Free Software is the Future, Open Source is Just Openwashing (Proprietary With a False Marketing Twist)
Also see postopen.org; New version, 0.06, published a week ago
THE other day I spoke to one of the cofounders of the OSI (Bruce, not ESR, even though ESR spoke to me in the past and he's active in spite of cancer). There's no denying that OSI lost its way; it acts as a part-time Microsoft lobby group these days. Its founders are no longer involved and it would be wrong to blame them for what OSI became. Bruce openly condemned it several times over the years. He also condemned the Linux Foundation and OIN, but that's a subject unrelated to today's.
Bruce, of Debian and OSI fame, spoke to me about a bunch of topics and gave me his phone number. One subject that came up was SFLC or Prof. Moglen, not necessarily in relation to the trademark dispute (over SFC, which seems to have resorted to the same serial defamation it had weaponised against other high-profile people).
"What is your take on Prof. Moglen?" I asked him. "Is it possible they nitpick on people's imperfections?"
"Well," he responded, "as far as I can tell, Eben [Moglen] is out of the picture. Some years ago he walked away from free software, claiming that enforcement could not scale. Which is true, but I have something I'm working on, see the license at postopen.org, which addresses that problem."
We wrote about this before [1, 2] and it was in the news last month.
Bruce said that "Eben walked away in a rather hurtful manner, leaving a lot of people central to free software hurt and mournful."
"Makes sense," I replied. "What he said was true though."
Enforcing the GPL at scale will be even harder because of what Microsoft is doing right now (GitHub's Copilot). The so-called 'founder' will be served legal papers soon.
OSI is actively helping Microsoft with this war on the GPL. OSI is basically an active participant in the attack on "Open Source". It promotes openwashing. That's how it makes money.
In the future we should focus on copyleft and Free software, maybe "postopen". The goal is to help users and developers, not marketing departments in firms like Amazon, Google, and IBM. █