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.”
A lotta words to describe what’s inevitable under a capitalist model of software creation and distribution and an ideology that limits itself inherently.
It seems like Perens is discovering what RMS already predicted a long time ago (ironic considering he quotes him), that Open Source will fail its users in terms of freedom (i am not speaking about Open Source as a development model but a political movement and collective who use the term to define itself).
The Open Source community has shown itself to be unreliable in defending our freedom. The lax attitude toward nonfree tooling like Github and copyleft licenses has shown itself to create issues like the ones mentioned by Perens. It’s a bad look when hackers are forced to use nonfree software to participate in open source development when libre solutions either exist already or can be spearheaded by these same hackers (source hut comes to mind).
The GPL enforces itself and hunting companies that violate the GPL was never the goal (when they are sued by the FSF, it is only so that they publish the source code by the license terms). The purpose of the GPL was to create a community of hackers to build software under a protected copyleft domain. These problems that perens mentioned are applicable to the pushover MIT/X11 license which unfortunately has lured hackers into believing that the current capitalist tech field would respect them (EEE and enshittification debunk this). Pushover licenses were a specific strategy for certain pieces of software (miniscule libraries, open file formats to replace closed/patented ones) but have been overused to the point of meaningless.
TL;DR a movement that appeals to capitalist corporate interests rather than emphasizing freedom on ethical/civil grounds will be limited by that same system.
The goal of the hacktivist struggle was always to create software that protects the users freedom as nonfree software is inherently unjust. With enough free software we can kick out the dirty contracts, patents, and licenses used to control us.
Of course those who identifty with Open Source can have their own set of strategies and beliefs, but the dominant culture and attitude are accurate to what I mentioned above. Open Source has always been a sister movement to the Free Software Movement in terms of ideology. It’s why FOSS is such a controversial term, it would be unfair to awkwardly (FOSS only excacerbates the confusion about “Free”) group these two communties together who differ in many key ways.