11 ms·

GPL Time Bomb – an interesting approach to FOSS licensing

162 points by boyter 10y ago

Scaevolus 10y ago
Unfortunately, this doesn't support regular expressions, which is a very useful feature for a code search engine. See https://github.com/google/codesearch https://github.com/google/codesearch for one implementation of this.
- boyter 10y ago
  Believe it or not thats actually one of the least requested features. The most requested is the one I am implementing for the next release 1.3.0 which is historical searches across every commit for auditing purposes. That said I am working on experimental regex search support as well.
ktRolster 10y ago
I remember Stallman once advocated a license similar to this (for things like games, so people can make money on them, then release shortly after. His timeframe was more like months though iirc).
- erlehmann_ 10y ago
  A model that works well for games can be summarized as “free code, proprietary assets”.
  - clarry 10y ago
    But even freeing the assets eventually would be really nice. There's plenty of creative effort involved around extending and improving existing content from old games, or making something new loosely or not-so-loosely based on the originals, but this often involves creating derivative works of the original proprietary assets which means these mods are illegal. In some cases you can work around these limitations with code. E.g. in the doom community you find that making custom palettes is very popular nowadays, as the original makes some bad tradeoffs and many nice color schemes are out of question without a custom palette. But to completely overhaul the palette, you must re-do the original assets or create some sort of a mapping that source ports would understand.
  - SXX 10y ago
    Problem with this model is fact that in modern games a lot of code is scipts that are part of assets.
tibbetts 10y ago
RapidMiner was doing something like this a few years ago. https://rapidminer.com/news-posts/rapidminerembracesitscommunity/ https://rapidminer.com/news-posts/rapidminerembracesitscommu... I haven't followed closely but I think they gave up on the complexity and started offering the same product as either AGPLv3 (a hostile license for the kind of customers who pay for software) or commercial license. A straight dual-license model reduces confusion about what is in which edition. If you are going to have an open and a closed product you really have two products, which should ideally have two separate reasons for existing. Just being the old version is not the right kind of difference.
- dspillett 10y ago
  > Just being the old version is not the right kind of difference. In a purely commercial context this worked for some time for products like PagePlus: you would get an older version from on magazine cover disks. For many the older version was good enough to do what they needed, for others the upgrade path to get the extra features was obvious and they would often buy the newer version of what they'd already played with without even looking for alternatives. Depending on the product I'm not sure I would trust an older version these days though. A desktop only DTP app like PP maybe, but anything online, at all security related, or just that I might put credentials into; I would have security concerns unless there was some sort of guarantee that security updates were getting back-ported. That and in a lot of cases there may well be a Free+free option as good as the 18+ month old version of [whatever]. As you and others have already stated, the straight dual-licensing model makes more sense from the user PoV (and maybe form the developer PoV too, though I expect opinion to differ more widely there).
pwang 10y ago
I applaud the spirit of this, i.e. in trying to lay out a covenant with the community while still being entrepreneurial about building a commercial business to fund continued innovation and maintenance of the software. The problem is that it falls into an outdated framing of the value of software. Namely, as more people around the world have gained significant expertise in coding, the skillsets needed to produce software is commoditizing. That skilled labor used to be scarce, and that meant that the fruit of that labor was scarce, and therefore the artifact itself was the thing to monetize. Creative and clever licensing around software can "protect" software from certain kinds of things, but they cannot protect the software from being commoditized. And commoditization pressure is very high right now. Over the last 10 years, OSS has permeated into real enterprise adoption, and many of the deep reasons for enterprises to adopt open source software are tied precisely to those commoditizing factors. So to build a sustainable business around software, you have to tie your price to the actual business value. In our modern times, when the skills to produce software are abundant, the thing that's valuable, then, is creating alignment on your API or framework or service, by earning the greatest mindshare among the collective labor pool that can maintain and innovate on software. And there's a huge virality to that, too - the game of developer mindshare is a winner-take-all game. All this is to say: don't worry so much about defending the software, because that's not the valuable thing. The community around your software is what determines whether it is relevant 3 years from now. And having weird/new/different licensing terms can stifle the growth of that community.
- slgeorge 10y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree. The skills might be abundant[0] but the effort and knowledge of the domain (business logic) are not available to many. It depends on the domain, games in IOS don't count for example, but I feel like there are lots of situations where the software can be directly monetized. Lets assume that's not true - how do you actually monetize a community? Developers around a 'platform' are difficult to monetize. SaaS works for some things but not everything. The idea that 'developer mindshare is a winner-take-all game' is true if your Google or Facebook - it's a total different game if you're one person or a medium sized software business. [0] I actually don't think this is true. There are abundant skills to do trivial things, but skilled problem solvers for harder classes are still constrained - we can see that by the rocketing salary bands of developers over all compared to the rest of the economy (at least in the USA/Western Europe).
m-ueberall 10y ago
For the record--this is basically the same as http://bit.ly/toxicBSL http://bit.ly/toxicBSL, http://bit.ly/bslMScl http://bit.ly/bslMScl, therefore the same arguments apply.
- jzelinskie 10y ago
  Next time can you not use a URL shortener but instead use cliff notes[0]? Mysterious links (especially from new users) definitely arouse suspicion of phishing/malware. [0]: like this
- lucb1e 10y ago
  /toxicBSL => http://swanhart.livejournal.com/140324.html http://swanhart.livejournal.com/140324.html | Basically Shitty License /bslMScl => https://falseisnotnull.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/thoughts-on-maxscale-new-license/ https://falseisnotnull.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/thoughts-on-... | Thoughts on MaxScale new license
anilgulecha 10y ago
Language matters. The idea is neat, but "time-bomb" gives it a negative connotation. Instead maybe call it anti-abandonware licence, or public-benefit timer, or something else. (I'm sure HN can come up with a better phrase).
- charonn0 10y ago
  How about "GPL Failsafe"?
  - caf 10y ago
    Fail-open license.
  - slowmovintarget 10y ago
    "GPL Time Lock"
- Mao_Zedang 10y ago
  Thought crime police
- superice 10y ago
  Auto-release time lock
  - uryga 10y ago
    how about just "auto release GPL?"
- uryga 10y ago
  GPL countdown something?
- v0lta 10y ago
  self releasing license
- JimDabell 10y ago
