[License-discuss] Query on "delayed open source" licensing

[Stefano Maffulli]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 12:49 PM Jim Jagielski <jim at jimjag.com> wrote:

> I agree that delayed FOSS is not open source. I also agree that OSI is
> ideally situated to be a major voice in clearing up that FUD and opposing
> the abuse of the term Open Source.


We're off-topic but I don't want to leave this unaddressed. OSI has a vast
amount of brand recognition but its authority is a soft power, more carrots
than sticks. And we use all the soft power we have. The most recent example
is the LLama 2 news: OSI very quickly issued a rebuttal for Meta using
"open source" to describe the license of LLama2. My post got very good
pickup (lots of mentions here
https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/ and
visitors
https://plausible.io/blog.opensource.org?page=%2Fmetas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source%2F).
But the sentiment I hear from many AI circles is still that LLama2 *is*
open source (or open enough), despite the popularity of my post on OSI's
site and social media channels.

I'm aware that there are more threats to Open Source (and it's the same if
you prefer to call it free software) coming from various business and
policy angles and I'm doing my best to prepare OSI's defenses, carefully
juggling priorities to maximize impact.

Remember this: OSI has only two full time employees (me and Nick Vidal, and
one open position,) plus two part-time staff on the policy program (Phipps
and Bryant) and three part-time consultants in supporting functions
(accounting, PR, crm developer and a policy analyst) with less than ~$800k
projected revenue in 2023. You're talking about countering the FUD of a
multi-billion dollar industry, at a time when most developers on Hacker
News can't even distinguish Open Source from gratis software from shared
source and many many groups hate the early corporate champions of Open
Source since they've became the crushing internet juggernauts (this is
crucial and few people pay attention to this shift.) There are at least 10
years of catching up to do, with little money and an aging army.

The way for us to counter the FUD is to help us raise funds to hire more
people to run our programs, educate and coordinate volunteers. Join and
donate to OSI: https://members.opensource.org/join/


> Unfortunately, doing so is not as sexy or as liable to get press as is
> getting involved in areas of tech which have tangential associations with
> open source (eg: "Open Source AI").
>

This is not about being sexy or getting press for vanity: tackling AI is a
strategic decision approved by the board when I started, 3 years ago. I
described why this is strategically important in many venues, and most
recently on https://opensource.net/lost-decade-crucial-lessons-for-ai/

I'd love to hear why you think AI it's tangential given how complex the
questions are around generative AI (to mention one): I hold office hours
for OSI members every Friday, feel free to use it
https://cal.com/smaffulli/osi-members-chat (although between travel
commitment and Thanksgiving, the first open slots are in December)

And I'll stop the off topic here.

Cheers,
/stef
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20231031/bdfc1cf6/attachment.html>