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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 t

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.
- hannob 9y ago
  I find that a strange question to be honest. Plenty of FOSS is well funded. Not sure what you mean with "truly", but in my worldview code that is under a license accepted by both FSF/OSI is "truly" FOSS. A lot of people work on such code and are well payed. I totally see the problems. But it's not that nothing is happening and no solutions exist. OpenSSL moved from "mostly one overworked guy with little funding" to "stable funding from multiple parties". It did so by convincing some major internet players that they need to increase the funding of software important for running the Internet. That is one way that can work. It's not the only one.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    OpenSSL moved from "mostly one overworked guy with little funding" to "stable funding from multiple parties". It did so by convincing some major internet players that they need to increase the funding of software important for running the Internet. How about this for a metric for whether the system is broken or not: What's a good estimate for the monetary cost of the "convincing"? Just revoking all of the keys cost millions. I wonder what the cost of the malicious activity was?
  - c-smile 9y ago
    > Plenty of FOSS is well funded For example?
    - hannob 9y ago
      > > Plenty of FOSS is well funded > For example? Is that a serious question? Ok... I heard Google pays its employers quite well. Plenty of FOSS is developed by Google, for example large parts of Chrome. I think Linus Torvalds gets a reasonable salary. So do many other kernel hackers - payed by all kinds of companies. Red Hat seems to be doing well, they have plenty of people working in all kinds of FOSS projects. I already mentioned OpenSSL. React is developed mostly by Facebook employers. I guess Facebook pays good salaries.
      - Applejinx 9y ago
        You have to be Linus? Dang. That doesn't scale…
- jdietrich 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901
- archagon 9y ago
  One-click micropayment donations via web/OS standards and/or cryptocurrency; centralized patronage sites that allot money to OSS projects based on various metrics; different licenses for assets and code, with assets only available to licensees? Some ideas.
- door 9y ago
  publicly-funded grants
- sjellis 9y ago
  I suspect that the first step is for to break down the problem a bit more. Large projects need full-time developers, plus other kinds of expertise, which means organizations. For the long tail of libraries and small tools, I don't think that the problem is funding, it's team-building. If lone maintainers had better ways of recruiting extra team members to help carry the load, there would be a lot less of an issue with burn-out.
- mirabilos 9y ago
  Just find something that brings bread on the table. Doesn’t even have to be software-related, could be, idfk, gardening.
kemitchell 9y ago
L0 will offer a choice of public licenses: noncommercial and very strong reciprocal/copyleft. The reciprocal license is being revised and reviewed with OSI now.
- hannob 9y ago
  How is your new copyleft license different from the existing ones, e.g. GPL-3 or AGPL? As someone who's been active in a Linux distributions license team I see such activity with a lot of skepticism. There are already FOSS licenses for pretty much every wish and many of them are redundant. License proliferation causes more incompatibilities and more work for people who have to decide whether or not something is acceptable in a FOSS environment. If people ask me what license they should choose the number one advice I give is that they should take something more or less ordinary (Apache, MIT, GPL, CC0), avoid obscure or unclear licenses and absolutely avoid writing up new licenses.
  - kemitchell 9y ago
    Thanks for your distro work. Skepticism is the proper reflex. L0-R is being revised, partly as a result of the OSI license-review process. But in general, speaking as of today, it differs from existing copyleft licenses in a few significant ways: Reciprocity requirements trigger in even more situations than under AGPL. Use with non-OSS modifications, as a component of non-OSS, or to develop non-OSS (the most controversial) falls outside L0-R's license conditions, after a grace period. This is a big extension of AGPL's leap to triggering source provision conditions on use for remote network interaction. Redistribution, on the other hand, is still permitted with retention or reproduction of terms and notices, a la BSD. So L0-R copyleft "hooks" into aggregated or modified _use_, instead of aggregated or modified _distribution_. Once copyleft is triggered, L0-R is both more permissive and more strict than existing OSI-approved copyleft licensing. On the license-terms side, L0-R permits any Open Source license terms, not just the terms of its own license, for follow-on code. That should significantly reduce intractable compatibility blocks. Essentially, it's (A)GPL-3.0 section 13 for the whole OSD roster. On the source side, L0-R is in flux in its specific language, but aims to require source availability. Originally it was phrased in terms of "publication" of source. Current drafts fall back on the Open Source Definition, which despite itself speaks to source availability, and not just license terms. If another license is "proliferation" in and of itself, L0-R is proliferation. But I think L0-R proliferates new ideas. I do not agree that the current OSI-approved roster covers all bases. There is a happy collective medium somewhere between everyone having an OSD-conformant license tailored to their precise needs and preferences, and restricting the community to a very limited palette of approved forms, which is easiest on the receiving end. Open data and tooling---which I've been involved in---make it easier to identify and handle license diversity, make it a software problem. Meanwhile, licenses have fallen down addressing legal, community, and community challenges. MIT, BSD, and ISC aren't good patent licenses. Apache-2.0 isn't hacker friendly, and has its own gotchas. AGPL didn't put so much as a dent in closed-source service.
stcredzero 9y ago
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. You should explain this. As far as I can tell from a 1st reading, so long as I'm non-commercial, I can just treat it as BSD 2 clause.
- chungy 9y ago
  That's the point, it violates the open source definition. See https://opensource.org/definition https://opensource.org/definition : "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research." "Non-commercial" clauses by definition make something not open source.
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    Your parent asked about encumbrances, not definitions. What is the encumbrance here beyond requiring application of different terminology?
    - rspeer 9y ago
      You can't release your code in a way that it can be used as a dependency, except by requiring your downstream users to use the License Zero payment platform. That's an encumbrance. You also can't distribute it along with GPL code, at all, whereas combining BSD and GPL code is totally fine (the result is GPL).
  - colejohnson66 9y ago
    How does Qt get around that?
    - mappu 9y ago
      Qt can be used commercially under the terms of the LGPL at no cost. When used appropriately (i.e. dynamic linking to unmodified Qt, or, offering source for a modified dynamically-linked Qt), the commercial company is not forced to open source anything. Qt has an optional alternative license with a cost attached, that gives you (A) a support contract, and (B) additional rights (static linking without invoking GPL virality, private modifications, ...).
bluetwo 9y ago
Ah, good old Shareware.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Yeah, those days when a programmer could make a living, even a killing, from their work.
c-smile 9y ago
Could you just define what does it mean "open source software" for your? And what is primary goal of software to be open?
alien_ 9y ago
Open source developers tend to maintain or contribute to multiple projects at the same time, and a small set of them can be monetized with this. This allows monetizing those, and does it targeted to large companies who can easily afford it and would happily pay a few bucks to use the software (they would likely burn more money in a meeting discussing whether to adopt the said software or to switch to a free alternative) and I think it's a good trade-off if it allows indie open source developers to pay their bills. On the long term those developers will generate much more open source output than when working as employees somewhere and creating only proprietary software all day and struggling to create open source only when they have some spare time a couple of hours a month. In addition, all this licensezero software will be developed in the open, which brings many of the practical benefits of open source to a vast majority of the users, and the open source ecosystem will grow as a side effect that the developers will also create other software distributed under ordinary open source licenses. Even if just a fraction of their time would be spent on those other open source projects, that can make a huge difference to the ecosystem.

