Henne Vogelsang

@henne@mastodon.social

@_msw_ @adamhjk software freedom (if you mean the four essential freedoms, not sure you do) does not pose an answer to the problem of downstream not behaving like expected, by widely shared sociotechnical standards, towards upstream.

The article @nearyd links to is great. It's, as far as I can understand without being in the work myself, the truth. This is why the folks who think that RH making bug-for-bug clones harder (not impossible! harder, marginaly) is bad for open source are wrong.

@adamhjk Judging from how this went now a couple of times, with various parties, I fear that this is a too intangible thing to point to.

@henne Their compliance. A desire to have equal ground with a competitor - not to remove them, but to have them share the burden of production (and to compete on the same)

@adamhjk Sorry if that was too harsh, I'm German 😉 This is exactly what I mean: Rocky points a the license as the reason for their entitlement. Where can RedHat point to?

@henne I’m not shrugging it off! I’m in the ring talking about it because I believe that the best way is together. To create more value than we capture. To lift each other up. The primary thing stopping that is the belief that one side is more entitled than the other.

@adamhjk I completely agree. I just think the way forward is to work out some form of shared understanding of what "being together" and "listen and accommodate each other" or willingness to change means. Especially *among* "producers" of open source software.

@henne But it can’t start from the expectation that we have to be together. We don’t. We have to choose it. If we start making villains, and creating positions we can’t walk back..

@adamhjk yet you cringe at this situation, I cringe at this situation, a lot of people cringe at this situation and some try to do something about that. I don't think it helps to shrug it off when it so frequently leads to shit shows among the people of the open souce community...

@henne Yes. The license. The four freedoms. They aren’t entitled to get what they want in a particularly easy way for them to do exactly what they want (bug for bug, exact reproduction including build order, etc) in an easy way. But they can do it.

@adamhjk Sure the license is allowing what Rocky does. We even collectively as community said (at least I would consider OSI to represent a large part of us somehow) that another license that does *not* allow this isn't the Open Souce compatible answer to this problem either.

@adamhjk Hm, I think you are talking how to resolve this situation now and I'm talking how to best avoid situations like this.

@henne But sometimes there just isn’t a path. And we agree to disagree. And we should expect folks to stop punching each other, and start moving on. And the power of open source is that they can do that. They don’t *need* to stay together. They should *want* to. But they don’t need to.

@adamhjk Entitled by whom or what? The license?

@henne We don’t. We say one of the best things about open source is that if we disagree about how to get what we want together - we can decide not to be. I’m more sympathetic to Red Hat than Rocky. But Rocky is fully entitled to do what they do.

@adamhjk Okay, but how do we want to solve the problem that RedHat (upstream) has a completely different understanding of how Rocky (downstream) should behave and vice versa?

@adamhjk Our community is looking to codify this. As community we have "rejected" all of the solutions people came up with: Licenses like SSPL, business models like Open Core or behavioral patterns like "source available".

Community is about finding the way forward together. Right now? It's all about who gets to put whose hand in your pocket for the remaining support dollars.

16.10.82, Hamburg: Adrian Maleika wird vor dem Fußballspiel HSV - Werder Bremen von rechten Hooligans totgeschlagen: ndr.de/sport/mehr_spo…

Despite what you've been told, it is rarely meritocracy that wins - it is almost always other things. You can be the most capable person in the room, and not be the person who comes out on top.

@Doubleface_hb @EisenBremen drölf

Welche Hausnummer hat das @EisenBremen? Ich frage für einen Barkeeper.

If you publish your software using an 'open source' license, then you are sharing outbound and can have no expectations of something in return. 1/4

@drublic As usual there are many attempts already. Free Software (Linux) distributions, various app stores or maintenance 'stores' like @tidelift that funnel money into maintainers hands

Has this been discussed before?

The internet runs on free open-source software. Who pays to fix it? technologyreview.com/2021/12/17/104…

Picard morality tip: If one side of a conflict preaches purity of bloodline above communal benefit for all, join the other side.