5 ms·

As an active maintainer of a popular 8.8K+ starred Open Source project, I can attest to how hard and difficult it is to run, fund, finance, etc. But, at the en

As an active maintainer of a popular 8.8K+ starred Open Source project, I can attest to how hard and difficult it is to run, fund, finance, etc. But, at the end of the day, there is no excuse - we cannot sacrifice our ideals/values just because Open Source can be rough. True Open Source is worth making the sacrifice for, but there are a lot of new/old licenses trying to evangelize themselves as "Open Source" but are secretly masked proprietary/cripple-ware. This needs to be stopped. We had a good discussion about this on Twitter the other day: https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1032763711008559104 https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1032763711008559104

kemitchell 8y ago
A noncommercial license like Prosperity differs from a permissive license like MIT only in withholding permission for unlimited, free commercial use. If that delta holds your value system, then your value system amounts to business welfare, financed largely by individual sacrifices. That's a strange kind of martyrdom. There's no question that useful software that costs for commercial use produces less economy-wide benefit than useful software that's always free of charge. But the question isn't how much potential benefit open source can pump out, but rather how much benefit open source can pump out for the cost, and how that cost gets allocated. I've never held Prosperity, or its predecessor, out as open source licenses in the traditional sense. Others have called them so, even after I pointed out my own opinion. I have and do hold Parity out as an open source license. If copyleft licenses don't meet your definition of open source, or only copyleft licenses with known, practical software-freedom vulnerabilities, I can certainly square that with your view of open source's purpose. But I can't square it with open source's history, or with most stacks we call "open source".
- zekevermillion 8y ago
  Commercial freedom is an important part of the "free" in free software, no? The values you're calling strange are basically the ethics of RMS. Perhaps there is a bit of a martyrdom to RMS' lifestyle, but I would hardly say that his ethics are strange at this point. I think it would work better to argue, open source is about leaving aside the ethical considerations (which are highly charged topics) to focus on how effective is code sharing as a development methodology, and within that, what licensing regime under current law works best from a business perspective. And the question is different for an academic talking about larger society, vs. an individual business or developer who is choosing his/her/its own license. Obviously your duty as an attorney is to grapple with the latter question. Thus, while I personally am more or less with RMS on the ethical inquiry, I see no reason why your L0 ideas should not be discussed within the context of open source. I personally would not choose to use your license, but that is irrelevant. One point of errata in your essay: free software (I hope) does not depend on copyright protection. Far from it. Free software viewpoint is that copyright protection should not extend to software. Rather, the law should require published software to be free software. However, given that the law is not going to change anytime soon, the GPL was written as a clever hack to use copyright to promote the values of software freedom. This has been successful to some degree, so it is a perfectly fair question to ask what we would do for software freedom if copyright protection as we know it today did not extend to functional software. But this is probably not a question that would be asked within the context of "open source" I guess...
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    I can't speak for RMS. He can speak plenty well for himself! I do try to understand him. On use restrictions and the limits of copyleft, I haven't always been able to find answers: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/14/free-to-take-freedom.html https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/14/free-to-take-freedom... I can speak about APGL. They limit commercial freedom, specifically the right to commercialize software incorporating AGPL code, and either distribute it or provide it as a network service without source or a similar license. In other words: the freedom to make and market software in the usual commercial way. A limitation on Freedom 3 (to share changes)? The FSF says so. A limitation on Freedom 0 (to run the software)? They don't say, but I think so. I also think you're right that software freedom doesn't depend on copyright. Copyright is merely a means to it, via copyleft. But if the law required freeing of software, that would restrict commercial freedom publicly in the same way AGPL does by private ordering. Unfortunately, that law would also have to require disclosure or publication of source code, and conformance on all the other fronts where AGPL fights: patent law and DRM, for example. That's a far more expansive legislative program than abolishing copyright. Abolish copyright, and I can keep my code secret. And lock others' code down with patents. And so on. Many laws affect software freedom! > I see no reason why your L0 ideas should not be discussed within the context of open source. I agree. In terms of open development as a production system, my point is largely here: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/16/two-party.html#swing-voters https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/16/two-party.html#swing... If making software in the open made sense to more people, we'd get more of it. Many of those projects might start as source-available, and end up copyleft or permissive open source. But instead of paving that path, we shame it as proprietary, and lump it in with Windows. Open source orthodoxy is right about transaction costs and efficiency on the consumer side, but totally abdicates the supply side of software production. I've read on their mailing list that if you have to ask how you're going to make money making open source, you're the wrong person to be making open source, and that OSI doesn't owe any cycles on any business model. > And the question is different for an academic talking about larger society, vs. an individual business or developer who is choosing his/her/its own license. Obviously your duty as an attorney is to grapple with the latter question. I can't tell you how much it means to read that. Thank you for acknowledging. It gets lost.

