My issue with the source-available model is the lack of standard source-available licenses that include a "poison-pill" (or inverse poison-pill) that would automatically make the code FOSS if the company fails. In the current scenario where we lack these standards it is really up to individual licensors to make good licenses. For example if I were to license a server-side library that does annual licensing (so subscription model) it usually implies that I can continue using it as long as I continue paying. If the company folds and the license lacked that kind of clause I would be unable to continue using it legally despite the source being available to me.
Licenses that don't reflect work done aren't great to begin with, and I think we see far too many of them. And a library is software where programmers would eventually heavily desire to modify the source, should they need to, once they've strongly coupled with it. If the license includes "you can modify, but only in (and/or not in) these specific ways these specific ways", then how does that problem persist? I think there's much harder use-cases than libraries though. I have the intuition that the more upkeep a service fundamentally requires, the harder it has potential to hit the customers if it went bankrupt.
I feel like blender should be mentioned in these conversations more. It is an extremely niche software specifically for 3d modelling and rendering. It isn't something most people would touch. It is not a web browser or operating system that everyone needs, but they still get major amounts of funding despite being fully open-source. OBS too!
Rossman I think has a really interesting point that isn't covered very often. My opinion Non-profit, volunteer/programmer community driven is awesome for technical excellence, but customer driven is where you get that polish, usability, utility, and design.
Non-profit, volunteer/programmer community is why products are shipped to users so fast as they are. Programmers like Casey are a very tiny fraction of programmers who don't need to be handheld by OS.
Louis, you can't just do the little foot dances like you're behind a table, Casey is getting distracted :D Never mind the crazy look like you haven't slept for two days
not to be a party pooper but these "we just need to figure out how we get financial power over foss" has literally been the central issue since the 90s and no one has solved it because it's probably intractable.
The main problem is you have entire billion dollar companies and trillion dollar governments who do everything they can to destroy FOSS and hacker culture. Ex. Bill Gates war on hacker culture, U.S. Govt vs Aaron Swartz, Lessig 2016, Late Stage Capitalism existing, etc. The censorship and propaganda is so bad, and the corporate control of government so complete, that idiocracy has become a movie about a more functional and intelligent society than the current one (at least in the USA).
I feel like they are missing the point of open source. A developer being able to stop a lazy repackaging and monetization of their software is one thing, but a developer dictating how their software is used makes it worse than proprietary software. I think there is this tension in open source that people dislike when others make money off of their project, but fail to understand that people used their project because it was free and open. Amazon would probably build their system with windows if linux had demanded the power to be checked on their business decisions. Linux became so popular and gain so much support because it was true free software. Also Linus claiming the right to make all the decisions of how Linux was used would be unfair to the huge amount of work everyone else did. I don't have a problem with the source available monetization route, but I don't think it should be treated as a universal solution to open sources woes.
Yeah I think they are to some degree, but in a sense developer is "dicatating" how software should be used via licences. The whole point of "Free and Open Source" is , well, to be free and open source and "payments" are supposed to be in a form of contribution to the project, but they are not inclusive. However, some financial support for the developer would defnitely be beneficial as they would have more resources to continue working on the project and delivering good software.
" I think there is this tension in open source that people dislike when others make money off of their project, but fail to understand that people used their project because it was free and open." Probably wouldn't be such a conflict, if Amazon etc. would actually contribute financially. On the other hand, why didn't they just use their software to make money?
0:23 if someone who is Gen z is watching a privacy focused technology conference they know what the patriot act is. and it's still in effect, it wasn't just an issue back then, it still is now.
Realistically, unless someone's paying your bills then it's always going to be a major uphill battle to get OSS to "win", that said, it has won in many ways and places, just not really on the end-user application space. You also have the issue that if you licence your software under BSD/MIT/X11 type permissive licence, then it's likely it can be legally commercialised, particularly if the major contributor of the source decides to do it ( yes, I did this ); conversely, if you go GPL type licences then majority of commercial development won't touch it with a 10ft pole. Best two development scenarios I've seen for open source is when someone is working in a company that uses the software and the company overall doesn't really see the software as being specifically important to their income or giving their competitors an equal footing. ... or ... the person is doing it as a development of passion in the hopes that they'll be able to use it as an example of their talents for a future job, and something is paying their bills.
"not really on the end-user application space" you must've meant something else the fact that there's more and more people using Linux as a daily driver is a clear indicator of the success. And on Windows there's plenty of OSS: VLC, Firefox, Chrome, WinSCP, VSCode, Powershell, Calibre, KeePassXC, WinDjView, SumatraPDF, Bittorrent, Audacity, and much more
@@the_original_dude yes, there's numerous good products available for linux ( often cross-platform ) but overall, the big trouble with a lot of OSS projects is that developers work on what they *like* working on and they leave that last 5% of refinement for "someone else", which results in a lot of projects that have great potential but don't get that last bit of polish required to push them in to the "completed product" status. The last 5% isn't fun, it's just doing things like maintaining consistency, writing documentation, getting consistent UI naming & behaviours, cleaning up small bugs, streamlining annoying little processes, and it takes a long time; it's stuff that as a developer you don't really do because once you've made a product that "works enough" to satisfy your itch/requirement there's no compelling reason to keep pushing ahead. Throw in that because a lot of projects are single-person-shows you also get a massive blowback from hurt egos if you make/recommend changes/improvements because for many it's their *artwork creation*. Been doing OSS since before it was called OSS and Linus hadn't even started with linux. Linux is fantastic, I use it as my daily, have since mid 90's, but as a general rule OSS projects lack the final polish because it's a boring process, frequently requiring financial push and help from outside to move it in to the general consumer world.
@@pldaniels the general mass of of projects isn't meant to be polished. Just because it's an end-user app, doesn't mean it's supposed to be polished. There aren't many kinds of apps that are widely used. So it's gonna be the most popular that gain traction to become a finished product. And it happens because there are more people who choose to enhance something they like/need -- basic probability. And the same kind of thing happens with commercial software. The more users there are, the more polished and full-featured the app will be.
@@the_original_dude you still have to achieve a level of polish to get a foothold unless your project is truly unique or exceptionally ground breaking that it compels people to climb over the usability issues. By default; * If a project doesn't build/run out of the box for me these days then I pretty much throw it to the bin. * If a project needs me to setup things manually before I can get it even to start/run, it goes in the bin. * If I have to spend more than 30 minutes to try find out how to get something to work, in to the bin. ...and general end-users are going to be somewhat more intolerant. There *are* some circumstances where you push harder, ie, exotic piece of hardware that you're trying to get to work right and you have to manually build the driver, or say if you step to a newer kernel and the API's changed so you have to do some tweaking to get the build to work again, of if you yourself are invested in a project and you're adding features that you want. The important thing is, there's a distinction between people who just want to run the software as an appliance and have it do its job, and there's people who can/will tweak; the fomer's acceptance determines if the project is popular/successful ultimately. Consider the LAMP stack, prior to it being pretty much a turn-key and/or default install the take up was "strong" among techs but limited beyond that. Ubuntu, as much as people pooh-pooh it because it's popular, it's popular because again, it's about the most polished offering of the linux distros. Polish is needed to expand popularity/traction and developers suck at it in general, or those who would be good at it are terrible developers and generally never get their project even close to being finished (or they kill somene elses's) because they're still stuck on determining how they're going to organise the development and what colour of blue to use for the logo. Big rule in sales - don't present a prototype/half-finished product to customers, because they will stump their toe on every damned issue and it'll kill your sale(s).
Considering that Stallman uses the Internet effectively by post, and has a rather dated take on what computers are used for today. He was a revolutionary, sure. But he has passed the visionary stage and gone towards the crackpot stage.
@@deckard5pegasus673 he's historically had some very, very problematic takes on social issues, his focus on foss software has gone past the visionary state. He hasn't really kept up with new technologies except to comment on how they aren't good for users, even when said users generally tend to prefer those technologies.
@@Ornithopter470 That is a very general non specific comment. What technologies is he saying aren't good? I would like to know specifics because I want to investigate it for myself. I have seen many of his interviews and really havent seen a problem in what he has said.
This was disappointing. When FUTO released Grayjay I felt betrayed. A lot. He was talking a whole year how is is gonna release it as an open source, and then when it was released there was that weird license. And now this is I think a second panel discussion that I'm watching on this topic where there is not a single Open Source advocate, just those people who are echoing their opinions and not understanding FOSS points. There were plenty of points and I don't feel like youtube comment is right place to discuss the importance of FOSS. But do you think that if MS teams, or Windows, or any other spyware was a source available it would be less intrusive and more respective to user rights? No! as long as a community or another corporation can't fork modify and resell products, it would be controlled only by bad actors and we would not have rights preserving software anyway. And this is not the only point. But it's annoying that every time FUTO is discussing this topic you guys are just talking in this echo chamber without somebody who understands the ethical, legal, and practical implications of both Free software and Open source.
How would you resolve the very real problem of open source projects being neglected by companies/people/groups/etc that utilize them without compensating their creators?
So far, FUTO's approach has been the most practical and realistic approach to resolving the issues that many independent programmers face. It acknowledges the reality of the society it exists in, which is capitalistic, and uses it to further its own goal; which is to ensure that creators of a project are receiving proper compensation, and to ensure that those projects themselves don't die out because of some legal technicality. It isn't an ideal solution, by definition reality is not an ideal. Don't get your nuts in a twist because some solution doesn't happen to check off every last one of your design requirements.
@@ironsquid9724 IMO the biggest issue is not neglect from companies/people/groups/etc as a whole but rather neglect by governments. Why is my tax money going to Microsoft for Windows licenses on the millions of government computers in my country when I know for a fact that the vast majority of them aren't used for anything other than running a web browser? I think many EU nations get this - which is why we see repeated attempts from them (or smaller administrative units within them) to move to FOSS. A German Bundesland (forgot which one) has just completed their pilot project for shifting almost completely to FOSS and are now rolling it out across all their departments. That should ideally lead to greater funding of FOSS projects as well and would go a long way in making the community much more feasible.
@@ironsquid9724 At no point I mention monetization nor care about it. Point it that at some point Louis started appealing to free software enthusiasts. He promised he will release grayjay as opensource. and on release day he rug pulled us. but if you're curious about FOSS business models there are plenty: - Redhat subscription model - They provide you with full platform, provides you with support and stuff, and you're paying monthly fees for that. The moment you decide to stop paying you'll still have a software just not access to other stuff. - Blender - There are subscription that you can pay to gain access for models made by blender foundation + studios and companies are paying on to top to get implemented features they need to have. - Linux foundation - companies are paying sponsorship so they would get better access to some people and features. Also selling courses and other random stuff. - Zabbix - Selling payed support for their system - Meta - they are releasing their infra tools as open source which makes their infra more standardized across industry, this give them later access to more engineers familiar with their tools, and also other companies are also contributing to their stack so they are saving money on development. And even futo didn't said it's issue of money. If you look at grayjay you can always use it without paying and their model allows that. It's issue of the control. And that's a big one. In past there were FOSS projects that community liked but then they changed their direction and just because they were FOSS we were able to fork them and fix issues. As and example you can take look at Simple Mobile tools, which were cool GPL privacy preserving cellphone apps, like for calling, messaging, calendar etc... but later author decided to put there bunch of spyware and stuff, but fortunately it was GPL license so community forked it and made it again what it was before.
