Sid Sijbrandij (sytses) Gitlab CEO Proposing Distributed OSS Label

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#1

I believe ownership of open source and open core software should be distributed between different parties to align incentives. I’m happy to answer any questions.

Read up from this tweet for the thread.

It actually starts with him saying that he wants to propose this new DOSS term:

Distributed Open Source Software (DOSS) has a OSI-approved license and a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) - Because there is no Contributor License Agreement (CLA) nobody can relicense the software without permission of the contributors or rewriting it.

On Gitlab switching to Developer Certificate of Origin in 2017:

Analysis at the time:

#2

I think everyone is trying to come up with new definitions so they can point to good people and bad people and form some smaller tribes.

Personally I’m in tune with the sentiment of more distributed / shared ownership, but I don’t feel the need to then restrict it to OSI blessed licenses.

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#3

Well, there goes the FSF catalog! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Ugh. The DCO makes very, very little sense outside of projects developed like the kernel and Git are developed, largely under copyleft licenses.

I get it. Developers don’t like CLAs. They don’t like interruptions in their process. Word has gotten out that the DCO is a CLA-shaped thing, and can plug a CLA-shaped hole. But it doesn’t do what a CLA is supposed to do. It was never designed to.

#4

Guess the year of this quote?:

It took me a long time to understand what (the industry) meant by open vs. proprietary, but I finally figured it out. From the perspective of any one supplier, open meant “our products.” Proprietary meant “everyone else’s products.”

The more I look at this, the more I wonder whether people are really thinking about what they’re fighting over, or just fighting over it because everybody’s fighting over it. We’re talking about a bungled, twenty-year-old rebrand of a vague concept around, of all the hot fun in this world, software licensing. The more controversy there is, over and over again, the more it’s clear to still more people that there was never much of a “consensus” about much of anything meaningful.

It’s like fighting over who takes home the open bottles from a party that happened twenty years ago.

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