  I had a similar idea years ago and the name I came up with was "Eventually Open". It wasn't a case of abandoning code more gracefully per se, but simply that after a set period of time, code would be relicensed as open, regardless of the state of the business. So you might have a timeline like: * Today: release version 1.0. * 6 months into the future: release version 2.0. * 12 months into the future: version 1.0 becomes GPL. * 18 months into the future: version 2.0 becomes GPL. * 24 months into the future: version 1.0 becomes MIT. * 30 months into the future: version 2.0 becomes MIT. And so on. The latest version would be proprietary but source-included, and previous versions get relicensed as soon as they age out. The other alternative is to have the same mechanism, but with a donations system to speed up the relicensing. If your codebase is worth 30k to you, then if people chip in 30k, it gets relicensed immediately. If people chip in 15k it gets relicensed earlier than it would normally. It's not a good alternative to open-source, but it's preferable to completely proprietary as it makes it possible for abandonware to be picked up and maintained by third parties, and it offers an alternative mechanism for funding development of code that will eventually be open.
bobajeff 10y ago
This almost but not quite sounds like the concept of public domain.
- mthoms 10y ago
  Public domain is a specific legal term denoting that something is entirely without copyright protection. His project is still covered by copyright using terms set forth in his license agreement. Be aware that the phrase "public domain" is often misused to describe content "publicly available on the internet" or "in a public space". Usually that content is indeed covered by copyright since that is the default in law. Copyright applies automatically from the moment something is created.
  - shiro 10y ago
    I think the grandparent meant the rule that a copyrighted work becomes public domain after certain period of creation or author's decease.
    - gpvos 10y ago
      Except that GPL is not at all like public domain. An MIT- or BSD-style license might be close enough to public domain to count.
  - HugoDaniel 10y ago
    Not "entirely without copyright". Once you create something the moral copyright is yours forever. What this means is that nobody else can claim they did it, even if its in the public domain. I cannot claim i wrote the Shakespeare works even though they are in the public domain. He still has the moral copyright over them.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Actually, in the US, you can!
    - mthoms 10y ago
mjevans 10y ago
This is an interesting take on licences that turn 'abandon-ware' in to public domain or close to public domain code when the maintainers are unresponsive. I like how it mandates that there are 3 years for innovation to occur within. However I feel like the license before that needs provisions for things like the ability to make local changes as needed, and also to publish /security patches/ freely. Edit (Beneath): The impression I got was that he has ONE version, and a built in escape clause for anyone using it. I took the view of this licensing scheme ensuring he'd have to 'compete' against a 3 year old version of the product with compelling features; not that there'd be an intended 'free' version of the product.
- slgeorge 10y ago
  He's definitely assuming that this commercial version remains primary: "I will be forced to continually improve it and upgrade if I want to keep a for sale version without there being an equivalent FOSS version around (which in theory could be maintained by the community)" But, is mostly discounting a community fork, or divergence between his commercial version and the older GPL version. If he receives patches he'll have to have a copyright assignment policy so that he can apply the features to both trees - which will risk a fork as many people strongly dislike them.
  - hughperkins 10y ago
    I dont think hes expecting other people to contribute code to his project whilst hes working on it.
    - boyter 10y ago
      That is correct. I do not anticipate much feedback from others.
michaelmrose 10y ago
This is obviously much better than proprietary as people can potentially benefit in the future from your work and I thank you for being so kind as to share it and yet I would probably use something significantly crappier to have real open source and several other things seem problematic. -- Others are unlikely to contribute to the proprietary fork. -- What do you do about contributions to the gpl3 version they would be copyright their creators and couldn't be part of a closed source version even the authors without copyright assignment. -- Do you backport fixes to the gpl version. It would be far simpler to say use the new version wherein issue foo is fixed. If you do its a lot more work if you don't the gpl version isn't just a older version its a known broken pos that will never be fixed. -- What if people offer fixes to the gpl version will they be expected to assign copyright so you can use them in the proprietary version? -- 3 years is an eternity. In 1 year someone could make their own version of whatever it is you are doing that is actually open source if it was really worth having it would also have none of the above complications.
- chubot 10y ago
  Yeah I agree... I like this idea in theory. But in practice I think you will end up with two major versions: "latest commercial version" and "latest GPL version". And then people will want to patch the GPL version and not the latest. 3 years is a lot of delta... git is really good at applying patches, but I wouldn't want disincentivize massive refactorings.
- rocqua 10y ago
  These concerns are why I tend to dislike the GPL.
  - wcoenen 10y ago
    I don't see anything GPL-specific about these concerns. The same concerns apply when you replace the GPL by any other non-proprietary license.
    - k_sze 10y ago
      If I understand correctly, I think it is somewhat GPL-specific. You basically can't port fixes and new features from a GPL codebase to another codebase that is not under a GPL-compatible license. I think you don't have this issue with more permissive licenses like MIT/BSD. At least then you have a chance of having the commercial-licensed one having all the fixes from the open-source version, in addition to its own fixes and new features. (My understanding of open source/free software licenses can be quite fuzzy, so correct me if I'm wrong.)
burgerdev 10y ago
a) Site is down, google cache is here http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NBcmXVo-izcJ:www.boyter.org/2016/08/gpl-time-bomb-interesting-approach-foss-licensing/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NBcmXVo... b) The license file on GitHub does not mention GPL, a time frame or something even remotely related to the post - looks like some sort of shareware license. c) If it's a good product today, will it still be a good product in 3 years? In today's version? I doubt it. Still better than just selling binaries, but not by much.
- m3adow 10y ago
  > b) The license file on GitHub does not mention GPL, a time frame or something even remotely related to the post - looks like some sort of shareware license. The README.txt does: https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/README.txt https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/READ...
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    Yeah that tripped me up too. The article had no links so I clicked the tweet on top, checked out the license file, saw nothing of the sort, and as a last hope scrolled through the readme. There at last.
    - boyter 10y ago
      Something for me to fix. I will sort this issue out over the next few days.
hsivonen 10y ago
IIRC, Ghostscript used a scheme like this prior to 2006.
- slgeorge 10y ago
  Yes, I believe that's true. I was reminded of it a few months ago when someone was asking for advice on how to monetise some software that they felt would require ongoing effort. If I remember correctly it was widely disliked, but perhaps the world has changed in the last 10 years!
kijin 10y ago
I'm planning to do something similar with some of the source-available proprietary software that I'm writing nowadays. If I die or otherwise fail to maintain the software for some time (much shorter than 3 years), the license will revert to GPL. This kind of arrangement might be more difficult to pull off when there are multiple copyright holders or if some of them are corporations. But for projects maintained by individuals or a small group of like-minded people, I think it hits a nice balance between making a profit and giving back to the community.
- Mchl 10y ago
  I also had a similar kind of license in mind. My idea was: the software becomes lincensed under an open source license once any one of these happens: 1. I earn x amount of money out of my work 2. It's n seconds since EPOCH 3. I am pronounced dead by a qualified proffesional or nobody has heard from me for m years.
  - kijin 10y ago