@@Xankill3r Because Microsoft offers an entire integrated stack and support for it, while being a legal entity that can be held responsible. The same is not true in the FOSS world. At best you can get Canonical/Redhat/SUSE, but they cover only portions of the whole package, and good luck holding Jia Tan responsible for introducing a back door in some obscure package that nobody really checks. I don't think you realize just how incredibly lucky we got with the XZ exploit. On top of that, Microsoft's business stack is incredibly compelling. I was looking into helping a friend's company modernize and wanted to use open source solutions, but when you see the stuff you can do with the whole Office 360/Power Bi, and how well it integrates... It's not even close. We've got such a long way to go, and it seems the FOSS world is regressing more than anything, with fragmentation only increasing.
Thanks so much for the very interesting panel discussion. Some really tough problems to solve. Just wanted to shout out that I paid for FUTO voice and think it's an amazing product. It's been really accurate and a time-saver. Thanks for making these products available and keep up the great work!
These folks are running into fundamental problems with the free market economic model such as its inability to correctly allocate value to a piece of work being done. Unfortunately there aren't solutions to the problems they're discussing in this framework. This conversation has a lot of economic naïveté in it. The free market works in a lot fewer contexts than advertised. Way fewer. Wondering why it doesn't work for X or Y is useless, it's wondering why a tool that doesn't work for a job doesn't work for that job. Corporations exist to isolate their people from the free market and gain partial control over it. E.g. this one division can't possibly make money but it's fundamental to these other divisions, so we pay people in it well to do the work needed so those other divisions can make money.
exactly, regulation is required to even have a chance at a functional market. without regs or with weak or wrong regs, there will be fluctuations between periods of monopolies, oligopolies, and more desirable states of many actors. i think the world, the human realm, is immensely complex because of people actually not always preferring more money, but instead often acting out of ideology or following their heart. it's difficult to eye simple strategies for proponents of liberal democratic values to follow in tech, but at least it's a relief to me to witness open and levelheaded discussions like this.
The investor on the right, who I think is monetarily powering FUTO, is missing that the power to control the technology resulting from code IS the pivotal point in the FOSS discussion, not whether the code is available. He is trying to figure out how to keep power over the code "for good". Information IS power, you can't release the information and keep the power. I know it's cliché but it's also fact. It's nuanced, but 99% of the discussion about open vs closed source code is actually about power over the code, not whether you can see the code. So sure the name is misleading, but whatever you call it, it's also nearly a tautology. I'll explain.. OSS does spawn from the principle that everyone should have the right to see what they are running. But that isn't where hardly any of the controversy lies. It's like how voters should have the right to see everything their politicians do. Of course we should. No one (sane) should really disagree with this, in principle. The problem is that in practice it is hard to do. I could continue that analogy, but you know what I mean. Moving back to code... If windows was all open source but MS kept the same legal power over the code that it has now, how would that be any better than our current situation with windows? Sure we could see all the problems we know exist and complain about them, but almost no one is going to help them fix the problems for free. MS could offer a bounty to fix problems, but bad actors can find 3rd parties to whom the exploits are much more valuable so they are more motivated to find them faster. So MS has to deal with this added threat. And of course MS still wants to sell their software, but bad actors can pirate the software with full capability easily. MS can combat this in various ways, but there is simply no way to fully control that some piracy will happen when the code is available. And so on. The availability of the information gives power to other actors, for good or bad. In practice living a principled life, like being open source, adds a lot of problems that being closed source abates (not solves). And many times the only benefit for the creator is making people who are principled about open source happy. Yes, everyone should be principled. But again, like with political transparency, in practice most people are too ignorant or busy trying to survive to care. Everyone likes the idea, but few want to pay the cost. If you want to retain control over your software, open source is nothing but a liability to you as the creator. Or to put a positive spin on it, it's a feature you support - for people who only want to buy or support open source. If you want open source to be more "successful" then your best bet is to boost the popularity of the principle. You won't solve all the nuanced problems created by giving away information, so you have to somehow instill in more people the demand for the principle. And when people believe more in the principle the edge problems will become easier to solve. There is no way to completely detatch the power from the information. Open code is open power. So I guess I would say that FOSS hasn't "won" for the same reason "good" hasn't beaten "evil", "pure" politicians haven't beaten "corrupt" politicians, honesty hasn't beaten lying, etc.
@@flyingturret208thecannon5 Kind of working in Europe and Japan. We at least make them label it. The problem is not enough local farmers for people that want to buy that produce at a reasonable price because some states make it WAAYYY to hard to sell your own produce. Here in Japan its very easy for farmers to just sell their own stuff in their own lil "store" . Where you can just drop the coins for the produce in a slot and the money nor the produce is stolen.
> "It's a feature you support - for people who want to buy or support open source" That's the thing, _nobody wants to buy or support open source._ If they did, then open source projects wouldn't universally struggle to get any kind of funding. But the truth is, nobody--FOSS advocates included--actually care about "freedom" or "being principled", they simply don't want to pay for anything. Hence selling open source software is virtually impossible, and donations aren't enough to be sustainable. And of course, companies are under no obligation to compensate developers either. Thus, if you want to make money, or be compensated for the use of your work, it can't be open source.
@@RunePonyRamblings You are missing the point here, while FOSS is free, the whole point doesn't stop there. You can find a software that you find useful, and thanks to the libre license, you can modify it and adapt it to other users (for example, porting it to another OS or programming language) THIS is what makes FOSS great besides of getting free stuff. You can have something for free, but you are forced to use it under restricting conditions to get it free.
@@RunePonyRamblings And another important thing you're missing. When your software is free, you're including people who CAN'T PAY IN ANY WAY to your userbase (m inors, people from under-developed countries, and so on) and *this is the actual main reason FOSS projects are not getting that much money* because the users can't afford stuff in the first place (technology in general is cheap enough to include poor people as users) And remember, half of humanity have less than $5,50 per day.
I think it should be important to know a natural person and a legal entity (legal person) must have different rights over the software they use because the two entities are no longer comparable.
It sounds like a lot of problems would be solved if the development teams used licenses that required some fractional % of kickback from corporate users making over x amount on a product/service using their tool
I'm not sure how you would manage that with forks of software, especially in cases where the original project has died. And it's bad enough how much Google controls Android, Chromium, etc I don't want to imagine how much worse OSS would be if it normal to monetise it.
I agree on the fairness aspect. Getting the company more revenue share isn't "getting the money back to people actually working it" to me. The issue of Amazon exploiting the value in the OpenSource commons is just yet another case of explotation, just like how they exploit the value of their employees *shrug*
My main problem with open source software has always been the lack of documentation, the lack of user friendliness and the lack of UX standardization. People who make open source software are mostly concerned with making it work. There's often not a lot of focus on the end user experience. Software devs make the software work, then they move on. There is a tinker-heavy aspect to most open source software. Engineers often have little trouble with this, they're used to dealing with software in that way. This is why open source software is far more successful in engineering-oriented communities.
@@rossmckechnie4491 Easy examples are OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and GIMP. Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Gmail, and Photoshop have much more active communities to cover any documentation holes than their open source counterparts which is ultimately the reason any software (proprietary included) loses. People need to get answer to how to solve their problems, either intuitively or by asking the community.
@@rossmckechnie4491 GIMP only recently started to become a viable option, believe me, been using it since '96 or so and it was a horror for many MANY years. I concur with @propaneWP 's statement in general, most OSS devs scratch the itch, solve the isssue, and move on to other things for either getting the dopamine hit or making life easier. Documentation, consistency, refining, and polishing are not usually on the list of "important attributes" for such developers ( IAAOSSD ).
The thing is, Vim or other "small" tools like this, are already making money for their developers, simply because they use it daily to work more productively at their jobs. When it comes to enterprise-grade software, that's when Open Source should be a more open term, I think SSPL for instance, should be considered Open Source.
"Why hasn't open source won" Meanwhile Rossman saying that Grayjay is only source available because thats actually better for users since if it was open source people could make fake apps and inject malware into them : "yeah I got no idea"
I said that's why FUTO chose to do it. If it were up to me, it would be GPL or something. I own Rossmann Repair Group, and direct Repair Preservation Group. I work for FUTO. There is a difference.
@@rossmanngroup "I didn't say the dishonest thing, I just explained the dishonest reasoning and never corrected it or said it was wrong" In your videos you repeatedly conflated licensing and trademark, implied/stated that open source allows for trojans because anyone could fork the project and put malware in it and it couldn't be stopped via legal means since it was openly licensed and intentionally talked around the issue to avoid ever mentioning the obvious fallacious logic involved there. What license it's under is irrelevant, people have every right to use shitty, locked down, spyware infested POS software if they want to. The issue is the willful misinformation you used to cover up the contradiction between supposedly pro-user goals and licensing which explicitly denies users the right to fork the software if the original developers decide to fuck them over. (Cough cough "please link your PSN account") Choosing a restrictive license is your choice as a developer. Lying to your audience to convince them it's actually better and safer for them if the software is not open source is intentional deception. It could be entirely proprietary and it wouldn't matter to me because I have no intention of using it but you willingly misinformed your audience by conflating entirely different things and implying open source is less safe, and that *was* your choice to make. You never even had to mention what license it was under but made the intentional choice to do so and chose to do so dishonestly. That was no-one else's choice, it was yours.
Source available is great for auditability, but its less a repairable and less user respecting form of software than FOSS. It's giving you the schematics but still slapping you with a law suite if you tried to actually fix it yourself.
"They should be happy that we're trying to join them, but if they're just gonna get upset I don't know what to do!" Ah yes, we really need your gracious presence barging in and asserting that your way is better than what we've valued for decades. We ought to humbly bow before you, the mighty Open Source Savior.
5:47 euh.. source-available says nothing about the software you are running. It's called a binary for a reason. So unless you do reproducible builds, so people know the software they are running is from the same source, you aren't actually proving anything. It's obviously a big step forward, but an important part is missing.
I guess the concept of Copyleft is lost on you guys. Linux and Opensource Software has won, not lost. If Facebook builds a billion dollar company on it without donating to the gnu project, it sucks, but it is not illegal, and should not be. The point is, everybody can use Gnu software, including bad actors, governments and even you.
Copyleft is the libertarian dream. No amount of restriction or authority can withhold it from anyone. The only restriction is against the restriction itself.
Infrastructure projects can attract funding from companies who produce applications, end user applications have a harder time. This is why we can have solid open source database but open source applications can miss a tonne of features.
Public Mindset: "Free software is inferior" "That's for poor people" "I only use the best" "The default option is default because it's the best" "open source is for basement dwellers with nothing better to do"
7:47 I don't understand this definition of success. Adoption and use = success? I think that the developers (note that I said developers, not investors) getting rich is the most reasonable measure of success that could be applied to a software project, since a software project is the WORK OF DEVELOPERS. This is one issue I see with the "open source community" at large. I think it's entitled and self-righteous to suggest that adoption is a higher measure of success than compensation.
If your concept of success is just getting rich, there's something wrong. People can be rich with doing useless stuff, scamming/screwing customers, corruption, nepotism, and so on. A software is valuable because of it's adoption (people care what you do, people need you). and you make influence over other software because of the adoption. Windows is the monopolic OS we know today because of ADOPTION, not money.
The true power in software is adoption here, not money. That's why they care more about adoption. (Because you can make influence over other software thanks to such adoption). Windows has the power we know today thanks to adoption.
@@derp2397 I don't know what power you are talking about. Why should a developer care about what runs on a user's computer? Maybe on an abstract theoretical level it is nice to have opinions on how the world should be, but those are not important compared to actually meaningful things like compensation for hard work.
