Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Posted Nov 2, 2024 5:17 UTC (Sat) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)Parent article: OSI board AMA at All Things Open
actively excluding voices all over, from FOSS experts to former board members, it didn’t matter,
dissenting voices are to not be taken for full by OSI.
> incredibly valuable to the work we have done
I bet the work was even more valuable to those…
> who ""may not have always affiliated themselves with open source""
And! Yes! Of course! Blame it on us poor people who don’t just…
> replicate the success we've seen in open-source software to AI"" and …
…insist on…
> simply translat[ing] the OSD to AI
… because we don’t have the “mind shift” necessary. Sure. That will be it.
I’ve seen enough. I barely skimmed the rest; OSI has successfully made itself obsolete.
Posted Nov 2, 2024 8:28 UTC (Sat)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (17 responses)
They did that a while ago, when they approved the "CAL", a proprietary license with usage resrictions that nonetheless can now masquerade as Open Source because it has OSI approval.
Posted Nov 4, 2024 4:54 UTC (Mon)
by Paf (subscriber, #91811)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2024 6:09 UTC (Mon)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link]
When they approved the “Unlicense”[sic!], an extremely badly worded combination of a (possibly not legal) PD waiver and a (definitely botched and not even remotely near working) attempt at a fallback licence that fails to actually licence anything of relevance, I was fed up enough, tbh. But this shows they lost the whole reason they exist in the first place.
Posted Nov 4, 2024 10:27 UTC (Mon)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (14 responses)
People don't even bother trying to convince other people of their position anymore. Just a lot of "I think X" as if that is somehow enough to change my mind.
I asked ChatGPT for a summary why it's controversial and I can see it's unusual for a software license, I don't see anything that could label it "proprietary". Unless you take the position that any non open-source license is proprietary and there is no grey area.
Posted Nov 4, 2024 11:08 UTC (Mon)
by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
[Link] (2 responses)
Uhm, yes?
Posted Nov 4, 2024 15:33 UTC (Mon)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (1 responses)
> gives You unlimited permission to use and modify the software to which it applies (the “Work”), either as-is or in modified form, for Your private purposes, while protecting the owners and contributors to the software from liability.
and say, a Microsoft Windows license which doesn't even give you the source?
Posted Nov 13, 2024 19:27 UTC (Wed)
by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
[Link]
Stating you should not call CAL open source, does not preclude differentiating between CAL, and other licenses. It just precludes calling it open source.
Posted Nov 4, 2024 12:48 UTC (Mon)
by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Nov 5, 2024 0:12 UTC (Tue)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (1 responses)
> 3.1. Permissions Granted
Note also that "Recipient" is defined in a way that is similar to the requirements of the AGPL (i.e. it includes people who interact with the software over a network).
In English:
* The CAL license is both a copyright license and a patent license. So we need to analyze it like a patent license, and not just like a copyright license.
Bruce's argument, as far as I can follow it, appears to be that the people who made CAL intend to use software patents to enforce the data availability provision as applied to their particular use case. In other words, they are not merely requiring that software based on the CAL-licensed code comply with this data availability rule, but are instead attempting to impose this requirement on all software that interacts with their (decentralized?) system, regardless of where the code came from. Perens also argues that this could be much more straightforwardly accomplished by simply requiring participants in this system to sign a contract relating to user data.
I'm not thrilled with the use of software patents for this use case. But I'm also not entirely convinced that this is a problem specific to CAL. This looks a lot more like a "software patents are evil" problem than a "CAL is not OSD-compliant" problem, at least from where I sit. Other participants in the thread pointed out that most other FOSS licenses (which mention patents at all) have similar "we are only licensing the patents that would otherwise be infringed by verbatim distribution" clauses, so it is rather difficult to argue that CAL violates the OSD on that basis, without then concluding that many long-accepted licenses also violate the OSD.
[1]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lis...
Posted Nov 5, 2024 14:04 UTC (Tue)
by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)
[Link]
Do I like the terms of the Cryptographic Autonomy License? No. I don't even like its name. Fortunately I don't have to use it, nor use any software which employs it. But it does seem to be consistent with the Open Source Definition at least as much as the AGPL, so I don't really see any inconsistency on the part of OSI.
Posted Nov 4, 2024 17:14 UTC (Mon)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link] (7 responses)
> The intent of all this language is relatively straightforward: if you are a user of an application (perhaps hosted on the net somewhere), you have the right to extract your data from that application to use with your own modified version of the code. Control of data is not to be used to lock users into a de-facto proprietary system.