    #1 is difficult for other people to verify. #3 needs a better definition of "nobody has heard from me". Has anyone heard from you if it becomes widely known that you made a billions dollar from an unrelated business and retired from programming? It will probably work better if you say something like n seconds since the last commit, or since your last public activity on your Github, HN, or Twitter account. Anyhow, it would be useful to have a standard, legally proven way to make these kinds of promises. Non-lawyers like me trying to be too clever are likely to leave serious loopholes.
    - PieterH 10y ago
      The model is simple, each version 'expires' and falls into free software domain after some specific time. If you stop making useful new releases your users fork the last good release. That's it, no need for more complex mechanisms.
    - Mchl 10y ago
      Regarding #1, I'm assuming my own good faith in this :) #3 in the second clause is indeed tricky, but I suppose it could be worded in legally unambigous way. And anyway I always assumed the dealine in #2 would be no more than three years in the future since the software is first published under these terms.
PieterH 10y ago
Proposed by MySQL's Monty some time ago under moniker "Business Source”.
Illniyar 10y ago
I think that having a license that is both open source and that protects the creator's ability to earn money from his creation (thus paying for it's maintenance really) is a very good and important idea. Personally though I wouldn't go with the TimeBomb idea, I think that if I ever get the chance I'll decide on a single expected revenue stream (such as sass hosting) and provide an open source license for use except for that purpose.
- boyter 10y ago
  I had considered that but since this is a product that indexes source code a lot of companies want to host on premise.
Arnt 10y ago
This was done twenty years ago with Ghostscript, google for AFPL to see the details. The author made enough to retire, so it can work for some people some of the time.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Ghostscript was dual-licensed, and not exactly the same as this scenario; though the end result is pretty similar. The Ghostscript folks never set a specific date on when the proprietary version would be GPL, as far as I know; they would do new releases of the proprietary version, and then the older and slightly less capable version would be open sourced. That's not to say calling it a time-bomb makes it an entirely novel idea. My company has been doing it for 10+ years now with Virtualmin (which has a GPL and commercial version, and we roll the commercial features down into GPL as new features come along in the commercial version, and as we can afford to do so). But, honestly, it's kind of an awful business model. We've been making a living at it all this time, but I wouldn't call it a success; we'd make higher salaries working for others. I'd like to find other ways to make a living from Open Source, that pay better (and aren't doing service contracting), but I haven't had much luck at it in 20 years of trying.
  - Arnt 10y ago
    ISTR there being a promise mentioning some period... 18 months? I don't care though. I think L. Peter Deutsch made his money by means that have ~nothing to do with the license. His licensing didn't break his business model, that's all. My own little palace is also largely paid for, and open source has something to do with that pleasant fact, but I hindsight I don't think licensing mattered much. FOSS licensing, and all the arguments about varieties of licensing, is a digression. Success comes from luck+work+xfactor, and whatever xfactor may be, license discussions isn't it.
  - cbsmith 10y ago
    It was a specific time period. I thought it was 12 months, but maybe it was 18. Either way, Stallman didn't like it, but he was willing to work with it, because it was better than the alternative.
kahrkunne 10y ago
I hate when people don't even try to make money off FOSS
martingxx 10y ago
I interpret this as "I don't want to collaborate with you people yet - I want this all for myself because I think I can make more money that way. But in case I fail, I'll change my mind and hey let's work together!" No thanks. GNU GPL is an excellent choice for a license for a commercial product if you do it right. It fosters collaboration and community from the start. Look around at the most successful companies whose major products are open source, especially the GPL ones. Note that none of them started off refusing reciprocal collaboration with potential contributors.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  You might be right in part: it's his product and his business and I'm not sure he means for the community to contribute to his wealth (like you say "I don't want to collaborate [yet]" is probably more or less accurate). However the "I'll change my mind and hey let's work together" part I think is wrong. He provides the source for people to see in the first place. Assuming there are no patents involved, that makes anyone free to re-implement ideas there, which is a risk for him, but nice for everyone who wants to see source code of stuff they use (I do). Then, when it turns out he no longer needs the product, it's free for everyone. If people don't find it worth the money but do want to use it and hack on it, they're free to do so, with or without him. So he's not asking to work together or for help in later years, he's giving the opportunity to use it after he stopped doing so himself.
  - martingxx 10y ago
    Re-implementing "independently" once you have seen the source code can be legally problematic. (see https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html#faq3_2 https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html#faq3_2 ) for an example. No longer needing the product kind of means that it's failed. In which case, why would it suddenly be valuable to others with a simple change of license? It's more likely to succeed in the first place by fostering collaboration from the start. This is how successful open source projects operate. It's all about community, mutual respect, and bi-directional sharing. Having the source available but not open (yet) strikes me as a cynical attempt to appear open while retaining control of other peoples freedoms, and I for one would never work with such a project. I'd probably rather use a completely closed product with no source available; at least you're getting something that's not pretending to be more open than it really is.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
IANAD 10y ago
I'm not sure if this will work as it is currently, and here's why: https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/LICE... Clearly shows that it is released under the Fair Source License, version 0.9 with no mention of license termination and restricted rights. It is NOT free. https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/README.txt https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/READ... then states: 'After the following date 27-August-2019 you may choose to use this software, version "1.2.3" or "1.2.4" under the GNU General Public License Version 3 with terms specified at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt' https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt' This is so wrong. Not that it is GPL, but this both contradicts the license and states that you "may choose to use this software..." under the GNU GPLv3. Also, the missing comma after "1.2.4" is a mistake in grammar. I'd say, as-is, you should consider this licensing unreliable. Yes, he posted in his blog stating his intention, but as it is now, it would appear that if a ruling had to be made on the actual license, it could very well be that the only valid license is the one in LICENSE.txt. Since that is unclear, though, if I were a user and cared about the license, I'd get a good lawyer to figure this out before making any assumptions. And, I would suggest that he get a lawyer to help craft the required changes to his license.
- tghw 10y ago
  Dual licensing happens all the time, often with GPL and some other, more restrictive license. He clearly states that until X date, you may only use the code under the Fair Source License. After X date, you may choose which of the two licenses you would like to use. There's no conflict in adding another license, it's his code, and the license and his directives dictate how people can copy and distribute it. Nor does the fact that there's only one license in LICENSE.txt really mean anything. README.txt is clear about the dual license in its "Licence" section.
