Open Source licenses are flawed. There, I've said it. I didn't say "Open Source" is flawed; I just said the licenses are flawed. There's a difference. Open Source, as a concept, came from a bunch of programmers (mostly in academia) who thought software should be open and shared. I don't have a problem with that. But who wrote the licenses? The licenses were written by people who didn't have to worry about putting bread on the table or paying for college. I don't think they ever even considered that people might want to write software, open source it, and somehow still not starve. Most people seemed to have given up on trying to make money from Open Source software development. But I don't think it has to be that way. In fact, if open source is to continue its growth, a better economic model (and licensing model) is needed.

I posted an email to a mailing list hosted by the Open Source Initiative intended for discussing licenses, with an idea for a semi-commercial license that preserved the important aspects of the open source spirit. It appears that my initial proposal goes against the Open Source Definition. But having read the Definition carefully, I don't see how a license which requires users that deploy modified versions of the software to either make modifications public, or pay a license fee, would violate the Definition.

It's rather simple. It's a lot like the GPL, except you must make your modifications public if you deploy the software. With web-based apps like IlohaMail, deployment is analogous to distributing binaries for desktop software, so in spirit, there's not much difference. But it has an optional BSD-like provision, because if for some reason you don't want to publicize the changes you made, you have that option too, if you pay a fee.

Although the license wouldn't specifically say so, it would mostly affect commercial entities. After all, who else would be secretive enough to not want to publicize proprietary changes they've made (and be willing to pay for that as well)? For anyone else, it's just a matter to sending an email to a mailing list saying "I've made these changes", or simply posting the entire modified source on their site. And for the vast majority of users (commercial or private) who don't make modifications, it'll be life as usual.

There's an article over on Memory Hole titled The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile (via Cee's ML). The artcle quotes from past publications and specialists in education to show how the American education system was designed specifically to create docile citizens. Here are two nice quotes:

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time orthey will lose their jobs in the real world."

I'm not a very bright 8 year old (or a very bright 23 year old, for that matter) but I did spend the last 7 years of my K12 education in a school that wasn't a public school, which tried relatively hard to keep students engaged, and allowed us to stimulate ourselves in areas that interested us (for me is was programming and theatre tech). Perhaps as a result of that, I never picked up the art of doing the same thing 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, 30 years in a row. I might never stick with the same job for more than a few years, and I might never be rich, but somehow, I don't feel I'm worse off because of that... Maybe society (read: the state) has more to lose from individuals, than individuals stand to lose from society.