3 ms·

Ah, so with the MIT license option they have the right to redistribute the source code, but you're asking them not to do that, as it would undercut your busines

Ah, so with the MIT license option they have the right to redistribute the source code, but you're asking them not to do that, as it would undercut your business? And most of your customers comply, as they have their own interest in holding their code close to the vest? This seems like a highly unusual structure, I can't think of a single other example where "made available under MIT license" does not also imply "code published." But I think I can see where it makes sense for you.

dalke 6y ago
Yes, though technically I didn't ask them to not buy the MIT license option, but rather offered them another option which was cheaper. Personally, I would have preferred they stayed with MIT because it appeals to my desire to have people people support open source, and because I would have made more money. I don't think my pharma customers have any desire to distribute the code, other than to their collaborators. It's not so much "close to the vest" but rather that they don't have any infrastructure support for that - no public repos, no public mailing lists, little career benefit for doing so, and little involvement in managing FOSS projects - and a risk that I would drop them as a support customer. I'm more concerned about academic customers - people who don't want to pay money - who might release the software, and be able to offer "free"/grant-subsidized support, because that's what grad students do. I agree that I'm in an unusual. Chemistry has always been more protective than, say, biology. I suspect it's because the connection between compound and new commercial product is more direct than between a biological sequence and a new commercial product. OTOH, there's a huge amount of public research money going into bioinformatics, so it's hard to compare things head-on. I don't know what other fields are like though. If I developed an improved method to find oil, and sold it to petro companies under an expensive open source license, I don't think they would redistribute it to their competitors.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  Thanks for the answer. In practice, the "MIT" option sounds very similar to the much more standard "buy a license to integrate the code into proprietary software." As I'm sure you're aware, that's the model that Ghostscript has used for 30 years or whatnot. Is there a particular reason you're risking your customer doing a source release instead of taking this avenue? My (incorrect) understanding of your MIT option is that it would essentially be a buyout, in other words compensating you for the lost revenue from a public release. I've seen that happen as well.
  - dalke 6y ago
    To date me, I learned about the Ghostscript model from Michael Tiemann in late 1996, when it used a delayed release model - GNU Ghostscript versions were released approximately a year after the corresponding Aladdin Ghostscript version. That model influenced my early thinking for chemfp. I thought there would be enough commercial interest to pay to develop the leading edge (and get a copy under an open source license), with a, say, 2-year delay for the no-cost open source version. There wasn't. But unlike the Ghostscript of 30 years ago, I wanted chemfp to be a fully open source project. That is, checking now, https://web.archive.org/web/20070614092626/http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/gnu/4.03/new-user.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20070614092626/http://pages.cs.w... says "[Artifex Software Inc. is] the only entity legally authorized to distribute Ghostscript per se on any terms other than the GNU or Aladdin" - that doesn't sound like an OEM could re-sell the source code under the same terms as received by the OEM, since only Artifex was authorized to allow that distribution. "Is there a particular reason .." My general support for FOSS? My willingness to try an experiment, see how it turns out, and report the results, in order to further the discussion about open source software in my field and how to fund it? My understanding that my pharma clients, almost as a rule, don't do software releases? My expectation that I can always fall back to consulting? My annoyance that published papers on fast similarity search almost invariably showed an amazing performance boost compared to a slow reference baseline, so even if there was a buyout this way, it would still result in reaching my main goals of promoting my FPS format and setting a more honest baseline? So no, no particular reason, but rather many reasons.

dalke 6y ago

Yes, though technically I didn't ask them to not buy the MIT license option, but rather offered them another option which was cheaper. Personally, I would have preferred they stayed with MIT because it appeals to my desire to have people people support open source, and because I would have made more money. I don't think my pharma customers have any desire to distribute the code, other than to their collaborators. It's not so much "close to the vest" but rather that they don't have any infrastructure support for that - no public repos, no public mailing lists, little career benefit for doing so, and little involvement in managing FOSS projects - and a risk that I would drop them as a support customer. I'm more concerned about academic customers - people who don't want to pay money - who might release the software, and be able to offer "free"/grant-subsidized support, because that's what grad students do. I agree that I'm in an unusual. Chemistry has always been more protective than, say, biology. I suspect it's because the connection between compound and new commercial product is more direct than between a biological sequence and a new commercial product. OTOH, there's a huge amount of public research money going into bioinformatics, so it's hard to compare things head-on. I don't know what other fields are like though. If I developed an improved method to find oil, and sold it to petro companies under an expensive open source license, I don't think they would redistribute it to their competitors.

raphlinus 6y ago
Thanks for the answer. In practice, the "MIT" option sounds very similar to the much more standard "buy a license to integrate the code into proprietary software." As I'm sure you're aware, that's the model that Ghostscript has used for 30 years or whatnot. Is there a particular reason you're risking your customer doing a source release instead of taking this avenue? My (incorrect) understanding of your MIT option is that it would essentially be a buyout, in other words compensating you for the lost revenue from a public release. I've seen that happen as well.
- dalke 6y ago
  To date me, I learned about the Ghostscript model from Michael Tiemann in late 1996, when it used a delayed release model - GNU Ghostscript versions were released approximately a year after the corresponding Aladdin Ghostscript version. That model influenced my early thinking for chemfp. I thought there would be enough commercial interest to pay to develop the leading edge (and get a copy under an open source license), with a, say, 2-year delay for the no-cost open source version. There wasn't. But unlike the Ghostscript of 30 years ago, I wanted chemfp to be a fully open source project. That is, checking now, https://web.archive.org/web/20070614092626/http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/gnu/4.03/new-user.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20070614092626/http://pages.cs.w... says "[Artifex Software Inc. is] the only entity legally authorized to distribute Ghostscript per se on any terms other than the GNU or Aladdin" - that doesn't sound like an OEM could re-sell the source code under the same terms as received by the OEM, since only Artifex was authorized to allow that distribution. "Is there a particular reason .." My general support for FOSS? My willingness to try an experiment, see how it turns out, and report the results, in order to further the discussion about open source software in my field and how to fund it? My understanding that my pharma clients, almost as a rule, don't do software releases? My expectation that I can always fall back to consulting? My annoyance that published papers on fast similarity search almost invariably showed an amazing performance boost compared to a slow reference baseline, so even if there was a buyout this way, it would still result in reaching my main goals of promoting my FPS format and setting a more honest baseline? So no, no particular reason, but rather many reasons.