* Jean Louis <[email protected]> [2022-01-31 19:28]: * Pen-Yuan Hsing <[email protected]> [2022-01-24 20:08]: > > Quick note: > > There is the Open Source Hardware Association which maintains the definition > of Open Source Hardware here which enshrines the four freedoms for free > software into hardware designs: > > https://www.oshwa.org/definition/
They have also published what is considered "fake open source". While I don't find "open source" distinctive enough for that same reason, and we use "free software" rather than "open source" -- they have published various levels of "openness": https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Levels_of_Openness#Levels_of_Openness Levels of Openness ------------------ We have observed 6 levels of open source in our journey towards the Open Source Economy, and this article explains them. Why is this important or more than just philosophical banter? In the Post-Truth Era, we cannot accept lies if we want societal progress. We present our observations here to clear up misconceptions about an important topic of openness - which has profound implications on access and justice. Ultimately, this openness refers to openness regarding the distribution of economic power. Technology is power. So it it important to understand how the world distributes power - how open and transparent it is with its technical knowledge - if we want to do better than we are doing today. Mass enlightenmess still needs to be resolved for democracy to work better than it does today. Because as in the movie The Gladiator - "The heart of Rome is not the marble of the senated. It's the sand of the coliseum." OSE is radically open source. We use the Distributive Enterprise method - where the goal is explicitly to solve the last unsolved problem of the economic sustem: distribution. Solving distribution (Sustainable Development Goal #1 - zero poverty) - is a critical and Pressing World Issue. Open Source is uniquely position to address exactly this issue. However, to achieve the goals of zero poverty - we must make sure that open source as a term includes the critical ingredient that allows for a historical transfer of wealth from the few to the many. That critical ingredient is economic freedom - to collaborate and be able to make a living from (to sell) the technology in question. That is one of the 4 Freedoms of Open Source, perhaps the most relevant, of the 4 Freedoms. This point - the economic freedom point - is absolutely obvious from the open hardware definition. More broadly speaking - the concept of economic freedom is generally accepted as good - unless you are a psychopath or dictator. In practice, however - the world does not yet accept economic freedom at its core: proprietary development - as opposed to open source collaboration - is the current norm in more than 99% of the economy. 100T is the entire economy - $33B is open source software [1]. So to be clear: the world does not practice economic freedom. Anyone who believes that economic freedom exists is misinformed. This is a big elephant in the room. Some clarity can begin by first understanding what open source is, and how it relates to economic freedom. And why, from the OSE perspective, we like to make the point about true economic freedom - so that we can even begin to move towards economic freedom as a civilization. We are still at the denial stage. Promoting fake open source as open source is part of that denial. The first step to a solution of the world economy begins with healing this denial. This page intends to shed some light on the topic. We can all start by recognizing that open source, in its definition, means economic freedom. Any freedomfighter thus must endorse open source, by definition. Open Source Open Source - meaning complying with the OSHWA Definition or DIN SPEC 3105. The best-in-class example here is Lulzbot up to the end of 2019 (until it got acquired) - which shares all of its CAD designs and production engineering in open formats. (we cannot tell what will happen after its end-of-2019 acquisition by another company). Even further than open source is Public Production Engineering. Open projects are nice, but without documenting the methods of how to produce the products, it may not be easy to replicate a viable enterprise. And thus - the project cannot be said to produce open source product a la Distributive Enterprise. Yet it is the ability to produce economically significant products - that is the greatest transformative potential of open source philosophy. This philosophy has not yet been tapped in hardware, and it has been coopted in software. See The Success of Open Source (software). See The Failure of Open Source. Undocumented Open Source ------------------------ Is code that is available, but without documentation - open source? Unfortunately, the legal definition of open source (OSI definition, section 2) is not explicit about this point. Section 2, addressing source code - states "Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed." However, what does this mean? Does this mean that code is written poorly, or it is missing documentation? Unclear. What is clear, is that undocumented source code is effectively unusable by non-experts in the field. OSE's intent with open source is to avail power to non-experts by teaching people throughout a development process - thus un-documented open source is effectively not open source. The distinction here comes from other requirements of open source: modificiation. Without documentation, it may be very difficult for users to parse code, if their intent is to modify. Thus, from the OSE point of view - Undocumented Open Source is effectively not open. Ambivalent Open Source It is ambiguous whether the OSHWA definition