@@mysterium364 I think you don't understand the actual motives to do FOSS. When you're doing FOSS, you're doing something useful **for you** not for anyone else. And this is why developers do not feel that bad when there's no that much money back. They enjoy programming, specially software that they care to develop. Getting money is a nice thing, but the actual reward most of the time is to be able to use the result of your hard work. Because when you're working for someone else, only money can be the reward.
For example, people develop VLC because *they want to*, is not a commission from someone else, or an activity that you are obliged to do against your will, such as what happens in a job. Also people do FOSS when they are learning to code, and the feedback or suggestions are a good exercises for that skill, and more details.
Also training AI on opensource is essentially license avoidace! At least for now you cannot prompt ChatGPT "build me but do not use any code from its repo"... But for how long
I invented and designed the hammer, and now this big company used my hammer to build their building they make billions in! Without my hammer they couldn't have done it, so where is my cut? Why are my values not reflected in the company? Where is my ownership of the company?
All those important open source projects worked on by one or two people.. if the companies wanted, they can just 'donate' an annual salary. But they don't. FUTO has the money to do it. But it doesn't. It's really simple why. They want their control. That's why open source can't 'win'. The people with money no matter how good the intention, always want control. And that's the opposite of open source and giving the control to everyone else even the competition. It's human nature.
What FUTO is trying to do is the logical thing that should have been done from the very beginning. Giving away control of the source just because it is open has ALWAYS been REALLY REALLY REALLY stupid. Long live FUTO and open source!
Source available is also not Open source. Because you can't modify it. FOSS is a bit more restrictive in that it ensures someone who has modified it most also publish their modifications.
@@KManAbout and if someone mods the software, and publishes it, of course they have to publish the changes. There's absolutely nothing restrictive about it. If you want to keep the changes private, and not publish, you are well within your rights to do so. But if you publish modifications to open source, then those changes by right, should be made public. If you're going to contribute the community, then you should abide by the rules of the community. I know that might not entirely make sense. But I'd gather you've not taken the time to read an open source license. I'd start with gpl if I were you.
Open source plays the game at a different time scale. A closed source app will die with a company or a dev. An open source app never dies, it can be picked up again in x years and start porting it and maintaining it etc. Closed source app are build to die and be replaced. Open source is build to last, to learn from, to iterate upon.
"Closed source" only truly lives at the event horizon of innovation. For projects that are not innovative, closed source leach off of the fear and ignorance of its customer base. If open source providers could organize in such a way that they could sell indemnification... they would win every day of the week.
The thing about game engines and how they are licensed: I bet they also use tons of open source libraries, like at least libjpeg, libpng, and maybe curl. Some embed open source scripting languages. So the not paying the libraries you use might still happen there (do the game engines donate to the open source projects they are using?), there is just that abstraction layer in between.
How is that an abstraction layer? The transfer of money there is real. Just because there's multiple layers to the software and the other layers aren't reflective of money going to those who did the work doesn't mean that at this particular layer where money is being distributed when work is done just geos away and didn't happen. If it can happen at one layer, it could happen at others.
@@Elrog3 I don't understand your comment (maybe a language barrier thing). To rephrase: If the game engine uses an open source library and the game developer uses a game engine and pays the game engine they might not even know all the open source libraries used by the game engine and those libraries most likely don't get donations by the game engine developers or game developers. In that way the game engine is an abstraction layer.
@@blenderpanzi The library developers wouldn't be paid by the game developers anyway because they made the library free to use. They don't have the monetization model that the game engines do.
@@Elrog3 They mentioned game engines as something separate from open source. Saying how they are licensed and make money. Ignoring that those profit off of open source libraries. If these open source libraries wouldn't exist, would these game engines exist (in the form/for the price they do now)? That's my point. You can't say, "Look how we're doing it, why isn't open source doing it like that?", while profiting from open source without donating anything to it.
@@blenderpanzi What do you mean the game engine wouldn't exist if the open source libraries didn't exist? Why is it not possible that game engines could pay to use the libraries they use? Sure, they may not be the same price. They would still exist.
Another big factor is Cloud. Big cloud just uses FOSS, changes it with proprietary modifications and there is nothing you can do about it, other than building your own cloud to compete with Amazon, Google Microsoft (good luck).
Eh.. software freedom in one breath and then restricting what the users can do based on the whim of the programmer in the next breath. Stick to traditional licenses like GPL and MIT.
This! I would hate to see code I released freely be used by a dictatorship to spy on and harm their citizens. But I accept the possibility that this may happen. When you release something into the world, it stops being yours.
The solution to getting open source right is extreme copyleft licenses like the GNU Affero GPL v3 or later, the cryptographic autonomy license 1.0 or later or the Open Software License 3.0 or later. The or later part is important because the licenses will need to be updated from time to time to address new threats to freedom as tyrants find new ways to follow the letter of the license while denying the freedom these licenses are intended to protect. The Apache style licenses may yield more adoption or more money, but relying on the goodness of humans while providing the option to choose to be evil is not a winning strategy.
Why would I pick peertube when it has no network effect? That’s really the reason any software loses, there’s nothing to drive people to it. The best software, open source or not, has a network to show people how to solve their problems. What problem does peertube or Vimeo or Dailymotion solve for me that UA-cam doesn’t do better? TikTok combined good recommendations with short videos, Twitch had a good livestream experience. What does peertube do to earn its place other than “I’m not UA-cam and I’m FOSS”?
We need to do a better job in terms of measuring the health of a FOSS project (or any software product) in sustainability and companies need to held liable for consequences of relying on unsustainable projects. If a project has CVEs and you get hacked using those CVEs and give attackers access to say customer data. That shouldn't be a surprise, they should be held liable nearly automatically for the damages caused to their users.
Whilst this would artificially inflate jobs in my field, it is very difficult to achieve such a result - take a list of every single software in use, and research dependent softwares, and once you finally run out of dependencies to add, start searching for matching CVEs. It's why vulnerability scans are performed bi-annually as a rule of thumb - PCI DSS requires only an annual audit, and the landscape can shift gigantically in a year.
@@flyingturret208thecannon5 It's odd in my field the push for SLSA 3 complaice (SBOMs and the works) plus using things like Neuvector to enforce realtime software complaince on the server stack at least seems to be the norm. Only getting a biannual vul scan seems nuts to me. 6 months of having no idea what the current CVEs that could be exploited on your system.
If the source code of a software is available, it means it's open-source. Those who argue otherwise are often the same individuals who want all software to be free, so they don't have to pay for it.
Well, but if the currently successful open source software demanded a fee, maybe it will get rewritten rather than forked, and maybe the rewrite would be very similar to the original with none of the credit and way more hazzle
Because you keep calling it open source, a term coined by the controlled mainstream that removes the ethical issues pointed from free software. You never acknowledge this, too, and call us pedantic, when in fact it's the reason why it never seems to take off, because you keep owning the mistakes that keep it from growing, but never go past that.
You should get Brian Lunduke on this panel to represent the sane FOSS viewpoint. There was a decided lack of that viewpoint, and several strawmen thrown up by the guy on the right, who I'm going to guess is the CEO of Futo, which is incredibly disappointing if true.
futo is trying to disguise itself as an open source company, but with this video I've realized they're really not. Those weird licenses they use, might aswell make it closed source since it doesn't matter anyway. Grayjay is just source available, not true open source. I can't fork it, I cant make money with it. So don't try to act like you guys are open source since its not.
Because Big Tech can buy their way into controlling FOS like MS did with the Linux Foundation. Meanwhile most of Big Tech figured out that they could use open source as a shortcut without really having to contribute.
lol, they actually control a lot of the OSS stuff. Chromium -> In control of Google and a little Microsoft. Kubernetes -> All the cloud provider have their people in it. Originally Google project.
This panel was... disappointing. When I first heard about FUTO I was pretty excited, but what you guys are advocating for here is not free or open source software at all. Your justification of "Facebook used free software and kept all the money" makes as much sense as "Facebook wrote their code in C and didn't give half their money to Dennis Ritchie". Free software developers aren't naive, they tend to understand what their chosen license means, and choose it specifically from a list of many options because it most closely matches their personal ideals. The "four freedoms" can be separated, that's called proprietary software. Preventing folks from redistributing their modified versions of your software because they might add malware and sell it in a shop in India, that's just some weirdly racist FUD. And you full skip over one of the most important aspects of FOSS, the ability to fork: ua-cam.com/video/m1Ay7rgRsUw/v-deo.html If you're going to make proprietary software, that's great and lots of people do and are successful. Just don't try to confuse people into thinking its FOSS or "even better than FOSS".
I swear that sometimes people opt to write OSS with some strange subconscious notion that the world will support them financially because of that ( I write a lot of OSS but I most definitely have commercial developments too, because apparently I have to pay money for some things ).
Casey seem to miss something regarding "lack of ownership" around 16 minutes; and the case Nick makes is even stronger. The reason permissive licenses (like BSD/MIT, Apache, and GPLv2 for Linux) have won is that very few large organizations (commercial or otherwise) would consider building on software with conditions that really limit what they can do; _and_ similarly they will not let their employees contribute to such projects - or to a project that they cannot use free of charge (all the CLA stuff). And most large Open Source projects wouldn't work without that backing.
> And most large Open Source projects wouldn't work without that backing. This is a conjecture. Linux is doing just fine. Blender is doing just fine. VLC is doing just fine. Samba is doing just fine. My conjecture is that if people stopped volunteering their effort writing software under permissive licenses, companies would have no choice but to start using GPL software.
@@mina86 You are using Linux as an example, however, Linux deliberately use the more permissive GPLv2 instead of GPLv3 for exactly this reason. It also depends on the project - Blender being GPL doesn't impact the copyright of generated artwork - so, someone could build an animation studio using Blender without paying a cent, or contributing anything (they still mostly use Maya). Same as AWS building on Linux etc without having to pay (however, AWS contribute to the Open Source Linux-ecosystem - under permissive licenses, ofc).
@@hansolsson874, calling GPLv2 more permissive than GPLv3 is simply not true. There are some differences between the licenses but they largely impose the same restrictions: if you release binaries you have to also release the source code. If you look closely you can point at some permissions that GPLv2 gives you that GPLv3 doesn’t, but for any one of those you can find something which goes in the other direction. I gave examples of four very different GPL projects which all are doing fine. One is a kernel. One is a creative tool for making artwork. One is a tool which just plays video files. And one is implementation of a file sharing protocol. If such collection of projects don’t need to resort to appeasing corporations by using permissive license, what does that need actually depend on?
@@hansolsson874, GPLv3 isn’t more permissive than GPLv3. On high level the licenses are equivalent. If you look closely you can find points where GPLv2 is more lenient but you can also find points in the opposite direction. I’ve given four different examples. A general purpose operating system kernel, a tool for creating art, a tool which plays files and implementation of a file sharing protocol. None of them needed permissive licenses or corporate backing to function. So what exactly does ‘it also depends’?
@@mina86 ua-cam.com/video/PaKIZ7gJlRU/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TFiR Linus explains why he thinks that GPLv3 adds restrictions that he doesn't want, i.e. he considers it less permissive; and thus he opted not to use it.
I suspect that if people really got paid for their open source code / projects “properly”, it would probably be much pressure to be held responsible for if the code/project caused damage for the ones using it.
server side, maybe, but for users? Not so much. Even assuming you go through the effort of installing Linux on your computer, which almost certainly came with windows pre-installed, chances are you're going to have to use a bunch of binary blobs if bluetooth and wifi are important to you. Then, if you want to engage in non-technical online communities, you have to run non-free software on your machine - yes, the javascript that makes this website work counts. Open source winning would look like open source operating systems being installed by default onto machines that are built without the need for binary blobs and are sold basically anywhere you might go to buy a laptop. It does not look like the overwhelming majority of mobile devices being locked into walled gardens and Windows having 90+% of the desktop market share.