From that article plus the Register one and some mailing list posts, it sounds like Bruce Perens didn't mind that specific licence's requirements, but he did mind the general idea of Open Source licences imposing requirements on data, largely because it makes the licences much trickier to comply with ("It's a good goal but it means you now need to have a lawyer to understand the license and to respond to your users"), and Open Source ought to be made simpler instead. He thought data restrictions should be completely out of scope for Open Source, and the OSI should reject CAL on that basis.
The OSI didn't have an existing policy on that, so it sounds like his arguments about field-of-use restrictions were stretching to find a technical justification within the OSD to reject it. And then he got increasingly frustrated when people didn't agree with him about the proposed policy or about that interpretation of the OSD, until he ended up quitting the OSI and accusing the board of conspiracy.
Incidentally, since at least 2020 he's been talking about what is now Post-Open (https://postopen.org/), apparently with the intent of supplanting Open Source by having a large number of software projects under a single new zero-cost licence for individuals and small businesses, and a second licence for larger businesses which requires royalties of 1% of the business's entire revenue paid to the Post-Open organisation. That organisation will subtract operating costs then divide the rest amongst individual developers (or their employers) in proportion to how widely each project is used and the number of lines of code each developer has written in the projects' Git repositories.
The goal is to make it simple for companies to comply - they don't have to spend any effort working out exactly which projects they use and how to follow all their different licences or pay for multiple support contracts etc, they just make a single payment to one organisation and that covers all their software - while also making them fund maintenance of the projects they rely on. Which doesn't sound like a bad goal in general, but his specific approach seems, uh, questionable. And I guess it's unsurprising he fell out with the OSI when his ideas are so radically different to Open Source.
Posted Nov 5, 2024 12:58 UTC (Tue)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (3 responses)
So a large business that has nothing to do with the software industry will end up paying far more than a "small" software house, in return for much less benefit ... and depending on the definition of "revenue" a licence may well be out of reach for companies in low-margin businesses ...
That doesn't sound a sensible business model at all. "Idealism, meet reality! Score, reality 1 idealism nil".
Cheers,
Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:40 UTC (Thu)
by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:59 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
Cheers,
Posted Nov 7, 2024 17:32 UTC (Thu)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link]
> We also have some non-goals:
...but I think those numbers are wrong - IBM's annual revenue is more like $60B, so the fee would be $600M per year. ($6B is IBM's recent annual net income, or their quarterly revenue from "software" alone (excluding "consulting", "infrastructure", etc))
And IBM isn't even a very big company by revenue (219th according to https://fortune.com/ranking/global500/ - the top companies are 10x higher), and it gets a higher proportion of its value from open source software than most companies, and it has reasonably decent net profit margins (~10%, compared to e.g Walmart's 2% which is typical for the grocery industry, meaning this fee would be half of Walmart's entire profits), so IBM is one of the better cases for this licence.
I think the non-goal is effectively excluding all companies in low-profit-margin industries, and most large-ish companies in high-profit-margin industries, and any small/medium company which hopes to either grow into a large-ish company or be acquired by one. So I find it hard to imagine _any_ company would ever agree to this. And without buy-in from companies totalling probably billions of dollars in revenue, there won't be enough money to fund the project.
Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:34 UTC (Thu)
by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
[Link] (2 responses)
This feels like an odd take. Are you familiar with the history of the Open Source Initiative and its Open Source Definition?
Posted Nov 7, 2024 16:16 UTC (Thu)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link] (1 responses)
I have the impression that the wider Open Source community wouldn't fundamentally disagree with those problems he highlights, but the little discussion I've been able to find about his proposed solution has a lot of criticism and almost no support. Most people seem happy to bumble along with Open Source as it is now despite its problems, with perhaps a few incremental changes, while he's trying to shake things up, so it's unsurprising when that causes friction.
Posted Nov 7, 2024 17:27 UTC (Thu)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
That's only a problem for copyleft "Free Software". It's nearly impossible to violate (therefore there is little need to "enforce") the "permissive" licenses that the "Open Source" movement embraced.
(Congratulations; once again, Stallman's predictions have been shown to be accurate....)
Posted Nov 2, 2024 21:44 UTC (Sat)
by Shamar (guest, #122602)
[Link] (1 responses)
Not much. Several people were silenced, harassed or censored during the "co-design" process.
