What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

AI, plagiarism, and training data

• One camp agrees with the claim that AI is “always plagiarism” because models are trained on copyrighted material without consent or attribution, and outputs are credited to the model/vendor, not original authors.
• Others argue plagiarism is about misattribution, not copyright, and note you can plagiarize public‑domain work. They see AI as an extreme form of remixing, aligned with “free culture.”
• Counter‑argument: if a human reading many NYT articles then writing a similar one is plagiarism, scaling that with a machine is still plagiarism. Reply: outside academia, this is just “thought.”
• Practical attribution for models is seen as nearly impossible given billions of sources; a “mega attribution file” is viewed as both unwieldy and not very meaningful.

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Free Software vs Open Source goals

• Several comments say emphasizing “open source” for business friendliness sidelined the original focus on user freedom; unsurprising then that most users don’t know or care about those freedoms.
• Some view the spread of permissive licenses as the main threat to software freedom, since they allow enclosure; others say the real threat is “source‑available” rebranding and license bait‑and‑switches.
• There’s debate over whether copyleft (GPL) is too “anti‑business” versus a necessary defense of user rights.

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Licensing tensions: GPL, AGPL, SSPL, RHEL

• The RHEL model (cutting off customers who redistribute) is seen by some as violating the spirit, though likely not the letter, of the GPL; others think it’s a legitimate way to avoid freeloaders while remaining copyleft‑compliant.
• AGPL is praised by some as addressing SaaS lock‑in; others argue it makes use conditional on releasing modifications and is therefore “non‑free” (an EULA).
• SSPL is criticized as effectively unworkable because it requires releasing source for all software used to provide the service; seen as incompatible with much existing OSS and functionally prohibiting hosting.

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Economics, exploitation, and SaaS

• Common view: open source is “free labor” powering highly profitable SaaS platforms that give users minimal freedom and lock in data.
• Some argue FOSS unintentionally enabled today’s SaaS silos; others say SaaS would have arisen anyway (patchable software, browsers as platforms).
• There’s disagreement on whether substantial OSS projects generally get adequate funding; examples exist of successful GPL‑based businesses and underfunded maintainers alike.
• Many emphasize that most contributors are unpaid (or underpaid relative to market rates) and that open source usually isn’t a sustainable business model on its own.

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Usability and serving “common people”

• Several comments say open‑source consumer apps are often weaker than commercial ones, especially where design, UX, accessibility, and product management matter.
• Others cite counterexamples (kernel, browser, 3D tools, email client) but acknowledge these benefited from significant paid corporate work.
• Consensus: better usability requires paying non‑developer experts, not just more licensing tweaks.

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“Post‑open source” ideas and enforcement

• The proposed move from pure licensing to contract‑like yearly corporate compliance/payments is intriguing to some but criticized as complex and hard to adopt.
• Skeptics note that even the GPL is regularly violated when authors lack money or interest to sue; any new scheme must address enforcement for small developers.
• Some suggest that at least a subset of companies would voluntarily comply if there were a clear path to “doing the right thing” financially.

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Attitudes toward corporations and open source ethos

• One strong faction insists that true open source must allow anyone, including large tech companies, to use and profit from code without special obligations; that’s the point of the existing definition.
• Another faction sees that as “free labor suicide” in an era of trillion‑dollar firms and argues for new models tying corporate benefit to mandatory compensation.
• There’s also a recurring view of open source as primarily a community and collaborative process, where compensation is nice but secondary to autonomy and shared creation.