  - IANAD 10y ago
    What about the following text in README: 'If you are building from source then you get no support and must work within the restrictions specified of the fair source licence (see LICENSE.txt for details). To purchase support see https://searchcode.com/product/#downloadlinks' https://searchcode.com/product/#downloadlinks' And what about: 'Use of this software is governed by the Fair Source License included in the LICENSE.TXT file' No period there at the end, but that seems to indicate to use the LICENSE.TXT. And then, even worse: 'In order to deal with the case of my death or this software becoming abandoned it has a time-bomb where the licence will change exactly 3 years after the publish date of a version release. This means that if version 1.0.0 was released on 1 July 2010 then it can be taken using the listed alternate licence on 2 July 2013. This licence, version and time is all specified below.' There is no definition of what 'software becoming abandoned' (Which 'software'? What does 'abandoned' mean?). There is no definition of what 'it can be taken' means. The example date is one day more than three years and the dates given as examples could confuse the date intended for expiry. There is no definition of what should be used as the 'publish date of a version release'. While these things may seem common sense to a developer, they should have a clear legal interpretation.
bitL 10y ago
If you really want to make money, it's probably not the best idea to put a fixed time into your time bomb, unless you are targeting a fast moving platform like mobile OSes. At some point your previous version will be sufficient to 99% of people and any new features will be just nice-to-haves. Maybe you can consider per-feature time bombs? You'll still have time to build a sustainable business on top of it, still allow people to study/modify your code, but with greater control over your cashflow.
- boyter 10y ago
  I considered that but assuming things get to that point I feel I will have either done well enough for it to be a moot issue or I have run out of ideas. At this point I feel it should be available for all to use.
ubertaco 10y ago
My gut-reaction to the title was to assume (based on the negative connotation to "time bomb") that you had some code that was permissively-licensed (something user-friendly like MIT or BSD), and then when the bomb "goes off", it switched to GPL, rendering it unusable in most commercial software.
majewsky 10y ago
There is something similar for Qt. Back when Qt was licensed more proprietarily (with a GPL option for pure FLOSS), the KDE folks were worried that Trolltech could just release new versions as proprietary-only. Therefore, an agreement was reached and codified that, should Trolltech fail to do an open-source release of Qt for more than 12 months, the last release shall fall under the BSD License to facilitate a community fork.
gioele 10y ago
I have been toying with a similar idea, but for born-FOSS source projects. I like copyleft licenses but I find the legalese in them too complex and I fear that they will cause problem down the road because of changes in the legal landscape. I am also worried about leaving code around that is useful but unusable by other for legal reasons. For all these reasons I would like to license my projects like this: * They are born AGPLv3/OHL. * All the published revisions older than 5 years are released into the public domain (CC0). Simple and easy to state, incredibly complex to write down. Especially if you want to make it enforceable without me (or the other contributors) being alive. From what I understand, the concept of a "legally binding promise" is even more fuzzy across the jurisditions than that of a "simple" copyleft license.
- perlgeek 10y ago
  > From what I understand, the concept of a "legally binding promise" is even more fuzzy across the jurisditions than that of a "simple" copyleft license. Couldn't you work around this by granting usage rights now that you're only allowed to exercise in three years? Contracts with specified durations are quite common, including those whose start date is in the future (like, renting a booth or a flat for a specific duration).
tytso 10y ago
I made a very similar proposal back in 2003, which I called the Temporary Proprietary License, or TPL: https://thunk.org/tytso/TPL.html https://thunk.org/tytso/TPL.html
TallGuyShort 10y ago
I like the intention, but a few thoughts: - If you're dead, to whom have you legally clarified copyright should go? No one but that person can enforce the GPL, because the foundation of enforcement is that it's otherwise copyright violation. - IIUC, new releases don't reset the date of old releases, so old releases become fair game after a few years. The reason that doesn't help people is that most of the value is in what you're doing right this very minute and your ability to support that today. That is why companies can make money from existing licenses. They're paying your for support, paying you to develop new features that matter to them, etc. But at the same time they can accept collaboration and contributions from even competitors right now. I think you're losing most of the benefits of open-source for making money despite the time window.
randoramax 10y ago
You have another option, keeping the GNU GPL as a license and avoiding this time-shift complexity: sell the binary, and offer the source only to those who buy the binary -- don't make the source code public on github. It's not only possible but it's what sustained many GNU projects, until they were acquired by others. Nobody in the comments mentioned the most successful case: Cygnus Solutions had been developing the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for good money, all under the GNU GPL. Notably, they made a lot of cash from a deal with Sony to support the original Playstation in gcc. A good read about how they marketed Free Software on John Gilmore's pages: http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/ http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  People confuse Free Software to mean gratis rather than libre. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > People confuse Free Software to mean gratis rather than libre. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be initially, but once you redistribute it to others with the permission to redistribute it that defines Free Software, the probability that you end up competing with gratis derivatives of the same code base tends to unity over time. So, Free-for-a-price software really relies on a premium price charged to early users (often only the first user); IOW, its more like selling bespoke software development services than like selling other software licenses.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  That definitely would only work where you can get paid for customisation. GCC is probably the best case scenario. There aren't many megacorps that would pay you loads to customise a code search engine.
- SamBam 10y ago
  > offer the source only to those who buy the binary But don't the receivers of the source then have the same right to redistribute it without charging?
perlgeek 10y ago
I for one welcome this experiment. Making money from Open Source is hard, and while this isn't quite about making money from Open Source, it's still an interesting experiment in this direction.
MasterYoda 10y ago
Got me to think about BSL that is something similarly. https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/mysql-founder-tries-a-new-software-licensing-model/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/mysql-founder-tries-a-new-... https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting
jegoodwin3 10y ago
as long as you are going to experiment, why not use a smart contract to implement your license? If someone meets your reserve price, it goes open source earlier. You can have a salvage value close 3 years in the future if the terms of the Code Tontine are not met.
michaelmrose 10y ago
It seems to me that a lot of strategies to fund the development of open source software are over complicated reactions to our failure to voluntarily fund the infrastructure that technology relies on. I also have to wonder if instead of coming up with more and different ways to do so we ought to just start taking out our collective wallets and paying for things that are useful without expecting a t-shirt.

