16 ms·

The License Zero Manifesto

190 points by vjeux 9y ago

foo101 9y ago
I am having a hard time finding the actual legal text of the license. Can someone share it here?
- kemitchell 9y ago
  Everything is on the website: https://licensezero.com/licenses https://licensezero.com/licenses Everything is also being revised. So much good feedback!
bskap 9y ago
So, what happens if one license 0 project (A) wants to depend on another license 0 project (B)? The way I can see it, there's three possibilities: * project A is now commercial and has to pay project B for the license * a commercial project that wants to use project A now has to track down and pay both the owners of A and B (and any other license zero dependencies) * a commercial project that wants to use A pays for A and B gets nothing for it because they are being used by project A (not commercial) and only incidentally by the commercial project.
- evancox10 9y ago
  Well project A is using B for a commercial purpose, namely the business of licensing out A. So it seems like it would be your first option, right?
- h34t 9y ago
  I believe L0 makes your second option painless: > Customers who want permission for commercial or non-Open Source uses can identify, price, and buy licenses for all License Zero dependencies of their Node.js projects, in one checkout transaction, using a free command-line tool
  - rspeer 9y ago
    Setting aside the practical detail that not everything is node.js: Nobody would want to sell commercial software under the terms of "you have to license our software A, but it won't work unless you also license software B from someone else at the same time".
    - lazerwalker 9y ago
      Presumably that's where having a single place to handle payments comes in handy. It's (hopefully?) less "well, you have to go to this other person and license their software too" as much as "here's the total cost for a license (which happens to include both A and B)"
    - zokier 9y ago
      There is already plenty of commercial software that depends on other commercial middleware that needs to be licensed separately. Of course licensing each and every library is typically bit different in scale, but conceptually it is pretty much the same thing.
    - mperham 9y ago
      Sure, no one's ever bought Tableau along with a Windows Server license to solve their data warehouse analytics needs.
      - rspeer 9y ago
        You're not describing a strict dependency. You can just buy Tableau and use it.
  - lazerwalker 9y ago
    Huh, fascinating. Licensing software by typing in a CC# via a CLI feels like a really foreign way to pay for something. I'm curious to see if that's behavior people take to easily.
    - kross 9y ago
dsr_ 9y ago
Doesn't mention forking at all, and that's a big thorny problem.
- jerf 9y ago
  Good point. If you can escape from the license by forking from it then it's worthless. Since that's obviously not the intent, then presumably a fork would still require licensing from the original source. Would it require licensing from the new source as well? If so, then forks are still theoretically possible, but the next question that raises is, are licenses compulsory? If not the original license holder still ends up with a veto over commercial use of the fork, simply by failing to give the license to anyone using the fork. Forks could conceivably carry on with purely-non-commercial licensing, but that's not a true fork. Should the community get through this, then License 0 is going to get awfully complicated the day you decide to download the fork of the hottest new web framework that itself uses several dozen License 0 components, with arbitrary numbers of forks in them. If licenses aren't compulsory then such a framework has the problem that suddenly there are dozens or hundreds of individuals that may decide for their own individual reasons to decline a license to someone that they may simply not like. (There is, in some sense, something to be said for greedy companies that just want your money and care nothing about you; at least they don't deny you licenses because you once gave their friend a bad interview experience, or violated some personal pet political stance.) An option would be to just say "Yeah, these projects can't be forked." Which is a solution of sorts, but definitely one that is losing something very valuable from open source. The fact that such a license would be classified as "not open source" probably means something real, not merely that the definition is outdated. There's an interesting idea here, but I think it's still the seed, not the fully-grown oak. But, again, let me end this with encouragement that the idea is being kicked around, and I'd like this to be seen as criticism in the spirit of refining and improving the idea, not merely being critical for the sake of being critical. There's some interesting ideas here in the service of a real need.
  - kemitchell 9y ago
    I have two lines of active thought around this for L0. One is sponsored relicensing. It's possible today to set a price at which you'll relicense an L0 project onto vanilla BSD-2-Clause terms. In essence, you can put an estimate on future dual licensing revenue, discount it to present day, subtract any discount you'd apply for personal gratification in making it maximally available, and make a standing buyout offer at that price. The other is an alternative public license for L0 projects, a very, very strong copyleft (reciprocal) license. That license should conform to the Open Source Definition. It's in review and revision with OSI now. The reciprocal license would allow forks that meets its conditions, namely that the fork and other software that incorporates or uses it in development must be Open Source. Dual licensing is fundamentally a privilege of initial copyright holders. When you fork, you almost always do so on the basis of your rights under the public license. If you fork under the noncommercial public license, you and users of your fork have to stick to noncommercial use, or pay for other terms on the original code.
splitbrain 9y ago
How exactly is "commercial" defined?
- kemitchell 9y ago
  Good question. The answer: exactly as in Creative Commons' noncommercial licenses, but without the filesharing clarification, since the noncommercial condition applies only to use, and not to redistribution.
- nine_k 9y ago
  You are a commercial entity (a business and don't have a non-profit status), serve customers, and use the software in question to extract profits? IANAL; I'd love a link / quotation of an exact legal definition.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
This seems well intentioned but poorly thought out. Also, software distributed under this license does not qualify as free software under the GNU _or_ OSI models.
- schoen 9y ago
  The FSF and OSI models are meant to cover the same class of software (for example, both explicitly accept both copyleft and permissively-licensed software). So far I believe they've disagreed about the status of a total of two licenses, which are rarely used.
- api 9y ago
  There are issues with this, but on the latter point: why are the GNU and OSI models an unquestionable religion? Do they work? Are they achieving their stated objectives? Why can't we question them?
  - nailer 9y ago
    They're not, but it's important to distinguish Open Source from other types of licenses, and avoid statements like: > License Zero is based on the two-clause BSD License, a classic permissive Open Source license, with two key additions: > Commercial use is limited to 90 days Which makes it seem like this is Open Source when it isn't.
    - kemitchell 9y ago
      The "Departure" section of the manifesto addresses very directly that the patch to BSD-2-Clause takes it out of the Open Source Definition: > According to The Open Source Definition, discriminating against commerce and non-contributors is not “Open Source”. The Definition also prohibits discrimination against “fields of endeavor”, like commerce, and persons and groups, like non-contributors. That means License Zero is no longer an Open Source license, even if it remains remarkably generous, a public gift to charitable organizations, students, teachers, academics, and hobbyists everywhere. L0-NC derives from BSD-2-Clause to make transition back to OSD-conformant terms very clear.
nine_k 9y ago
Kudos for giving the gist of the idea in a piece of code: def public_license (paid_available, commercial, contributing): if paid_available: if commercial: if contributing: return 'contribution-enabling, BSD-like license' else: return '90-day free trial, then you have to buy a license' else: return 'noncommercial, BSD-like license' else return 'standard, Open Source, two-clause BSD'
- kemitchell 9y ago
  I've ended up doing the same for the other L0 public licensing option, L0-R, a stronger-than-strong copyleft license, in the Open Source Initiative license review thread. That license is still being revised, so I won't dump the pseudocode here. But pseudocode's been very useful in that discussion, too. All the same, I don't quite feel like kudos are appropriate. I'd like to think I'm capable of writing the license terms plainly enough that regular old English speakers can understand them. But experience has taught me that I should translate to code, especially when I'm patching an existing license, rather than writing from scratch, as with https://github.com/berneout/berneout-license-kit https://github.com/berneout/berneout-license-kit (_very experimental_) FWIW, I often start drafting legal code based on more structured pseudocode. Most lawyers I know who do a lot of drafting have some kind of personal boolean logic shorthand.
  - nine_k 9y ago
    The pseudo code expresses the gist very succinctly, hence kudos. It's like an abstract of a scientific article. Not all important details, but the few key things.
- nobodyorother 9y ago
  The trouble with these code snippets is that they condense very complex and squishy social structures into what incorrectly appears to be simple binary decisions. Creative Commons spent years defining what "commercial" means. It's obviously a commercial use if I'm using your items to make money... But, what if I'm a charity? What if it's hosted on a website that runs banner ads? What if I don't turn a profit? This was a years-long discussion that you can review https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial Code emphasizes what consensus we need to come to, the consensus that those complex legal documents define. For example, that's part of why the GPL is so long, it's specific.
geofft 9y ago
