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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 pe

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.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> The terms "open", "proprietary", and "free" don't have consistent meaning across our communities. While any community sufficiently large has some members using terms in unusual ways, Open Source and Free Software now have very clear generally accepted definitions, and “proprietary”, in the licensing context, as well (as “neither Open nor Free”.)
- kemitchell 9y ago
  My experience points to strong established connotations for "open", "free", and "proprietary", but few if any concrete denotations, across the broad swathe of developers.
- geofft 9y ago
  The weird part is that "Open Source" is well-acknowledged to mean the Open Source Definition, "Free Software" is well-acknowledged to mean the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and "Open Source" is well-acknowledged to mean something different and broader than "Free Software" - even though the DFSG and the OSD are fundamentally the same document! (Well, I guess "Free Software" also has the FSF's Free Software Definition, but in practice that has very few differences on paper with the DFSG. There are differences in interpretation over things like firmware and invariant sections.)

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.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> The terms "open", "proprietary", and "free" don't have consistent meaning across our communities. While any community sufficiently large has some members using terms in unusual ways, Open Source and Free Software now have very clear generally accepted definitions, and “proprietary”, in the licensing context, as well (as “neither Open nor Free”.)

kemitchell 9y ago
My experience points to strong established connotations for "open", "free", and "proprietary", but few if any concrete denotations, across the broad swathe of developers.
geofft 9y ago
The weird part is that "Open Source" is well-acknowledged to mean the Open Source Definition, "Free Software" is well-acknowledged to mean the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and "Open Source" is well-acknowledged to mean something different and broader than "Free Software" - even though the DFSG and the OSD are fundamentally the same document! (Well, I guess "Free Software" also has the FSF's Free Software Definition, but in practice that has very few differences on paper with the DFSG. There are differences in interpretation over things like firmware and invariant sections.)