful that the people I choose to associate with have universally condemned this as harmful. I wrote in 2012 that I think he hurts his own ideological cause. At the time I wrote the post, I was thinking entirely of his rigid aherence to free software over all else. In truth, the harm he does goes well beyond that. For me, the licensing terms of free and open source software are not as important as the human impact.

As I wrote last month, free and open source software is not the end goal. What good is free software that is used to harm others? And what good is a free software movement that is not willing to include underindexed groups. We cannot tolerate nor enable this sort of behavior.

The Fedora Council spent a lot of time debating our vision statement.

The Fedora Project envisions a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, welcoming, and open-minded communities.

Fedora PRoject vision

The inclusion of the “built by” is no accident. We want our community to be vibrant and healthy. That cannot happen when bad behavior is allowed to persist.

I think it’s too late for the FSF. They’ve painted themselves into a corner long ago. This only cements that. Still, perhaps with a new slate, the organization can be reborn into something that aids the cause it purports to champion. That is why I have signed the open letter calling for the resignation of Stallman and the entire FSF Board of Directors.

Free and open source software is not the end goal

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When I first started thinking about this article, the title was going to be “I don’t care about free software anymore.” But I figured that would be troll bait and I thought I should be a little less spicy. It’s true in a sense, though. I don’t care about free/open source software as an end goal.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says “free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses”. The point isn’t that the software itself is freely-licensed, it’s about what the software license permits or restricts. I used to think that free software was a necessary-but-insufficient condition for users having control over their computing. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case anymore.

Why free software might not matter

Software isn’t useful until someone uses it. So we should evaluate software in that context. And most software use these days involves 1. data and 2. computers outside the user’s control. We’ll get back to #2 in a moment, but I want to focus on the data. If Facebook provided the source code to their entire stack tomorrow—indeed, if they had done it from the beginning—that would do nothing to prevent the harms caused by that platform. One, it does nothing to diminish the “joys” of spreading disinformation. Two, it would be no guarantee that something else isn’t reading the data.

While we were so focused on the software, we essentially ignored the data. Now, the data is just as important, if not more, as the software. There are plenty of examples of this in my talk “We won. Now what?” presented at DevConf.CZ (25 minutes) and DevConf.US (40 minutes) last year. Being open is no guarantee of data protection, just as being proprietary is not guarantee of data harm.

We’ll always use other people’s computers

Let’s return to the “computers outside the user’s control” point. There’s a lot of truth to the “there is no cloud, there’s only other people’s computers” argument. And certainly if everyone ran their own services, that would reduce the risk of harm.

But here in the real world, that’s not going to happen. Most people cannot run their own software services—they have neither the skill nor the resources. Among those who do, many have no desire to. Apart from the impossibility of people running their own services, there’s the fact that communication means that the information lives in two places, so you’re still using someone else’s computer.

It’s all very complicated

There’s also the question of whether or not the absolutist view of software freedom is the right approach. The free software movement seems to be very libertarian in nature: if each user has freedom over their computing, that is a benefit to everyone. Others would argue (as the Ethical Source movement has) that enabling unethical uses of software is harmful. These two positions are at odds.

Whether or not you think the software license is the appropriate places to address this issue, I suspect many, if not most, developers would prefer that their software not be used for evil purposes. In order to enforce that, the software becomes non-free.

This is a complicated issue, with no right answer and no universal agreement. I don’t know what the way forward is, but I know that we cannot act like free software is the end goal. If we want to get the general public on board, we have to convince them in terms that make sense to their values and concerns, not ours. We must make software that is useful and usable in addition to being free. And we must understand that people choosing non-free software is not a moral failing but a decision to optimize for other values. We must update our worldview to match the 2020s; the 1990s are not coming back.

What does “open source” mean in 2021?

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The licensing discourse in the last few weeks has highlighted a difference between what “open source” means and what we’re talking about when we use the term. Strictly speaking, open source software is software released under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative. In most practical usage, we’re talking about software developed in a particular way. When we talk about open source, we talk about the communities of users and developers, (generally) not the license. “Open source” has come to define an ethos that was all have our own definition of.

