Where do we go towards POSS?

In 2012, James Governor coined the term POSS — Post Open Source Software — as a way to capture the feeling of a young group of new developers who feel that we should all just “fuck the license and governance, [and] commit to github.” In our fast paced development environment, we’ve established free and open source software as the norm for development. We’ve developed the legal tools that go with it in order to make it work under current legislation. The Free Software Foundation and others have developed licenses for software that can be easily applied when distributing it; Creative Commons have developed the licenses that are needed to distribute free culture. It’s a shame that we have not spent more time on making it easier to use.

For a very long time, there’s been a miss match between current laws and technology. It’s clear that copyright haven’t kept up with the pace of developments, and bills to amend copyright law have focused more on entrenching existing rights rather than relaxing them. It’s fortunate that we live in a time when awareness of this miss match is building, and where real changes to copyright is within reach. We live in a time where, within five to ten years, we will see increased exceptions for private and non-profit use in copyright. That change, while it may appear fundamental, has already been factored in by the industry.

The way in which we consume and enjoy music, literature and photographs have changed. An increasing amount of information is purchased and made accessible digitally and online. With increased digital content being made available comes increased abilities for those delivering the content to regulate how we may use it. Larry Lessig outlined this argument in his book Code is Law, and established that it is not primarily an elected legislative body that regulates what you may and may not do with digital content; that power to regulate is vested in whoever distributes digital content. Our legislative bodies are trying to read the map and give direction, but it’s ultimately the driver of the car that determines where to go.

If we accept the principles of POSS development — a tempting alternative if we feel that the current system is miss matched to reality, and there’s a need to simplify and ease software development — we fuck copyright and put our shit on Github, the future looks relatively certain: it’ll be filled with uncertainty. Without a license on the code that’s put on Github, it’ll be technically illegal for anyone to copy it and re-use it in their own context. As long as everyone plays nice and follow the POSS principles, it’ll all be fine, but the risk will never quite go away. At any one point the author of the code you used could for whatever reason choose to claim copyright infringement, and the courts would rule in their favor.

We can try to factor in that risk when developing, trying to isolate pieces that we’re uncertain about to make them easy to replace, stop sharing source code and hope that no one notices, or just hide it away in our code and put our own copyright notice on it, again hoping that no one notices. It doesn’t feel too tempting. But the answer is not as easy as simply saying that people should pay more attention to copyright. We can’t spend all our resources educating in a system that is miss matched to society.

The onerous to figure things out is on those of us who feel that copyright is still important to pay attention to and that the alternative —not caring about copyright, is much worse. Let us all agree that copyright and licenses are difficult to understand, that not everyone wants or can understand, and find solutions to making it possible to develop and enjoy software without understanding copyright. We have years of experience with abstracting technology, let us adopt the same principles of abstraction to law. Let us figure out the software equivalent of not reading your insurance paper. Sure, you’d be better off if you had read it, but you can still drive your car even if you don’t.