kemitchell 8y ago

A noncommercial license like Prosperity differs from a permissive license like MIT only in withholding permission for unlimited, free commercial use. If that delta holds your value system, then your value system amounts to business welfare, financed largely by individual sacrifices. That's a strange kind of martyrdom. There's no question that useful software that costs for commercial use produces less economy-wide benefit than useful software that's always free of charge. But the question isn't how much potential benefit open source can pump out, but rather how much benefit open source can pump out for the cost, and how that cost gets allocated. I've never held Prosperity, or its predecessor, out as open source licenses in the traditional sense. Others have called them so, even after I pointed out my own opinion. I have and do hold Parity out as an open source license. If copyleft licenses don't meet your definition of open source, or only copyleft licenses with known, practical software-freedom vulnerabilities, I can certainly square that with your view of open source's purpose. But I can't square it with open source's history, or with most stacks we call "open source".

zekevermillion 8y ago
Commercial freedom is an important part of the "free" in free software, no? The values you're calling strange are basically the ethics of RMS. Perhaps there is a bit of a martyrdom to RMS' lifestyle, but I would hardly say that his ethics are strange at this point. I think it would work better to argue, open source is about leaving aside the ethical considerations (which are highly charged topics) to focus on how effective is code sharing as a development methodology, and within that, what licensing regime under current law works best from a business perspective. And the question is different for an academic talking about larger society, vs. an individual business or developer who is choosing his/her/its own license. Obviously your duty as an attorney is to grapple with the latter question. Thus, while I personally am more or less with RMS on the ethical inquiry, I see no reason why your L0 ideas should not be discussed within the context of open source. I personally would not choose to use your license, but that is irrelevant. One point of errata in your essay: free software (I hope) does not depend on copyright protection. Far from it. Free software viewpoint is that copyright protection should not extend to software. Rather, the law should require published software to be free software. However, given that the law is not going to change anytime soon, the GPL was written as a clever hack to use copyright to promote the values of software freedom. This has been successful to some degree, so it is a perfectly fair question to ask what we would do for software freedom if copyright protection as we know it today did not extend to functional software. But this is probably not a question that would be asked within the context of "open source" I guess...
- kemitchell 8y ago
  I can't speak for RMS. He can speak plenty well for himself! I do try to understand him. On use restrictions and the limits of copyleft, I haven't always been able to find answers: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/14/free-to-take-freedom.html https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/14/free-to-take-freedom... I can speak about APGL. They limit commercial freedom, specifically the right to commercialize software incorporating AGPL code, and either distribute it or provide it as a network service without source or a similar license. In other words: the freedom to make and market software in the usual commercial way. A limitation on Freedom 3 (to share changes)? The FSF says so. A limitation on Freedom 0 (to run the software)? They don't say, but I think so. I also think you're right that software freedom doesn't depend on copyright. Copyright is merely a means to it, via copyleft. But if the law required freeing of software, that would restrict commercial freedom publicly in the same way AGPL does by private ordering. Unfortunately, that law would also have to require disclosure or publication of source code, and conformance on all the other fronts where AGPL fights: patent law and DRM, for example. That's a far more expansive legislative program than abolishing copyright. Abolish copyright, and I can keep my code secret. And lock others' code down with patents. And so on. Many laws affect software freedom! > I see no reason why your L0 ideas should not be discussed within the context of open source. I agree. In terms of open development as a production system, my point is largely here: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/16/two-party.html#swing-voters https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/09/16/two-party.html#swing... If making software in the open made sense to more people, we'd get more of it. Many of those projects might start as source-available, and end up copyleft or permissive open source. But instead of paving that path, we shame it as proprietary, and lump it in with Windows. Open source orthodoxy is right about transaction costs and efficiency on the consumer side, but totally abdicates the supply side of software production. I've read on their mailing list that if you have to ask how you're going to make money making open source, you're the wrong person to be making open source, and that OSI doesn't owe any cycles on any business model. > And the question is different for an academic talking about larger society, vs. an individual business or developer who is choosing his/her/its own license. Obviously your duty as an attorney is to grapple with the latter question. I can't tell you how much it means to read that. Thank you for acknowledging. It gets lost.