162 points by boyter 10y ago

Unfortunately, this doesn't support regular expressions, which is a very useful feature for a code search engine. See https://github.com/google/codesearch https://github.com/google/codesearch for one implementation of this.

boyter 10y ago
Believe it or not thats actually one of the least requested features. The most requested is the one I am implementing for the next release 1.3.0 which is historical searches across every commit for auditing purposes. That said I am working on experimental regex search support as well.

ktRolster 10y ago

I remember Stallman once advocated a license similar to this (for things like games, so people can make money on them, then release shortly after. His timeframe was more like months though iirc).

erlehmann_ 10y ago
A model that works well for games can be summarized as “free code, proprietary assets”.
- clarry 10y ago
  But even freeing the assets eventually would be really nice. There's plenty of creative effort involved around extending and improving existing content from old games, or making something new loosely or not-so-loosely based on the originals, but this often involves creating derivative works of the original proprietary assets which means these mods are illegal. In some cases you can work around these limitations with code. E.g. in the doom community you find that making custom palettes is very popular nowadays, as the original makes some bad tradeoffs and many nice color schemes are out of question without a custom palette. But to completely overhaul the palette, you must re-do the original assets or create some sort of a mapping that source ports would understand.
- SXX 10y ago
  Problem with this model is fact that in modern games a lot of code is scipts that are part of assets.

tibbetts 10y ago

RapidMiner was doing something like this a few years ago. https://rapidminer.com/news-posts/rapidminerembracesitscommunity/ https://rapidminer.com/news-posts/rapidminerembracesitscommu... I haven't followed closely but I think they gave up on the complexity and started offering the same product as either AGPLv3 (a hostile license for the kind of customers who pay for software) or commercial license. A straight dual-license model reduces confusion about what is in which edition. If you are going to have an open and a closed product you really have two products, which should ideally have two separate reasons for existing. Just being the old version is not the right kind of difference.

dspillett 10y ago
> Just being the old version is not the right kind of difference. In a purely commercial context this worked for some time for products like PagePlus: you would get an older version from on magazine cover disks. For many the older version was good enough to do what they needed, for others the upgrade path to get the extra features was obvious and they would often buy the newer version of what they'd already played with without even looking for alternatives. Depending on the product I'm not sure I would trust an older version these days though. A desktop only DTP app like PP maybe, but anything online, at all security related, or just that I might put credentials into; I would have security concerns unless there was some sort of guarantee that security updates were getting back-ported. That and in a lot of cases there may well be a Free+free option as good as the 18+ month old version of [whatever]. As you and others have already stated, the straight dual-licensing model makes more sense from the user PoV (and maybe form the developer PoV too, though I expect opinion to differ more widely there).

pwang 10y ago

I applaud the spirit of this, i.e. in trying to lay out a covenant with the community while still being entrepreneurial about building a commercial business to fund continued innovation and maintenance of the software. The problem is that it falls into an outdated framing of the value of software. Namely, as more people around the world have gained significant expertise in coding, the skillsets needed to produce software is commoditizing. That skilled labor used to be scarce, and that meant that the fruit of that labor was scarce, and therefore the artifact itself was the thing to monetize. Creative and clever licensing around software can "protect" software from certain kinds of things, but they cannot protect the software from being commoditized. And commoditization pressure is very high right now. Over the last 10 years, OSS has permeated into real enterprise adoption, and many of the deep reasons for enterprises to adopt open source software are tied precisely to those commoditizing factors. So to build a sustainable business around software, you have to tie your price to the actual business value. In our modern times, when the skills to produce software are abundant, the thing that's valuable, then, is creating alignment on your API or framework or service, by earning the greatest mindshare among the collective labor pool that can maintain and innovate on software. And there's a huge virality to that, too - the game of developer mindshare is a winner-take-all game. All this is to say: don't worry so much about defending the software, because that's not the valuable thing. The community around your software is what determines whether it is relevant 3 years from now. And having weird/new/different licensing terms can stifle the growth of that community.

slgeorge 10y ago
I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree. The skills might be abundant[0] but the effort and knowledge of the domain (business logic) are not available to many. It depends on the domain, games in IOS don't count for example, but I feel like there are lots of situations where the software can be directly monetized. Lets assume that's not true - how do you actually monetize a community? Developers around a 'platform' are difficult to monetize. SaaS works for some things but not everything. The idea that 'developer mindshare is a winner-take-all game' is true if your Google or Facebook - it's a total different game if you're one person or a medium sized software business. [0] I actually don't think this is true. There are abundant skills to do trivial things, but skilled problem solvers for harder classes are still constrained - we can see that by the rocketing salary bands of developers over all compared to the rest of the economy (at least in the USA/Western Europe).

m-ueberall 10y ago

For the record--this is basically the same as http://bit.ly/toxicBSL http://bit.ly/toxicBSL, http://bit.ly/bslMScl http://bit.ly/bslMScl, therefore the same arguments apply.

jzelinskie 10y ago
Next time can you not use a URL shortener but instead use cliff notes[0]? Mysterious links (especially from new users) definitely arouse suspicion of phishing/malware. [0]: like this
lucb1e 10y ago
/toxicBSL => http://swanhart.livejournal.com/140324.html http://swanhart.livejournal.com/140324.html | Basically Shitty License /bslMScl => https://falseisnotnull.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/thoughts-on-maxscale-new-license/ https://falseisnotnull.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/thoughts-on-... | Thoughts on MaxScale new license

anilgulecha 10y ago

Language matters. The idea is neat, but "time-bomb" gives it a negative connotation. Instead maybe call it anti-abandonware licence, or public-benefit timer, or something else. (I'm sure HN can come up with a better phrase).

charonn0 10y ago
How about "GPL Failsafe"?
- caf 10y ago
  Fail-open license.
- slowmovintarget 10y ago
  "GPL Time Lock"
Mao_Zedang 10y ago
Thought crime police
superice 10y ago
Auto-release time lock
- uryga 10y ago
  how about just "auto release GPL?"
uryga 10y ago
GPL countdown something?
v0lta 10y ago
self releasing license
JimDabell 10y ago
I had a similar idea years ago and the name I came up with was "Eventually Open". It wasn't a case of abandoning code more gracefully per se, but simply that after a set period of time, code would be relicensed as open, regardless of the state of the business. So you might have a timeline like: * Today: release version 1.0. * 6 months into the future: release version 2.0. * 12 months into the future: version 1.0 becomes GPL. * 18 months into the future: version 2.0 becomes GPL. * 24 months into the future: version 1.0 becomes MIT. * 30 months into the future: version 2.0 becomes MIT. And so on. The latest version would be proprietary but source-included, and previous versions get relicensed as soon as they age out. The other alternative is to have the same mechanism, but with a donations system to speed up the relicensing. If your codebase is worth 30k to you, then if people chip in 30k, it gets relicensed immediately. If people chip in 15k it gets relicensed earlier than it would normally. It's not a good alternative to open-source, but it's preferable to completely proprietary as it makes it possible for abandonware to be picked up and maintained by third parties, and it offers an alternative mechanism for funding development of code that will eventually be open.

