I would love to see it applied also to hardware, so that for example when a 8 years old phone that nobody would buy anymore gets opened (including chipsets) small Linux distros can be ported to it, turning it into a hacking platform, IoT terminal, media player, navigator, etc. instead of a paperweight, or worse, more junk into some 3rd world landfill.

IMHO, I think this counters a philosophical point of open source software.

The open code to the software we use should not be a handout or a gift ex post facto.

The open code to the software should be an invitation: to collaborate on it, audit it, or frankly do anything you want with it (e.g. WTFPL); before, during, and after using it.

There are times to hold fast to ideals, and times when demanding purity is self-destructive. (And of course wisdom is knowing the difference, and much harder than it looks.)

Open source should be a big tent - it should be an answer to questions people have many different motives for asking. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The old cathedral vs bazaar argument never goes away ;)

That's like saying "landlords shouldn't be incentivized to hand over apartment over to residents after x years, because all housing should be publicly held"

You're not wrong, but given the world we live in the incentive would be better. And I would say that's the sort of "non-reformist reform" that's liable to push towards the ideal, not appease and reinforce the status quo.

> That's like saying "landlords shouldn't be incentivized to hand over apartment over to residents after x years, because all housing should be publicly held"

> You're not wrong

"Not wrong" seems like a... generous... description of this viewpoint. Lots of places tried the system of "all housing is publicly held"; it was not a success.

Ironically of course WTFPL is in fact not "do anything you want with it" despite the claims of the author and fans of the license.

https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/29718/is-the-wtfpl-g...

I'd never read that Google page before. I can't make sense of the section there named The ‘restricted’ licenses. It says:

> Third-party software made available under one of these licenses must not be part of Google products that are delivered to outside customers.

This policy covers all 3 versions of the GPL. And yet they made Android, based on the Linux kernel.

It’s really quite infuriating to me that I can’t just say “yeah I made this, but anyone can have it.”

I mean, really. It just seems batshit insane to me that this is problematic.

It's the original spirit/sentiment behind patent law and copyright law. Copyright sort of lost the thread on that one over the course of its extensions, but in the case of the book the "source code" to construct the book is very similar to the contents of the book and a limited copyright term was supposed to imply that eventually the public would have access to it after the brief monopoly rights granted to the creators of the work.

As copyright pushed to things beyond books that also made it easy to forget that original "open source" idealism behind copyright. It's tougher to build a new movie out of the components of a published movie than to build books from the components of published books.

Patent law is where the idea was applied to something that needed "source control preserved": describe an invention in complete detail in a public registry so that others can recreate and get a powerful limited monopoly on it, but as soon as that limit hits everyone should be able to recreate it.

Software patents have long been a mockery of that original spirit of patent law, but "open source projects by companies get stronger piracy protection/what have you for the first X years of their registered life" is really what software patents should have been in the first place, based on the original goals of what patents were for.

"You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out." -- jwz, 1999

Create that tax incentive, and 99% of publishers will slap the "open source" label on something 5 or 10 years old which is completely unmaintained, unusably buggy, and virtually unreadable. Nothing of value will be gained, and big companies will have yet another tax loophole.

This would be a great idea. Could probably have larger and more beneficial results than the government just funding research projects.