is met, or if it is met, whether the open source contributes to Distributive Enterprise or economic freedom. To clarify this ambivalnce, one looks for the license. If something says open source, the license information should be clearly visible. And, if the license is visible, source code must be available. One interesting case that comes up here is that of Prusa 3D Printers - read more about Prusa Research Fake Open Source Fake Open Source - pretending to be open source, but the license in not open - typically being non-commercial. Note that not all Creative Commons licenses are OSHWA Definition-compliant. According to this definition, the Peer Production License is fake open source. The word 'fake' refers specifically to the appearance of openness - an impostor open source - where in reality the subject matter is not open source. This is a violation of General Semantics - where the 'map is not the territory' - in the Post-Truth Era. Just because something appears to be - does not mean that it is. Effectively Fake Open Source - this is not necessarily a slander, but would apply to projects where full documentation is available to the OSHWA standard. However, if the build requires very expensive equipment, rare inputs, extensive skill sets - that very few or no other people can access - then the design is effectively un-replicable - and from the standpoint of replicability - unreplicable open source. Which is effectively not open for replication. Thus, it is ambiguous whether the people who are offering the blueprints are really following a mindset of open culture - or they are simply being strategic. It may be either honest - in that resources did not allow full documentation to be published (we know that documentation takes time) - or delusive - if the company is leveraging open source more for marketing than allowing others to replicate. However, there is hope in the projects that simply do not have the energy to document - but would be completely willing to do so. Such projects should be sought as collaborators. Strategic Open Source --------------------- Strategic open source - this describes typical commercial open source projects - where it simply makes business sense to collaborate on a common core of open code. FB, Google, Microsoft, Amazon - and all the giants now understand that it is cheaper to create new products if they collaborate. These companies typically take the common core and build proprietary applications on top of that common code. So it may be said that open culture is not a prerequisite for strategic open source behavior. Undocumented open source - see Informative Article on Undocumented Open Source Code - for comments. See above. Undocumeneted source code is Strategic Open Source if deliberate, and if not deliberate, is just poor practice. See above. See an example of strategic open source from OSE's experiences with Discourse forum software: Discourse#Strategic_Open_Source. This example appears particularly eggregious, in that the Discourse dev team _deliberately_ deleted useful documentation from their forum, which was otherwise undocumented, after OSE (Michael Altfield) spent the time posting it. Fortunately, we copied the documentation to a safe location before the post was deleted. This is a good example that some 'open source' projects violently reject open culture on business grounds. In our book, this is not part of the Economy of Affection that OSE promotes. Useful Open Source IRNAS has coined the term useful open source in reference to whether documentation is useful to replicating some hardware - or if it is practically useless. As discussed above, technically open source, OSHWA-compliant documentation does not mean that you can replicate the product, nor that it is worthwhile to replicate it. This is a good distinction, pointed out buy Luka Mustafa at IRNAS. We share this view on usefulness - and our Distributive Enterprise diurection is dedicated to usefulness in the most complete sense. But LOL, see the current state of Useful Open Source by IRNAS - the link does not work, so the point is well taken from https://github.com/IRNAS/UsefulSource Ethical Open Source ------------------- Ethical/Radical Open Source - this is Richard Stallman and the ethical position of libre. OSE endorses ethical open source, and for practical purposes of developing purely open source products - they are one and the same. The main distinction is that Stallman does not believe that open source applies to hardware (because hardware cannot be replicated easily like software) - and the FSF does not allow for mixing of closed and open content in one license. Mixing open source and proprietary is currently not possible for hardware - because our designs are open source - but we use many proprietary components for which there are no open source alternatives - YET. By 2028, OSE intends to use 100% open source components, as achieved by Technological Recursion. Being clear about the level at which others are open source allows OSE to make sound decisions regarding collaboration potential. For OSE purposes - if collaborators are fully open source without bounds - such as Lulzbot (was pre-2020) as our posterchild - then it's a worthwhile relationship to pursue and that relationship creates clear and visible forward motion. If they are not, time is spent better collaborating with those people who are fully open source, because life is short - and there is no time for Competitive Waste. At the same time, we must be careful about Collaborative Waste. Jean Take action in Free Software Foundation campaigns: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns In support of Richard M. Stallman https://stallmansupport.org/ _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