Talk about a moot conversation. Open Source is a gigantic industry that serves and is part of big tech. What failed is Free Software as a way to liberate users from big tech, completely coopted by Open Source.
I think we should come up with an strategy: Talk to engineers in Big Tech to map from which Open Source projects their companies(current or former) leech the most from. Then create a taskforce to categorise them by precariousness of repo/developer's situation (basically try and find out all "XZ" instances). Finally we brainstorm regarding how to extract CASH/GRANA/PLATA/FLOCKEN from those bloody executives. And bring their employees to the light. It'd still be an unjust deal for the developers, but IMO it'd be a step forward....
Success can mean different things. If the code I wrote is in every piece of hardware in the world but I'm not making any money from it, that's not success.
If sony can install rootkits to keep people from ripping cds they own I don't see why people profiting off of someone else's work can't pay a cut to them.
I work in a small firm that writes driver code. Open source is a blessing and a curse but more of the latter. The work you have to do to avoid your code being infected with GPL is significant. If our code gets bitten by sharealike licensing we cant sell it and we go bankerupt. The driver version of the call to get the system time was recently replaced with a call covered by GPL. Just getting the time of day without getting infected has become a problem.
Then it's clear that you're using open source wrong, and perhaps don't understand the open source ethos. The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that the software is community owned. You're allowed to earn profit off the use of GPL licensed code, but you're not allowed to modify it and deny the community the chance to inspect what your code is doing. The recipients of your modified GPL code have the same rights as you, to access the source and be able to examine its workings. Meanwhile, what you want to do is take the result of years of effort from the FOSS community, benefit from the fact you don't have to write all of that "base layer stuff" yourself, but then not honour the agreement you made when you incorporated that FOSS code into your own work. I'm sorry, but that's not how it works. You're perfectly in your right to write closed source software, there's nothing wrong with that, but it means that you'll have to either write _everything_ yourself instead of mooching off of somebody else's efforts, or find solutions with a more compatible license, such as MIT or BSD. But if nothing exists with the correct licensing terms, then yes, you need to build your own. Just like you'd have had to had FOSS never existed.
@@TheJimNicholsonYeah I suspect that too... People don't understand the licenses at all. They do get very confusing though, but there are explanations.. Lawyers are probably just too lazy to bother. Typical corporate lawyers just say no to everything as if that's their job. Using an external function to get the time shouldn't "poison" a closed source project, unless by "poison" they mean being forced to include a notice that they implement some GPL code in their project. It wouldn't require them providing the driver source code just because they use some GPL code. Unless they modified the get time function... Which seems unlikely. And even if they did, they would just have to share their modified get time not their entire code base. There's pretty clear definitions of what constitutes modifying the original code base vs using it in your project.
you claim the values of the authors weren't reflected in facebook... but the authors licensed their software *so that* commercial use was allowed. Their values were thus *perfectly* reflected.
heh i wanted to know how you're doing purchases-wise when it comes to selling software while you're providing the complete source code for free, so i searched for "does grayjay make money?" and found someone's rant on how it's not "open source".. sure he's probably technically correct, but to me open source just means the source is right there in the open. maybe it doesn't fully meet the definition, but it fully meets my expectation
The OSI (Open Source Initiative) coined the term FOSS with a meaning, and Stallman prefers FLOSS as it has a clearer meaning. FOSS - Free Open Source Software FLOSS - Free/Libre Open Source Software If a project is FLOSS depends on the license, development and components. For example AOSP (Android Open Source Project) is considered "Source Available" because it has binary blobs and mostly doesn't accept contributions from people outside of Google; the source is partially not fully Free/Libre Open Source. Grayjay's license (FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE) isn't FLOSS because it violates the definition, and so it's only Source Available.
Ugh, open source is never free. I wish people would not referred to it that way. It most often is maintained by individuals who donate their time and energy as a hobby and not professionally.
I don't know how I feel about this, clearly out of touch, panel. Like where are the beards? You CANNOT talk about OSS seriously without beards.... It's in the manual!!
"Why hasn't open source won?" This is a nonsense question. If "winning" means eliminating closed source, then why would you want that? If I write a program, compile it, and distribute the binary, you have exactly zero right to the source code unless I choose to share it. I owe you nothing, exactly as it should be. If "winning" means getting everything you want for free, then you're living in a dream world. We tried communism. It didn't work. If the complaint is that some programmers shared their code and then regretted it because they didn't like what somebody else did with it, then... stop doing that, I guess? Open source has "won" in the sense that it exists and it's useful. What more do you want?
Winning means the open source solution works, does a good job, and is simple to install/implement. It means finishing the last 15% that turns a cool idea into a project that people I know would want to use rather than resorting to closed source software that "just works"
I don't like the direction Mozilla has taken, but Firefox is still pretty much the only alternative to Chromium, which I don't want to use. So. What's your alternative?
Fact remains, you are NOT open source but seem to want to be. How ? By redefining what open source is. The open source people and supporters don't want to redefine and don't want/cant to include you as you stand. Simple, what's the problem again? Ohhh ok, I get it, you want to be, but can't. Do call yourself futo sourced, please! Great, everyone is ok with that, just do it! But don't try to hijack open source. You are rattling at the wrong tree and creating a negative image, mostly for yourself. You are NOT open source.
Well, there are several problems with open source and why it never will win. The most prominent problem is just the tradegy of commons. As old as humans are. Second, open source people keep fighting fights that already have been lost. Mobile OS? Lost, don't even try. Social media? Give it up, people won't switch to Mastodon etc. It's cute, but no one cares. I am with him on AI. That's something open source people should focus on. DLT, IoT and AI are still fight you could win. But I am pretty pessimistic about this, since people keep pouring money into things that can't be won. As much as people say they care about privacy, the way the majority acts though speaks volumes. Pick the right fights.
I like your point. But that is only IF OSS is a community acting together and not mash of people acting selfishly... For those who do want to act as a community thanklessly improving the future, I think your assessment of where that should be done is right. The way people pour resources into areas when it's too late suggests it's not as much a community. People put resources now into social media because it is already successful. The value is obvious now, so people want to take it. Linux is a rare exception where a group saw that OSs WOULD be a critical future technology, even though they weren't yet, and instead of starting a competitor to MS they decided the world would be better if it was open source. And they were right, the world is much better due to linux. Yet no one turns around and gives the hundreds of billions of dollars in value created through increased innovation and technology advancement back to those early creators. Linus would be Jeff Bezos if that was the case. Along with many other contributors of course. But ironically if they had just made another MS competitor company the world would just be set back decades in tech. Imagine how bad smart phones would still be. They probably wouldn't have reached today's tech levels until the 40s. I'm digressing... The point is, it's unfortunately rare and takes a small group of especially talented people to pioneer an area and securely claim it for OSS, giving up on receiving any compensation. But all of society benefits with compound interest on their investmemt. This is really only something that people do when their society is self loving and giving, so they don't feel a need to take "what's theirs". Not the way many countries are (including the US) now, fractured and self hating. Sub-societies like the hacker community and programmers may be an exception still, hopefully, but the anti-community pure/anarcho-capitalist mindset has become very pervasive. You can see why it's more common that people are drawn to try to claim areas that are already "lost" as you say - because at that point the value has become obvious.
@@craigslist6988 "But the anti-community pure/anarcho-capitalist mindset has become very pervasive" I don't think you *quite* understand what anarcho-capitalism is. I know I don't agree with anarcho-capitalism - I'm more min-archist myself. Your choice of words there seems to be a red herring to me.
I think you don't actually use linux. systemd sleep and hibernate work fine for me. Bluetooth works perfectly for me. Remote desktop in linux works. There are problems with it you can complain about but a) there are solutions to any problem you name, they just aren't as easy to implement as windows RDP. But they also aren't a security hole big enough to fit yo momma through... And b) the problems will be entirely gone in at most a few years with Wayland replacing X11. The crazy thing is how long the list of things you cannot do with windows is, yet somehow the comparison you make is only ever one way. Because you don't use linux.
You mean the zionist lobby? That's probably partially true in the realm of tech censorship, especially as it regards speech on Israel-Palestine, Zionist ethnocentrism, the history of communism, German WWII history, etc. on most platforms save Twitter.
Never thought I'd see Casey and Louis on the same panel, but it makes so much sense now that I think about it.
Legends are present.
Indeed
Exactly what I was thinking. Two people I have known independently for somewhat different things.
Great Duo to have a talk about this
I am not sure if i remember correctly - are they in conflict or the guy from Google Pixel s-phone was somebody else?
My issue with the source-available model is the lack of standard source-available licenses that include a "poison-pill" (or inverse poison-pill) that would automatically make the code FOSS if the company fails. In the current scenario where we lack these standards it is really up to individual licensors to make good licenses. For example if I were to license a server-side library that does annual licensing (so subscription model) it usually implies that I can continue using it as long as I continue paying. If the company folds and the license lacked that kind of clause I would be unable to continue using it legally despite the source being available to me.
Licenses that don't reflect work done aren't great to begin with, and I think we see far too many of them. And a library is software where programmers would eventually heavily desire to modify the source, should they need to, once they've strongly coupled with it. If the license includes "you can modify, but only in (and/or not in) these specific ways these specific ways", then how does that problem persist? I think there's much harder use-cases than libraries though. I have the intuition that the more upkeep a service fundamentally requires, the harder it has potential to hit the customers if it went bankrupt.
I feel like blender should be mentioned in these conversations more. It is an extremely niche software specifically for 3d modelling and rendering. It isn't something most people would touch. It is not a web browser or operating system that everyone needs, but they still get major amounts of funding despite being fully open-source. OBS too!
Rossman I think has a really interesting point that isn't covered very often. My opinion Non-profit, volunteer/programmer community driven is awesome for technical excellence, but customer driven is where you get that polish, usability, utility, and design.
Non-profit, volunteer/programmer community is why products are shipped to users so fast as they are. Programmers like Casey are a very tiny fraction of programmers who don't need to be handheld by OS.
Rossman and Muratori on one stage!? What a delight!
The organizer of this panel looks like he's in the witness protection program.
Great conversation here.
Hilarious
Louis, you can't just do the little foot dances like you're behind a table, Casey is getting distracted :D
Never mind the crazy look like you haven't slept for two days
what years of leaded solder and flux fumes exposure do
nearly continuous use of power hands mudra. what a babe.
not to be a party pooper but these "we just need to figure out how we get financial power over foss" has literally been the central issue since the 90s and no one has solved it because it's probably intractable.
The main problem is you have entire billion dollar companies and trillion dollar governments who do everything they can to destroy FOSS and hacker culture.
Ex. Bill Gates war on hacker culture, U.S. Govt vs Aaron Swartz, Lessig 2016, Late Stage Capitalism existing, etc.
The censorship and propaganda is so bad, and the corporate control of government so complete, that idiocracy has become a movie about a more functional and intelligent society than the current one (at least in the USA).
The problem is treating ideas and information as proprietary in the first place, and seeking power over how they are used.
