4 ms·

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

by dsr_ 9y ago

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a license would be classified as "not open source" probably means something real, not merely that the definition is outdated.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.
  - geofft 9y ago
    Oooooh. I really like the idea of dual AGPLv3/commercial-if-entity-exists-else-2BSD, because that means it is free software no matter what. It's just the sort of free software that big companies will pay money to avoid, which is what you want. :-)
    - kemitchell 9y ago
      I originally set out to do L0 with a noncommercial license only. Then I had half a dozen good conversations with copyleft friends, who pointed out that (1) they really liked what I was doing, (2) they'd never use anything but a copyleft license, (3) even the (A)GPLs were compromise implementations of the values they really hold dear. Open Source licenses can't discriminate against groups or fields of endeavor. But groups discriminate against Open Source all the time. A strong copyleft license could be both Open Source and nearly as effective as a noncommercial license in driving financial support to OSS maintainers. Under L0-R, companies can choose: Either they make their work available as Open Source, or they support others who do.
      - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
        I like the direction where this is going. Giving adopters the option to choose between strong copyleft (e.g. AGPL) or paying. Everybody wins, except freeloaders. What license would you provide the paid copy with? It should allow modification, linking, redistribution but only for the paying customer.
        kemitchell 9y ago
        https://licensezero.com/licenses/private https://licensezero.com/licenses/private They're based on Apache-2.0: https://licensezero.com/licenses/private/diff https://licensezero.com/licenses/private/diff
geofft 9y ago
Yeah, it seems like this is better understood as "Here is an option for proprietary software that fails open" instead of "Here is an option for free software that provides revenue for the authors." If I'm understanding this right, the agent seems to be the License Zero entity (Artless Devices), not the software author, meaning that even if the software author disappears off the face of the earth, you still have to buy a commercial license from Artless Devices. It only triggers if Artless Devices themselves disappear off the face of the earth, or voluntarily stop selling licenses, which seems like a weird thing to trust them to do.
- kemitchell 9y ago
  The terms "open", "proprietary", and "free" don't have consistent meaning across our communities. It's a well ingrained instinct at this point to tease what people mean by those terms apart. If nothing else, L0 has rhetorical value in bringing those issues to the fore. Relationships between devs and Artless Devices are all under the agency terms found here: https://licensezero.com/terms/agency https://licensezero.com/terms/agency A few points: * "Agent" is used in its legal sense, to mean someone appointed to act on another's behalf. With licensezero.com, it's appointing AD as your agent to essentially run the back office of a dual licensing play on your behalf. * The agency relationship isn't exclusive. Devs can sell licenses on their own, or use other agents. They could even use L0's forms to do their own deals. For large enough price tags, that makes sense, to bypass Stripe fees and L0 commission. But there are big advantages to automation and the L0 network, especially for relatively low-dollar, high-volume plays. * It's perfectly possible to dual-license on L0 or other terms without AD/L0. * If L0 falls off the face of the earth, devs can step in to sell licenses themselves to avoid automatic waiver back onto permissive terms. They can go to another agent, or set up their own automation.
  - geofft 9y ago
    My concern is that if the actual developers fall off the face of the earth, and AD doesn't, I'm still obligated to buy proprietary licenses from AD until such a point as you decide to stop selling them. I'm not getting any advantage from financially supporting the authors any more, but I'm still required to do that. Now, there might be good reasons for that - for instance, I might have children I want to provide for after death, and request that AD continue to sell licenses and provide the revenue to my children, even though my children are unlikely to provide any development or support for the software. In our society, letting your heirs inherit your commercial IP rights after death seems to be as well-accepted as letting your heirs inherit just about anything else. But in terms of mental model, that is much much closer to what currently goes by the name of "proprietary" than what currently goes by the name of "open"/"free". And because there are good reasons for AD to continue selling licenses if the dev disappears, I can't count on the fact that if the dev becomes unavailable to actually respond with technical support, you'll stop selling licenses and allow me to just fork the code and try to build a community myself.