bobajeff 10y ago

This almost but not quite sounds like the concept of public domain.

mthoms 10y ago
Public domain is a specific legal term denoting that something is entirely without copyright protection. His project is still covered by copyright using terms set forth in his license agreement. Be aware that the phrase "public domain" is often misused to describe content "publicly available on the internet" or "in a public space". Usually that content is indeed covered by copyright since that is the default in law. Copyright applies automatically from the moment something is created.
- shiro 10y ago
  I think the grandparent meant the rule that a copyrighted work becomes public domain after certain period of creation or author's decease.
  - gpvos 10y ago
    Except that GPL is not at all like public domain. An MIT- or BSD-style license might be close enough to public domain to count.
- HugoDaniel 10y ago
  Not "entirely without copyright". Once you create something the moral copyright is yours forever. What this means is that nobody else can claim they did it, even if its in the public domain. I cannot claim i wrote the Shakespeare works even though they are in the public domain. He still has the moral copyright over them.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Actually, in the US, you can!
  - mthoms 10y ago

mjevans 10y ago

This is an interesting take on licences that turn 'abandon-ware' in to public domain or close to public domain code when the maintainers are unresponsive. I like how it mandates that there are 3 years for innovation to occur within. However I feel like the license before that needs provisions for things like the ability to make local changes as needed, and also to publish /security patches/ freely. Edit (Beneath): The impression I got was that he has ONE version, and a built in escape clause for anyone using it. I took the view of this licensing scheme ensuring he'd have to 'compete' against a 3 year old version of the product with compelling features; not that there'd be an intended 'free' version of the product.

slgeorge 10y ago
He's definitely assuming that this commercial version remains primary: "I will be forced to continually improve it and upgrade if I want to keep a for sale version without there being an equivalent FOSS version around (which in theory could be maintained by the community)" But, is mostly discounting a community fork, or divergence between his commercial version and the older GPL version. If he receives patches he'll have to have a copyright assignment policy so that he can apply the features to both trees - which will risk a fork as many people strongly dislike them.
- hughperkins 10y ago
  I dont think hes expecting other people to contribute code to his project whilst hes working on it.
  - boyter 10y ago
    That is correct. I do not anticipate much feedback from others.

michaelmrose 10y ago

This is obviously much better than proprietary as people can potentially benefit in the future from your work and I thank you for being so kind as to share it and yet I would probably use something significantly crappier to have real open source and several other things seem problematic. -- Others are unlikely to contribute to the proprietary fork. -- What do you do about contributions to the gpl3 version they would be copyright their creators and couldn't be part of a closed source version even the authors without copyright assignment. -- Do you backport fixes to the gpl version. It would be far simpler to say use the new version wherein issue foo is fixed. If you do its a lot more work if you don't the gpl version isn't just a older version its a known broken pos that will never be fixed. -- What if people offer fixes to the gpl version will they be expected to assign copyright so you can use them in the proprietary version? -- 3 years is an eternity. In 1 year someone could make their own version of whatever it is you are doing that is actually open source if it was really worth having it would also have none of the above complications.

chubot 10y ago
Yeah I agree... I like this idea in theory. But in practice I think you will end up with two major versions: "latest commercial version" and "latest GPL version". And then people will want to patch the GPL version and not the latest. 3 years is a lot of delta... git is really good at applying patches, but I wouldn't want disincentivize massive refactorings.
rocqua 10y ago
These concerns are why I tend to dislike the GPL.
- wcoenen 10y ago
  I don't see anything GPL-specific about these concerns. The same concerns apply when you replace the GPL by any other non-proprietary license.
  - k_sze 10y ago
    If I understand correctly, I think it is somewhat GPL-specific. You basically can't port fixes and new features from a GPL codebase to another codebase that is not under a GPL-compatible license. I think you don't have this issue with more permissive licenses like MIT/BSD. At least then you have a chance of having the commercial-licensed one having all the fixes from the open-source version, in addition to its own fixes and new features. (My understanding of open source/free software licenses can be quite fuzzy, so correct me if I'm wrong.)

burgerdev 10y ago

a) Site is down, google cache is here http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NBcmXVo-izcJ:www.boyter.org/2016/08/gpl-time-bomb-interesting-approach-foss-licensing/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NBcmXVo... b) The license file on GitHub does not mention GPL, a time frame or something even remotely related to the post - looks like some sort of shareware license. c) If it's a good product today, will it still be a good product in 3 years? In today's version? I doubt it. Still better than just selling binaries, but not by much.

m3adow 10y ago
> b) The license file on GitHub does not mention GPL, a time frame or something even remotely related to the post - looks like some sort of shareware license. The README.txt does: https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/README.txt https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/READ...
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Yeah that tripped me up too. The article had no links so I clicked the tweet on top, checked out the license file, saw nothing of the sort, and as a last hope scrolled through the readme. There at last.
  - boyter 10y ago
    Something for me to fix. I will sort this issue out over the next few days.

hsivonen 10y ago

IIRC, Ghostscript used a scheme like this prior to 2006.

slgeorge 10y ago
Yes, I believe that's true. I was reminded of it a few months ago when someone was asking for advice on how to monetise some software that they felt would require ongoing effort. If I remember correctly it was widely disliked, but perhaps the world has changed in the last 10 years!

kijin 10y ago

I'm planning to do something similar with some of the source-available proprietary software that I'm writing nowadays. If I die or otherwise fail to maintain the software for some time (much shorter than 3 years), the license will revert to GPL. This kind of arrangement might be more difficult to pull off when there are multiple copyright holders or if some of them are corporations. But for projects maintained by individuals or a small group of like-minded people, I think it hits a nice balance between making a profit and giving back to the community.

