Chris Tankersley

Post Open Source is a Fallacy

Posted on 2017-05-07
This was originally published on Medium.com

If you aren’t familiar with how Open Source came to be the way it is today, please read “A History of Open Source,” which is effectively Part 1 of this small series of posts.

“younger devs today are about POSS — Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github.” — James Govenor

There are two basic licensing camps in the Open Source world — the world of copyleft and the GPL, and the permissive realm of BSD/MIT. Since 2000, a shift has been made toward permissive licensing.

Is one better than the other? If so, why?

The trend does seem to indicate that the current development environment is favoring developer ease-of-use for code (permissive licensing) over a requirement of code sharing (copyleft). The general idea of permissive licensing is to make the Developer’s life easier, but what if there was an even more permissive license than permissive licenses?

“Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts. ” — Tim O’Reilly

As with everything, the internet change how we shared code.

Github did what no other source code sharing system did, and that was make it easy to share code. Now before you jump down my throat, let me clarify. While there had been Sourceforge for open source projects, and Google Code for sharing code, neither were that great, let alone for a new developer getting started.

Github made it easy for anyone to throw code up on a website, and made it easy to get that code down to your machine. They invested in teaching people to use git and made the case for why you should use them. They made open source project hosting free.

For many years Github actively made the decision to not enforce a license on code that was uploaded as open source repositories. Github left it up to the maintainer to sort that out. 80–90% did not bother with a license. That is even after a change in 2013 where Github decided to start asking about licensing when new projects were created.

“Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free.” — Linus Torvalds

“All information should be free” has been a tenant of hackers since the 1960’s. Instead of restricting usage of code, why not just make it free? Completely free?

There has been a recent trend toward the idea of releasing software under much more lax licenses that veer more toward Public Domain than they do an established Open Source license. In some extreme cases code is being released without any license as to how it can be used, under the assumption that no license is the same as Public Domain.

The driving force behind this idea is “I don’t care what you do with my code.” It’s a noble idea that hearkens back to the 1960s. Code does not need all of these rules around sharing and usage, just take my code and do what you want.

There are even licenses that support this, due to the way that copyright works. Licenses such as WTFPL (Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License) and the DBAD (Don’t be a Dick) Public License are designed to get out of the nitty-gritty thinking when it comes to sharing code — here is code, just use it.

The First Fallacy — No License is OK

“Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That’s the way that the license works.” — Steve Ballmer

Licensing is restrictive no matter which camp you are in, and by making licenses you make it harder to integrate software. For example, the company you work for probably will not use GPL software for fear of having to release the source code of their flagship product which contains many proprietary ideas and business rules.

In the US, copyright is automatically assigned. There isn’t a special form you have to send into the government, when you create something copyright is assigned to you, or whomever hired you to do the work. There are things you can do to further prove that you are a copyright holder, but simply publishing code online marks you as the copyright holder. Created works do not automatically go into the public domain anymore.

Copyright holders hold all the cards. Just because you can see the source code for a piece of software doesn’t mean you can use it without repercussion, just like finding a $100 bill on the ground doesn’t automatically make it yours.

We live in a world controlled by copyright, and until such a time as copyright laws change, releasing software without a license is a dangerous move, even potentially more dangerous than other licenses.

Unless you have something in your hand that says you are allowed to use the software, you are right back at an AT&T Unix situation. Otherwise the copyright holder can pick up their ball and go home, or worse, sue you for using their software.

The Second Fallacy — Lax Licenses are Open Source

”From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!” — Anakin Skywalker

The current development landscape very much carries a “Fuck It, Ship It” attitude. It is a core mentality of many tech startups and developers. Getting an MVP out and validated is more important than wasting time thinking about licensing. We are developers that use open source tools so we feel the need to give back, so we release what code we can.

In an ideal world you might just release your software as Public Domain, but there are many countries that do not recognize public domain, and public domain has different definitions depending on where you are. You need some sort of licensing.

In a world where Public Domain is not really a good thing to release code under, we end up with these licenses that absolve the original developer from putting restrictions on the code.

  • Don’t Be a Dick
  • Do What The Fuck You Want
  • Don’t Be Evil

Developers do not want to have to mess around with licensing. Public domain is not a viable choice. “I just want to release code.” Developers ended up coming up with very lax software licenses where they basically say they don’t care what you do with the code.

Public Licenses are also littered vague concepts, like the DBAD. What defines being a dick? Who defines it? While there are examples in the licenses, DBAD even says that it is not limited to the examples given. What happens when someone decides you are being a dick with their software when you don’t think you’re being a dick? Douglas Crockford famously added “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” to the MIT license used for JSMin. Who determines what is evil?

These lax licenses are coming from a good place, and the people that come up with them are not ignorant or stupid people. The only problem is that the legal system doesn’t like vague concepts, and from a business standpoint vague definitions can really put you in a bad spot if someone decides you are being a dick, or doing something evil.


Developers that are fed up with licenses and procedure and bureaucracy are, in my mind, ignoring sixty years of history in computing. The “Just Ship It” attitude and the “Just Commit It” culture of many groups feeds into this idea that the early MIT hackers would have loved — make the software available and good things will come of it.

As humans though, we screw it up. We tried sharing software without licensing and, honestly, that did not end up working out. Hell, we cannot even agree on how software should be shared. Should be be copy-left? Should it be permissive? Can’t I just give it away?

Open Source licenses were chosen because they had been vetted and have the legal verbiage to make their usage cases safe (permissive or copyleft). While it might suck to have to put a license on something, sometimes the right, and safe, thing to do is suck it up and spend thirty seconds deciding if you want a permissive license or a copyleft license.

Saying that we are beyond Open Source and the need for licenses is just a lie developers are telling themselves when they don’t want to think about what happens to their code. You created it, take thirty seconds make sure that the code is released properly and will be used properly.

Go to https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical and take a look at the licenses that are available. There are many out there, as well as the venerable GPL and BSD licenses. If that list is daunting, check out http://choosealicense.com/ from Github.

Don’t ignore sixty years of history.


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