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.
hannob 9y ago
I find that a strange question to be honest. Plenty of FOSS is well funded. Not sure what you mean with "truly", but in my worldview code that is under a license accepted by both FSF/OSI is "truly" FOSS. A lot of people work on such code and are well payed. I totally see the problems. But it's not that nothing is happening and no solutions exist. OpenSSL moved from "mostly one overworked guy with little funding" to "stable funding from multiple parties". It did so by convincing some major internet players that they need to increase the funding of software important for running the Internet. That is one way that can work. It's not the only one.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  OpenSSL moved from "mostly one overworked guy with little funding" to "stable funding from multiple parties". It did so by convincing some major internet players that they need to increase the funding of software important for running the Internet. How about this for a metric for whether the system is broken or not: What's a good estimate for the monetary cost of the "convincing"? Just revoking all of the keys cost millions. I wonder what the cost of the malicious activity was?
- c-smile 9y ago
  > Plenty of FOSS is well funded For example?
  - hannob 9y ago
    > > Plenty of FOSS is well funded > For example? Is that a serious question? Ok... I heard Google pays its employers quite well. Plenty of FOSS is developed by Google, for example large parts of Chrome. I think Linus Torvalds gets a reasonable salary. So do many other kernel hackers - payed by all kinds of companies. Red Hat seems to be doing well, they have plenty of people working in all kinds of FOSS projects. I already mentioned OpenSSL. React is developed mostly by Facebook employers. I guess Facebook pays good salaries.
    - Applejinx 9y ago
      You have to be Linus? Dang. That doesn't scale…
jdietrich 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901
archagon 9y ago
One-click micropayment donations via web/OS standards and/or cryptocurrency; centralized patronage sites that allot money to OSS projects based on various metrics; different licenses for assets and code, with assets only available to licensees? Some ideas.
door 9y ago
publicly-funded grants
sjellis 9y ago
I suspect that the first step is for to break down the problem a bit more. Large projects need full-time developers, plus other kinds of expertise, which means organizations. For the long tail of libraries and small tools, I don't think that the problem is funding, it's team-building. If lone maintainers had better ways of recruiting extra team members to help carry the load, there would be a lot less of an issue with burn-out.
mirabilos 9y ago
Just find something that brings bread on the table. Doesn’t even have to be software-related, could be, idfk, gardening.

