Four Freedoms... and a right?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic recently, though not nearly as much as you have obviously as my ideas on it are nascent, triggered recently by interactions with OSD author Bruce Perens and his Post-Open proposal (What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it).

My general feeling is that while there are some errata (like modernising the term programmer as practitioner, and dealing with the subjective term “preferred form”), fundamental changes like @giacomo’s minimalist amendment to cover data for completeness do not in fact expand the scope of Open Source, rather merely update it to reflect the nature of modern software (e.g., media, databases, and more recently, AI models).

I think there would need to be a very high bar set for any changes that fundamentally altered the meaning of Open Source. If I understand well, such a change would invalidate most/all of the 96 currently approved licenses. As would others like it, for example requiring patent grants. The data proposal on the other hand may force existing projects out of compliance if they ship with proprietary data, but would not conflict with the licenses themselves.

Have you considered creating a license that implements the right to receive (and obligation to give) support to participants, and whether that would comply with the current Open Source Definition? I suspect it would not, but I’m not sure what specific clauses would be problematic and that may depend on the implementation itself. We could then consider whether the OSD should be updated to cater for such license/s, and the implications and unintended consequences of same.

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