[License-discuss] OSI's purely-neutral policy position on production of proprietary software (was Re: Query on "delayed open source" licensing)

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Russ, thanks for clarifying this point as one of OSI's leaders.

Russell Nelson wrote at 19:32 (PDT) on Friday:
> We [speaking for OSI] don't criticize people for producing proprietary
> software.

Various OSI leaders have indicated that they agree that proprietary software
is harmful over the years, and, as such I had thought there had already been
a position change by OSI from being neutral about proprietary software
toward a pro-software-rights position that sees proprietary software as
fundamentally harmful to society.

It seems the gap between OSI's positions — when compared to those of us who
are working for universal software rights and freedoms — remain as wide, and
it was merely my misunderstanding that there had been a position change.

While I'd rather see the positions between software rights activists and OSI
become closer, it's admittedly helpful to have a definitive answer from
leadership on that point, so thanks for that.

> We [the OSI] think that the proprietary nature is its own punishment.

Earning billions by taking rights away from consumers is a punishment?  I
don't think Big Tech feels that punished right now, do you? 😆

Less pithy: I wish the myth of FOSS technical exceptionalism were true, and
maybe it was true in the late 1990s — 🤷.
Sadly, it's certainly not true today. I observe that Big Tech has gotten
extremely adept at exploiting FOSS for their own (proprietary) ends [0].
IOW, companies have mostly found a way to get all the benefits from FOSS
that they needed — *without* actually expanding the rights of their users
beyond what users already had 20-30 years ago. (In fact, I suspect users, on
average, probably have fewer rights in their ability to modify, improve, and
reinstall their software today than they did in the 1990s).

lrosen at rosenlaw.com wrote at 11:18 (PDT):
>> We believe that Eric Allman (sendmail) invented dual-track releasing for
>> sendmail simultaneous with, or slightly before, Deutsch's dual-track
>> release of Ghostscript.

It seems to me the sendmail business model was generally more of the nature
of a proprietary fork of an upstream project (as opposed to delayed FOSS
release).  I think what Ghostscript was, in fact, novel at the time: Aladdin
had an entire product which stayed proprietary for some period — then the
entire package was released under a copyleft license after that waiting
period.  It seemed to me that particular behavior was what Seth was seeking
information on … and not generally proprietary forks of FOSS.  But, it's
OSI's study so maybe they are researching proprietary forks, too?

> It is only because of Bradley Kuhn's judgmental and misleading posting that
> we want to respond.

What a world we live in that a post to an list run by *Open Source*
Initiative that makes the assumption (as my post that Larry references did)
that proprietary software is bad for society is called 'judgmental'.  🤣

It feels like posting on a climate change organization's list and being told
that one shouldn't judge Big Oil too harshly — those companies are just are
trying to make a buck, after all, and their punishment will be that their
profits will go down when we finally get renewable energy fully adopted.


[0] I think one of the biggest changes in this regard has been how excellent
    DVCS now is [1], and how convenient medium-term fork-based collaboration has
    become.  At this point, there really is no punishment (as Russ calls it)
    for maintaining a proprietary fork of a FOSS system.  Beyond that,
    software is generally just better written to be more easily extensible
    these days, too.

[1] … which is its own irony, since the best DVCS's are, themselves,
    FOSS, but are widely used to help make authorship of proprietary forks
    of FOSS easier to maintain.
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn - he/them