Mchl 10y ago
I also had a similar kind of license in mind. My idea was: the software becomes lincensed under an open source license once any one of these happens: 1. I earn x amount of money out of my work 2. It's n seconds since EPOCH 3. I am pronounced dead by a qualified proffesional or nobody has heard from me for m years.
- kijin 10y ago
  #1 is difficult for other people to verify. #3 needs a better definition of "nobody has heard from me". Has anyone heard from you if it becomes widely known that you made a billions dollar from an unrelated business and retired from programming? It will probably work better if you say something like n seconds since the last commit, or since your last public activity on your Github, HN, or Twitter account. Anyhow, it would be useful to have a standard, legally proven way to make these kinds of promises. Non-lawyers like me trying to be too clever are likely to leave serious loopholes.
  - PieterH 10y ago
    The model is simple, each version 'expires' and falls into free software domain after some specific time. If you stop making useful new releases your users fork the last good release. That's it, no need for more complex mechanisms.
  - Mchl 10y ago
    Regarding #1, I'm assuming my own good faith in this :) #3 in the second clause is indeed tricky, but I suppose it could be worded in legally unambigous way. And anyway I always assumed the dealine in #2 would be no more than three years in the future since the software is first published under these terms.

PieterH 10y ago

Proposed by MySQL's Monty some time ago under moniker "Business Source”.

Illniyar 10y ago

I think that having a license that is both open source and that protects the creator's ability to earn money from his creation (thus paying for it's maintenance really) is a very good and important idea. Personally though I wouldn't go with the TimeBomb idea, I think that if I ever get the chance I'll decide on a single expected revenue stream (such as sass hosting) and provide an open source license for use except for that purpose.

boyter 10y ago
I had considered that but since this is a product that indexes source code a lot of companies want to host on premise.

Arnt 10y ago

This was done twenty years ago with Ghostscript, google for AFPL to see the details. The author made enough to retire, so it can work for some people some of the time.

SwellJoe 10y ago
Ghostscript was dual-licensed, and not exactly the same as this scenario; though the end result is pretty similar. The Ghostscript folks never set a specific date on when the proprietary version would be GPL, as far as I know; they would do new releases of the proprietary version, and then the older and slightly less capable version would be open sourced. That's not to say calling it a time-bomb makes it an entirely novel idea. My company has been doing it for 10+ years now with Virtualmin (which has a GPL and commercial version, and we roll the commercial features down into GPL as new features come along in the commercial version, and as we can afford to do so). But, honestly, it's kind of an awful business model. We've been making a living at it all this time, but I wouldn't call it a success; we'd make higher salaries working for others. I'd like to find other ways to make a living from Open Source, that pay better (and aren't doing service contracting), but I haven't had much luck at it in 20 years of trying.
- Arnt 10y ago
  ISTR there being a promise mentioning some period... 18 months? I don't care though. I think L. Peter Deutsch made his money by means that have ~nothing to do with the license. His licensing didn't break his business model, that's all. My own little palace is also largely paid for, and open source has something to do with that pleasant fact, but I hindsight I don't think licensing mattered much. FOSS licensing, and all the arguments about varieties of licensing, is a digression. Success comes from luck+work+xfactor, and whatever xfactor may be, license discussions isn't it.
- cbsmith 10y ago
  It was a specific time period. I thought it was 12 months, but maybe it was 18. Either way, Stallman didn't like it, but he was willing to work with it, because it was better than the alternative.

kahrkunne 10y ago

I hate when people don't even try to make money off FOSS

martingxx 10y ago

I interpret this as "I don't want to collaborate with you people yet - I want this all for myself because I think I can make more money that way. But in case I fail, I'll change my mind and hey let's work together!" No thanks. GNU GPL is an excellent choice for a license for a commercial product if you do it right. It fosters collaboration and community from the start. Look around at the most successful companies whose major products are open source, especially the GPL ones. Note that none of them started off refusing reciprocal collaboration with potential contributors.

lucb1e 10y ago
You might be right in part: it's his product and his business and I'm not sure he means for the community to contribute to his wealth (like you say "I don't want to collaborate [yet]" is probably more or less accurate). However the "I'll change my mind and hey let's work together" part I think is wrong. He provides the source for people to see in the first place. Assuming there are no patents involved, that makes anyone free to re-implement ideas there, which is a risk for him, but nice for everyone who wants to see source code of stuff they use (I do). Then, when it turns out he no longer needs the product, it's free for everyone. If people don't find it worth the money but do want to use it and hack on it, they're free to do so, with or without him. So he's not asking to work together or for help in later years, he's giving the opportunity to use it after he stopped doing so himself.
- martingxx 10y ago
  Re-implementing "independently" once you have seen the source code can be legally problematic. (see https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html#faq3_2 https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html#faq3_2 ) for an example. No longer needing the product kind of means that it's failed. In which case, why would it suddenly be valuable to others with a simple change of license? It's more likely to succeed in the first place by fostering collaboration from the start. This is how successful open source projects operate. It's all about community, mutual respect, and bi-directional sharing. Having the source available but not open (yet) strikes me as a cynical attempt to appear open while retaining control of other peoples freedoms, and I for one would never work with such a project. I'd probably rather use a completely closed product with no source available; at least you're getting something that's not pretending to be more open than it really is.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

IANAD 10y ago

I'm not sure if this will work as it is currently, and here's why: https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/LICE... Clearly shows that it is released under the Fair Source License, version 0.9 with no mention of license termination and restricted rights. It is NOT free. https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/README.txt https://github.com/boyter/searchcode-server/blob/master/READ... then states: 'After the following date 27-August-2019 you may choose to use this software, version "1.2.3" or "1.2.4" under the GNU General Public License Version 3 with terms specified at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt' https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt' This is so wrong. Not that it is GPL, but this both contradicts the license and states that you "may choose to use this software..." under the GNU GPLv3. Also, the missing comma after "1.2.4" is a mistake in grammar. I'd say, as-is, you should consider this licensing unreliable. Yes, he posted in his blog stating his intention, but as it is now, it would appear that if a ruling had to be made on the actual license, it could very well be that the only valid license is the one in LICENSE.txt. Since that is unclear, though, if I were a user and cared about the license, I'd get a good lawyer to figure this out before making any assumptions. And, I would suggest that he get a lawyer to help craft the required changes to his license.