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Did software stagnate in 1996?

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Betteridge’s Law says “no”. But in a blog post last week, Jonathan Edwards says “yes”. Specifically, he says:

Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996. 

It’s not clear what Edwards thinks happened in 1996. Maybe he blames the introduction of the Palm PIlot? In any case, he argues that the developments since 1996 have all been incremental improvements upon existing technology. Nothing revolutionary has happened in programming languages, databases, etc.

This has real “old man yells at cloud” energy. Literally. He includes “AWS” in his list of technology he dismisses.

Edwards sets up a strawman to knock down. Maybe “[t]his is as good as it gets: a 50 year old OS, 30 year old text editors, and 25 year old languages,” he proposes. “Bullshit,” he says.

I’d employ my expletive differently: who gives a shit?

Programming does not exist for the benefit of programmers. Software is written to do something for people. The universe of what is possible with computing is inarguably broader than in 1996. Much of that is owed to improvements in hardware, to be sure. And you can certainly argue of what’s possible with computing is bad. But that’s not what’s at issue here.

I don’t see carpenters bemoaning the lack of innovation in hammers. Software development isn’t special. It’s a trade like any other. And if the tools are working, let them work.

I won’t even bother with his “open source is stifling innovation” nonsense. Rebutting that is left as an exercise to the reader.

Releasing open source software is not immoral

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Matt Stancliff recently made a bold statement on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/mattsta/status/1117794650742513664

He made this comment in the context of the small amount of money the largest tech companies use to fund open source. With the five largest companies contributing less than a percentage of their annual revenue, open source projects would have two billion dollars of support. These projects are already subsidizing the large corporations, he argues, so they deserve some of the rewards.

This continues the recent trend of people being surprised that people will take free things and not pay for them. Developers who choose to release software under an open source license do so with the knowledge that someone else may use their software to make boatloads of money. Downstream users are under no obligation to remunerate or support upstreams in any way.

That said, I happen to think it’s the right thing to do. I contributed to Fedora as a volunteer for years as a way to “pay back” the community that gave me a free operating system. At a previous company, we made heavy use of an open source job scheduler/resource manager. We provided support on the community mailing lists and sponsored a reception at the annual conference. This was good marketing, of course, but it was also good community citizenship.

At any rate, if you want to make a moral judgment about open source, it’s not the release of open source software that’s the issue. The issue is parasitic consumption of open source software. I’m sure all of the large tech companies would say they support open source software, and they probably do in their own way. But not necessarily in the way that allows small-but-critical projects to thrive.

Toward a more moral ecosystem

Saying “releasing open source software has become immoral” is not helpful. Depriving large companies of open source would also deprive small companies and consumers. And it’s the large companies who could best survive the loss. Witness how MongoDB’s license change has Amazon using DocumentDB instead; meanwhile Linux distributions like Fedora are dropping MongoDB.

It’s an interesting argument, though, because normally when morality and software are in the mix, it’s the position that open source (or “free software” in this context, generally) is the moral imperative. That presents us with one possible solution: licensing your projects under a copyleft license (e.g. the GNU General Public License (GPL)). Copyleft-licensed software can still be used by large corporations to make boatloads of money, but at least it requires them to make source (including of derived works) available. With permissively-licensed software, you’re essentially saying “here’s my code, do whatever you want with it.” Of course people are going to take you up on that offer.

I support Software Freedom Conservancy

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If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that free and open source software is important to me. It’s important to Software Freedom Conservancy as well. Conservancy is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to supporting software projects.

Conservancy provides a lot of services to member projects, including financial and administrivia. Conservancy also provides license enforcement services, including support of a high-profile suit against VMWare. Although Conservancy uses litigation as a last resort, it’s sometimes necessary. However, this has lead to some corporate sponsors pulling their funding.

In order to continue their efforts, Conservancy is moving to an individual-supporter model. I first became a Conservancy supporter last year, and when it’s shortly time to renew my support, I will contribute double. Free and open source software is important to my personal and professional lives, and the services Conservancy provide to projects is invaluable.

