Post-Open Source
GitHub has the best stickers, by Paris Buttfield-Addison / CC BY
I’m a tad late to this discussion, but I think it’s still pertinent today—perhaps even more so—and Jordi Boggiano’s recent post, “Common files in PHP packages,” got me thinking about the lack of open source licenses in public repositories.
In his post, Jordi explains how he analyzed all packages at Packagist, specifically for the sake of identifying common file names developers are using for their change logs. As part of that analysis, he was also able to tell how many projects have a license file, about which he writes:
55% [of PHP packages at Packagist] have a LICENSE file, that’s.. pretty disastrous but hopefully a lot of those that don’t at least indicate in the README and composer.json
In a 2013 analysis of software licenses on Github, Aaron Williamson, then Senior Staff Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, found that 14.9% of repositories had a top-level license file, while 3.7% only announce the license in the project’s README[1]. Of the top licenses, he noted that there has been a significant shift since 2000 in favor of more permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, etc.) and surmises this could be the result of “corporate influence/allergy to GPL” or a reaction against the GPL, favoring “freedom of developer over freedom of users.”
Why are so few repositories adding open source licenses?
Luis Villa posits it might be because developers are rejecting permission culture.
The open license ecosystem assumes that sharing can’t (or even shouldn’t) happen without explicit permission in the form of licenses. What if “post open source” is an implicit critique of that assumption – saying, in essence, “I reject the permission culture”?
So, when James Governor posted in September 2012 his sentiment about younger developers being about “post open source software,” it was perhaps a bit of tongue-in-cheek crotchety cane-shaking about a cultural shift in developer attitudes toward open source and the need to grant permission.
younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github.
— James Governor (@monkchips), September 17, 2012, Twitter
If we’re in a post-open source era and open source licenses represent permission granted to use one’s code, then is this era marked by a reaction against the need for that permission? After all, the “younger devs” grew up in a post-Napster world full of DRM, EULAs, IP/copyright lobbyists, and legalspeak about what we can and cannot do with the content and software we’ve purchased. Open source licenses are yet another way to proliferate that permission culture. It’s no wonder there’s a backlash against the need for licenses.
In Lawrence Lessig’s 2004 book Free Culture, Lessig warned:
Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less. Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so.
Are open source licenses just another manifestation of the shift to a permission culture and away from a free culture? While companies have embraced open source software and many contribute back to open source projects under a variety of permissive licenses, I can’t help but feel that open source is losing its soul. These days, I don’t hear people talking about it as a philosophy. Rather, the focus is always on licensing and business cases—the permission to use it.
What do you think? Do open source licenses propagate permission culture? Are we in a post-open source era?
4 Comments
I think the "Github generation" has a mindset more like "it's on github, by default it's totally free (not like GNU GPL haha)". The main problem is that, in some countries, by the moment you don't write a license to "free" somehow the code, you are legally the owner of it and you can attack whoever use it without your permission. That's silly and it shows well what kind of society we're living in...
Just my two cents, with my limited english expression capabilities x(
I don't think the younger generation realize that the license also protects them. Most licenses have some sort of clause stating that the software is provided "As Is" with no warranty implied, or otherwise given. The license it there to protect your software AND you. If someone uses your nifty little script and looses a ton of money and/or data, you could be held responsible without it. To me the license is one of the big differences between an amateur and a professional.
And your last sentence is, also, one of the big differences between an amateur and a professional.
The bewildering array of license options and license incompatibilities is probably the root cause - not some appeal to return to copyright law as it existed 10 years before these developers were born.
For me personally, I had a revelation. I don't actually understand what the GNU GPL says (either V2 or V3, but *especially V3*), and I'm surely not going to pay a lawyer to explain it to me, or volunteer to be a test case for testing some clause's compatibility with the laws of nation XYZ, just so I can publish a logger class.
It's a response of "I don't know (or care) WTF is going on legally, but here's some code I found useful".