I feel like they are missing the point of open source. A developer being able to stop a lazy repackaging and monetization of their software is one thing, but a developer dictating how their software is used makes it worse than proprietary software. I think there is this tension in open source that people dislike when others make money off of their project, but fail to understand that people used their project because it was free and open. Amazon would probably build their system with windows if linux had demanded the power to be checked on their business decisions. Linux became so popular and gain so much support because it was true free software. Also Linus claiming the right to make all the decisions of how Linux was used would be unfair to the huge amount of work everyone else did. I don't have a problem with the source available monetization route, but I don't think it should be treated as a universal solution to open sources woes.
Yeah I think they are to some degree, but in a sense developer is "dicatating" how software should be used via licences. The whole point of "Free and Open Source" is , well, to be free and open source and "payments" are supposed to be in a form of contribution to the project, but they are not inclusive. However, some financial support for the developer would defnitely be beneficial as they would have more resources to continue working on the project and delivering good software.
" I think there is this tension in open source that people dislike when others make money off of their project, but fail to understand that people used their project because it was free and open."
Probably wouldn't be such a conflict, if Amazon etc. would actually contribute financially. On the other hand, why didn't they just use their software to make money?
@@PhilippBlum Why should they make financial contribution?
@@melongrasp They use it, they have the money.
@@PhilippBlum Then defies the whole purpose of "Free and Open Source".
0:23 if someone who is Gen z is watching a privacy focused technology conference they know what the patriot act is. and it's still in effect, it wasn't just an issue back then, it still is now.
Realistically, unless someone's paying your bills then it's always going to be a major uphill battle to get OSS to "win", that said, it has won in many ways and places, just not really on the end-user application space.
You also have the issue that if you licence your software under BSD/MIT/X11 type permissive licence, then it's likely it can be legally commercialised, particularly if the major contributor of the source decides to do it ( yes, I did this ); conversely, if you go GPL type licences then majority of commercial development won't touch it with a 10ft pole.
Best two development scenarios I've seen for open source is when someone is working in a company that uses the software and the company overall doesn't really see the software as being specifically important to their income or giving their competitors an equal footing.
... or ... the person is doing it as a development of passion in the hopes that they'll be able to use it as an example of their talents for a future job, and something is paying their bills.
It's just the tragedy of commons. People won't pay for it. Just look at what happened to Redis. People went against Redis, not Amazon.
"not really on the end-user application space"
you must've meant something else
the fact that there's more and more people using Linux as a daily driver is a clear indicator of the success.
And on Windows there's plenty of OSS: VLC, Firefox, Chrome, WinSCP, VSCode, Powershell, Calibre, KeePassXC, WinDjView, SumatraPDF, Bittorrent, Audacity, and much more
@@the_original_dude yes, there's numerous good products available for linux ( often cross-platform ) but overall, the big trouble with a lot of OSS projects is that developers work on what they *like* working on and they leave that last 5% of refinement for "someone else", which results in a lot of projects that have great potential but don't get that last bit of polish required to push them in to the "completed product" status.
The last 5% isn't fun, it's just doing things like maintaining consistency, writing documentation, getting consistent UI naming & behaviours, cleaning up small bugs, streamlining annoying little processes, and it takes a long time; it's stuff that as a developer you don't really do because once you've made a product that "works enough" to satisfy your itch/requirement there's no compelling reason to keep pushing ahead. Throw in that because a lot of projects are single-person-shows you also get a massive blowback from hurt egos if you make/recommend changes/improvements because for many it's their *artwork creation*.
Been doing OSS since before it was called OSS and Linus hadn't even started with linux. Linux is fantastic, I use it as my daily, have since mid 90's, but as a general rule OSS projects lack the final polish because it's a boring process, frequently requiring financial push and help from outside to move it in to the general consumer world.
@@pldaniels the general mass of of projects isn't meant to be polished.
Just because it's an end-user app, doesn't mean it's supposed to be polished.
There aren't many kinds of apps that are widely used.
So it's gonna be the most popular that gain traction to become a finished product.
And it happens because there are more people who choose to enhance something they like/need -- basic probability.
And the same kind of thing happens with commercial software.
The more users there are, the more polished and full-featured the app will be.
@@the_original_dude you still have to achieve a level of polish to get a foothold unless your project is truly unique or exceptionally ground breaking that it compels people to climb over the usability issues.
By default;
* If a project doesn't build/run out of the box for me these days then I pretty much throw it to the bin.
* If a project needs me to setup things manually before I can get it even to start/run, it goes in the bin.
* If I have to spend more than 30 minutes to try find out how to get something to work, in to the bin.
...and general end-users are going to be somewhat more intolerant.
There *are* some circumstances where you push harder, ie, exotic piece of hardware that you're trying to get to work right and you have to manually build the driver, or say if you step to a newer kernel and the API's changed so you have to do some tweaking to get the build to work again, of if you yourself are invested in a project and you're adding features that you want.
The important thing is, there's a distinction between people who just want to run the software as an appliance and have it do its job, and there's people who can/will tweak; the fomer's acceptance determines if the project is popular/successful ultimately.
Consider the LAMP stack, prior to it being pretty much a turn-key and/or default install the take up was "strong" among techs but limited beyond that. Ubuntu, as much as people pooh-pooh it because it's popular, it's popular because again, it's about the most polished offering of the linux distros.
Polish is needed to expand popularity/traction and developers suck at it in general, or those who would be good at it are terrible developers and generally never get their project even close to being finished (or they kill somene elses's) because they're still stuck on determining how they're going to organise the development and what colour of blue to use for the logo.
Big rule in sales - don't present a prototype/half-finished product to customers, because they will stump their toe on every damned issue and it'll kill your sale(s).
Stallman is a living example of 100% commitment.
Considering that Stallman uses the Internet effectively by post, and has a rather dated take on what computers are used for today. He was a revolutionary, sure. But he has passed the visionary stage and gone towards the crackpot stage.
@@Ornithopter470 crackpot? in what way?, can you be specific.
@@deckard5pegasus673 he's historically had some very, very problematic takes on social issues, his focus on foss software has gone past the visionary state. He hasn't really kept up with new technologies except to comment on how they aren't good for users, even when said users generally tend to prefer those technologies.
@@Ornithopter470 That is a very general non specific comment. What technologies is he saying aren't good? I would like to know specifics because I want to investigate it for myself. I have seen many of his interviews and really havent seen a problem in what he has said.
@@deckard5pegasus673anything to do with cloud computing and/or SaaS. Have you read his blog?
This was disappointing. When FUTO released Grayjay I felt betrayed. A lot. He was talking a whole year how is is gonna release it as an open source, and then when it was released there was that weird license.
And now this is I think a second panel discussion that I'm watching on this topic where there is not a single Open Source advocate, just those people who are echoing their opinions and not understanding FOSS points.
There were plenty of points and I don't feel like youtube comment is right place to discuss the importance of FOSS. But do you think that if MS teams, or Windows, or any other spyware was a source available it would be less intrusive and more respective to user rights? No! as long as a community or another corporation can't fork modify and resell products, it would be controlled only by bad actors and we would not have rights preserving software anyway.
And this is not the only point. But it's annoying that every time FUTO is discussing this topic you guys are just talking in this echo chamber without somebody who understands the ethical, legal, and practical implications of both Free software and Open source.
How would you resolve the very real problem of open source projects being neglected by companies/people/groups/etc that utilize them without compensating their creators?
So far, FUTO's approach has been the most practical and realistic approach to resolving the issues that many independent programmers face. It acknowledges the reality of the society it exists in, which is capitalistic, and uses it to further its own goal; which is to ensure that creators of a project are receiving proper compensation, and to ensure that those projects themselves don't die out because of some legal technicality.
It isn't an ideal solution, by definition reality is not an ideal. Don't get your nuts in a twist because some solution doesn't happen to check off every last one of your design requirements.
@@ironsquid9724 IMO the biggest issue is not neglect from companies/people/groups/etc as a whole but rather neglect by governments. Why is my tax money going to Microsoft for Windows licenses on the millions of government computers in my country when I know for a fact that the vast majority of them aren't used for anything other than running a web browser? I think many EU nations get this - which is why we see repeated attempts from them (or smaller administrative units within them) to move to FOSS. A German Bundesland (forgot which one) has just completed their pilot project for shifting almost completely to FOSS and are now rolling it out across all their departments. That should ideally lead to greater funding of FOSS projects as well and would go a long way in making the community much more feasible.
@@ironsquid9724 At no point I mention monetization nor care about it. Point it that at some point Louis started appealing to free software enthusiasts. He promised he will release grayjay as opensource. and on release day he rug pulled us.
but if you're curious about FOSS business models there are plenty:
- Redhat subscription model - They provide you with full platform, provides you with support and stuff, and you're paying monthly fees for that. The moment you decide to stop paying you'll still have a software just not access to other stuff.
- Blender - There are subscription that you can pay to gain access for models made by blender foundation + studios and companies are paying on to top to get implemented features they need to have.
- Linux foundation - companies are paying sponsorship so they would get better access to some people and features. Also selling courses and other random stuff.
- Zabbix - Selling payed support for their system
- Meta - they are releasing their infra tools as open source which makes their infra more standardized across industry, this give them later access to more engineers familiar with their tools, and also other companies are also contributing to their stack so they are saving money on development.
And even futo didn't said it's issue of money. If you look at grayjay you can always use it without paying and their model allows that. It's issue of the control. And that's a big one.
In past there were FOSS projects that community liked but then they changed their direction and just because they were FOSS we were able to fork them and fix issues. As and example you can take look at Simple Mobile tools, which were cool GPL privacy preserving cellphone apps, like for calling, messaging, calendar etc... but later author decided to put there bunch of spyware and stuff, but fortunately it was GPL license so community forked it and made it again what it was before.
@@Xankill3r Because Microsoft offers an entire integrated stack and support for it, while being a legal entity that can be held responsible. The same is not true in the FOSS world. At best you can get Canonical/Redhat/SUSE, but they cover only portions of the whole package, and good luck holding Jia Tan responsible for introducing a back door in some obscure package that nobody really checks. I don't think you realize just how incredibly lucky we got with the XZ exploit. On top of that, Microsoft's business stack is incredibly compelling. I was looking into helping a friend's company modernize and wanted to use open source solutions, but when you see the stuff you can do with the whole Office 360/Power Bi, and how well it integrates... It's not even close. We've got such a long way to go, and it seems the FOSS world is regressing more than anything, with fragmentation only increasing.
Blow is missing.
Thanks so much for the very interesting panel discussion. Some really tough problems to solve. Just wanted to shout out that I paid for FUTO voice and think it's an amazing product. It's been really accurate and a time-saver. Thanks for making these products available and keep up the great work!
These folks are running into fundamental problems with the free market economic model such as its inability to correctly allocate value to a piece of work being done. Unfortunately there aren't solutions to the problems they're discussing in this framework. This conversation has a lot of economic naïveté in it. The free market works in a lot fewer contexts than advertised. Way fewer. Wondering why it doesn't work for X or Y is useless, it's wondering why a tool that doesn't work for a job doesn't work for that job. Corporations exist to isolate their people from the free market and gain partial control over it. E.g. this one division can't possibly make money but it's fundamental to these other divisions, so we pay people in it well to do the work needed so those other divisions can make money.
Fun fact: Intellectual Property works as a Monopoly on Violence.
exactly, regulation is required to even have a chance at a functional market. without regs or with weak or wrong regs, there will be fluctuations between periods of monopolies, oligopolies, and more desirable states of many actors. i think the world, the human realm, is immensely complex because of people actually not always preferring more money, but instead often acting out of ideology or following their heart. it's difficult to eye simple strategies for proponents of liberal democratic values to follow in tech, but at least it's a relief to me to witness open and levelheaded discussions like this.
