Post open source

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Post Open (for Post Open Source) is a proposed successor to the Open Source software paradigm, originated by Bruce Perens, the creator of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative. It is promoted at the web site PostOpen.org

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Post open source, also called "post open-source software (POSS)", was a 2012/2013 noticed movement [1] [2] among software developers, in particular open-source software developers. The interpretation was that this was a reaction to the complex compliance requirements of the software license/permission culture, noticed by more code being posted into repositories without any license whatsoever, implying a disregard for the current license regimes, including copyleft as supporter of the current copyright system ("Copyright reform movement").

History

"POSS" was first used by James Governor, founder of analyst firm RedMonk, who said [3] "younger devs today are about POSS – Post open-source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github." [2] According to Luis Villa, when even "...the open license ecosystem assumes that sharing can't (or even shouldn't) happen without explicit permission in the form of licenses", developers vote their dissent through POSS. [4] This was mostly ineffective, since the default in international copyright law is "all rights reserved", and some dedication to the public domain or license is necessary if the software is to be shared with the public without legal ambiguity.

Precursor

In 2004 Daniel J. Bernstein pushed a similar idea with his License-free software, where he neither placed his software (qmail, djbdns, daemontools, and ucspi-tcp) into public domain nor released it with a software license. [5] But, with end of 2007 he dedicated his software in the public domain with an explicit waiver statement. [6] [7]

See also

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source license</span> Software license allowing source code to be used, modified, and shared

Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose. They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These criteria are outlined in the Open Source Definition.

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons license</span> Copyright license for free use of a work

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers. It is distinguished from others as a middle ground between the permissive software BSD-style licenses and the GNU General Public License. So under the terms of the MPL, it allows the integration of MPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases, but only on condition those components remain accessible.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public-domain software</span> Software in the public domain

Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, or sold even without any attribution by anyone; this is unlike the common case of software under exclusive copyright, where licenses grant limited usage rights.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free content</span> Nonrestrictive creative work

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-software license</span> License allowing software modification and redistribution

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyleft</span> Practice of mandating free use in all derivatives of a work

Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, and scientific discoveries, and similar approaches have even been applied to certain patents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Free Documentation License</span> Copyleft license primarily for free software documentation

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open source</span> Source code made freely available

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References

  1. How to think like open source pioneer by Michael Tiemann (5 Aug 2014)
  2. 1 2 Simon Phipps (30 November 2012). "GitHub needs to take open source seriously". Infoworld. Retrieved 30 January 2013.
  3. "Dai Jesting". Twitter.
  4. Luis Villa (2013). "Pushing back against licensing and the permission culture". tieguy.org.
  5. "qmail is not open source" – an article published by Russell Nelson, OSI board member in 2004
  6. "Frequently asked questions from distributors". 2007. Retrieved 18 January 2008.
  7. "Information for distributors". 2007. Retrieved 18 January 2008.