I like seeing things like this. There are two practical problems that come to mind (not fundamental problems): 1. Many traditional distros - Debian (and by extension Ubuntu), Fedora (and by extension RHEL), etc. - won't carry your software if it breaks the Open Source Definition in this way. If you're targeting npm modules, this isn't a problem at all, given how much technical work needs to be done to get the average npm module in one of these distros. :-) But there are lots of sizable use cases where this is a problem, and the Open Source Definition has become something of a Schelling point. One solution in the Debian/Ubuntu case (I'm less familiar with the Fedora/RHEL side of this) is to package your software for Debian "non-free" and Ubuntu "multiverse", which are for software that can be freely redistributed but is not Free Software and therefore not officially part of the distro / officially supported to the same extent. This isn't an extremely popular choice right now, but I think that could change. 2. Sort of expanded from there, really the value of an open-source project is far more in its community, that is, in the trust that it will continue to do the thing you want it to do as your requirements and the world around it change, not in the code as it is. I don't think that the most valuable thing you have to offer is your software, and I do think that compared to ongoing support and maintenance and interaction with users, the value of the software itself is probably approximately $0, yes. As a perhaps-controversial example, consider systemd: there are plenty of other service managers with similar approaches to process supervision, and plenty of other inits, but systemd has the property that everyone expects Red Hat to continue funding full-time development on it for many years, there's a lot of people on StackOverflow who have answered questions about it, etc. That's not particularly a function of the code itself; that's a function of an entity like Red Hat standing behind it and basically every distro having adopted it. Speaking for myself, at least, I'm unlikely to try to convince an employer that we should use some piece of software that's sorta-open-source when actually-open-source options exist, unless the support around it is so good that we might as well treat it as a normal proprietary competitor that happens to make source available to customers if they want. Mostly I'm hesitant because I don't expect other companies to do the same thing, and I therefore don't expect the ecosystem to grow. If you can cause people to believe that License Zero software is as viable as open-source software with a similar level of functionality, that ecosystems will grow around it as well as with open-source software, etc., it definitely sounds like this model is better for long-term sustainability of the project.
segphault 9y ago
What this amounts to is an attempt to solve the challenges of monetizing open source software by no longer writing open source software. The encumbrances that this license places on the downstream modification and redistribution of code largely eliminate any of the material advantages that come from the code being open in the first place. This is a terrible idea.
- forsaken 9y ago
  So, what is your suggestion for funding truly open source software, then?
  - sukilot 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...
    - forsaken 9y ago
      https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/r...
      - quadrangle 9y ago
        https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software/public-software https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software...
  - liotier 9y ago
    Scratch your own itch ! Free software is in the interest of the users - not in anyone else's interest. So, if you need software and if that software isn't your competitive edge, you have an incentive to cooperate with other users (as a developer or as a client of developers) and a free software license is a way to regulate that cooperation. Criticizing free software licenses for not providing a business model is missing the point entirely.
lazerwalker 9y ago
This is an interesting idea. I'm curious how the author imagines licensing working, practically: am I paying once for a specific version/build of a library, am I paying a recurring subscription fee for regular updates/bugfixes, or am I paying once and expecting free updates?
- kemitchell 9y ago
  https://licensezero.com/licenses/private https://licensezero.com/licenses/private https://licensezero.com/licenses/waiver https://licensezero.com/licenses/waiver https://licensezero.com/licenses/relicense https://licensezero.com/licenses/relicense
  - lazerwalker 9y ago
    Thanks for those links! If I'm interpreting these correctly, you pay once for a license, and get access to all future versions of the library? Most models for building companies on OSS tend to rely at least somewhat on a service model, rather than selling a piece of software once as a product and then continuing to maintain it for free (relying, then, on continuing to sell new licenses of the same software in order to keep money coming in). In this case in particular, I feel like this creates misaligned incentives: after someone has already paid me for a license, if they have feature requests or bug reports for me, it's actively against my financial interests to spend time addressing those rather than working on things that will help bring in new paying customers (of course, these two things will sometimes align, but not necessarily). That's presumably most easily fixed by that customer contracting me to make those changes, but at that point I've now got a revenue stream and business model that feels a bit orthogonal to the licensing idea (and would lose all the benefits of e.g. your nice integrated payment system). Curious if you have suggestions or thoughts about bridging that gap!
    - c-smile 9y ago
      In other words: how to 1) motivate the author to publish project as L0 and 2) motivate the author to keep working on it. Am I right in my understanding of what you are saying? If "yes" then it is a reasonable question. Some complex projects have quite narrow potential audience to get sustainable cache flow (from new license buyers). But are valuable for those few who already paid.
unlmtd1 9y ago
Intellectual property does not exist.
jasode 9y ago
I'd like to ask Ken Mitchell if there were concrete examples that motivated this. Such as... - Were there specific open source projects where you thought the creators got screwed out of money and therefore this license would have helped them? - As a thought experiment in the vein of game theory, would projects with heavy commercial usage like Linux, ffmpeg, openssl, etc be in a better situation today if they only had a 90-day window for free use? (Speculate and replay history with L0 license.) My intuition is that the 90-day restriction is enough of a turn off that we wouldn't have the situation today of IBM + Google + Redhat + etc adopting Linux and contributing code back to it.
- archagon 9y ago
  I mean, we can daily see how much effort is wasted on projects beholden to stockholders and business interests. In my experience, open source software is the only software that can stand the test of time; everything else will be pivoted, sunset, or bought out eventually. The problem is that it's so hard to make money doing it. (Not that this is necessarily a good solution, mind you.)
- woolvalley 9y ago
  I think it's come from the typical pattern of maintainer burnout and project abandonment after a few years, since a successful open source project typically turns into an unpaid second job.
  - jasode 9y ago
    >typical pattern of maintainer burnout [...] , since a successful open source project Right, but that's what my "game theory thought experiment" was trying to dissect: the 90-day restriction can dissuade commercial entities from embracing that software so therefore, it's not "successful". As a result, there is no work overload and no burnout. Which past open-source project can we confidently replay history with the L0 license and say it would have roughly the same commercial adoption and the maintainers got paid more money?
  - chii 9y ago
    > a successful open source project typically turns into an unpaid second job. which the maintainer voluntarily performs. If it's a burden, stop! If users of said software are asking for features/bug-fixes, and you as a maintainer can't be bothered, then ask them to pay for said fixes (either via a common-pot method like patreon, or a one time fee, or some other method). If those people asking for fixes aren't willing to pay, then they clearly don't really need those fixes.
TylerJewell 9y ago
I want to applaud the author for taking such a bold step, but I would like to disagree with the assertion in the manifesto that all forms of open source software are failing business models. I would like to encourage the author to dive deeper into the various ways that commercial companies that promote open source are finding ways to make it commercially viable. By experience, I was founder and CEO of Codenvy, which ultimately made Eclipse Che open source workspace server. We created that with an EPL by taking the large majority of our intellectual property and open sourcing it. While Codenvy's IP was closed and commercially for sale, there were significant feature differences between Che (for workgroups) and Codenvy (for enterprises). We steered the entirety of our company's go-to-market to be Eclipse Che-first promotion, and as Che grew to 50,000 usage hours / day and 10s of 1000s of downloads, the cross-over to Codenvy was significant enough where we were able to build a nice business. It was a business that let us put more than 60% of our engineering resources into Che and we had 40 engineers. Codenvy was later acquired by Red Hat earlier this year. I am CEO of WSO2, whose product line is entirely (well, almost) Apache licensed open source. WSO2 competes with large proprietary platform vendors like Oracle, IBM, Tibco, Software AG, and Mule Soft. Mule has an open core, but largely is still a proprietary vendor. We have 400 enterprise customers and - from what we can tell - probably another couple thousand installs of our various open source servers for identity, streaming SQL, integration, or API management. We estimate about 5 trillion transactions run through our software each year and our customers are some incredible high quality brands. The company is 12 years old and has stayed committed to open source in this way. But we are commercially viable. We have 492 employees worldwide, offices in 5 countries, and a rich set of long-lived subscribing partners. This allows 100% (caveat below) of our engineers to work on pure open source development. Of our 492 employees, roughly 400 are technical. All of our technical people work in engineering, and then do rotations into support, consulting, training, or solution architecture / sales / marketing so that everything that we do related to our technology is witnessed by a full fledged engineer that can bring the advancements back into the product itself. And this also has an affect of building a strong ecosystem, where we have roughly 1000 other people who are certified and / or committers to our various open source initiatives. So I look at us as a healthy business, commercially viable, and found a way to make pure open source work. The caveat - the way that we have been able to balance the trade off between a pure Apache license and the commercial viability is around subscriptions. Subscriptions offer customers specialized value for their implementation: support, indemnities, warranties, security scanning, incremental builds, and certified builds. To help us commercially, we only distribute patches, updates, and security addendums as binaries that are closed source. Customers who have a subscription get a perpetual license to the patch. Otherwise, the patch is also made into our project's code base, and at any time you can compile the code from the Apache base. Every 6 months or so, we update our open source binaries with the cumulative updates and patches. It's this sort of balance that allows us to create value for enterprises and gives them an incentive to get onto a subscription with us. And it's through those subscriptions that we have become a commercially viable company. There are other models as well - with open core, and what I call open fringe, which are open source platforms that have closed-source "management" around it. These are all flavors of permissiveness that each company must find for itself to find an equilibrium between commercial interests and contributing to open source. Again, I am very positive on the author's initiatives and do not want to provide a critique. But really do encourage a deeper exploration of the commercial ways many companies make OSS viable.
