TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.
He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they’d fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that’s usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.
It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.
What are your thoughts on it?
Companies violating the GPL is not really the issue, I think. (And not what Bruce is talking about, either)
In the general case, companies that have an interest in existing in the long term don’t violate the GPL. GPL violations either get corrected, are done by fly-by-night operations to begin with, or happen in weird jurisdictions where the idea of a public licence just doesn’t fly. Side note, but Bruce’s idea would actually fix that last problem. There was a case a few years back that I can’t recall which GPL’d project was involved in it now, but it was in a European court, and they ruled that they couldn’t sue the GPL violator because there was no contract, and hence no damages. I can’t say I’m totally gungho about the idea of using contracts instead of licences (we’ll see about the details), but at least that one situation would be fixed.
Anyway, in regards to the big boys, everybody adheres strongly to the public licences. IBM, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., they all follow the open source licences to a T, and they all make off like bandits anyway, because the licences don’t really stop the companies from doing that. And that’s really where the focus us. Can we live in a world where unpaid hobbyists aren’t unwittingly volunteering to do all the work for the big tech companies?