I’m shocked, shocked that Bruce Perens is suggesting to use contracts as a way to reinforce software freedom rather than the Free Software licenses.

  • they have a lot more complexity in how you deal with
    • effectively enforcing such contracts
    • how you manage the applicable geographical jurisdictions
    • how you may loose it all if a contract condition is considered abusive somewhere
  • they are a lot more expensive than free (which is what copyright law effectively is)
    • you need costly (potentially internationally savvy) lawyer expertise to draw the contracts
    • you find yourself with additional obligations that you need to fulfill
  • they are a lot more uncertain in different geographical jurisdictions, as copyright is pretty much harmonized across most of the “western world”

This Slashdot article [How Should the FOSS Movement Respond to Proprietary Software?(https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/09/07/0258256/how-should-the-foss-movement-respond-to-proprietary-software), points to a Bruce Byfield article A Post-Open World that paraphrases Bruce Perens from an interview saying:

The GPL is designed not as a contract but as a license.
What **Richard Stallman was thinking was** he didn't want to take away anyone's rights.
**He only wanted to grant rights**. So it's **not a contract**. It's a license.

Well, **we can't do that anymore. We need enforceable contract terms**."

Way back then, when GPLv3 was being written, this scenario was already had in consideration. We needed stronger copyleft for the online world of cloud services, and that was something Affero GPL and GPLv3 addressed.

But all the “business savvy” open source advocates made it hard to reach a consensus (they did not want the closure of the loopholes), instead they caused a bit of FUD chaos and then proceeded to have a strong impulse of new cloud oriented software that went all the way opposite the GPLv3 and in fact opened MORE loopholes, hence the strong investment into MIT, Apache 2, and other less strong free software licenses.

This way, they could make proprietary versions (and many companies went the proprietary relicensing bait and switch model of “open core”) or turn software proprietary for all practical effects by having it used in cloud services (without the additional requisites addressed by GPLv3) without a “download me” recourse.

Nothing good ever comes from “there’s a problem, instead of fixing it let’s add more complexity”.

And adding contracts to free software… IMHO, is an epitome of that. Replacing Free Software licenses with contracts would:

  1. be in opposition to international law
  2. weaken users and developers when trying to enforce their rights
  3. be like adding a bacteria infested pile of crap into an open would

I hope nobody gets fooled into this path.