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

by 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.
- geofft 9y ago
  Oooooh. I really like the idea of dual AGPLv3/commercial-if-entity-exists-else-2BSD, because that means it is free software no matter what. It's just the sort of free software that big companies will pay money to avoid, which is what you want. :-)
  - kemitchell 9y ago
    I originally set out to do L0 with a noncommercial license only. Then I had half a dozen good conversations with copyleft friends, who pointed out that (1) they really liked what I was doing, (2) they'd never use anything but a copyleft license, (3) even the (A)GPLs were compromise implementations of the values they really hold dear. Open Source licenses can't discriminate against groups or fields of endeavor. But groups discriminate against Open Source all the time. A strong copyleft license could be both Open Source and nearly as effective as a noncommercial license in driving financial support to OSS maintainers. Under L0-R, companies can choose: Either they make their work available as Open Source, or they support others who do.
    - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      I like the direction where this is going. Giving adopters the option to choose between strong copyleft (e.g. AGPL) or paying. Everybody wins, except freeloaders. What license would you provide the paid copy with? It should allow modification, linking, redistribution but only for the paying customer.
      - kemitchell 9y ago
        https://licensezero.com/licenses/private https://licensezero.com/licenses/private They're based on Apache-2.0: https://licensezero.com/licenses/private/diff https://licensezero.com/licenses/private/diff

geofft 9y ago

Yeah, it seems like this is better understood as "Here is an option for proprietary software that fails open" instead of "Here is an option for free software that provides revenue for the authors." If I'm understanding this right, the agent seems to be the License Zero entity (Artless Devices), not the software author, meaning that even if the software author disappears off the face of the earth, you still have to buy a commercial license from Artless Devices. It only triggers if Artless Devices themselves disappear off the face of the earth, or voluntarily stop selling licenses, which seems like a weird thing to trust them to do.

kemitchell 9y ago
The terms "open", "proprietary", and "free" don't have consistent meaning across our communities. It's a well ingrained instinct at this point to tease what people mean by those terms apart. If nothing else, L0 has rhetorical value in bringing those issues to the fore. Relationships between devs and Artless Devices are all under the agency terms found here: https://licensezero.com/terms/agency https://licensezero.com/terms/agency A few points: * "Agent" is used in its legal sense, to mean someone appointed to act on another's behalf. With licensezero.com, it's appointing AD as your agent to essentially run the back office of a dual licensing play on your behalf. * The agency relationship isn't exclusive. Devs can sell licenses on their own, or use other agents. They could even use L0's forms to do their own deals. For large enough price tags, that makes sense, to bypass Stripe fees and L0 commission. But there are big advantages to automation and the L0 network, especially for relatively low-dollar, high-volume plays. * It's perfectly possible to dual-license on L0 or other terms without AD/L0. * If L0 falls off the face of the earth, devs can step in to sell licenses themselves to avoid automatic waiver back onto permissive terms. They can go to another agent, or set up their own automation.
- geofft 9y ago
  My concern is that if the actual developers fall off the face of the earth, and AD doesn't, I'm still obligated to buy proprietary licenses from AD until such a point as you decide to stop selling them. I'm not getting any advantage from financially supporting the authors any more, but I'm still required to do that. Now, there might be good reasons for that - for instance, I might have children I want to provide for after death, and request that AD continue to sell licenses and provide the revenue to my children, even though my children are unlikely to provide any development or support for the software. In our society, letting your heirs inherit your commercial IP rights after death seems to be as well-accepted as letting your heirs inherit just about anything else. But in terms of mental model, that is much much closer to what currently goes by the name of "proprietary" than what currently goes by the name of "open"/"free". And because there are good reasons for AD to continue selling licenses if the dev disappears, I can't count on the fact that if the dev becomes unavailable to actually respond with technical support, you'll stop selling licenses and allow me to just fork the code and try to build a community myself.