I knew it was this way but it's really hitting me today how much the Open Source movement and copyright maximalism supplanted the idea of free software, and again how much the Free Software movement turned from a close ideological cousin of the remix and open culture movement into a culture of legalism. At the same time, copyright law itself has been extended to be near-immortal copyrights rather than brief monopolies to spur creation by enabling profit from creating works.
It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.
Open Source is Broken
The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns...
Open Source Software and Corporate Influence — Andrew Lilley Brinker
Open source software projects are frequently enmeshed with the interests of corporations. We should update mental models of who works on open source accordingly, and build or modify power structures to be more resilient to corporate capture.
Reimagining OSS Licensing and Commercialization with Fair Source - Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Permissive-Washing in the Open AI Supply Chain: A Large-Scale Audit of License Integrity
Permissive licenses like MIT, Apache-2.0, and BSD-3-Clause dominate open-source AI, signaling that artifacts like models, datasets, and code can be freely used, modified, and redistributed. However, these licenses carry mandatory requirements: include the full license text, provide a copyright notice, and preserve upstream attribution, that remain unverified at scale. Failure to meet these conditions can place reuse outside the scope of the license, effectively leaving AI artifacts under default copyright for those uses and exposing downstream users to litigation. We call this phenomenon ``permissive washing'': labeling AI artifacts as free to use, while omitting the legal documentation required to make that label actionable. To assess how widespread permissive washing is in the AI supply chain, we empirically audit 124,278 dataset $\rightarrow$ model $\rightarrow$ application supply chains, spanning 3,338 datasets, 6,664 models, and 28,516 applications across Hugging Face and GitHub. We find that an astonishing 96.5\% of datasets and 95.8\% of models lack the required license text, only 2.3\% of datasets and 3.2\% of models satisfy both license text and copyright requirements, and even when upstream artifacts provide complete licensing evidence, attribution rarely propagates downstream: only 27.59\% of models preserve compliant dataset notices and only 5.75\% of applications preserve compliant model notices (with just 6.38\% preserving any linked upstream notice). Practitioners cannot assume permissive labels confer the rights they claim: license files and notices, not metadata, are the source of legal truth. To support future research, we release our full audit dataset and reproducible pipeline.
Tyranny of Permissionlessness
open source’s narrow focus further empowers those with other ways to exclude
Open source is a restaurant
[[Chad Whitacre]] makes a great analogy around when/how software gets paid for, vs food. Open Source is a restaurant. At a restaurant, you eat your meal fir...
Open Source, Incentives, and Why 'Monetize Later' Often Backfires
How misaligned incentives undermine open source projects — and why 'monetize later' often leads to the very restrictions open source was meant to avoid.
Something Big Happened in 1998
It is reasonable to accept that OSI founded Open Source with the Open Source Definition.
Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft
Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:
Can Agentic AI Coding Tools Finally End Copyright For Software While Re-Inventing Open Source?
Most of the discussions about the impact of the latest generative AI systems on copyright have centered on text, images and video. That’s no surprise, since writers, artists and film-makers feel ve…