whipoodle 9y ago
I don't really understand what this is offering but long-term open source contribution seems like a mug's game (outside of positions where you're paid to contribute). The argument is that it will supposedly get you enough notoriety to land a job, but if the guy who made Homebrew can't get that to happen, it's certainly not happening for me.
- dpc_pw 9y ago
  I have landed a job by contributing to Open Source project. After three years, the company got acquired, I got a Visa, and moved to SV. Life changing event, if you ask me.
woolvalley 9y ago
How does this work in a project with multiple contributors, how does the money get distributed?
- kemitchell 9y ago
  L0 says nothing about revenue sharing or other financial arrangements of more than one player. L0's CLI _does_ support "stacking" metadata about available private licenses. So if you start an L0-NC project, I fork it and add my own significant contributions, folks who download my fork can tell they need private terms from both of us, at the prices we set independently. I suspect many small projects, which are effectively single-maintainer, many-contributor, will accept contributions BSD-2-Clause, or offer waivers (essentially freebie private licenses) for the project in return for contributions on BSD-2-Clause terms. There's some exciting work being done by others on transparent, automated licensing and royalties. As an aside, I think that line of research is far more promising for the kind of "network team", "swarm of contractors" business aspiration than models tackling, say, equity stakes or 701 plans. But it's not directly in scope for L0.
BFatts 9y ago
If you want to release open source, don't expect to get a payday - period. If you want a payday, use a commercial EULA. Simple as that. Trying to limit the usage of open source violates the open source definition and CAN'T be considered open source.
hathawsh 9y ago
Has anyone tried simply creating a business that negotiates with companies to fund open source developers and takes a small cut? It seems like a simple proposition. The company identifies an open source project that needs help, identifies clients that depend on it, approaches those clients and the developers, and sets up a deal between them for ongoing maintenance. It wouldn't fit every project, every client, or every developer, but when it does fit, it could be a great deal for the developer and for the client.
- nix0n 9y ago
  In what ways would this differ from Patreon?
  - hathawsh 9y ago
    Patreon expects creators to advertise. The idea I had is that this business would actively seek both clients (who don't know they should be paying developers) and developers (who don't know how to get paid for their open source work).
  - geofft 9y ago
    It would let you sign contracts that look like the sort of contracts that big companies are willing to pay 5+-figure amounts for. I don't even know how I would get my employer (either my current one or any past one) to sign up for a Patreon. Do I ... use someone's corporate credit card? How does that even get audited? I can totally tell procurement to sign a contract with someone, though. This post by 'patio11 on selling software is relevant: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris... (I'm imagining that the amount of money needed to make a self-funded OSS developer viable is on the large side, and that a lot of companies contributing a relatively small amount to each Patreon isn't reliable enough for the developer to count on. But maybe it is, in which case maybe the corporate-credit-card approach would work.)
    - hathawsh 9y ago
      Exactly. As your link says, "anyone can do enterprise sales", but it surely takes time away from development. Someone stepping in and doing the enterprise sales for open source developers could fill a lot of gaps.
agumonkey 9y ago
I wonder if the real end of open source is energy research. To be able to create without worrying too much you need physical security. Food, heat, water. Which is indirect result of energy access.
- carapace 9y ago
  Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have the technology to provide a decent standard of living for everyone on Earth by sometime in the 1970's. We just have to deploy it efficiently. And there's the rub. Put another way, all our problems now are psychological.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    That's also part of my understanding. We live in a bubble that makes most of us think we have to do some things and do them in "that" way. Think food or transportation. For 20 years people busted me to have a driving licence. Western cities were so much about having a car .. it became an absolute. In a way the first factor going against Fuller is consumerist capitalism. Markets aren't made for people to have enough but for companies to survive and get fat.
    - carapace 9y ago
      You probably know this, one of his books is titled "Grunch of Giants: Gross Universe Cash Heist". He had a plan, "Design science revolution", to produce artifacts for consumers that embodied the changes needed. The concept of the "trimtab" informed his methods. > Trim tabs are small surfaces connected to the trailing edge of a larger control surface on a boat or aircraft, used to control the trim of the controls, i.e. to counteract hydro- or aerodynamic forces and stabilize the boat or aircraft in a particular desired attitude without the need for the operator to constantly apply a control force. This is done by adjusting the angle of the tab relative to the larger surface. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab no real point, just wanted to mention it. Cheers.
      - 9y ago
dragonwriter 9y ago
So, the linked license itself[0] has at least one typo in clause 3: > must be limited to a period of 30} consecutive calendar days. The stray “}” is clearly a typo, and if the description in the Manifesto is correct, the “3” should be a “9”. This is kind of critical stuff to get right in a license. [0] https://licensezero.com/licenses/noncommercial https://licensezero.com/licenses/noncommercial
- kemitchell 9y ago
  Nice catch! And fixed. It's a Mustache templating error, fixed on master in the submodule, but apparently not in the current deploy. I moved from {{template vars with HTML escaping}} to {{{raw template vars}}} sometime back. Bad merge, perhaps. There have been quite a few changes, in response to feedback!
BFatts 9y ago
This seems antithetical to the OSS movement, almost like a "Yeah, we released our code as open source, so everyone can learn, extend, and distribute. But we've changed our mind and SURPRISE - now we want a payday!" Open source only applying to other open source? C'mon - who are you, Stallman? If companies have to pay for licenses to OSS they will simply stop using it. It makes sense to a business to benefit from the freedom of others. If devs are expecting a payday, don't release as open source. I know that sounds like I'm saying "stop being a jerk" and I am. The idea of OSS has been the sharing of software with limited license responsibility, but adding in a specific license for commercial use thru a command-line interface is going to be too much of a nightmare to manage. This will end up turning into another GPL border dispute (to use Heather Meeker's term). Which code is covered by the open-source part, and what's covered by commercial? Where does my software start and yours ends? I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses.
- h34t 9y ago
  Many companies have no problem paying reasonable fees to license software they find useful. I don't see why they should stop paying, on some kind of ethical principle, if a developer decides to publish some or all of a product's source code on GitHub with a restrictive, noncommercial-use-only license. Why should a developer be accused of greed for publishing code openly, but with paid licenses for commercial use? How is this not better, in absolute terms, than remaining closed source? > I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses. From what I can see, this is exactly what L0 provides, with the added _option_ that if a company _does_ want to use the software for commercial purposes, they can pay for a license with a credit card.
- rspeer 9y ago
  CC-NC is not a license for code. Creative Commons has spent a while trying to pin down what counts as "commercial use" for art and data, but they'll tell you flat out that code is out of scope. Ideas like "dependencies" or "linking" are not considered by CC licenses.
  - ghaff 9y ago
davidjgraph 9y ago
I suspect the key problem with this isn't the one most people will think of. We had a commercial JS library that we sold for 10 years and I'd estimate the % of companies that properly read the evaluation and commercial use license was under 10%. We open sourced the product last year and found out how many silent users there were only afterwards. When I asked why they were using the software within a company long after the 3 months evaluation period had expired, the response was always "We never sold the resulting software that we built with your software". By "commercial use" the majority of software engineers take that to mean selling. Of course, commercial use means use within a company. Some companies just hadn't got to point of starting to sell the resulting software, but others only used it internally and didn't count that as commercial use since they didn't get money for it. Since software engineers are likely to be the only ones who see the license in a lot of cases, and the majority of software engineers I've met are not good at licensing legalese, I think this license will simply be treated as an open source license most of the time and simply not work as intended.
- kemitchell 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. L0 isn't interested in DRM, or surveillance, or any other invasive method of rooting out unlicensed users. That's an indirect way of saying that L0's approach will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use. The same way that book publishers or music distributors who offer DRM-free files accept some unlicensed use of those products. L0 shares the approach of the more enlightened ebook and music stores: Make it as easy as possible to do the right thing.
  - patrickaljord 9y ago
    > That's an indirect way of saying that L0's approach will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use. Not sure it's very wise to say this on a public forum, if any L0 user decides one day to enforce L0 in court, the people infringing on the L0 license could point to this comment by the creator of L0 that L0 "will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use". I also don't see much difference between that and a donate button.
barkingcat 9y ago
This name is really confusing. If they called it "Shareware 90 plus other restrictions" it would at least convey a bit about what the idea of the license is trying to do. Using "License Zero" is a really marketing oriented approach.
- kemitchell 9y ago
  My marketing plan at this point is stickers. "License Zero" because it aims for zero marginal friction over use of permissive open source software. That's entirely attainable with good metadata, a good CLI, and a speed checkout process.
