[sunshine-o]

At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore.

It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?

What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".

None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.

Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)

Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.

Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...

- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/digital-public-goods-alli...

- [1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/03/17/pmOS-budget-and-fin...

[immibis]

The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.

For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.

In response, the OSI put out this official blog post seething with anger but not a single rational argument: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...

In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.

(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)

[jraph]

that doesn't hold. The whole ecosystem, not just the OSI, has agreed that SSPL is not open source / free software, including the FSF, Debian, Fedora.

[immibis]

That doesn't hold.

FSF declined to make a statement either way - citing the fact that very little software uses this license and it all has xGPL alternatives, so there's no urgent need to make an official decision.

Debian didn't call it free or unfree, but rather decided not to include SSPL software in their distribution, which is an orthogonal issue, due to it having a higher risk of being incompatible with all the other stuff when used a certain way, which does not make it non-free.

Fedora calls it non-free, but just calls it their own belief, not something based on solid reasoning about meeting guidelines or not. Note that Fedora is a project of one of those open source reseller companies.

[jraph]

I found the points in your last comment to be true.

I still think you'd need to back the fact OSI rejected SSPL for commercial concerns of its members a bit more. Even if nobody else has formally rejected SSPL on convincing grounds, major parts of the free software ecosystem distrusts it and OSI is not that special in this. I found nobody making the case that SSPL is a free software license. Nobody likes it except mongodb, and formerly redis and elasticsearch. That would be an interesting revelation to me but I need more convincing evidences.

I do think that open source is the watered down corporate version of free software that attempts to get rid of the end user rights concerns (which I care about most, but the corporations around the OSI don't care about much or at all), and that the OSI is governed by big corps and is not the most trusty organization when it comes to protect free software. One only needs to see the definition they came up for open source AI models which is not quite restrictive (and thus useful) to see the least. So I'm actually somewhat inclined to believe this.

[immibis]

Distrust is different from non-free. SSPL happens to be a free software license - that is a fact - which many people dislike - that is also a fact. The latter fact doesn't invalidate the former fact.

The incompatibility between *GPL and SSPL is a very good reason to dislike SSPL. I don't like it either, but I still think it's open source. Perhaps SSPL version 2 could be written to require that the source code for other parts of the service could be released under some particular set of licenses, which would make it much more compatible.

> OSI is not that special in this.

OSI is special because it's taken as an authority on what the term "open source" means, and it's special because it has actually written an official press release full of actual bullshit in order to justify its objectively wrong statement, while still claiming to be an authority and still being seen as one.

> I still think you'd need to back ... a bit more.

No competent capitalist entity will ever say outright "we lie for profit." It always has to be inferred from their actions. Look at what happened to Ratner's jewellery chain. If you outright say what everyone already knows, you can still get punished for breaking the suspension of disbelief. Same thing when Musk did the salute.

We can see that a capitalist entity did something which looks stupid on the face of it, but obviously advances its business interests. We conclude that either the board of directors were infected by brainworms, or they are advancing their business interests. The latter is much more likely. Burning social capital to gain financial capital is a tried and tested strategy.

https://opensource.org/sponsors

[jraph]

> SSPL happens to be a free software license - that is a fact

Says who? I assume you have irrefutable evidence for this since you are stating this with such confidence?

It would be some major development in the SSPL case.

> No competent capitalist entity will ever say

As much as I don't like them, you need to back something you claimed. Until you do, it's just beautiful theory.

[robert_foss]

I don't think I agree with any part of this take, other than postmarketOS having a bit more money would be nice.

[sunshine-o]

Which part?

While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:

- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)

- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])

- the Cloud

- IoT

The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.

Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.

We won some battles but lost the war. The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.

You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:

- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,

- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.

I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].

Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.

- [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

- [1] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns-summaries

- [2] https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, so hopefully the EU (including France) will freak out about "fake open source" (building for iOS or Android, using Github...) too.

[mytailorisrich]

> At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore

Agreed and a case in point are those UN principles that bundle unrelated things together.