Bruce Perevs Advocates for Revised Open Source Concept to Harmonize Relations Between Open Software and Commercial Companies
Bruce Perevs, one of the authors of the definition of Open Source and the co-founder of the organization Open Source Initiative, believes that the Open Source paradigm has reached a point where open licenses no longer provide sufficient protection. Perevs suggests the need to create a revised concept, known as POST (Open Source Technology) which will help establish a harmonious relationship between open software and commercial companies (source).
Perevs highlights that the GNU General Public License (GPL), which was originally designed as a license and not a contract, grants rights but cannot take someone’s rights away. He argues that the new licensing model should be more comprehensive and consider contractual conditions in accordance with regional law regulations governing contractual relations. Currently, companies have found ways to bypass the requirements of the GPL license by imposing additional contractual conditions with end users, thus limiting the secondary distribution of open-source code underlying a product.
For instance, when a client purchases a distribution of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), they sign an agreement with Red Hat that restricts the redistribution of data and grants Red Hat the right to terminate the contract if the purchased copies of RHEL are not consistent with the established terms. This situation puts clients in a dilemma, forcing them to choose between the freedom to modify and maintain their own systems or the preservation of their status with Red Hat. Patch updates provided for RHEL, which are based on GPL code, can be distributed by users under the license. However, this action may be perceived as a violation of the contractual agreement with Red Hat, leading to the termination of the company’s services.
In the past, the community turned a blind eye to such manipulations when changes were published in the CentOS repository. However, with the recent change in the policy governing access to the source texts of RHEL packages, there is a need to reevaluate the mechanisms of interaction between open projects and companies benefiting from their contributions.