  - mirabilos 9y ago
    It’s misleading because it pretends that you need zero licences for it.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
This suggestion is missing the incentives present for software writers. Open source drives adoption and the network effects of Google-ability and stack overflow Q&A, along with prestige for the creators. Straight up removing free commercial use does some real damage to the network building - your license prevents it from getting used for many projects. What you want is a license that allows use in "cheap" situations without giving away your right to price-discriminate against companies that have large checkbooks. So, some sort of simple price discrimination screen built into the license. Something like "Does your company have 1000 or more employees? If so, pay us. If not, you've got a free license and 90 days to get into compliance if you change categories".
- kemitchell 9y ago
  The L0 public licenses come with grace periods, essentially free trials. Right now they're at 90 days, but will almost certainly shorten, perhaps to 30 days or less. The utility of L0 is to make it possible to offer one set of public tools with, say, a noncommercial use limitation, but offer those who need to use commercially an easy way to buy the right to do that. "License Zero", as in near-zero friction. Zero is impossible of course, because there will always be some friction in the additional step of getting a different license, versus not needing a separately license at all. But it's up to developers to decide what's best, in terms of optimizing leverage to command support, on the hand, and minimizing friction that puts a brake on adoption, on the other. Purely proprietary software with closed source is at one extreme. Hyper permissive licenses like 0BSD are on the other.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    My point is that "commercial" versus "noncommercial" isn't the same distinction you want to use for "pay us" versus "don't pay us". The proper price point for many commercial uses of software products is still zero.
    - kemitchell 9y ago
      Agreed. Some may opt for the reciprocal public license for that reason, since it allows unmodified use for commercial purposes. Leaving the terms behind for a moment, to focus on context: Many users, both individual and business, don't have any money to sue for. They're judgment proof. But if they make it to cash flow, they should pay. They'll almost certainly have paid for other goods and services, like AWS or SaaS, before then.
deleted 9y ago
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nqzero 9y ago
one of the key advantages of FOSS licenses is that we immediately know long term what the trade-offs are (except maybe the AGPL). and this means we can invest in learning to use, improve and integrate the software without a lot of negotiating with the author. without the risk of the rug being pulled out from under us in spite of the misleading name and the allusions to open source, this license scheme fails to capture that predictability i've written a license that attempts to capture more of a balance: https://github.com/db4j/pupl https://github.com/db4j/pupl
h34t 9y ago
I see an effort like License Zero less as an encroachment on existing "Free and Open Source" licenses and culture, and more as an alternative to behind-closed-door development. I want to _sustainably_ write software, not for donations but by having people who want to use it, pay for it. If I have to go closed-source to do so, then that's what I'll do. I don't have a big company behind me paying a salary. But I would prefer to make things in the open, sharing my process; I'd like to allow students and other individuals to benefit from my work, either freely or very affordably; and I'd like to charge for-profit companies a fair price for what they receive. The open source community tried to trademark the 'open source' label, and failed¹, precisely because it is _too descriptive_: it sounds like a generic way of describing source code that isn't private, not a specialized term with specific ethical and legal implications. But nevertheless the 'Open Source Definition' campaign has been rather effective in limiting use of the term. So I'm not even sure what to call what I want to do: maybe "open-source-ish"? Some of my work belongs under OSI-approved licenses, but not all of it, and I appreciate that people like Kyle are working, creatively, on alternatives. 1. https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
- kemitchell 9y ago
  For what it's worth, L0 absolutely expects, but does not require, that source will be available, and development will continue with many of the same tools and platforms as MIT- or BSD-licensed code. It also expects _distribution_ to work much the same way. The terms for redistribution of L0 code are more or less the same as BSD. Long story short, L0 code belongs on GitHub, and L0 packages belong on npm. It won't be hard to extend to other open languages, package systems, and platforms.
cestith 9y ago
Open source means anyone can make changes and redistribute them, not just that anyone can use the software. Let's say Bob writes a little stub of a project. It's kind of useful, and he licenses it with L0. Then someone, let's call her Jane, using the noncommercial rights listed takes her copy, adds features, fixes bugs, and speeds up the performance. Jane's contributions far outweigh the initial contributions from Bob, but she added enhancements one at a time rather than starting from scratch. Then IBM needs 30,000 seat licenses for company desktops. The money for the commercial use of Jane's contributions goes to... Bob?
- andybak 9y ago
  This comment crystallizes my concerns. I use and write open source because software is clay, not shiny spheres. People often need to blend and mould code. Tracking which bits of clay end up where is a huge burden. Those fragments of code that Oracle sued Google over? That's where this leads.
- slavik81 9y ago
  That depends on what license Jane used for her contributions. A contributor license agreement (CLA) would make that a lot clearer in the case that she submitted her contributions back to the main project. If I used L0, I would definitely have a CLA. If she forked it and maintained her fork separately, it seems simple enough how things work if she updated the license file. You'd just end up with the combination of her new license and Bob's old license. However, it is a little unclear what it means if she didn't change the license file. How can you be sure that she just hadn't yet gotten around to updating the payment information?
deleted 9y ago
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hasenj 9y ago
I like the physical source manifesto much better. Which actually addresses the _actual_ problem with monetizing open source: that people can just copy your project and send it to someone else. https://daplie.com/articles/physical-source-an-honest-alternative-to-open-source/ https://daplie.com/articles/physical-source-an-honest-altern... EDIT: seems link is dead, here's an alternate url: https://git.daplie.com/Daplie/daplie.com/blob/db7a9d0a72fa340ee13fd1de0936a5886746223b/posts/physical-source-an-honest-alternative-to-open-source.md https://git.daplie.com/Daplie/daplie.com/blob/db7a9d0a72fa34...
- SteveBash 9y ago
  I was thinking for a while now that a license like this was needed, the redistribution of copies seemed to me the main problem. It makes so much sense to tie the code to a physical medium. I plan to use physical source on a future project. Thank you so much for sharing.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
What's broken is fucking Google and Apple who think their engineers are such hot shit they deserve a platform monopoly. Die in a fire. Web Forever. #federatedcloudhosting2020
chrismorgan 9y ago
On a purely practical point: ell zero. Probably the two worst characters to combine in this way, because in various contexts and fonts it’ll look like the wrong thing and thus be confusing to users. In uppercase, the zero looks like a capital o (L0 looks like LO), and in lowercase the ell looks like a one (l0 looks like 10).
vortico 9y ago
Nothing to see here, just a non-open-source license someone decided to write and then an article with the word "manifesto" in it to make it seem like it's worth anything.
averagewall 9y ago
The name is very misleading. I was expecting something minimalist like CC0 but it's actually more restrictive than GPL. Perhaps call it "License Plus" or something.
coldtea 9y ago
How about a license that says: If you use this software in your company and your company makes more than $100 million per year, they should give $10.000 per year or per release to the community/person who wrote it -- otherwise do anything you want with it, view the code, edit it, ship it, etc. Straightforward, capped (so they don't worry about you jacking up the fee), a drop in the bucket for large companies, and would allow projects to actually hire people.
- drewfish 9y ago
  As someone who works at a large company, $10k is in no way "a drop in the bucket". Sales teams might have a budget to wine-and-dine clients, but as a developer I have pretty much zero budget and every expense has to be justified. This is probably true of any publicly traded company (as mine is) which has a legal obligation to shareholders to be careful that all expenses are worth it. My understanding is that licensezero is essentially doing what you propose, but also addresses practicalities such as how/where to send payments, tools (for licensees) to aid auditing, flexibility in pricing (and changing the pricing as time goes by).
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >As someone who works at a large company, $10k is in no way "a drop in the bucket". Sales teams might have a budget to wine-and-dine clients, but as a developer I have pretty much zero budget and every expense has to be justified. My idea was mostly meant for stuff in the category of Nginx, OpenLDAP, Postgres, Mongo, Elm, and co -- stuff that's used as the backbone of projects or services. So, not just what some random developer in a big company might ask for their personal use. So, not something that some developer would need to justify for their use, but something that has to be accounted for when planning for a new project ("We'll make it in the Foo framework, which costs $10K/year for a company of our size"). If that was adopted, in the end, it would be a budget item like anything else. If they can pay $$$ to IBM and Oracle, not to mention the untold millions made by widget makers, chart libs, and the like, then they can pay a measly 10K to a project they rely on.
throw2016 9y ago
While the principles and benefits of open source have been well established the funding has been left vague perhaps because a lot of early open source was developed by academics driven by ideology with little concern about funding. This funding lacuna leaves open source completely open to corporate capture. Entrenched interests are adept at controlling outcomes by controlling the money. What is missing is user organization, systems and a culture of individuals supporting open source as a matter of course which should have been thought of and built early. Without this financial support it will become corporate controlled. There must be more transparency and social pressure on successful companies using open source and simply forgetting about it.

