Folks, we have an open source problem. And, no, it’s not the problem some think. You’ll hear people rail against corporations that falsely describing their code as open source. Sometimes they’re correct. You’ll hear others bemoan the influx of venture-backed companies diluting the meaning of open source to fuel corporate gains. Sometimes they’re correct.
But the problem isn’t the companies. At least, not the primary problem. We’ve always had businesses try to piggyback on open source branding in pursuit of commercial gains. The difference during the past few years, however, is that free and open source software lost its way, leaving developers (and businesses) just one option: permissive, Apache-style licensing. The first kind of open source licensing was, as its sometimes prickly and pedantic adherents insist, not “open source” at all, but rather copyleft, free software licensing like the GPL. (“We want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters,” said Richard Stallman.)
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