If you use computers at all, a Conservancy project is probably an important part of your daily life. Please join me in supporting the Software Freedom Conservancy with a tax-deductible* donation today.

*Consult your tax professional to see if donations are tax-deductible in your jurisdiction.

Licensing and open source communities

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At FOSDEM 2014, Eileen Evans gave a talk entitled “Licensing Models and Building an Open Source Community“. The talk is basically a discussion how Evans changed her mind about the suitability of permissive licenses in vibrant open source communities. She proposes that a vibrant community requires excellent technology, suitable governance, and a license that the community perceives as fair.

A decade ago, Evans was working at Sun and considering what license to use for OpenSolaris. The decision at the time was that because copyleft licenses require downstream changes to be returned to the community (in the sense that they remain freely-licensed), copyleft licenses are necessary for a healthy community.

In the intervening years, many projects have adopted permissive licenses. The GPL family is no longer the majority license, according to several surveys. Vendor participating in open source projects favored strong copyleft until around 2006, but the preference has shifted toward permissive licenses. A survey of GitHub projects showed the MIT license with a dramatic lead over the next-most-widely-used license.

Based on this, Evans concluded that permissive licenses can, in fact, be used

Is that still true today? Projects are increasingly using permissive licenses. MIT dominates GitHub. Vendor engagement (participation in projects) was toward strong copyleft until ~2006 when permissive licenses take over. 5x increased in contributors to CloudStack after changing from copyleft to permissive. Permissive licenses may be used to build a community.

Of course, there are few who would take the position these days that permissive licenses can’t be used. Even noted copyleft advocate Bradley Kuhn can be heard agreeing on the video, though he points out his view that copyleft licenses make for better communities. Perhaps the question should be phrased as “what kind of communities develop?”

In conducting research for my thesis, I came across a study that showed copyleft licenses were associated with higher user engagement, but permissive licenses were associated with higher developer engagement. This makes sense, since not all developers develop FLOSS. A developer who isn’t developing FLOSS would probably be more drawn to a project where the license was conducive to proprietary downstreams.

Evans’ anecdote about the increase in contributions to CloudStack when it switched from copyleft to permissive licensing may or may not tell us something. It may be purely coincidental. An increase in the popularity of the project or of cloud computing generally may have driven the change. And of course, there’s more to a community than the number of committers.

I suspect that the license itself may be less important than the overall governance model. It’s certainly an area that merits further research.

The Fundamental Theorem of Developing FLOSS

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Recently Fedora developer and all-around good gal Máirín Duffy has been working on what she calls “The Fundamental Theorem of Developing FLOSS“. Inspired by what she called “opinionated non-doers”, this is an attempt to catalogue the sorts of behaviors a FLOSS developer should expect. Most of the entries revolve around change, particularly the addition or removal of features.

This isn’t some “those damn lusers” screed. Instead, Máirín offers a fairly objective summary of the experience of her and others. It’s a rather useful, if cynical, checklist of the kinds of feedback a developer might expect when introducing a change. Knowing what will happen in advance allows a project to better communicate the reasoning and impacts for a change (though the Axiom of Assuming the Worst would suggest this is a futile effort).

If I were to claim any beef with the theorem as it currently exists, it would be the Axiom of Ignoring the Source. It’s not that it’s wrong, necessarily, but that it’s incomplete. There are certainly those who are capable of reading the source, making changes, and submitting those change and yet decide not to. Sometimes it’s laziness, sometimes there are other reasons.

But there are a lot of people, and I would generally count myself among them, who lack the ability to understand the source or to make the changes I want. I think we, as various open source communities, often assume the hypothetical user is as knowledgeable as the developer and forget about the non-developer users. “Whining in an online forum” is often as much as someone can do (though it’s certainly not a productive way of expressing discontent). I’d also argue that access to source is not “the entire point” of FLOSS, but instead a means to an end. That’s more of a semantic quibble than any actual disagreement.

I suspect there’s a Fundamental Theorem of Using FLOSS to be written that is the user perspective of some of the same issues.