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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[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (10 children)

I wasn't too psyched about reading this article, but I was surprised at how sensible it is -- among a bunch of pretty good points he makes, this is one of them:

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."

From the end user's point of view, there is absolutely no open-source-ness to your Android phone. (BSD which iOS is based on was always designed to make this a possibility, but the GPL was not.) They're using all this software which was supposed to be authored under this theory of GPL, but except for the thinnest thinnest veneer of theoretical source availability, it's proprietary software at this point.

RMS actually talked about this. He laid out this vision of this bright future where you'd always have access to the source code for all the software on your computer and the rights to take a look at it or build on it or modify it, and some reporter said, well yes but what about all these other urgent problems that are ruining the world with private industry trying to make money at all costs and destroy it all. And RMS said, more or less: Yes. It bothers me a lot. But I don't really know about that, and I know software, and I felt like in this one specific area I could write a bunch of software and solve this one problem in this one area where I felt like I could make a difference. If other people could get to to work on these other more urgent problems that'd be great, because they also bother me a lot.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

BSD which iOS is based on

Note that Apple's OSs have very little to do with BSDs unless you deem coreutils the only criteria for an OS' quality.

[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah, 100%. At this point the resources invested in MacOS / iOS have probably exceeded even the decades of work they were able to leverage by starting with FreeBSD / NeXT / Mach / whatever else.

(Edit: Actually, not 100% true. Macs are still very BSD-like under the hood; I actually really like development on Macs because I can basically treat them as BSD systems with unusual package management and a fancy GUI. For that reason they're far preferable for me over Windows or pre-OSX Macs. But yes, your point is well taken that iOS development at this point has far eclipsed anything they started out from in terms of LOC and time spent.)

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