The investor on the right, who I think is monetarily powering FUTO, is missing that the power to control the technology resulting from code IS the pivotal point in the FOSS discussion, not whether the code is available.
He is trying to figure out how to keep power over the code "for good".
Information IS power, you can't release the information and keep the power. I know it's cliché but it's also fact.
It's nuanced, but 99% of the discussion about open vs closed source code is actually about power over the code, not whether you can see the code. So sure the name is misleading, but whatever you call it, it's also nearly a tautology. I'll explain..
OSS does spawn from the principle that everyone should have the right to see what they are running. But that isn't where hardly any of the controversy lies.
It's like how voters should have the right to see everything their politicians do.
Of course we should. No one (sane) should really disagree with this, in principle. The problem is that in practice it is hard to do.
I could continue that analogy, but you know what I mean. Moving back to code... If windows was all open source but MS kept the same legal power over the code that it has now, how would that be any better than our current situation with windows?
Sure we could see all the problems we know exist and complain about them, but almost no one is going to help them fix the problems for free.
MS could offer a bounty to fix problems, but bad actors can find 3rd parties to whom the exploits are much more valuable so they are more motivated to find them faster. So MS has to deal with this added threat.
And of course MS still wants to sell their software, but bad actors can pirate the software with full capability easily. MS can combat this in various ways, but there is simply no way to fully control that some piracy will happen when the code is available.
And so on. The availability of the information gives power to other actors, for good or bad.
In practice living a principled life, like being open source, adds a lot of problems that being closed source abates (not solves). And many times the only benefit for the creator is making people who are principled about open source happy.
Yes, everyone should be principled. But again, like with political transparency, in practice most people are too ignorant or busy trying to survive to care. Everyone likes the idea, but few want to pay the cost.
If you want to retain control over your software, open source is nothing but a liability to you as the creator. Or to put a positive spin on it, it's a feature you support - for people who only want to buy or support open source.
If you want open source to be more "successful" then your best bet is to boost the popularity of the principle. You won't solve all the nuanced problems created by giving away information, so you have to somehow instill in more people the demand for the principle. And when people believe more in the principle the edge problems will become easier to solve.
There is no way to completely detatch the power from the information. Open code is open power.
So I guess I would say that FOSS hasn't "won" for the same reason "good" hasn't beaten "evil", "pure" politicians haven't beaten "corrupt" politicians, honesty hasn't beaten lying, etc.
Quite similar to the "Non-GMO" & "All-natural" food movements, wouldn't you agree? At least, for the strategy of getting it widely accepted.
@@flyingturret208thecannon5 Kind of working in Europe and Japan. We at least make them label it. The problem is not enough local farmers for people that want to buy that produce at a reasonable price because some states make it WAAYYY to hard to sell your own produce. Here in Japan its very easy for farmers to just sell their own stuff in their own lil "store" . Where you can just drop the coins for the produce in a slot and the money nor the produce is stolen.
> "It's a feature you support - for people who want to buy or support open source"
That's the thing, _nobody wants to buy or support open source._ If they did, then open source projects wouldn't universally struggle to get any kind of funding.
But the truth is, nobody--FOSS advocates included--actually care about "freedom" or "being principled", they simply don't want to pay for anything. Hence selling open source software is virtually impossible, and donations aren't enough to be sustainable. And of course, companies are under no obligation to compensate developers either.
Thus, if you want to make money, or be compensated for the use of your work, it can't be open source.
@@RunePonyRamblings You are missing the point here, while FOSS is free, the whole point doesn't stop there.
You can find a software that you find useful, and thanks to the libre license, you can modify it and adapt it to other users (for example, porting it to another OS or programming language) THIS is what makes FOSS great besides of getting free stuff.
You can have something for free, but you are forced to use it under restricting conditions to get it free.
@@RunePonyRamblings And another important thing you're missing. When your software is free, you're including people who CAN'T PAY IN ANY WAY to your userbase (m inors, people from under-developed countries, and so on) and *this is the actual main reason FOSS projects are not getting that much money* because the users can't afford stuff in the first place (technology in general is cheap enough to include poor people as users)
And remember, half of humanity have less than $5,50 per day.
I think it should be important to know a natural person and a legal entity (legal person) must have different rights over the software they use because the two entities are no longer comparable.
It sounds like a lot of problems would be solved if the development teams used licenses that required some fractional % of kickback from corporate users making over x amount on a product/service using their tool
I'm not sure how you would manage that with forks of software, especially in cases where the original project has died. And it's bad enough how much Google controls Android, Chromium, etc I don't want to imagine how much worse OSS would be if it normal to monetise it.
@@thesenamesaretaken Percentage of similar code maybe
That's called a commercial license.
I agree on the fairness aspect. Getting the company more revenue share isn't "getting the money back to people actually working it" to me. The issue of Amazon exploiting the value in the OpenSource commons is just yet another case of explotation, just like how they exploit the value of their employees *shrug*
My main problem with open source software has always been the lack of documentation, the lack of user friendliness and the lack of UX standardization. People who make open source software are mostly concerned with making it work. There's often not a lot of focus on the end user experience. Software devs make the software work, then they move on. There is a tinker-heavy aspect to most open source software.
Engineers often have little trouble with this, they're used to dealing with software in that way. This is why open source software is far more successful in engineering-oriented communities.
the software Ive been using ubuntu, gimp, blender and godot have really good ui and docs. Im not sure what software you have been using?
Proprietary software often has far worse documentation, especially when it comes to libraries
@@rossmckechnie4491 Easy examples are OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and GIMP. Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Gmail, and Photoshop have much more active communities to cover any documentation holes than their open source counterparts which is ultimately the reason any software (proprietary included) loses. People need to get answer to how to solve their problems, either intuitively or by asking the community.
@@rossmckechnie4491 GIMP only recently started to become a viable option, believe me, been using it since '96 or so and it was a horror for many MANY years.
I concur with @propaneWP 's statement in general, most OSS devs scratch the itch, solve the isssue, and move on to other things for either getting the dopamine hit or making life easier. Documentation, consistency, refining, and polishing are not usually on the list of "important attributes" for such developers ( IAAOSSD ).
The thing is, Vim or other "small" tools like this, are already making money for their developers, simply because they use it daily to work more productively at their jobs. When it comes to enterprise-grade software, that's when Open Source should be a more open term, I think SSPL for instance, should be considered Open Source.
The short answer: because money.
The long answer: because money.
"Why hasn't open source won"
Meanwhile Rossman saying that Grayjay is only source available because thats actually better for users since if it was open source people could make fake apps and inject malware into them : "yeah I got no idea"
I said that's why FUTO chose to do it. If it were up to me, it would be GPL or something.
I own Rossmann Repair Group, and direct Repair Preservation Group. I work for FUTO.
There is a difference.
@@rossmanngroup "I didn't say the dishonest thing, I just explained the dishonest reasoning and never corrected it or said it was wrong"
In your videos you repeatedly conflated licensing and trademark, implied/stated that open source allows for trojans because anyone could fork the project and put malware in it and it couldn't be stopped via legal means since it was openly licensed and intentionally talked around the issue to avoid ever mentioning the obvious fallacious logic involved there.
What license it's under is irrelevant, people have every right to use shitty, locked down, spyware infested POS software if they want to. The issue is the willful misinformation you used to cover up the contradiction between supposedly pro-user goals and licensing which explicitly denies users the right to fork the software if the original developers decide to fuck them over. (Cough cough "please link your PSN account")
Choosing a restrictive license is your choice as a developer. Lying to your audience to convince them it's actually better and safer for them if the software is not open source is intentional deception. It could be entirely proprietary and it wouldn't matter to me because I have no intention of using it but you willingly misinformed your audience by conflating entirely different things and implying open source is less safe, and that *was* your choice to make. You never even had to mention what license it was under but made the intentional choice to do so and chose to do so dishonestly. That was no-one else's choice, it was yours.
Source available is great for auditability, but its less a repairable and less user respecting form of software than FOSS. It's giving you the schematics but still slapping you with a law suite if you tried to actually fix it yourself.
"They should be happy that we're trying to join them, but if they're just gonna get upset I don't know what to do!"
Ah yes, we really need your gracious presence barging in and asserting that your way is better than what we've valued for decades. We ought to humbly bow before you, the mighty Open Source Savior.
It's nice to see experts, who are also critical about Open Source talk about it.
5:47 euh.. source-available says nothing about the software you are running. It's called a binary for a reason.
So unless you do reproducible builds, so people know the software they are running is from the same source, you aren't actually proving anything.
It's obviously a big step forward, but an important part is missing.
I guess the concept of Copyleft is lost on you guys. Linux and Opensource Software has won, not lost. If Facebook builds a billion dollar company on it without donating to the gnu project, it sucks, but it is not illegal, and should not be. The point is, everybody can use Gnu software, including bad actors, governments and even you.
Copyleft is the libertarian dream. No amount of restriction or authority can withhold it from anyone. The only restriction is against the restriction itself.
@@oserodal2702 No political ideology's ideal will come to fruition, so you gotta take your W's wherever you can - true compromise.
Infrastructure projects can attract funding from companies who produce applications, end user applications have a harder time.
This is why we can have solid open source database but open source applications can miss a tonne of features.
I feel like this panel could've gone one 1-2 hours longer and they still wouldn't have run out of steam!
Be sure to redo it next time! =D
Public Mindset: "Free software is inferior" "That's for poor people" "I only use the best" "The default option is default because it's the best" "open source is for basement dwellers with nothing better to do"
7:47 I don't understand this definition of success. Adoption and use = success? I think that the developers (note that I said developers, not investors) getting rich is the most reasonable measure of success that could be applied to a software project, since a software project is the WORK OF DEVELOPERS. This is one issue I see with the "open source community" at large. I think it's entitled and self-righteous to suggest that adoption is a higher measure of success than compensation.
If your concept of success is just getting rich, there's something wrong. People can be rich with doing useless stuff, scamming/screwing customers, corruption, nepotism, and so on. A software is valuable because of it's adoption (people care what you do, people need you). and you make influence over other software because of the adoption.
Windows is the monopolic OS we know today because of ADOPTION, not money.
The true power in software is adoption here, not money. That's why they care more about adoption. (Because you can make influence over other software thanks to such adoption).
Windows has the power we know today thanks to adoption.
@@derp2397 I don't know what power you are talking about. Why should a developer care about what runs on a user's computer? Maybe on an abstract theoretical level it is nice to have opinions on how the world should be, but those are not important compared to actually meaningful things like compensation for hard work.
@@mysterium364 I think you don't understand the actual motives to do FOSS.
When you're doing FOSS, you're doing something useful **for you** not for anyone else. And this is why developers do not feel that bad when there's no that much money back. They enjoy programming, specially software that they care to develop.
Getting money is a nice thing, but the actual reward most of the time is to be able to use the result of your hard work. Because when you're working for someone else, only money can be the reward.
For example, people develop VLC because *they want to*, is not a commission from someone else, or an activity that you are obliged to do against your will, such as what happens in a job. Also people do FOSS when they are learning to code, and the feedback or suggestions are a good exercises for that skill, and more details.
Also training AI on opensource is essentially license avoidace!
At least for now you cannot prompt ChatGPT "build me but do not use any code from its repo"... But for how long
Literally all those language models do is copy/paste. If you took away that, there'd be nothing left.
Are you aware those language models can't do basic written-out math? You can ask one to add one 4 digit number to another and it will get it wrong.
I'd like to know the source of that "Any fight worth fighting never stays won" quote.