190 points by vjeux 9y ago

foo101 9y ago

I am having a hard time finding the actual legal text of the license. Can someone share it here?

kemitchell 9y ago
Everything is on the website: https://licensezero.com/licenses https://licensezero.com/licenses Everything is also being revised. So much good feedback!

bskap 9y ago

So, what happens if one license 0 project (A) wants to depend on another license 0 project (B)? The way I can see it, there's three possibilities: * project A is now commercial and has to pay project B for the license * a commercial project that wants to use project A now has to track down and pay both the owners of A and B (and any other license zero dependencies) * a commercial project that wants to use A pays for A and B gets nothing for it because they are being used by project A (not commercial) and only incidentally by the commercial project.

evancox10 9y ago
Well project A is using B for a commercial purpose, namely the business of licensing out A. So it seems like it would be your first option, right?
h34t 9y ago
I believe L0 makes your second option painless: > Customers who want permission for commercial or non-Open Source uses can identify, price, and buy licenses for all License Zero dependencies of their Node.js projects, in one checkout transaction, using a free command-line tool
- rspeer 9y ago
  Setting aside the practical detail that not everything is node.js: Nobody would want to sell commercial software under the terms of "you have to license our software A, but it won't work unless you also license software B from someone else at the same time".
  - lazerwalker 9y ago
    Presumably that's where having a single place to handle payments comes in handy. It's (hopefully?) less "well, you have to go to this other person and license their software too" as much as "here's the total cost for a license (which happens to include both A and B)"
  - zokier 9y ago
    There is already plenty of commercial software that depends on other commercial middleware that needs to be licensed separately. Of course licensing each and every library is typically bit different in scale, but conceptually it is pretty much the same thing.
  - mperham 9y ago
    Sure, no one's ever bought Tableau along with a Windows Server license to solve their data warehouse analytics needs.
    - rspeer 9y ago
      You're not describing a strict dependency. You can just buy Tableau and use it.
- lazerwalker 9y ago
  Huh, fascinating. Licensing software by typing in a CC# via a CLI feels like a really foreign way to pay for something. I'm curious to see if that's behavior people take to easily.
  - kross 9y ago

dsr_ 9y ago

Doesn't mention forking at all, and that's a big thorny problem.

jerf 9y ago
Good point. If you can escape from the license by forking from it then it's worthless. Since that's obviously not the intent, then presumably a fork would still require licensing from the original source. Would it require licensing from the new source as well? If so, then forks are still theoretically possible, but the next question that raises is, are licenses compulsory? If not the original license holder still ends up with a veto over commercial use of the fork, simply by failing to give the license to anyone using the fork. Forks could conceivably carry on with purely-non-commercial licensing, but that's not a true fork. Should the community get through this, then License 0 is going to get awfully complicated the day you decide to download the fork of the hottest new web framework that itself uses several dozen License 0 components, with arbitrary numbers of forks in them. If licenses aren't compulsory then such a framework has the problem that suddenly there are dozens or hundreds of individuals that may decide for their own individual reasons to decline a license to someone that they may simply not like. (There is, in some sense, something to be said for greedy companies that just want your money and care nothing about you; at least they don't deny you licenses because you once gave their friend a bad interview experience, or violated some personal pet political stance.) An option would be to just say "Yeah, these projects can't be forked." Which is a solution of sorts, but definitely one that is losing something very valuable from open source. The fact that such a license would be classified as "not open source" probably means something real, not merely that the definition is outdated. There's an interesting idea here, but I think it's still the seed, not the fully-grown oak. But, again, let me end this with encouragement that the idea is being kicked around, and I'd like this to be seen as criticism in the spirit of refining and improving the idea, not merely being critical for the sake of being critical. There's some interesting ideas here in the service of a real need.
- kemitchell 9y ago
  I have two lines of active thought around this for L0. One is sponsored relicensing. It's possible today to set a price at which you'll relicense an L0 project onto vanilla BSD-2-Clause terms. In essence, you can put an estimate on future dual licensing revenue, discount it to present day, subtract any discount you'd apply for personal gratification in making it maximally available, and make a standing buyout offer at that price. The other is an alternative public license for L0 projects, a very, very strong copyleft (reciprocal) license. That license should conform to the Open Source Definition. It's in review and revision with OSI now. The reciprocal license would allow forks that meets its conditions, namely that the fork and other software that incorporates or uses it in development must be Open Source. Dual licensing is fundamentally a privilege of initial copyright holders. When you fork, you almost always do so on the basis of your rights under the public license. If you fork under the noncommercial public license, you and users of your fork have to stick to noncommercial use, or pay for other terms on the original code.

splitbrain 9y ago

How exactly is "commercial" defined?

kemitchell 9y ago
Good question. The answer: exactly as in Creative Commons' noncommercial licenses, but without the filesharing clarification, since the noncommercial condition applies only to use, and not to redistribution.
nine_k 9y ago
You are a commercial entity (a business and don't have a non-profit status), serve customers, and use the software in question to extract profits? IANAL; I'd love a link / quotation of an exact legal definition.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

This seems well intentioned but poorly thought out. Also, software distributed under this license does not qualify as free software under the GNU _or_ OSI models.

schoen 9y ago
The FSF and OSI models are meant to cover the same class of software (for example, both explicitly accept both copyleft and permissively-licensed software). So far I believe they've disagreed about the status of a total of two licenses, which are rarely used.
api 9y ago
There are issues with this, but on the latter point: why are the GNU and OSI models an unquestionable religion? Do they work? Are they achieving their stated objectives? Why can't we question them?
- nailer 9y ago
  They're not, but it's important to distinguish Open Source from other types of licenses, and avoid statements like: > License Zero is based on the two-clause BSD License, a classic permissive Open Source license, with two key additions: > Commercial use is limited to 90 days Which makes it seem like this is Open Source when it isn't.
  - kemitchell 9y ago
    The "Departure" section of the manifesto addresses very directly that the patch to BSD-2-Clause takes it out of the Open Source Definition: > According to The Open Source Definition, discriminating against commerce and non-contributors is not “Open Source”. The Definition also prohibits discrimination against “fields of endeavor”, like commerce, and persons and groups, like non-contributors. That means License Zero is no longer an Open Source license, even if it remains remarkably generous, a public gift to charitable organizations, students, teachers, academics, and hobbyists everywhere. L0-NC derives from BSD-2-Clause to make transition back to OSD-conformant terms very clear.

nine_k 9y ago

Kudos for giving the gist of the idea in a piece of code: def public_license (paid_available, commercial, contributing): if paid_available: if commercial: if contributing: return 'contribution-enabling, BSD-like license' else: return '90-day free trial, then you have to buy a license' else: return 'noncommercial, BSD-like license' else return 'standard, Open Source, two-clause BSD'

kemitchell 9y ago
I've ended up doing the same for the other L0 public licensing option, L0-R, a stronger-than-strong copyleft license, in the Open Source Initiative license review thread. That license is still being revised, so I won't dump the pseudocode here. But pseudocode's been very useful in that discussion, too. All the same, I don't quite feel like kudos are appropriate. I'd like to think I'm capable of writing the license terms plainly enough that regular old English speakers can understand them. But experience has taught me that I should translate to code, especially when I'm patching an existing license, rather than writing from scratch, as with https://github.com/berneout/berneout-license-kit https://github.com/berneout/berneout-license-kit (_very experimental_) FWIW, I often start drafting legal code based on more structured pseudocode. Most lawyers I know who do a lot of drafting have some kind of personal boolean logic shorthand.
- nine_k 9y ago
  The pseudo code expresses the gist very succinctly, hence kudos. It's like an abstract of a scientific article. Not all important details, but the few key things.
nobodyorother 9y ago
The trouble with these code snippets is that they condense very complex and squishy social structures into what incorrectly appears to be simple binary decisions. Creative Commons spent years defining what "commercial" means. It's obviously a commercial use if I'm using your items to make money... But, what if I'm a charity? What if it's hosted on a website that runs banner ads? What if I don't turn a profit? This was a years-long discussion that you can review https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial Code emphasizes what consensus we need to come to, the consensus that those complex legal documents define. For example, that's part of why the GPL is so long, it's specific.

