In this clip, hosts Dave Lockie and Robert Jacobi discuss the balance between personal convenience and the ideals of open source technology. They explore the ongoing struggle between SaaS and open source, questioning whether current licensing does enough to benefit the wider community.
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Episode Transcript
Robert Jacobi:
My technology should be open source. Those should be like the top level of requirements for anything I do. And I’m not saying I’m great about this because I live in my little Apple universe and I’m quite happy with my little Apple products, but I find them safer and more secure. And I have other reasons for utilizing them. And then you have a, you know, a punnett table about what makes sense and what doesn’t.
Dave Lockie:
But, um, cost benefit, right? Like you could be. Freedom maxing with Linux? I bet you’re not, because that would be a lot of sysadmin for somebody that just wants to use the tech.
Robert Jacobi:
Well, and I only have so many resources in my heartbeat for whatever this lifetime is, and I need to also optimize those personally, right? And I think whether everyone realizes that or not, that’s part of the case in everything we do is like, okay, do I really want to walk 4 miles for, you know, a sandwich that takes me then, you know, 2 hours to do, or do I call, uh, you know, one of the delivery services?
Dave Lockie:
Yeah, yeah. Um, so where do you think the battleground or opportunities are for freedom, um, online? If Were you saying that open source is like a valuable part of freedom? You know, it’s one component of freedom, right? Not the only one, but definitely one of them. Where is that fight? Is that fight happening? Is it even part of the conversation at the moment?
Robert Jacobi:
I’d like to think that a fight needs to occur between SaaS and open source. The GPL, as most folks are using it, taking advantage of it. Does not force people to turn content over or, uh, works over back to the projects as long as they’re running internally. Uh, I will say Automattic obviously does a wonderful job of that because the work they do at.com and whatnot winds up, you know, significant portion of that winds up back in the actual WordPress project. But so many companies are doing things internally or with SaaS that should be pushed back out to the public as a whole so we can innovate and grow with them and, you know, and be free to make technological decisions. And I’ll, I’ll even take this out of the WordPress realm. You know, we know who are good contributors or not. Uh, but, you know, there are oil companies, there are industrial companies that are, you know, relying on open source tools. Uh, certainly the consumer product companies are. That stuff should be out there. If you’re using it internally and saying it’s SaaS and I’m following the GPL correctly, well, we need to change the GPL. To enforce more accountability and allowing the public to reap some of the rewards that the public has put into those projects. Because let’s take my family. It’s not just me who’s contributing, working open source. It’s the rest of the family who’s doing things. Their money and time is helping me do money and time to the open source project. So everyone in this household will benefit from that. And that only expands, is, you know, you go out and to the rest of the world.
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