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I keep thinking we need some sort of new license for open source that limits which entities can use the software based on their net worth or the networth of the

I keep thinking we need some sort of new license for open source that limits which entities can use the software based on their net worth or the networth of their shareholders. That way large companies like Google can automatically fund these long tail of projects without burdening casual hackers or startups with unnecessary costs.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> I keep thinking we need some sort of new license for open source that limits which entities can use the software based on their net worth or the networth of their shareholders. That might be a new license, but it is by definition not open source. And, no, companies like Google won't “automatically” buy commercial software with that style of license; from their perspective it's worse than regular commercial software since it has all the downsides of traditional commercial software plus gives a competitive advantage to upstart competitors. EDIT: How about instead a “new” license that, if you feel the software isn't maintained adequately for the needs of your organization, allows you to hire whoever you want to maintain it to your requirements, instead of impotently raging that other people aren't supporting it?
- coding123 7y ago
  This is totally incorrect about the licensing models of open source.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    I can only guess what you might think is wrong, but if you think it is the description of the proposed license as not-open-source, I would direct you to paragraphs 5 & 6 of the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Hey, try not insulting people that are trying to have a reasonable conversation. > EDIT: How about instead a “new” license that, if you feel the software isn't maintained adequately for the needs of your organization, allows you to hire whoever you want to maintain it to your requirements, instead of impotently raging that other people aren't supporting it? It makes sense for the people that are getting the most profit from a piece of software to be the ones paying for basic maintenance/cleanup/improvements. If you want customizations or new features, that's when it makes the most sense to 100% self-fund. > it has all the downsides of traditional commercial software plus gives a competitive advantage to upstart competitors On average, I'd expect it to still be a lot cheaper than commercial closed-source software. And what exactly do you mean by competitive advantage here?
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > It makes sense for the people that are getting the most profit from a piece of software to be the ones paying for basic maintenance/cleanup/improvements. It often does make sense for them, and you can see lots of cases where this is is done with actual open source software without resorting to a commercial license that discriminates on scale. If it doesn't make sense for the people you want to pay, making a free-for-everyone-else license isn't going to convince them that it does, it's just going to convince them that they are better served elsewhere. > If you want customizations or new features, that's when it makes the most sense to 100% self-fund. I would argue that it makes sense to 100% self-fund the additional work whenever you want something more than the open-source offering provides and doing so is less expensive than commercial (off-the-shelf or bespoke) solutions, whether the additional work is basic maintenance or something else, and if you are using an open source solution and it's not maintained adequately for your need, the responsibility for addressing that isn't on other users that you’d like to have subsidize your use.
hedora 7y ago
The Business Source License allows you to restrict use of the open source product based on thresholds of your choosing. Entities using it above the threshold need to pay for a license. After a certain amount of time passes, the software reverts to an open source license of the author’s choosing: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ Example: use restricted to non-production use, reverts to GPLv2 in four years: https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ The clock protects users from lazy / out of business vendors. If few enough improvements have been made recently for it to make sense, the customers simply fork an old version of the project, and deploy that instead of paying for ongoing “development.” (The business source license is not “open source”, but I think it is close enough to be a good compromise in practice)
novok 7y ago
That is a recipe for an ambitious PM in the corp to just make their own version, tailored for their 1 of 10 companies in the world needs. Once you start getting that big, build starts becoming cheaper than buy for critical infra.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> I keep thinking we need some sort of new license for open source that limits which entities can use the software based on their net worth or the networth of their shareholders. That might be a new license, but it is by definition not open source. And, no, companies like Google won't “automatically” buy commercial software with that style of license; from their perspective it's worse than regular commercial software since it has all the downsides of traditional commercial software plus gives a competitive advantage to upstart competitors. EDIT: How about instead a “new” license that, if you feel the software isn't maintained adequately for the needs of your organization, allows you to hire whoever you want to maintain it to your requirements, instead of impotently raging that other people aren't supporting it?

coding123 7y ago
This is totally incorrect about the licensing models of open source.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  I can only guess what you might think is wrong, but if you think it is the description of the proposed license as not-open-source, I would direct you to paragraphs 5 & 6 of the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
Dylan16807 7y ago
Hey, try not insulting people that are trying to have a reasonable conversation. > EDIT: How about instead a “new” license that, if you feel the software isn't maintained adequately for the needs of your organization, allows you to hire whoever you want to maintain it to your requirements, instead of impotently raging that other people aren't supporting it? It makes sense for the people that are getting the most profit from a piece of software to be the ones paying for basic maintenance/cleanup/improvements. If you want customizations or new features, that's when it makes the most sense to 100% self-fund. > it has all the downsides of traditional commercial software plus gives a competitive advantage to upstart competitors On average, I'd expect it to still be a lot cheaper than commercial closed-source software. And what exactly do you mean by competitive advantage here?
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It makes sense for the people that are getting the most profit from a piece of software to be the ones paying for basic maintenance/cleanup/improvements. It often does make sense for them, and you can see lots of cases where this is is done with actual open source software without resorting to a commercial license that discriminates on scale. If it doesn't make sense for the people you want to pay, making a free-for-everyone-else license isn't going to convince them that it does, it's just going to convince them that they are better served elsewhere. > If you want customizations or new features, that's when it makes the most sense to 100% self-fund. I would argue that it makes sense to 100% self-fund the additional work whenever you want something more than the open-source offering provides and doing so is less expensive than commercial (off-the-shelf or bespoke) solutions, whether the additional work is basic maintenance or something else, and if you are using an open source solution and it's not maintained adequately for your need, the responsibility for addressing that isn't on other users that you’d like to have subsidize your use.

hedora 7y ago

The Business Source License allows you to restrict use of the open source product based on thresholds of your choosing. Entities using it above the threshold need to pay for a license. After a certain amount of time passes, the software reverts to an open source license of the author’s choosing: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ Example: use restricted to non-production use, reverts to GPLv2 in four years: https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ The clock protects users from lazy / out of business vendors. If few enough improvements have been made recently for it to make sense, the customers simply fork an old version of the project, and deploy that instead of paying for ongoing “development.” (The business source license is not “open source”, but I think it is close enough to be a good compromise in practice)

novok 7y ago

That is a recipe for an ambitious PM in the corp to just make their own version, tailored for their 1 of 10 companies in the world needs. Once you start getting that big, build starts becoming cheaper than buy for critical infra.