geofft 9y ago

I like seeing things like this. There are two practical problems that come to mind (not fundamental problems): 1. Many traditional distros - Debian (and by extension Ubuntu), Fedora (and by extension RHEL), etc. - won't carry your software if it breaks the Open Source Definition in this way. If you're targeting npm modules, this isn't a problem at all, given how much technical work needs to be done to get the average npm module in one of these distros. :-) But there are lots of sizable use cases where this is a problem, and the Open Source Definition has become something of a Schelling point. One solution in the Debian/Ubuntu case (I'm less familiar with the Fedora/RHEL side of this) is to package your software for Debian "non-free" and Ubuntu "multiverse", which are for software that can be freely redistributed but is not Free Software and therefore not officially part of the distro / officially supported to the same extent. This isn't an extremely popular choice right now, but I think that could change. 2. Sort of expanded from there, really the value of an open-source project is far more in its community, that is, in the trust that it will continue to do the thing you want it to do as your requirements and the world around it change, not in the code as it is. I don't think that the most valuable thing you have to offer is your software, and I do think that compared to ongoing support and maintenance and interaction with users, the value of the software itself is probably approximately $0, yes. As a perhaps-controversial example, consider systemd: there are plenty of other service managers with similar approaches to process supervision, and plenty of other inits, but systemd has the property that everyone expects Red Hat to continue funding full-time development on it for many years, there's a lot of people on StackOverflow who have answered questions about it, etc. That's not particularly a function of the code itself; that's a function of an entity like Red Hat standing behind it and basically every distro having adopted it. Speaking for myself, at least, I'm unlikely to try to convince an employer that we should use some piece of software that's sorta-open-source when actually-open-source options exist, unless the support around it is so good that we might as well treat it as a normal proprietary competitor that happens to make source available to customers if they want. Mostly I'm hesitant because I don't expect other companies to do the same thing, and I therefore don't expect the ecosystem to grow. If you can cause people to believe that License Zero software is as viable as open-source software with a similar level of functionality, that ecosystems will grow around it as well as with open-source software, etc., it definitely sounds like this model is better for long-term sustainability of the project.

segphault 9y ago

What this amounts to is an attempt to solve the challenges of monetizing open source software by no longer writing open source software. The encumbrances that this license places on the downstream modification and redistribution of code largely eliminate any of the material advantages that come from the code being open in the first place. This is a terrible idea.

forsaken 9y ago
So, what is your suggestion for funding truly open source software, then?
- sukilot 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...
  - forsaken 9y ago
    https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/r...
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software/public-software https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software...
- liotier 9y ago
  Scratch your own itch ! Free software is in the interest of the users - not in anyone else's interest. So, if you need software and if that software isn't your competitive edge, you have an incentive to cooperate with other users (as a developer or as a client of developers) and a free software license is a way to regulate that cooperation. Criticizing free software licenses for not providing a business model is missing the point entirely.

lazerwalker 9y ago

This is an interesting idea. I'm curious how the author imagines licensing working, practically: am I paying once for a specific version/build of a library, am I paying a recurring subscription fee for regular updates/bugfixes, or am I paying once and expecting free updates?

kemitchell 9y ago
https://licensezero.com/licenses/private https://licensezero.com/licenses/private https://licensezero.com/licenses/waiver https://licensezero.com/licenses/waiver https://licensezero.com/licenses/relicense https://licensezero.com/licenses/relicense
- lazerwalker 9y ago
  Thanks for those links! If I'm interpreting these correctly, you pay once for a license, and get access to all future versions of the library? Most models for building companies on OSS tend to rely at least somewhat on a service model, rather than selling a piece of software once as a product and then continuing to maintain it for free (relying, then, on continuing to sell new licenses of the same software in order to keep money coming in). In this case in particular, I feel like this creates misaligned incentives: after someone has already paid me for a license, if they have feature requests or bug reports for me, it's actively against my financial interests to spend time addressing those rather than working on things that will help bring in new paying customers (of course, these two things will sometimes align, but not necessarily). That's presumably most easily fixed by that customer contracting me to make those changes, but at that point I've now got a revenue stream and business model that feels a bit orthogonal to the licensing idea (and would lose all the benefits of e.g. your nice integrated payment system). Curious if you have suggestions or thoughts about bridging that gap!
  - c-smile 9y ago
    In other words: how to 1) motivate the author to publish project as L0 and 2) motivate the author to keep working on it. Am I right in my understanding of what you are saying? If "yes" then it is a reasonable question. Some complex projects have quite narrow potential audience to get sustainable cache flow (from new license buyers). But are valuable for those few who already paid.

unlmtd1 9y ago

Intellectual property does not exist.

jasode 9y ago

I'd like to ask Ken Mitchell if there were concrete examples that motivated this. Such as... - Were there specific open source projects where you thought the creators got screwed out of money and therefore this license would have helped them? - As a thought experiment in the vein of game theory, would projects with heavy commercial usage like Linux, ffmpeg, openssl, etc be in a better situation today if they only had a 90-day window for free use? (Speculate and replay history with L0 license.) My intuition is that the 90-day restriction is enough of a turn off that we wouldn't have the situation today of IBM + Google + Redhat + etc adopting Linux and contributing code back to it.

archagon 9y ago
I mean, we can daily see how much effort is wasted on projects beholden to stockholders and business interests. In my experience, open source software is the only software that can stand the test of time; everything else will be pivoted, sunset, or bought out eventually. The problem is that it's so hard to make money doing it. (Not that this is necessarily a good solution, mind you.)
woolvalley 9y ago
I think it's come from the typical pattern of maintainer burnout and project abandonment after a few years, since a successful open source project typically turns into an unpaid second job.
- jasode 9y ago
  >typical pattern of maintainer burnout [...] , since a successful open source project Right, but that's what my "game theory thought experiment" was trying to dissect: the 90-day restriction can dissuade commercial entities from embracing that software so therefore, it's not "successful". As a result, there is no work overload and no burnout. Which past open-source project can we confidently replay history with the L0 license and say it would have roughly the same commercial adoption and the maintainers got paid more money?
- chii 9y ago
  > a successful open source project typically turns into an unpaid second job. which the maintainer voluntarily performs. If it's a burden, stop! If users of said software are asking for features/bug-fixes, and you as a maintainer can't be bothered, then ask them to pay for said fixes (either via a common-pot method like patreon, or a one time fee, or some other method). If those people asking for fixes aren't willing to pay, then they clearly don't really need those fixes.

TylerJewell 9y ago

I want to applaud the author for taking such a bold step, but I would like to disagree with the assertion in the manifesto that all forms of open source software are failing business models. I would like to encourage the author to dive deeper into the various ways that commercial companies that promote open source are finding ways to make it commercially viable. By experience, I was founder and CEO of Codenvy, which ultimately made Eclipse Che open source workspace server. We created that with an EPL by taking the large majority of our intellectual property and open sourcing it. While Codenvy's IP was closed and commercially for sale, there were significant feature differences between Che (for workgroups) and Codenvy (for enterprises). We steered the entirety of our company's go-to-market to be Eclipse Che-first promotion, and as Che grew to 50,000 usage hours / day and 10s of 1000s of downloads, the cross-over to Codenvy was significant enough where we were able to build a nice business. It was a business that let us put more than 60% of our engineering resources into Che and we had 40 engineers. Codenvy was later acquired by Red Hat earlier this year. I am CEO of WSO2, whose product line is entirely (well, almost) Apache licensed open source. WSO2 competes with large proprietary platform vendors like Oracle, IBM, Tibco, Software AG, and Mule Soft. Mule has an open core, but largely is still a proprietary vendor. We have 400 enterprise customers and - from what we can tell - probably another couple thousand installs of our various open source servers for identity, streaming SQL, integration, or API management. We estimate about 5 trillion transactions run through our software each year and our customers are some incredible high quality brands. The company is 12 years old and has stayed committed to open source in this way. But we are commercially viable. We have 492 employees worldwide, offices in 5 countries, and a rich set of long-lived subscribing partners. This allows 100% (caveat below) of our engineers to work on pure open source development. Of our 492 employees, roughly 400 are technical. All of our technical people work in engineering, and then do rotations into support, consulting, training, or solution architecture / sales / marketing so that everything that we do related to our technology is witnessed by a full fledged engineer that can bring the advancements back into the product itself. And this also has an affect of building a strong ecosystem, where we have roughly 1000 other people who are certified and / or committers to our various open source initiatives. So I look at us as a healthy business, commercially viable, and found a way to make pure open source work. The caveat - the way that we have been able to balance the trade off between a pure Apache license and the commercial viability is around subscriptions. Subscriptions offer customers specialized value for their implementation: support, indemnities, warranties, security scanning, incremental builds, and certified builds. To help us commercially, we only distribute patches, updates, and security addendums as binaries that are closed source. Customers who have a subscription get a perpetual license to the patch. Otherwise, the patch is also made into our project's code base, and at any time you can compile the code from the Apache base. Every 6 months or so, we update our open source binaries with the cumulative updates and patches. It's this sort of balance that allows us to create value for enterprises and gives them an incentive to get onto a subscription with us. And it's through those subscriptions that we have become a commercially viable company. There are other models as well - with open core, and what I call open fringe, which are open source platforms that have closed-source "management" around it. These are all flavors of permissiveness that each company must find for itself to find an equilibrium between commercial interests and contributing to open source. Again, I am very positive on the author's initiatives and do not want to provide a critique. But really do encourage a deeper exploration of the commercial ways many companies make OSS viable.