I invented and designed the hammer, and now this big company used my hammer to build their building they make billions in! Without my hammer they couldn't have done it, so where is my cut? Why are my values not reflected in the company? Where is my ownership of the company?
Pea brain analogy
@@lucasjames8281 ur mad
@@ShyStudios nein
All those important open source projects worked on by one or two people.. if the companies wanted, they can just 'donate' an annual salary. But they don't. FUTO has the money to do it. But it doesn't. It's really simple why. They want their control. That's why open source can't 'win'. The people with money no matter how good the intention, always want control. And that's the opposite of open source and giving the control to everyone else even the competition. It's human nature.
Even the people with money who donate to open source developers?
What FUTO is trying to do is the logical thing that should have been done from the very beginning. Giving away control of the source just because it is open has ALWAYS been REALLY REALLY REALLY stupid. Long live FUTO and open source!
"Source available" is not FOSS. "think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”" --Richard Stallman
Source available is also not Open source. Because you can't modify it. FOSS is a bit more restrictive in that it ensures someone who has modified it most also publish their modifications.
@@KManAbout FOSS is "Free and OPEN SOURCE Software". IE, both terms are used interchangably and mean the same thing.
@@KManAbout and if someone mods the software, and publishes it, of course they have to publish the changes. There's absolutely nothing restrictive about it. If you want to keep the changes private, and not publish, you are well within your rights to do so. But if you publish modifications to open source, then those changes by right, should be made public. If you're going to contribute the community, then you should abide by the rules of the community. I know that might not entirely make sense. But I'd gather you've not taken the time to read an open source license. I'd start with gpl if I were you.
and then compare it to nearly any modern eula
like, at least with open source, you can actually read the source. You've never done that with windows.
Open source plays the game at a different time scale.
A closed source app will die with a company or a dev.
An open source app never dies, it can be picked up again in x years and start porting it and maintaining it etc.
Closed source app are build to die and be replaced. Open source is build to last, to learn from, to iterate upon.
"Closed source" only truly lives at the event horizon of innovation. For projects that are not innovative, closed source leach off of the fear and ignorance of its customer base. If open source providers could organize in such a way that they could sell indemnification... they would win every day of the week.
The thing about game engines and how they are licensed: I bet they also use tons of open source libraries, like at least libjpeg, libpng, and maybe curl. Some embed open source scripting languages. So the not paying the libraries you use might still happen there (do the game engines donate to the open source projects they are using?), there is just that abstraction layer in between.
How is that an abstraction layer? The transfer of money there is real. Just because there's multiple layers to the software and the other layers aren't reflective of money going to those who did the work doesn't mean that at this particular layer where money is being distributed when work is done just geos away and didn't happen. If it can happen at one layer, it could happen at others.
@@Elrog3 I don't understand your comment (maybe a language barrier thing). To rephrase: If the game engine uses an open source library and the game developer uses a game engine and pays the game engine they might not even know all the open source libraries used by the game engine and those libraries most likely don't get donations by the game engine developers or game developers. In that way the game engine is an abstraction layer.
@@blenderpanzi The library developers wouldn't be paid by the game developers anyway because they made the library free to use. They don't have the monetization model that the game engines do.
@@Elrog3 They mentioned game engines as something separate from open source. Saying how they are licensed and make money. Ignoring that those profit off of open source libraries. If these open source libraries wouldn't exist, would these game engines exist (in the form/for the price they do now)? That's my point. You can't say, "Look how we're doing it, why isn't open source doing it like that?", while profiting from open source without donating anything to it.
@@blenderpanzi What do you mean the game engine wouldn't exist if the open source libraries didn't exist? Why is it not possible that game engines could pay to use the libraries they use? Sure, they may not be the same price. They would still exist.
Another big factor is Cloud. Big cloud just uses FOSS, changes it with proprietary modifications and there is nothing you can do about it, other than building your own cloud to compete with Amazon, Google Microsoft (good luck).
Louis and Casey ????? this i enjoy!!!
Surviving is winning.
What a low opinion of software
@@JollyGiant19 Very very few softwares survive after a few years. The only one that I am awary of are all open source projects.
Eh.. software freedom in one breath and then restricting what the users can do based on the whim of the programmer in the next breath. Stick to traditional licenses like GPL and MIT.
This! I would hate to see code I released freely be used by a dictatorship to spy on and harm their citizens. But I accept the possibility that this may happen. When you release something into the world, it stops being yours.
yeah agreed. MIT license, fork it if you dont like the way i approve commits
The solution to getting open source right is extreme copyleft licenses like the GNU Affero GPL v3 or later, the cryptographic autonomy license 1.0 or later or the Open Software License 3.0 or later. The or later part is important because the licenses will need to be updated from time to time to address new threats to freedom as tyrants find new ways to follow the letter of the license while denying the freedom these licenses are intended to protect. The Apache style licenses may yield more adoption or more money, but relying on the goodness of humans while providing the option to choose to be evil is not a winning strategy.
Why not just add option in to the licensing, 10% of income above certain threshold? That's logical.
Part of the problem is this video is available on UA-cam but not on peer tube.
Why would I pick peertube when it has no network effect?
That’s really the reason any software loses, there’s nothing to drive people to it. The best software, open source or not, has a network to show people how to solve their problems. What problem does peertube or Vimeo or Dailymotion solve for me that UA-cam doesn’t do better?
TikTok combined good recommendations with short videos, Twitch had a good livestream experience.
What does peertube do to earn its place other than “I’m not UA-cam and I’m FOSS”?
We need to do a better job in terms of measuring the health of a FOSS project (or any software product) in sustainability and companies need to held liable for consequences of relying on unsustainable projects. If a project has CVEs and you get hacked using those CVEs and give attackers access to say customer data. That shouldn't be a surprise, they should be held liable nearly automatically for the damages caused to their users.
Whilst this would artificially inflate jobs in my field, it is very difficult to achieve such a result - take a list of every single software in use, and research dependent softwares, and once you finally run out of dependencies to add, start searching for matching CVEs. It's why vulnerability scans are performed bi-annually as a rule of thumb - PCI DSS requires only an annual audit, and the landscape can shift gigantically in a year.
@@flyingturret208thecannon5 It's odd in my field the push for SLSA 3 complaice (SBOMs and the works) plus using things like Neuvector to enforce realtime software complaince on the server stack at least seems to be the norm.
Only getting a biannual vul scan seems nuts to me. 6 months of having no idea what the current CVEs that could be exploited on your system.
What image software is Louis referring to at 36:54 that he states is better than Google photos?
Immich
Immich*
We WERE big fans. As of this very morning, we're more than big fans: github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/9206
@@FUTOTECH Oh cool!
If the source code of a software is available, it means it's open-source. Those who argue otherwise are often the same individuals who want all software to be free, so they don't have to pay for it.
Well, but if the currently successful open source software demanded a fee, maybe it will get rewritten rather than forked, and maybe the rewrite would be very similar to the original with none of the credit and way more hazzle
Because you keep calling it open source, a term coined by the controlled mainstream that removes the ethical issues pointed from free software.
You never acknowledge this, too, and call us pedantic, when in fact it's the reason why it never seems to take off, because you keep owning the mistakes that keep it from growing, but never go past that.
Open Source has won but it's not the only winner
You should get Brian Lunduke on this panel to represent the sane FOSS viewpoint. There was a decided lack of that viewpoint, and several strawmen thrown up by the guy on the right, who I'm going to guess is the CEO of Futo, which is incredibly disappointing if true.
futo is trying to disguise itself as an open source company, but with this video I've realized they're really not. Those weird licenses they use, might aswell make it closed source since it doesn't matter anyway. Grayjay is just source available, not true open source. I can't fork it, I cant make money with it. So don't try to act like you guys are open source since its not.
Because Big Tech can buy their way into controlling FOS like MS did with the Linux Foundation. Meanwhile most of Big Tech figured out that they could use open source as a shortcut without really having to contribute.
if MS controlled the Linux Foundation we would have ReFS and SMB by now, not to mention a file explorer that isn't spaghetti code.
lol, they actually control a lot of the OSS stuff. Chromium -> In control of Google and a little Microsoft. Kubernetes -> All the cloud provider have their people in it. Originally Google project.
The thing is that they do contribute, and a lot, especially on the more critical projects.
Thanks for sharing
This panel was... disappointing. When I first heard about FUTO I was pretty excited, but what you guys are advocating for here is not free or open source software at all. Your justification of "Facebook used free software and kept all the money" makes as much sense as "Facebook wrote their code in C and didn't give half their money to Dennis Ritchie". Free software developers aren't naive, they tend to understand what their chosen license means, and choose it specifically from a list of many options because it most closely matches their personal ideals. The "four freedoms" can be separated, that's called proprietary software. Preventing folks from redistributing their modified versions of your software because they might add malware and sell it in a shop in India, that's just some weirdly racist FUD. And you full skip over one of the most important aspects of FOSS, the ability to fork: ua-cam.com/video/m1Ay7rgRsUw/v-deo.html
If you're going to make proprietary software, that's great and lots of people do and are successful. Just don't try to confuse people into thinking its FOSS or "even better than FOSS".
I swear that sometimes people opt to write OSS with some strange subconscious notion that the world will support them financially because of that ( I write a lot of OSS but I most definitely have commercial developments too, because apparently I have to pay money for some things ).
Casey seem to miss something regarding "lack of ownership" around 16 minutes; and the case Nick makes is even stronger. The reason permissive licenses (like BSD/MIT, Apache, and GPLv2 for Linux) have won is that very few large organizations (commercial or otherwise) would consider building on software with conditions that really limit what they can do; _and_ similarly they will not let their employees contribute to such projects - or to a project that they cannot use free of charge (all the CLA stuff). And most large Open Source projects wouldn't work without that backing.
> And most large Open Source projects wouldn't work without that backing.
This is a conjecture. Linux is doing just fine. Blender is doing just fine. VLC is doing just fine. Samba is doing just fine.
My conjecture is that if people stopped volunteering their effort writing software under permissive licenses, companies would have no choice but to start using GPL software.
@@mina86 You are using Linux as an example, however, Linux deliberately use the more permissive GPLv2 instead of GPLv3 for exactly this reason.
It also depends on the project - Blender being GPL doesn't impact the copyright of generated artwork - so, someone could build an animation studio using Blender without paying a cent, or contributing anything (they still mostly use Maya).
Same as AWS building on Linux etc without having to pay (however, AWS contribute to the Open Source Linux-ecosystem - under permissive licenses, ofc).
@@hansolsson874, calling GPLv2 more permissive than GPLv3 is simply not true. There are some differences between the licenses but they largely impose the same restrictions: if you release binaries you have to also release the source code. If you look closely you can point at some permissions that GPLv2 gives you that GPLv3 doesn’t, but for any one of those you can find something which goes in the other direction.
I gave examples of four very different GPL projects which all are doing fine. One is a kernel. One is a creative tool for making artwork. One is a tool which just plays video files. And one is implementation of a file sharing protocol. If such collection of projects don’t need to resort to appeasing corporations by using permissive license, what does that need actually depend on?
@@hansolsson874, GPLv3 isn’t more permissive than GPLv3. On high level the licenses are equivalent. If you look closely you can find points where GPLv2 is more lenient but you can also find points in the opposite direction.
I’ve given four different examples. A general purpose operating system kernel, a tool for creating art, a tool which plays files and implementation of a file sharing protocol. None of them needed permissive licenses or corporate backing to function. So what exactly does ‘it also depends’?
