Thoughts on 'The Open Source Definition'

" … the obvious meaning for the expression ‘open source software’ is ‘You can look at the source code’."

Richard Stallman

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I learned by 2004 that Silicon Valley was up to no good. I wound up spending most of my time playing World of Warcraft for years after leaving Yahoo!. No one I knew wanted to put in the effort to create quality software for people without abusive hidden agendas.

At that time, me and everyone I knew understood open source to just mean “the source code is available”. This is coming from someone who spent 6.5 years at Yahoo! utilizing open source software every day of my life. I programmed using emacs and Linux. The servers for my product ran on FreeBSD and Linux. The software I wrote was enjoyed by tens of millions of people around the world and I had a great time creating good, usable things. I had no idea the OSI even existed.

After years of WoW, LoL, random gigs, and personal programming pursuits, I started putting the concept of FUTO together around 2017. The goal of FUTO was to remedy the abuses of big tech through targeted software development. The principle tenet of FUTO I laid out was that the people need to be in control of the computers they own, not corporations and governments. None of my friends in Silicon Valley were interested.

While conceptualizing FUTO, my first thought was always “Why hasn’t open source solved this problem?” Billions of people have access to programming tools now, yet the problem seems to continually be getting worse.

After moving to Austin, and in the aftermath of many gross abuses by the Tech Oligopoly, I finally started discovering other people who also cared about solving the problem in 2021. It could be argued that I should have sought people out sooner but personally I find WoW to be much more fun than networking at alcohol parties. Even at this point, I had still never even heard of the OSI nor their “definition” of open source.

FUTO started out with a plan to make substantial grants to open source projects and fund various open source companies. It’s fair to say that this ended up with largely poor outcomes. At this point, I have determined that I could pour all my resources down to my last penny into external open source projects and still barely make a dent in solving these problems.

We’ve since pivoted mostly to building software internally. FUTO now exists as an organization aimed at assisting and funding great teams who want to create non-abusive software. In contrast to earlier efforts, this has been getting incredible results. I am extremely pleased with the amazing things all of the internally incubated teams have been able to achieve.

We first launched Grayjay in October of 2023 and I abruptly became aware of the OSI and all the related semantic arguments that surround the so called “open source community”. Many people in this “community” feel like we have mislead them with how we have gone about crafting our FUTO license . I can assure you that it was never our intention.

I fully believe that the term “open source” applies to what we’re doing, and I know many people agree with me. I also understand there are some who disagree and feel mislead. For this, I regret any miscommunication on our part.

I don’t think anyone owns this term, especially not the OSI. I believe the OSI should not have continued to pretend they owned the term after they lost the trademark . They should have pivoted to a new term that they could trademark if they wanted to behave this way. It is absolutely ridiculous that they continue to slander anyone using alternative licenses with terms like “openwashing”. The OSI is wrong and it is them and their large corporate donors who have mislead people.

Now here we are amidst some minor controversy. Through our experiences and experiments we have determined that “open source” by itself is not a working solution. The problems created by the Tech Oligopoly are steadily getting worse and their stranglehold over the consumer software space is suffocating. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are very happy with the current trajectory of open source. I am not.

I know FUTO will fail in our mission if we do not put forward alternative licensing structures. The OSI’s definition is not something we will abide by. Given how the Tech Oligopoly influences the decision making processes within the OSI, I do not even know for sure if their goals align with ours.

I am much more interested in building great ethical software that respect our users than passing purity tests put forward by obscure foundations.

Hence, we have decided to go our own way whilst still remaining allied with open source advocates: The Source First Definition . Everything we do is open source, but we must take steps to avoid causing unnecessary confusion and negative perceptions (even if we feel those perceptions are incorrect).