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Openwashing and Misuse of Brands: 'Linux' Foundation, OSI, and SFC

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 17th of March 2022 10:27:09 PM Filed under
Misc
  • LF Energy: Solving the Problems of the Modern Electric Grid Through Shared Investment [Ed: Microsoft's Jason Perlow keeps pushing "Linux" Foundation further and further away from Linux]

    The energy industry sits at the epicenter of change because energy makes everything else run. And inside the energy industry is the need for a rapid transition to electrification and our vast power grids. Like it or not, utilities face existential decisions on transforming themselves while delivering ever more power to more people without making energy unaffordable or unavailable.

  • Court affirms it's false advertising to claim software is Open Source when it’s not | Open Source Initiative [Ed: This is the same OSI that promotes Microsoft proprietary software]

    Stop saying Open Source when it's not. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we’ve always known: that it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when it’s not licensed under an open source license.

    You can read the decision here. The facts, as described by the trial court, are that Neo4j, Inc. had been through several releases of its software and several license choices along the way, ending with what the court called “the Sweden Software License,” because the licensor was a Swedish subsidiary of the plaintiff.

  • OSI: Court affirms it's false advertising to claim software is Open Source when it’s not

    The Open Source Initiative reports on a ruling in the US Court of Appeals reaffirming the meaning of "open source" in a software license.

  • Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them [Ed: SFC sounds like it is joining anti-Free software trolls now]

    We are passionate about and dedicated to the cause of software freeedom and rights because proprietary software harmfully takes control of and agency in software away from users. In 2014, we started talking about FOSS as fundamental to “ethical software” (and, more broadly “ethical technology”) — which contrasts FOSS with the unethical behavior that Big Tech carries out with proprietary software. Some FOSS critics (circa 2018) coined the phrase “ethical source” — which outlined a new approach to these issues — based on the assumption that software freedom activists were inherently complicit in the bad behavior of Big Tech and other bad actors since the inception of FOSS. These folks argue that copyleft — the only form of software licensing that makes any effort to place ethical and moral requirements on FOSS redistributors/reusers — has fundamentally ignored the larger problems of society such as human rights abuses and unbridled capitalism. They propose new copyleft-like licenses, which, rather than focusing on the requirement of disclosure of source code, they instead use the mechanisms of copyleft to mandate behaviors in areas of ethics generally unrelated to software. For example, the Hippocratic License molds a copyleft clause into a generalized mechanism for imposing a more comprehensive moral code on software redistributors/reusers. In essence, they argue that copylefted software (such as software under the GPL) is unethical software. This criticism of copyleft reached crescendo in the last three weeks as pundits began to criticize FOSS licenses for failing to prohibit Putin from potentially using FOSS in his Ukrainian invasion or other bad acts.

    We have in the past avoided a comprehensive written response to the so-called “ethical source” arguments — lest our response create acromony with an adjacent community of activists who mean well and with whom we share some goals, but with whose strategies (and conclusions about our behavior and motivations) we disagree. Nevertheless, the recent events have shown that a single, comprehensive response would help clarify our position on a matter of active, heated public debate and fully answer these ongoing criticism of FOSS and our software freedom principles.

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More here

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 18th of March 2022 07:08:46 PM.
  • US Court Rules That Misrepresenting Software As Open Source Is False Advertising

    The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in February affirmed a lower court decision concluding that it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when it’s not licensed under an open source license. The court’s decision last month held that the defendants, The Graph Foundation, PureThink and iGov misrepresented ONgDB as a free version of Neo4j EE licensed under the APGLv3, and that the price differential was likely to influence customers’ purchasing decisions. By adding the non-free Commons Clause the software could not be characterized as “open source”, therefore advertising it to be so was unlawful false advertising.

Openwash loses in court

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 18th of March 2022 08:16:17 PM.
  • False advertising to call software open source when it's not, says court

    Last year, the Graph Foundation had to rethink how it develops and distributes its Open Native Graph Database (ONgDB) after it settled a trademark and copyright claim by database biz Neo4j.

    The Graph Foundation agreed [PDF] it would no longer claim specific versions of ONgDB, its Neo4j Enterprise Edition fork, are a "100 percent free and open source version" of Neo4J EE. And last month, two other companies challenged by Neo4j – PureThink and iGov – were also required by a court ruling to make similar concessions.

    ONgDB is forked from Neo4j EE, which in May 2018 dropped the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) and adopted a new license that incorporates the AGPLv3 alongside additional limitations spelled out in the Commons Clause license. This new Neo4j EE license forbade non-paying users of the software from reselling the code or offering some support services, and thus is not open source as defined by the Open Source Initiative.

In LWN today

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 18th of March 2022 11:15:48 PM.
  • Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

    Over on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog, Bradley M. Kuhn considers the question of the interaction between copyleft and the "ethical source" effort that seeks to use copyleft-like licensing to bring about additional changes, beyond just software freedom; the Hippocratic License is an example of such a license. In his view, copyleft and ethical software are not really compatible, even though many in free-software world (including Kuhn) are highly sympathetic to the goals, especially in light of the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

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