Current challenges in free software and open source development

Speaker: Paul Ivanov 1. License laundering as a service: the intersection of large language models and pyramid schemes. 2. Oil and water: the effort and expectation differences of mixing paid and volunteer work. 3. Pay the piper: relicensing trends in commercially supported source-available projects. License laundering as a service: the intersection of large language models and pyramid schemes. GitHub Copilot, and other large language models for code completion trained on publicly available software with no regard for the licenses of that software, acts as a license laundering cudgel that denigrates the work of open source developers who have contributed their code under a legal framework for how their code can be used. If their code was contributed under a copyleft license, like GPL (v2 or v3), the expectation is that no user of their code will ever lose the ability to modify their code. If it was contributed under a permissive license, like BSD (2 or 3 clause) or MIT, the expectation was that inclusion of their code would result in an attribution to the project they contributed to. Tools like GitHub Copilot makes all of those expectation of the original authors of the code null and void, enabling theft of their work, all in the name of making it "easier" for other programmers. Oil and water: the effort and expectation differences of mixing paid and volunteer work. Popular collaboratively developed software can attract a mixture of monetarily compensated development as well as the hobbyist unpaid labor that nourished the software in its nascency. "Business critical gift economies" don't exist, but projects and their participants vary on a spectrum from those two opposite poles, and positions shift over time. Paradoxically, this tension can be both productive and detrimental at the same time, depending on the perspective of those involved. Pay the piper: relicensing trends in commercially supported source-available projects. With increasing frequency, previously open source software projects backed by a commercial entity are shifting away from traditional licenses. Recent examples include Sentry, Terraform, Redis, and CockroachDB. Why are they doing that and what are affected users and developers doing in response.