@@mina86 ua-cam.com/video/PaKIZ7gJlRU/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TFiR Linus explains why he thinks that GPLv3 adds restrictions that he doesn't want, i.e. he considers it less permissive; and thus he opted not to use it.
I suspect that if people really got paid for their open source code / projects “properly”, it would probably be much pressure to be held responsible for if the code/project caused damage for the ones using it.
Functional Source License
24:24 SaaC Software as a Currency (loan)
Open source HAS won. just everywhere - Apache2? Caddy? NGINX? Linux?
server side, maybe, but for users? Not so much. Even assuming you go through the effort of installing Linux on your computer, which almost certainly came with windows pre-installed, chances are you're going to have to use a bunch of binary blobs if bluetooth and wifi are important to you. Then, if you want to engage in non-technical online communities, you have to run non-free software on your machine - yes, the javascript that makes this website work counts.
Open source winning would look like open source operating systems being installed by default onto machines that are built without the need for binary blobs and are sold basically anywhere you might go to buy a laptop. It does not look like the overwhelming majority of mobile devices being locked into walled gardens and Windows having 90+% of the desktop market share.
That was part of my point.
Talk about a moot conversation. Open Source is a gigantic industry that serves and is part of big tech.
What failed is Free Software as a way to liberate users from big tech, completely coopted by Open Source.
I think we should come up with an strategy: Talk to engineers in Big Tech to map from which Open Source projects their companies(current or former) leech the most from. Then create a taskforce to categorise them by precariousness of repo/developer's situation (basically try and find out all "XZ" instances). Finally we brainstorm regarding how to extract CASH/GRANA/PLATA/FLOCKEN from those bloody executives. And bring their employees to the light. It'd still be an unjust deal for the developers, but IMO it'd be a step forward....
I like the FUTO-y term haha
9:00 louis is hilarious :)
Success can mean different things. If the code I wrote is in every piece of hardware in the world but I'm not making any money from it, that's not success.
Because of capitalism.
If sony can install rootkits to keep people from ripping cds they own I don't see why people profiting off of someone else's work can't pay a cut to them.
I work in a small firm that writes driver code. Open source is a blessing and a curse but more of the latter. The work you have to do to avoid your code being infected with GPL is significant. If our code gets bitten by sharealike licensing we cant sell it and we go bankerupt.
The driver version of the call to get the system time was recently replaced with a call covered by GPL. Just getting the time of day without getting infected has become a problem.
Boo hoo... A for profit corporation wants to benefit from free software without contributing back. Sorry for not feeling any sympathy.
Then it's clear that you're using open source wrong, and perhaps don't understand the open source ethos. The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that the software is community owned. You're allowed to earn profit off the use of GPL licensed code, but you're not allowed to modify it and deny the community the chance to inspect what your code is doing. The recipients of your modified GPL code have the same rights as you, to access the source and be able to examine its workings.
Meanwhile, what you want to do is take the result of years of effort from the FOSS community, benefit from the fact you don't have to write all of that "base layer stuff" yourself, but then not honour the agreement you made when you incorporated that FOSS code into your own work. I'm sorry, but that's not how it works. You're perfectly in your right to write closed source software, there's nothing wrong with that, but it means that you'll have to either write _everything_ yourself instead of mooching off of somebody else's efforts, or find solutions with a more compatible license, such as MIT or BSD. But if nothing exists with the correct licensing terms, then yes, you need to build your own. Just like you'd have had to had FOSS never existed.
It sounds like whoever is giving you legal guidance might not actually understand how the GPL works.
@@TheJimNicholsonYeah I suspect that too... People don't understand the licenses at all. They do get very confusing though, but there are explanations.. Lawyers are probably just too lazy to bother. Typical corporate lawyers just say no to everything as if that's their job.
Using an external function to get the time shouldn't "poison" a closed source project, unless by "poison" they mean being forced to include a notice that they implement some GPL code in their project. It wouldn't require them providing the driver source code just because they use some GPL code. Unless they modified the get time function... Which seems unlikely. And even if they did, they would just have to share their modified get time not their entire code base.
There's pretty clear definitions of what constitutes modifying the original code base vs using it in your project.
This is a super misleading comment. You should seek legal advice and stop bad-mouthing excellent licenses like GPL.
What does FUTO stand for?
Free something something Organisation.
@@gapho5198 Why can’t they tell us? Why?
clearly not open source, but they wanna make you think it is. Its such a weird way to go about it, kinda dissapointing and comcerning.
you claim the values of the authors weren't reflected in facebook... but the authors licensed their software *so that* commercial use was allowed. Their values were thus *perfectly* reflected.
The winning condition dictated by the previous victor
I’m a millennial let’s go anti patriot act
Open source makes this possible, commercial software makes things convenient.
Not gonna watch this since they don't start out defining their terms. I.e. What does it mean for open source to have "won" in the first place?
a billion dollars probably? 🤷♂️
heh i wanted to know how you're doing purchases-wise when it comes to selling software while you're providing the complete source code for free, so i searched for "does grayjay make money?" and found someone's rant on how it's not "open source".. sure he's probably technically correct, but to me open source just means the source is right there in the open. maybe it doesn't fully meet the definition, but it fully meets my expectation
Source Available
@@HUEHUEUHEPony could we think of a more lacklustre name for it? XD
The OSI (Open Source Initiative) coined the term FOSS with a meaning, and Stallman prefers FLOSS as it has a clearer meaning.
FOSS - Free Open Source Software
FLOSS - Free/Libre Open Source Software
If a project is FLOSS depends on the license, development and components. For example AOSP (Android Open Source Project) is considered "Source Available" because it has binary blobs and mostly doesn't accept contributions from people outside of Google; the source is partially not fully Free/Libre Open Source.
Grayjay's license (FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE) isn't FLOSS because it violates the definition, and so it's only Source Available.
@@monochromeart7311 tsk someone already stole my name for it XD i didn't check or realise
There's a raccoon in the thumbnail
because it's not superior in all regards
You can't completely account for how society is without researching gang / group / community / stalking.
i use plenty of open source software but usually only for specific use cases when the mainstream options dont do what i need them to
futoi
Takeaway stop giving away your hard work
Ugh, open source is never free. I wish people would not referred to it that way. It most often is maintained by individuals who donate their time and energy as a hobby and not professionally.
Free as in "free speech" not "free beer". Meaning, you are FREE to use it as you want.
I don't know how I feel about this, clearly out of touch, panel. Like where are the beards? You CANNOT talk about OSS seriously without beards.... It's in the manual!!
"Why hasn't open source won?" This is a nonsense question. If "winning" means eliminating closed source, then why would you want that? If I write a program, compile it, and distribute the binary, you have exactly zero right to the source code unless I choose to share it. I owe you nothing, exactly as it should be.
If "winning" means getting everything you want for free, then you're living in a dream world. We tried communism. It didn't work.
If the complaint is that some programmers shared their code and then regretted it because they didn't like what somebody else did with it, then... stop doing that, I guess?
Open source has "won" in the sense that it exists and it's useful. What more do you want?
Winning means the open source solution works, does a good job, and is simple to install/implement. It means finishing the last 15% that turns a cool idea into a project that people I know would want to use rather than resorting to closed source software that "just works"
Lol the hat guy sucks. Calling Linux communist means he doesn't understand either
firefox pulled some political shit a while back so i dropped it.
I don't like the direction Mozilla has taken, but Firefox is still pretty much the only alternative to Chromium, which I don't want to use. So. What's your alternative?
Inb4 for some pure webkit browser like surf, or one of those minimal browsers like Midori, net-surf or even a older one like Dilo. @@joseoncrack
Fact remains, you are NOT open source but seem to want to be. How ? By redefining what open source is. The open source people and supporters don't want to redefine and don't want/cant to include you as you stand. Simple, what's the problem again? Ohhh ok, I get it, you want to be, but can't. Do call yourself futo sourced, please! Great, everyone is ok with that, just do it! But don't try to hijack open source. You are rattling at the wrong tree and creating a negative image, mostly for yourself. You are NOT open source.
Is Louis Rossmann Jewish?
Well, there are several problems with open source and why it never will win.
The most prominent problem is just the tradegy of commons. As old as humans are.
Second, open source people keep fighting fights that already have been lost. Mobile OS? Lost, don't even try.
Social media? Give it up, people won't switch to Mastodon etc. It's cute, but no one cares.
I am with him on AI. That's something open source people should focus on.
DLT, IoT and AI are still fight you could win. But I am pretty pessimistic about this, since people keep pouring money into things that can't be won.
As much as people say they care about privacy, the way the majority acts though speaks volumes.
Pick the right fights.
I like your point. But that is only IF OSS is a community acting together and not mash of people acting selfishly...
For those who do want to act as a community thanklessly improving the future, I think your assessment of where that should be done is right.
The way people pour resources into areas when it's too late suggests it's not as much a community. People put resources now into social media because it is already successful. The value is obvious now, so people want to take it.
Linux is a rare exception where a group saw that OSs WOULD be a critical future technology, even though they weren't yet, and instead of starting a competitor to MS they decided the world would be better if it was open source. And they were right, the world is much better due to linux. Yet no one turns around and gives the hundreds of billions of dollars in value created through increased innovation and technology advancement back to those early creators. Linus would be Jeff Bezos if that was the case. Along with many other contributors of course.
But ironically if they had just made another MS competitor company the world would just be set back decades in tech. Imagine how bad smart phones would still be. They probably wouldn't have reached today's tech levels until the 40s.
I'm digressing... The point is, it's unfortunately rare and takes a small group of especially talented people to pioneer an area and securely claim it for OSS, giving up on receiving any compensation. But all of society benefits with compound interest on their investmemt.
This is really only something that people do when their society is self loving and giving, so they don't feel a need to take "what's theirs". Not the way many countries are (including the US) now, fractured and self hating.
Sub-societies like the hacker community and programmers may be an exception still, hopefully, but the anti-community pure/anarcho-capitalist mindset has become very pervasive.
You can see why it's more common that people are drawn to try to claim areas that are already "lost" as you say - because at that point the value has become obvious.
@@craigslist6988 "But the anti-community pure/anarcho-capitalist mindset has become very pervasive"
I don't think you *quite* understand what anarcho-capitalism is. I know I don't agree with anarcho-capitalism - I'm more min-archist myself. Your choice of words there seems to be a red herring to me.
things linux is missing:
- sleep
- hibernate
- faster remote desktop
- bluetooth
- get rid of glibc
bluetooth works perfectly well on linux these days.
I use sleep and hibernation on my linux every day. What do you mean when you say it's missing?
I think you don't actually use linux.
systemd sleep and hibernate work fine for me.
Bluetooth works perfectly for me.
Remote desktop in linux works. There are problems with it you can complain about but a) there are solutions to any problem you name, they just aren't as easy to implement as windows RDP. But they also aren't a security hole big enough to fit yo momma through... And b) the problems will be entirely gone in at most a few years with Wayland replacing X11.
The crazy thing is how long the list of things you cannot do with windows is, yet somehow the comparison you make is only ever one way. Because you don't use linux.
@@nBp4tB12out of the voz half of the time it doesn't work for me depending on the machine. Always have to mess with it.
it did
The problem is the oye vey.
You mean the zionist lobby? That's probably partially true in the realm of tech censorship, especially as it regards speech on Israel-Palestine, Zionist ethnocentrism, the history of communism, German WWII history, etc. on most platforms save Twitter.
Phase one: release free software, phase 2: software becomes ubiquitous, phase 3: charge for pull requests.
Infinate game...