whipoodle 9y ago

I don't really understand what this is offering but long-term open source contribution seems like a mug's game (outside of positions where you're paid to contribute). The argument is that it will supposedly get you enough notoriety to land a job, but if the guy who made Homebrew can't get that to happen, it's certainly not happening for me.

dpc_pw 9y ago
I have landed a job by contributing to Open Source project. After three years, the company got acquired, I got a Visa, and moved to SV. Life changing event, if you ask me.

woolvalley 9y ago

How does this work in a project with multiple contributors, how does the money get distributed?

kemitchell 9y ago
L0 says nothing about revenue sharing or other financial arrangements of more than one player. L0's CLI _does_ support "stacking" metadata about available private licenses. So if you start an L0-NC project, I fork it and add my own significant contributions, folks who download my fork can tell they need private terms from both of us, at the prices we set independently. I suspect many small projects, which are effectively single-maintainer, many-contributor, will accept contributions BSD-2-Clause, or offer waivers (essentially freebie private licenses) for the project in return for contributions on BSD-2-Clause terms. There's some exciting work being done by others on transparent, automated licensing and royalties. As an aside, I think that line of research is far more promising for the kind of "network team", "swarm of contractors" business aspiration than models tackling, say, equity stakes or 701 plans. But it's not directly in scope for L0.

BFatts 9y ago

If you want to release open source, don't expect to get a payday - period. If you want a payday, use a commercial EULA. Simple as that. Trying to limit the usage of open source violates the open source definition and CAN'T be considered open source.

hathawsh 9y ago

Has anyone tried simply creating a business that negotiates with companies to fund open source developers and takes a small cut? It seems like a simple proposition. The company identifies an open source project that needs help, identifies clients that depend on it, approaches those clients and the developers, and sets up a deal between them for ongoing maintenance. It wouldn't fit every project, every client, or every developer, but when it does fit, it could be a great deal for the developer and for the client.

nix0n 9y ago
In what ways would this differ from Patreon?
- hathawsh 9y ago
  Patreon expects creators to advertise. The idea I had is that this business would actively seek both clients (who don't know they should be paying developers) and developers (who don't know how to get paid for their open source work).
- geofft 9y ago
  It would let you sign contracts that look like the sort of contracts that big companies are willing to pay 5+-figure amounts for. I don't even know how I would get my employer (either my current one or any past one) to sign up for a Patreon. Do I ... use someone's corporate credit card? How does that even get audited? I can totally tell procurement to sign a contract with someone, though. This post by 'patio11 on selling software is relevant: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris... (I'm imagining that the amount of money needed to make a self-funded OSS developer viable is on the large side, and that a lot of companies contributing a relatively small amount to each Patreon isn't reliable enough for the developer to count on. But maybe it is, in which case maybe the corporate-credit-card approach would work.)
  - hathawsh 9y ago
    Exactly. As your link says, "anyone can do enterprise sales", but it surely takes time away from development. Someone stepping in and doing the enterprise sales for open source developers could fill a lot of gaps.

agumonkey 9y ago

I wonder if the real end of open source is energy research. To be able to create without worrying too much you need physical security. Food, heat, water. Which is indirect result of energy access.

carapace 9y ago
Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have the technology to provide a decent standard of living for everyone on Earth by sometime in the 1970's. We just have to deploy it efficiently. And there's the rub. Put another way, all our problems now are psychological.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  That's also part of my understanding. We live in a bubble that makes most of us think we have to do some things and do them in "that" way. Think food or transportation. For 20 years people busted me to have a driving licence. Western cities were so much about having a car .. it became an absolute. In a way the first factor going against Fuller is consumerist capitalism. Markets aren't made for people to have enough but for companies to survive and get fat.
  - carapace 9y ago
    You probably know this, one of his books is titled "Grunch of Giants: Gross Universe Cash Heist". He had a plan, "Design science revolution", to produce artifacts for consumers that embodied the changes needed. The concept of the "trimtab" informed his methods. > Trim tabs are small surfaces connected to the trailing edge of a larger control surface on a boat or aircraft, used to control the trim of the controls, i.e. to counteract hydro- or aerodynamic forces and stabilize the boat or aircraft in a particular desired attitude without the need for the operator to constantly apply a control force. This is done by adjusting the angle of the tab relative to the larger surface. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab no real point, just wanted to mention it. Cheers.
    - 9y ago

dragonwriter 9y ago

So, the linked license itself[0] has at least one typo in clause 3: > must be limited to a period of 30} consecutive calendar days. The stray “}” is clearly a typo, and if the description in the Manifesto is correct, the “3” should be a “9”. This is kind of critical stuff to get right in a license. [0] https://licensezero.com/licenses/noncommercial https://licensezero.com/licenses/noncommercial

kemitchell 9y ago
Nice catch! And fixed. It's a Mustache templating error, fixed on master in the submodule, but apparently not in the current deploy. I moved from {{template vars with HTML escaping}} to {{{raw template vars}}} sometime back. Bad merge, perhaps. There have been quite a few changes, in response to feedback!

BFatts 9y ago

This seems antithetical to the OSS movement, almost like a "Yeah, we released our code as open source, so everyone can learn, extend, and distribute. But we've changed our mind and SURPRISE - now we want a payday!" Open source only applying to other open source? C'mon - who are you, Stallman? If companies have to pay for licenses to OSS they will simply stop using it. It makes sense to a business to benefit from the freedom of others. If devs are expecting a payday, don't release as open source. I know that sounds like I'm saying "stop being a jerk" and I am. The idea of OSS has been the sharing of software with limited license responsibility, but adding in a specific license for commercial use thru a command-line interface is going to be too much of a nightmare to manage. This will end up turning into another GPL border dispute (to use Heather Meeker's term). Which code is covered by the open-source part, and what's covered by commercial? Where does my software start and yours ends? I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses.

h34t 9y ago
Many companies have no problem paying reasonable fees to license software they find useful. I don't see why they should stop paying, on some kind of ethical principle, if a developer decides to publish some or all of a product's source code on GitHub with a restrictive, noncommercial-use-only license. Why should a developer be accused of greed for publishing code openly, but with paid licenses for commercial use? How is this not better, in absolute terms, than remaining closed source? > I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses. From what I can see, this is exactly what L0 provides, with the added _option_ that if a company _does_ want to use the software for commercial purposes, they can pay for a license with a credit card.
rspeer 9y ago
CC-NC is not a license for code. Creative Commons has spent a while trying to pin down what counts as "commercial use" for art and data, but they'll tell you flat out that code is out of scope. Ideas like "dependencies" or "linking" are not considered by CC licenses.
- ghaff 9y ago

davidjgraph 9y ago

I suspect the key problem with this isn't the one most people will think of. We had a commercial JS library that we sold for 10 years and I'd estimate the % of companies that properly read the evaluation and commercial use license was under 10%. We open sourced the product last year and found out how many silent users there were only afterwards. When I asked why they were using the software within a company long after the 3 months evaluation period had expired, the response was always "We never sold the resulting software that we built with your software". By "commercial use" the majority of software engineers take that to mean selling. Of course, commercial use means use within a company. Some companies just hadn't got to point of starting to sell the resulting software, but others only used it internally and didn't count that as commercial use since they didn't get money for it. Since software engineers are likely to be the only ones who see the license in a lot of cases, and the majority of software engineers I've met are not good at licensing legalese, I think this license will simply be treated as an open source license most of the time and simply not work as intended.

kemitchell 9y ago
Thanks for sharing this. L0 isn't interested in DRM, or surveillance, or any other invasive method of rooting out unlicensed users. That's an indirect way of saying that L0's approach will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use. The same way that book publishers or music distributors who offer DRM-free files accept some unlicensed use of those products. L0 shares the approach of the more enlightened ebook and music stores: Make it as easy as possible to do the right thing.
- patrickaljord 9y ago
  > That's an indirect way of saying that L0's approach will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use. Not sure it's very wise to say this on a public forum, if any L0 user decides one day to enforce L0 in court, the people infringing on the L0 license could point to this comment by the creator of L0 that L0 "will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use". I also don't see much difference between that and a donate button.

barkingcat 9y ago

This name is really confusing. If they called it "Shareware 90 plus other restrictions" it would at least convey a bit about what the idea of the license is trying to do. Using "License Zero" is a really marketing oriented approach.

kemitchell 9y ago
My marketing plan at this point is stickers. "License Zero" because it aims for zero marginal friction over use of permissive open source software. That's entirely attainable with good metadata, a good CLI, and a speed checkout process.
- mirabilos 9y ago
  It’s misleading because it pretends that you need zero licences for it.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

