Since the very beginning of the M17 Project, the primary aim of the whole idea has been to provide People – the Amateur Radio Community – with freely available hardware and software solutions. The paramount concern has always been documentation accessibility and reproducibility of all devices and programs.
During the recent years, quite a few people reached out to us commenting on the licensing choices and wording that we use throughout – specifically the open-source phrase. These critics’ issue was with that phrase’s definition and our (mis)use of it. For them, open-source doesn’t merely mean free, but free to anyone, “not discriminating any field of endeavor”, as they said.
Our projects were, are, and will always be free for the People, the Amateur Radio Community. We care about humans, living beings, not commercial entities and their greed for money – exploitation without fair compensation. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, famously stated: “I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one”1. I do not consider companies people either. And while I acknowledge that our interpretation of openness differs from the Open Source Initiative’s definition, I question whether that definition should be treated as the final word on the subject.
The M17 Project (or the M17 Foundation) does not have any moral obligation to serve commercial interests simply because we publish our work. Making our work publicly available should not automatically entitle commercial interests to appropriate the results of our volunteer labor for private gain. We are a volunteer-driven community, not an unpaid R&D department for someone else’s business. We are not to be exploited. Volunteers seeing their work commercialized for the profit of third-party companies, without recognition or reciprocity, inevitably risk losing the incentive to keep contributing. This is something we will not let happen.
We believe that the fruits of community effort should remain accessible to the community that created them. Licensing should protect that principle, rather than allow the appropriation of volunteer labor without reciprocity. In an ideal utopia, the OSI’s non-discrimination clause would work, but we do not live in such a world. One of the solutions that I can identify is for the commercial entities to reach out to the copyright holders asking them to grant a separate permission to use their work for a particular purpose.
Should the definition of open-source be treated as an unquestionable doctrine (vide: OSI), or should the community be allowed to challenge what openness actually means?
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