Julia Ferraioli paid a mental tool for trying to defend open source freedom from OSI's open washing goals:
But several other people felt the same and didn't dare to speak about it in public.
As for me, I was silenced for several weeks, and my posts were deleted because they debunked the OSI narrative:
And something they don't even mention was the role Meta employees had to exclude training data from the requirements: here's where they admit the trick adopted (discovered by a user that was later silenced too) https://discuss.opensource.org/t/we-heard-you-lets-focus-...
For sure, the OSI has made itself obsolete, but too few people are aware of the alternatives such as https://opensourcedefinition.org/
Posted Nov 3, 2024 14:36 UTC (Sun)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link]
The relevant definition of open-source for AI for the purposes of the Act is described within the Act itself (recitals 102-104). No, they don't require the providing of the training data. But more importantly, an exceptions for open-source AI are not available for any product/service placed on the EU market (Article 2(12)). So essentially unavailable for any commercial party like OpenAI or Meta. The idea that commercial parties could hijack the OSI process to secure themselves exemptions to the EU AI Act is just so far off the mark it's silly.
The exemptions also don't cover providing a summary of the training data and showing you complied with copyright restrictions. Which are probably the ones commercial companies are most interested in.
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
So I thought I'd google to figure out what you mean, and end up with an article like this one which is totally useless. It does link to the license, but is basically an entire article full of quotes from people I don't know who disagree with each other, without even bothering to quote or reference the actual parts of the license that are a problem, so how can I make up my mind? On the other hand the OSI has an article which explains it well enough. It seems to be targeted at a very specific use-case.
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
>
> Conditioned on compliance with section 4, and subject to the limitations of section 3.2, Licensor grants You the world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive permission to:
>
> a) Take any action with the Work that would infringe the non-patent intellectual property laws of any jurisdiction to which You are subject; and
>
> b) Take any action with the Work that would infringe any patent claims that Licensor can license or becomes able to license, to the extent that those claims are embodied in the Work as distributed by Licensor.
>
> 3.2. Limitations on Permissions Granted
> The following limitations apply to the permissions granted in section 3.1:
>
> a) Licensor does not grant any patent license for claims that are only infringed due to modification of the Work as provided by Licensor, or the combination of the Work as provided by Licensor, directly or indirectly, with any other component, including other software or hardware.
>
> b) Licensor does not grant any license to the trademarks, service marks, or logos of Licensor, except to the extent necessary to comply with the attribution conditions in section 4.1 of this License.
>
> [...]
>
> 4.2. Maintain User Autonomy
> In addition to providing each Recipient the opportunity to have Access to the Source Code, You cannot use the permissions given under this License to interfere with a Recipient’s ability to fully use an independent copy of the Work generated from the Source Code You provide with the Recipient’s own User Data.
>
> “User Data” means any data that is an input to or an output from the Work, where the presence of the data is necessary for substantially identical use of the Work in an equivalent context chosen by the Recipient, and where the Recipient has an existing ownership interest, an existing right to possess, or where the data has been generated by, for, or has been assigned to the Recipient.
>
> 4.2.1. No Withholding User Data
> Throughout any period in which You exercise any of the permissions granted to You under this License, You must also provide to any Recipient to whom you provide services via the Work, a no-charge copy, provided in a commonly used electronic form, of the Recipient’s User Data in your possession, to the extent that such User Data is available to You for use in conjunction with the Work.
* If you allow an end user to interact with CAL-licensed software in some way that generates data, you must allow the end user to obtain a copy of their data, in a format that can be directly used by the software, and you must not modify the software in such a way that the user can't actually run it on their own private copy of their data.
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Wol
I'm not sure I'd give Bruce Perens' idealism a score of 'nil'. Pretty sure he's put a few points on the board over the Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
yearsdecades.
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Wol
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
> * Don’t worry about when or if today’s giant companies will join Post Open. The answer to "When will IBM come on board" may well be "never", because for such a large company, participation would mean a new USD$60 Million dollar per year fee (1% of USD$6 Billion). Instead, attract small and new companies with a free license, and grow them into paid license customers.
(https://postopen.org/how-post-open-works/)
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
And I guess it's unsurprising [Bruce Perens] fell out with the OSI when his ideas are so radically different to Open Source.
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?
https://archive.is/paD1W
see for example my reply to Carlo Piana (OSI board member) https://archive.is/JPSRX#post_3 that was removed from the forum: https://discuss.opensource.org/t/fsf-announced-basics-of-...
Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?