This suggestion is missing the incentives present for software writers. Open source drives adoption and the network effects of Google-ability and stack overflow Q&A, along with prestige for the creators. Straight up removing free commercial use does some real damage to the network building - your license prevents it from getting used for many projects. What you want is a license that allows use in "cheap" situations without giving away your right to price-discriminate against companies that have large checkbooks. So, some sort of simple price discrimination screen built into the license. Something like "Does your company have 1000 or more employees? If so, pay us. If not, you've got a free license and 90 days to get into compliance if you change categories".

kemitchell 9y ago
The L0 public licenses come with grace periods, essentially free trials. Right now they're at 90 days, but will almost certainly shorten, perhaps to 30 days or less. The utility of L0 is to make it possible to offer one set of public tools with, say, a noncommercial use limitation, but offer those who need to use commercially an easy way to buy the right to do that. "License Zero", as in near-zero friction. Zero is impossible of course, because there will always be some friction in the additional step of getting a different license, versus not needing a separately license at all. But it's up to developers to decide what's best, in terms of optimizing leverage to command support, on the hand, and minimizing friction that puts a brake on adoption, on the other. Purely proprietary software with closed source is at one extreme. Hyper permissive licenses like 0BSD are on the other.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  My point is that "commercial" versus "noncommercial" isn't the same distinction you want to use for "pay us" versus "don't pay us". The proper price point for many commercial uses of software products is still zero.
  - kemitchell 9y ago
    Agreed. Some may opt for the reciprocal public license for that reason, since it allows unmodified use for commercial purposes. Leaving the terms behind for a moment, to focus on context: Many users, both individual and business, don't have any money to sue for. They're judgment proof. But if they make it to cash flow, they should pay. They'll almost certainly have paid for other goods and services, like AWS or SaaS, before then.

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nqzero 9y ago

one of the key advantages of FOSS licenses is that we immediately know long term what the trade-offs are (except maybe the AGPL). and this means we can invest in learning to use, improve and integrate the software without a lot of negotiating with the author. without the risk of the rug being pulled out from under us in spite of the misleading name and the allusions to open source, this license scheme fails to capture that predictability i've written a license that attempts to capture more of a balance: https://github.com/db4j/pupl https://github.com/db4j/pupl

h34t 9y ago

I see an effort like License Zero less as an encroachment on existing "Free and Open Source" licenses and culture, and more as an alternative to behind-closed-door development. I want to _sustainably_ write software, not for donations but by having people who want to use it, pay for it. If I have to go closed-source to do so, then that's what I'll do. I don't have a big company behind me paying a salary. But I would prefer to make things in the open, sharing my process; I'd like to allow students and other individuals to benefit from my work, either freely or very affordably; and I'd like to charge for-profit companies a fair price for what they receive. The open source community tried to trademark the 'open source' label, and failed¹, precisely because it is _too descriptive_: it sounds like a generic way of describing source code that isn't private, not a specialized term with specific ethical and legal implications. But nevertheless the 'Open Source Definition' campaign has been rather effective in limiting use of the term. So I'm not even sure what to call what I want to do: maybe "open-source-ish"? Some of my work belongs under OSI-approved licenses, but not all of it, and I appreciate that people like Kyle are working, creatively, on alternatives. 1. https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

kemitchell 9y ago
For what it's worth, L0 absolutely expects, but does not require, that source will be available, and development will continue with many of the same tools and platforms as MIT- or BSD-licensed code. It also expects _distribution_ to work much the same way. The terms for redistribution of L0 code are more or less the same as BSD. Long story short, L0 code belongs on GitHub, and L0 packages belong on npm. It won't be hard to extend to other open languages, package systems, and platforms.

cestith 9y ago

Open source means anyone can make changes and redistribute them, not just that anyone can use the software. Let's say Bob writes a little stub of a project. It's kind of useful, and he licenses it with L0. Then someone, let's call her Jane, using the noncommercial rights listed takes her copy, adds features, fixes bugs, and speeds up the performance. Jane's contributions far outweigh the initial contributions from Bob, but she added enhancements one at a time rather than starting from scratch. Then IBM needs 30,000 seat licenses for company desktops. The money for the commercial use of Jane's contributions goes to... Bob?

andybak 9y ago
This comment crystallizes my concerns. I use and write open source because software is clay, not shiny spheres. People often need to blend and mould code. Tracking which bits of clay end up where is a huge burden. Those fragments of code that Oracle sued Google over? That's where this leads.
slavik81 9y ago
That depends on what license Jane used for her contributions. A contributor license agreement (CLA) would make that a lot clearer in the case that she submitted her contributions back to the main project. If I used L0, I would definitely have a CLA. If she forked it and maintained her fork separately, it seems simple enough how things work if she updated the license file. You'd just end up with the combination of her new license and Bob's old license. However, it is a little unclear what it means if she didn't change the license file. How can you be sure that she just hadn't yet gotten around to updating the payment information?

deleted 9y ago

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hasenj 9y ago

I like the physical source manifesto much better. Which actually addresses the _actual_ problem with monetizing open source: that people can just copy your project and send it to someone else. https://daplie.com/articles/physical-source-an-honest-alternative-to-open-source/ https://daplie.com/articles/physical-source-an-honest-altern... EDIT: seems link is dead, here's an alternate url: https://git.daplie.com/Daplie/daplie.com/blob/db7a9d0a72fa340ee13fd1de0936a5886746223b/posts/physical-source-an-honest-alternative-to-open-source.md https://git.daplie.com/Daplie/daplie.com/blob/db7a9d0a72fa34...

SteveBash 9y ago
I was thinking for a while now that a license like this was needed, the redistribution of copies seemed to me the main problem. It makes so much sense to tie the code to a physical medium. I plan to use physical source on a future project. Thank you so much for sharing.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

What's broken is fucking Google and Apple who think their engineers are such hot shit they deserve a platform monopoly. Die in a fire. Web Forever. #federatedcloudhosting2020

chrismorgan 9y ago

On a purely practical point: ell zero. Probably the two worst characters to combine in this way, because in various contexts and fonts it’ll look like the wrong thing and thus be confusing to users. In uppercase, the zero looks like a capital o (L0 looks like LO), and in lowercase the ell looks like a one (l0 looks like 10).

vortico 9y ago

Nothing to see here, just a non-open-source license someone decided to write and then an article with the word "manifesto" in it to make it seem like it's worth anything.

averagewall 9y ago

The name is very misleading. I was expecting something minimalist like CC0 but it's actually more restrictive than GPL. Perhaps call it "License Plus" or something.

coldtea 9y ago

How about a license that says: If you use this software in your company and your company makes more than $100 million per year, they should give $10.000 per year or per release to the community/person who wrote it -- otherwise do anything you want with it, view the code, edit it, ship it, etc. Straightforward, capped (so they don't worry about you jacking up the fee), a drop in the bucket for large companies, and would allow projects to actually hire people.

drewfish 9y ago
As someone who works at a large company, $10k is in no way "a drop in the bucket". Sales teams might have a budget to wine-and-dine clients, but as a developer I have pretty much zero budget and every expense has to be justified. This is probably true of any publicly traded company (as mine is) which has a legal obligation to shareholders to be careful that all expenses are worth it. My understanding is that licensezero is essentially doing what you propose, but also addresses practicalities such as how/where to send payments, tools (for licensees) to aid auditing, flexibility in pricing (and changing the pricing as time goes by).
- coldtea 9y ago
  >As someone who works at a large company, $10k is in no way "a drop in the bucket". Sales teams might have a budget to wine-and-dine clients, but as a developer I have pretty much zero budget and every expense has to be justified. My idea was mostly meant for stuff in the category of Nginx, OpenLDAP, Postgres, Mongo, Elm, and co -- stuff that's used as the backbone of projects or services. So, not just what some random developer in a big company might ask for their personal use. So, not something that some developer would need to justify for their use, but something that has to be accounted for when planning for a new project ("We'll make it in the Foo framework, which costs $10K/year for a company of our size"). If that was adopted, in the end, it would be a budget item like anything else. If they can pay $$$ to IBM and Oracle, not to mention the untold millions made by widget makers, chart libs, and the like, then they can pay a measly 10K to a project they rely on.

throw2016 9y ago

While the principles and benefits of open source have been well established the funding has been left vague perhaps because a lot of early open source was developed by academics driven by ideology with little concern about funding. This funding lacuna leaves open source completely open to corporate capture. Entrenched interests are adept at controlling outcomes by controlling the money. What is missing is user organization, systems and a culture of individuals supporting open source as a matter of course which should have been thought of and built early. Without this financial support it will become corporate controlled. There must be more transparency and social pressure on successful companies using open source and simply forgetting about it.