kemitchell 9y ago

L0 will offer a choice of public licenses: noncommercial and very strong reciprocal/copyleft. The reciprocal license is being revised and reviewed with OSI now.

hannob 9y ago
How is your new copyleft license different from the existing ones, e.g. GPL-3 or AGPL? As someone who's been active in a Linux distributions license team I see such activity with a lot of skepticism. There are already FOSS licenses for pretty much every wish and many of them are redundant. License proliferation causes more incompatibilities and more work for people who have to decide whether or not something is acceptable in a FOSS environment. If people ask me what license they should choose the number one advice I give is that they should take something more or less ordinary (Apache, MIT, GPL, CC0), avoid obscure or unclear licenses and absolutely avoid writing up new licenses.
- kemitchell 9y ago
  Thanks for your distro work. Skepticism is the proper reflex. L0-R is being revised, partly as a result of the OSI license-review process. But in general, speaking as of today, it differs from existing copyleft licenses in a few significant ways: Reciprocity requirements trigger in even more situations than under AGPL. Use with non-OSS modifications, as a component of non-OSS, or to develop non-OSS (the most controversial) falls outside L0-R's license conditions, after a grace period. This is a big extension of AGPL's leap to triggering source provision conditions on use for remote network interaction. Redistribution, on the other hand, is still permitted with retention or reproduction of terms and notices, a la BSD. So L0-R copyleft "hooks" into aggregated or modified _use_, instead of aggregated or modified _distribution_. Once copyleft is triggered, L0-R is both more permissive and more strict than existing OSI-approved copyleft licensing. On the license-terms side, L0-R permits any Open Source license terms, not just the terms of its own license, for follow-on code. That should significantly reduce intractable compatibility blocks. Essentially, it's (A)GPL-3.0 section 13 for the whole OSD roster. On the source side, L0-R is in flux in its specific language, but aims to require source availability. Originally it was phrased in terms of "publication" of source. Current drafts fall back on the Open Source Definition, which despite itself speaks to source availability, and not just license terms. If another license is "proliferation" in and of itself, L0-R is proliferation. But I think L0-R proliferates new ideas. I do not agree that the current OSI-approved roster covers all bases. There is a happy collective medium somewhere between everyone having an OSD-conformant license tailored to their precise needs and preferences, and restricting the community to a very limited palette of approved forms, which is easiest on the receiving end. Open data and tooling---which I've been involved in---make it easier to identify and handle license diversity, make it a software problem. Meanwhile, licenses have fallen down addressing legal, community, and community challenges. MIT, BSD, and ISC aren't good patent licenses. Apache-2.0 isn't hacker friendly, and has its own gotchas. AGPL didn't put so much as a dent in closed-source service.

stcredzero 9y ago

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. You should explain this. As far as I can tell from a 1st reading, so long as I'm non-commercial, I can just treat it as BSD 2 clause.

chungy 9y ago
That's the point, it violates the open source definition. See https://opensource.org/definition https://opensource.org/definition : "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research." "Non-commercial" clauses by definition make something not open source.
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  Your parent asked about encumbrances, not definitions. What is the encumbrance here beyond requiring application of different terminology?
  - rspeer 9y ago
    You can't release your code in a way that it can be used as a dependency, except by requiring your downstream users to use the License Zero payment platform. That's an encumbrance. You also can't distribute it along with GPL code, at all, whereas combining BSD and GPL code is totally fine (the result is GPL).
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  How does Qt get around that?
  - mappu 9y ago
    Qt can be used commercially under the terms of the LGPL at no cost. When used appropriately (i.e. dynamic linking to unmodified Qt, or, offering source for a modified dynamically-linked Qt), the commercial company is not forced to open source anything. Qt has an optional alternative license with a cost attached, that gives you (A) a support contract, and (B) additional rights (static linking without invoking GPL virality, private modifications, ...).

bluetwo 9y ago

Ah, good old Shareware.

coldtea 9y ago
Yeah, those days when a programmer could make a living, even a killing, from their work.

c-smile 9y ago

Could you just define what does it mean "open source software" for your? And what is primary goal of software to be open?

alien_ 9y ago

Open source developers tend to maintain or contribute to multiple projects at the same time, and a small set of them can be monetized with this. This allows monetizing those, and does it targeted to large companies who can easily afford it and would happily pay a few bucks to use the software (they would likely burn more money in a meeting discussing whether to adopt the said software or to switch to a free alternative) and I think it's a good trade-off if it allows indie open source developers to pay their bills. On the long term those developers will generate much more open source output than when working as employees somewhere and creating only proprietary software all day and struggling to create open source only when they have some spare time a couple of hours a month. In addition, all this licensezero software will be developed in the open, which brings many of the practical benefits of open source to a vast majority of the users, and the open source ecosystem will grow as a side effect that the developers will also create other software distributed under ordinary open source licenses. Even if just a fraction of their time would be spent on those other open source projects, that can make a huge difference to the ecosystem.