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I welcome critique! And greatly appreciate the time you've put into this comment. I've bookmarked it to read again, in case I've missed something the first tim

I welcome critique! And greatly appreciate the time you've put into this comment. I've bookmarked it to read again, in case I've missed something the first time around. I'd also be interested in following up, publicly or privately, in a more direct way. I support what you're doing, and it sounds like you support at least the spirit of what I'm doing. We should talk. One point I'd like to go ahead and bring up: A common thread through the examples of success you've given is size. There are some examples of single-person, profitable operations, like Sidekiq, but they're very, very rare. Many successes boil down to economies of scale on services, information, relationships, corporate process compatibility and so on. L0 aims to make one business model that currently involves a lot of structure---dual licensing---available to very small, independent players. As an indie developer today, sure, you can set up an LLC and start e-mailing forms off the Internet to procurement departments. But doing all that will swallow you, as well as the time you already don't have to spend developing software. Part of making that play available to indies is automation. Part of it is standardization: one form for buyers to review. Part of it is network effects: one place for customers to get all the licenses they need, in one transaction. Part of it is recognizing a play that can, forgive me, "scale". Dual licensing is the most direct of the well known options, in that sense. The software is valuable. Pay for the software. Where does the pay go? Into the one who'll make more and better software.

TylerJewell 9y ago
Yes, of course - happy to discourse further. tyler at wso2 dot com. In seeing your response, it does occur to me that you may be tackling an alternative form of monetization that is suitable for micro-payments, or for open source project leaders that do not desire to oversee the more traditional commercial business aspects that you must under take to monetize a project. These are things such as support, consulting, and training. There is an investment (sweat, not monetary) that goes into thinking about how to deliver such services, meeting an SLA, and whether there are associated assets that must be created to support such a delivery. This is a lot of effort and maybe not commensurate with the time or objectives of the OSS developer. There is also the challenge of commercially transacting on such alternative forms of monetization (or value added software that is proprietary). So while these are profitable endeavors, there are any number of reasons that it may not be interesting to pursue them. It may not have to do with size of the project, but of the cost to pursue the alternative monetization strategy. So in that case, it may be interesting for a project to have different forms of licensing at different phases of development that are more conducive to either micro-monetization or classic-monetization, for which WSO2 falls into. And so perhaps it benefits us all to think of licensing for monetization as a spectrum to be applied given the objectives of the project leaders.
- kemitchell 9y ago
  I will follow up by e-mail shortly, but can't help adding a couple things to two lines of thought in your response: Here's an open form agreement that I wrote from scratch for contractors that allows switching from terms for "open" and more traditionally "closed" projects: https://github.com/kemitchell/switchmode https://github.com/kemitchell/switchmode Terms for either "mode" are compatible with use of OSS and collaboration with OSS communities. I represent both open-style devs doing paid work and companies who hire them. I tried to strike a balance, in much more approachable language, with Switchmode. L0 currently supports one kind of very dramatic licensing transition: developers can offer to relicense their projects BSD-2-Clause for a stated amount. Sponsor pays the price, developer automatically grants a BSD-2-Clause license, and takes obligations to update notices and push commits accordingly.

TylerJewell 9y ago

Yes, of course - happy to discourse further. tyler at wso2 dot com. In seeing your response, it does occur to me that you may be tackling an alternative form of monetization that is suitable for micro-payments, or for open source project leaders that do not desire to oversee the more traditional commercial business aspects that you must under take to monetize a project. These are things such as support, consulting, and training. There is an investment (sweat, not monetary) that goes into thinking about how to deliver such services, meeting an SLA, and whether there are associated assets that must be created to support such a delivery. This is a lot of effort and maybe not commensurate with the time or objectives of the OSS developer. There is also the challenge of commercially transacting on such alternative forms of monetization (or value added software that is proprietary). So while these are profitable endeavors, there are any number of reasons that it may not be interesting to pursue them. It may not have to do with size of the project, but of the cost to pursue the alternative monetization strategy. So in that case, it may be interesting for a project to have different forms of licensing at different phases of development that are more conducive to either micro-monetization or classic-monetization, for which WSO2 falls into. And so perhaps it benefits us all to think of licensing for monetization as a spectrum to be applied given the objectives of the project leaders.

kemitchell 9y ago
I will follow up by e-mail shortly, but can't help adding a couple things to two lines of thought in your response: Here's an open form agreement that I wrote from scratch for contractors that allows switching from terms for "open" and more traditionally "closed" projects: https://github.com/kemitchell/switchmode https://github.com/kemitchell/switchmode Terms for either "mode" are compatible with use of OSS and collaboration with OSS communities. I represent both open-style devs doing paid work and companies who hire them. I tried to strike a balance, in much more approachable language, with Switchmode. L0 currently supports one kind of very dramatic licensing transition: developers can offer to relicense their projects BSD-2-Clause for a stated amount. Sponsor pays the price, developer automatically grants a BSD-2-Clause license, and takes obligations to update notices and push commits accordingly.