What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it
Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement.
"I've written papers about it, and I've tried to put together a prototype license," Perens explains in an interview with The Register. "Obviously, I need help from a lawyer. And then the next step is to go for grant money."
Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address.
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Whether it can or not, Perens argues that the GPL isn't enough. "The GPL is designed not as a contract but as a license. What Richard Stallman was thinking was he didn't want to take away anyone's rights. He only wanted to grant rights. So it's not a contract. It's a license. Well, we can't do that anymore. We need enforceable contract terms."
Asked whether the adoption of non-Open Source licenses, by the likes of HashiCorp, Elastic, Neo4j, and MongoDB, represent a viable way forward, Perens says new thinking is needed.
He's not a fan of licenses like the Commons Clause, which is at the center of a legal battle involving Neo4j. Read on