tghw 10y ago
Dual licensing happens all the time, often with GPL and some other, more restrictive license. He clearly states that until X date, you may only use the code under the Fair Source License. After X date, you may choose which of the two licenses you would like to use. There's no conflict in adding another license, it's his code, and the license and his directives dictate how people can copy and distribute it. Nor does the fact that there's only one license in LICENSE.txt really mean anything. README.txt is clear about the dual license in its "Licence" section.
- IANAD 10y ago
  What about the following text in README: 'If you are building from source then you get no support and must work within the restrictions specified of the fair source licence (see LICENSE.txt for details). To purchase support see https://searchcode.com/product/#downloadlinks' https://searchcode.com/product/#downloadlinks' And what about: 'Use of this software is governed by the Fair Source License included in the LICENSE.TXT file' No period there at the end, but that seems to indicate to use the LICENSE.TXT. And then, even worse: 'In order to deal with the case of my death or this software becoming abandoned it has a time-bomb where the licence will change exactly 3 years after the publish date of a version release. This means that if version 1.0.0 was released on 1 July 2010 then it can be taken using the listed alternate licence on 2 July 2013. This licence, version and time is all specified below.' There is no definition of what 'software becoming abandoned' (Which 'software'? What does 'abandoned' mean?). There is no definition of what 'it can be taken' means. The example date is one day more than three years and the dates given as examples could confuse the date intended for expiry. There is no definition of what should be used as the 'publish date of a version release'. While these things may seem common sense to a developer, they should have a clear legal interpretation.

bitL 10y ago

If you really want to make money, it's probably not the best idea to put a fixed time into your time bomb, unless you are targeting a fast moving platform like mobile OSes. At some point your previous version will be sufficient to 99% of people and any new features will be just nice-to-haves. Maybe you can consider per-feature time bombs? You'll still have time to build a sustainable business on top of it, still allow people to study/modify your code, but with greater control over your cashflow.

boyter 10y ago
I considered that but assuming things get to that point I feel I will have either done well enough for it to be a moot issue or I have run out of ideas. At this point I feel it should be available for all to use.

ubertaco 10y ago

My gut-reaction to the title was to assume (based on the negative connotation to "time bomb") that you had some code that was permissively-licensed (something user-friendly like MIT or BSD), and then when the bomb "goes off", it switched to GPL, rendering it unusable in most commercial software.

majewsky 10y ago

There is something similar for Qt. Back when Qt was licensed more proprietarily (with a GPL option for pure FLOSS), the KDE folks were worried that Trolltech could just release new versions as proprietary-only. Therefore, an agreement was reached and codified that, should Trolltech fail to do an open-source release of Qt for more than 12 months, the last release shall fall under the BSD License to facilitate a community fork.

gioele 10y ago

I have been toying with a similar idea, but for born-FOSS source projects. I like copyleft licenses but I find the legalese in them too complex and I fear that they will cause problem down the road because of changes in the legal landscape. I am also worried about leaving code around that is useful but unusable by other for legal reasons. For all these reasons I would like to license my projects like this: * They are born AGPLv3/OHL. * All the published revisions older than 5 years are released into the public domain (CC0). Simple and easy to state, incredibly complex to write down. Especially if you want to make it enforceable without me (or the other contributors) being alive. From what I understand, the concept of a "legally binding promise" is even more fuzzy across the jurisditions than that of a "simple" copyleft license.

perlgeek 10y ago
> From what I understand, the concept of a "legally binding promise" is even more fuzzy across the jurisditions than that of a "simple" copyleft license. Couldn't you work around this by granting usage rights now that you're only allowed to exercise in three years? Contracts with specified durations are quite common, including those whose start date is in the future (like, renting a booth or a flat for a specific duration).

tytso 10y ago

I made a very similar proposal back in 2003, which I called the Temporary Proprietary License, or TPL: https://thunk.org/tytso/TPL.html https://thunk.org/tytso/TPL.html

TallGuyShort 10y ago

I like the intention, but a few thoughts: - If you're dead, to whom have you legally clarified copyright should go? No one but that person can enforce the GPL, because the foundation of enforcement is that it's otherwise copyright violation. - IIUC, new releases don't reset the date of old releases, so old releases become fair game after a few years. The reason that doesn't help people is that most of the value is in what you're doing right this very minute and your ability to support that today. That is why companies can make money from existing licenses. They're paying your for support, paying you to develop new features that matter to them, etc. But at the same time they can accept collaboration and contributions from even competitors right now. I think you're losing most of the benefits of open-source for making money despite the time window.

randoramax 10y ago

You have another option, keeping the GNU GPL as a license and avoiding this time-shift complexity: sell the binary, and offer the source only to those who buy the binary -- don't make the source code public on github. It's not only possible but it's what sustained many GNU projects, until they were acquired by others. Nobody in the comments mentioned the most successful case: Cygnus Solutions had been developing the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for good money, all under the GNU GPL. Notably, they made a lot of cash from a deal with Sony to support the original Playstation in gcc. A good read about how they marketed Free Software on John Gilmore's pages: http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/ http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/

CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
People confuse Free Software to mean gratis rather than libre. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > People confuse Free Software to mean gratis rather than libre. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be initially, but once you redistribute it to others with the permission to redistribute it that defines Free Software, the probability that you end up competing with gratis derivatives of the same code base tends to unity over time. So, Free-for-a-price software really relies on a premium price charged to early users (often only the first user); IOW, its more like selling bespoke software development services than like selling other software licenses.
IshKebab 10y ago
That definitely would only work where you can get paid for customisation. GCC is probably the best case scenario. There aren't many megacorps that would pay you loads to customise a code search engine.
SamBam 10y ago
> offer the source only to those who buy the binary But don't the receivers of the source then have the same right to redistribute it without charging?

perlgeek 10y ago

I for one welcome this experiment. Making money from Open Source is hard, and while this isn't quite about making money from Open Source, it's still an interesting experiment in this direction.

MasterYoda 10y ago

Got me to think about BSL that is something similarly. https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/mysql-founder-tries-a-new-software-licensing-model/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/mysql-founder-tries-a-new-... https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting

jegoodwin3 10y ago

as long as you are going to experiment, why not use a smart contract to implement your license? If someone meets your reserve price, it goes open source earlier. You can have a salvage value close 3 years in the future if the terms of the Code Tontine are not met.

michaelmrose 10y ago

It seems to me that a lot of strategies to fund the development of open source software are over complicated reactions to our failure to voluntarily fund the infrastructure that technology relies on. I also have to wonder if instead of coming up with more and different ways to do so we ought to just start taking out our collective wallets and paying for things that are useful without expecting a t-shirt.