Tonight was a lot of threads connecting for me. At Automattic’s Noho Space we hosted an event for Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about Pope Francis, called Aldeas. There was a point in my life when I wanted to become a priest, and I had been inspired by meeting a Franciscan seminary student. I took it very seriously and considered that as a path for my life, but some combination of jazz and girls made me realize that the priesthood was not my destiny.

The jazz led to building websites for Houston jazz musicians, which led to coding, which led to WordPress, which after a lot of twists and turns led to Automattic acquiring Tumblr. One of Tumblr’s greatest memes was Goncharov, directed by Martin Scorsese. The only reason Automattic, as a distributed company, has an office in NYC is because of the Tumblr acquisition. The office is filled with art from Tumblr artists so I had the very surreal experience of talking after Martin Scorsese, who at 83 is sharp as a tack and a gifted speaker, a few feet away from a Goncharov poster about how my Catholic upbringing led me down the path of starting WordPress, and how Pope Francis’ life inspired the WordPress Jubilee and reflection. Full circle.

I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source.

37signals/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson’s insistence on calling it open source. “One more thing…  Fizzy is open source and 100% free to run yourself.”

Thanks to Freedom of Speech, DHH is free to describe his proprietary software as Open Source, a form of greenwashing, and even though he wants to “Well akshually” denigrate those saying why this is BS, we as free citizens are free to explain why, despite how fast he talks and confident he sounds, he’s not always right.

Myself and other “Actually Open Source” leaders (including DHH) who release software under licenses that meet a common definition of Open Source benefit from decades of prior art and an incredible foundation that lays out the philosophy and definition of what defines open source.

For the layperson, though, it might be helpful to break things down in an analogy of authoritarian vs democratic regimes, or a core question of who holds the power.

Proprietary licenses may grant things that feel like freedoms; for example, Fizzy’s O’Saasy license lets you download the source code, run it yourself, modify it, and use a public bug tracker, and you can see the software’s source control history. That’s cool! Also, in the past several years, there have been Middle Eastern countries that have just now allowed women to drive cars. That’s great! However, as a free person choosing to use this software, or choosing to live in a country, you have to ask yourself: Am I still free?

No, you’re not. You are allowed to do some things that are in and of themselves good, but ultimately, it’s not built on a foundation of an inalienable right or constitution; it’s at the whim of the leader. O’Saasy license has this restriction:

No licensee or downstream recipient may use the Software (including any modified or derivative versions) to directly compete with the original Licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted, managed, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product or cloud service where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself.

Oh wow, I can’t compete with the leader. In how they choose to operate their business today, or however they might choose to in the future. My freedoms are at their whim. This violates rule 5 of the OSI definition of Open Source: “The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.”

I’d like to choose software and live in a society that doesn’t discriminate.

It’s not uncommon for people trying to take away your freedom to want to use the same words as those in truly free societies. North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Why? Per Google’s AI:

Socialist Definition of Democracy During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies used “democracy” to mean “people’s power” through a single ruling party, representing the working class, as opposed to the multi-party “bourgeois” democracy of the West. North Korea adopted this lexicon, as did other communist states like the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Yeah, really democratic. In that sense, you can say O’Saasy is an “open” “source” license. Perhaps a bubble of people will agree with you. But the rest of the world will use common sense and see that as a fraud. And most disappointingly for 37signals, a company that prides itself on high integrity, it’s false advertising.

(For what it’s worth, I tried to resolve this quietly with Jason Fried a few days ago.)

Though the stream didn’t work as we hoped, the recording of this year’s State of the Word, which in many ways was our best one yet, is up now.

We’ve secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Tuesday, but it has limited capacity in terms of people and has a lot of security hurdles to jump through to get in.

So to open things up to the community more, we’re going to activate my hacker/maker art warehouse, TinkerTendo, in the Dogpatch neighbourhood for a simulcast watch party. There will be some cool art from the Misalignment Museum there, great wifi, lots of power plugs and floor seating, a big projection screen and speakers and I think will be a great spot for WordPress folks to hang and network and co-work while in San Francisco. I’ll swing by after the talk to meet everyone as well.

If you want access, you can register via Meetup here.